The OP repeatedly underlined the fact that the mission is boring and painfully repetitive.
It's not like other MMOs, where teamwork and coordination are they key elements and each battle has a unique twist to it -- it's just one giant timesink with never-ending Borg until you get into a miserable little room with floating squares, as if video games haven't evolved since the days of Donkey Kong.
And as the OP pointed out, more HP does not mean more epic or more challenging...it just means a long, repetitive, boring grind.
I'll probably get flamed for invoking WoW, but anyone who played that game knows how exciting it was to enter a raid like Karazhan for the first time...it was beautifully designed, beautifully scripted and masterfully executed. As a player, you WANTED to be in there.
In STO, people refuse to run Infected despite some potentially great rewards, loot-wise. If people aren't running it despite the loot, then it's safe to say most people do not enjoy it and the design was a failure.
That's not meant to be harsh, just reality. It's simply not fun to hit 1 and 2 for three hours.
If they are hitting 1 and 2 only then thats why they are there for hours.Ive recently found that running dual stun pistols is quite fun and sets up exposes like craaaaazzyyyy.
This game is like lego. Lego inherently isnt fun but if you are imaginative its fun. Im starting to not even jump across the plasma I just run. I wonder how many people know a science officer can just run across it.
Heh. Wait till you see The Cure. I am a veteran of WoW (pre-TBC, when everything couldn't be done by "get them together and AOE them down"). I think I know what it is to run an annoying mission (pre-nerf 15 man Stratholme anyone?) but I don't think I've ever seen more annoying TRIBBLE than The Cure.
Infected is a joke compared to it, because at Infected, only 3 people usually have to know what's really going on (eg. the jumpers), while Cure has 100+1 ways of TRIBBLE up, especially at the gates part.
I'm a RA Upper half who soloed everything until this mission. Our TF was all Tac. It was a 3 hour slog, but we did finish it . 3 hours. It wasn't fun...The content was unappealing and after it was over I had a "Thank God" moment. Props to the PUG. Harshed it out. All during the Seahawks game. 1-5, I'd give this mission a 2.5
So you guys can't appreciate that you need some practice and some ground skills and some good teamates that can work together.. Infected can be done in just over 30 minutes with a good team that knows what to do. I would suggest educating yourself with some tips and tricks that are available here in the forums. Knowledge is power, but there's a big difference between theory and application.
The OP makes very valid points about previous missions in the game not preparing you for the STF's. They are meant to be difficult and challenging and will require an investment of time to master.
However, there is a payoff that you cannot see because you are new at these missions. There are no other 5 man missions specifically made to offer a significant challenge in the game whatsoever. The payoff is that when you find some players that know what they are doing, the action is invigorating and very fulfilling and shows what the game can really be.
Mastering STF's is a long term goal that will be very painful to accomplish, but will be another feather in your STO cap. If you think infected is tough, don't try the rest of the STF's yet, you are not ready and will be very upset with your experience.
Many complain that these missions are Zerg fests - meaning that you just die and run back... this is totally un-true... there is no need to do this and if you are then you are doing something wrong. You need to work together in an orderly and organized fashion. Teamspeak is not needed for any STF and I've never used it myself, but Noobs will find it very helpful.
The whole idea is to teach players to be prepared, work as a team and to use strategies for dealing with difficult problems. This is a foreign concept in relation to the rest of the game and players will need to "go back to school" and un-learn the bad habits that have worked in the past.
If you care to put in the time and effort both in-game and socially to develop a good STF team your gaming experience will be greatly enriched and you will find these missions are actually a lot of fun to run through and won't take a lot of time.
The problem is that players expect to just run right through them and they constantly fail. This indicates that the STF's are working as intended... a humbling experience that shows just how far you still have to go before you truly are at the End-Game.
I recently encountered a similar frustration on a mission after leveling to RA Upper Level. The game was going along, easy mode, and then bam...suddenly there was this really hard quest and I died like 5 times. Luckily a guildmate helped me, otherwise I would have been screwed.
I think part of the problem is the ground game is pretty much easy mode throughout the majority of the game, followed by a sudden difficulty increase toward the end which as the OP points out in some instances is nothing more than an increase in HP, which is annoying.
I haven't attempted Infected yet, but after the OP's post I'm not really looking forward to it.
If you shoot the right targets, clearing the ground areas isn't very hard. Too bad for us, Cryptic TOTALLY FAILED to train any of its players in this critical skill. WoW throws instances at its players at level 15-ish out of 80. Most other MMOs have at least a few training-wheels areas to allow people to wet their feet. Cryptic designed every single ground mission prior to this to be completable with no actual tactics beyond "shoot the nearest guy you can target".
That's not entirely accurate. There is at least one Borg mission before the STFs when you first encounter the nodes, and the different types of Borg drones (and just what they can do). If you pay attention there, and figure out how to get past them, you already have good knowledge as to how to do it in the STFs.
There is a learning curve associated with "pulling" however, but that is true for any game. Just the only time you really need to deal with it is in the STFs here (though the assimilated-Undine mission is MUCH easier if you practice pulling in the last room).
Only fools run in and start shooting, expecting to fight where they are at...unless you can smoke everything around you in record time, which you typically can't in STFs.
Edit: Figures, I type out a thoughtful response to a year-old post. *******s.
Infected isn't so bad truth be told. Come see me when you go to Cure ground and are at the last Field gate and one of the transformers bugs out or you have an early beam in of borg, then we can talk annoyances.
My Fleet have the STF's down to a science. You want to have fun in an STF join Pax Infinitus, www.paxgaming.com. We do 'em several times a week and we do them well. Infected is a breeze, not the huge clusterBWOCK! you made it sound like it is. Part of the challenge is KNOWING WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO. If you are in a group who doesn't, good luck you might have a really bad experience.
naw, worst thing is buying c-store items in a P2P game or then not giving you c-store points each month for your sub like other games. 2nd worst thing is getting to the queen room and having complete morons that can't jump so always ask before taking a group in if they have common sense and the ability to actually, physically control their toon.
ok first of all like you said you were nto speced into groudn at all, that is not charlie sheen winning, but rather losing in an stf.
secondly, its not a 30 second window till your transported ground side, someone clicked it. you can stay up there for eternity if now one clicks to transport down..
thirdly, the epic loot only drops if you keep the three tranmisttes alive that are around the gate. also, set the loot to need or greed, anyone can loot it and its a roll to see who gets it.
and lastly for the space combat part, my team (all of us being specced half ground and half space, can down the entire gate in one sitting. which means we only get one wave of probes, spheres and cubes. you then retreat back without agroing everything and take it one group at a time.
planet side, drones and tac team esorts are useless as they run around agroing everything, the idea is to pull one group at a time, usually targetting the node first, and line of site pulling them behind a wall so no one grabs another group. the groups of borg are designed to be just beatable by a 5 man team, so grabbing three groups is suicide.
the captain fight you speak goes better if you pull him off the platform and all the way back to the hallway,
then from there you can skip all the mobs between him and the "queen" boss byt running streight through. (this takes a little getting used to).
the end is just needing 3 peeps who can jump, and two peaple in the middle, i find that a sci and a good dps tac in the middle do just fine.
the boss fight you need to get into the alcoves so you dont line of sight youru own players (as there is an aoe dmg that will kill you if you can see them).
all in all it sounds like your a pvper who tried to do pve with a pvp spec. also, it sounds like your group just pulled without thinking it out. it takes me and my friends a little less than a half hour to complete infected, we can do cure in about 40 minutes, and we can get ka done in about a half hour.
there are videos on you tube ( i think they are still up) that can show you how to play the stfs and show you strats...
give it a try again and see if it is a little more enjoyable ..
also, people who prefer single playing need to realize that nerfing an stf is unfair to us who like to play multiple player. remember, this game has many different players who prefer different sytles.
Any mission that is requiring 5 people to play is annoying to me, I went through once, it ended there. Your concerns are legit. No those aren't the only missions they are doing. Featured episodes are better
What Iv never been able to understand is why in a game thats ment to uber casual friendly like STO the STF's are designed so badly as to be nothing more than long drawn out exercises in boredom. The bad old days of EQ1, EQ2 and early WOW where MMO end content consisted of hours spent killing trash mobs to spend a fraction of that facing down a boss are well and truly over.
STF's im my opinion should be like the current WOW dungeons encounters where a bunch of strangers with some playing skill can hook up and spend 30 to 60 minutes running through the mission. Maybe the so callled ground combat revamp will sort this problem out but at the moment paying customers should be provided with viable content for their subscription fee and not have to always be looking forward to whats coming down the line months to half a year later.
Cryptic should be embarrassed wasting development time on C-Store items when a major part of the subscription game such as ground combat and end game content is so poor.
I couldn't agree more. I've managed to get to that room with THREE different groups (two of which i briefed on the 'acid room' beforehand), and invariably someone quits, at which point you're SOL. I was actually in this situation earlier tonight and we had someone try to join us to replace a "lost" team member, but it's simply impossible. I even PMd with a GM/DEV and griped about the fact that you cant replace people in STF. He told me (paraphrasing, i started drinking @ this point so i cant call this a quote) that the option to join a group in progress was basically disabled to prevent people from joining the STF @ the end and getting easy credit for the mission (think he called it exploiting or something).
The worst part about this is you are forced to drop the mission the next time you want to attempt it (in order to get a team), so you can never resume your progress.
my suggestion: allow people to join the STF group in progress, for reduced rewards... that's the gray text on any other mission that's shared in this game... says something about reduced mission rewards. Honestly i have no way of telling you what rewards to take out (as i've never fraking seen them), but surely some[ accomodation could be made.
and btw, it's really easy to do this mission if you just take the easy route and knock the borg into the acid. I'm frustrated by everyone's frustration-quitting. when 2 ppl decide they dont want to finish this mission, they force the other 3 to abandon the mission and do it all-over-again.
"all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again, and again, and again..."
You hit the nail on the head, I've tried this mission at least 5 times now and everytime, we lose half the team before the last chamber. The 5th time was last night, half way thru, just before the Capt.'s chamber someone had to leave. "No problem", I say; we still had 4 VA1's, loaded for bear, so we pressed onward. We Kill lthe Capt. and suddenly 2 of the other player's just disappear, so three hours and some change wasted on a pointless, over-long and artificially difficult mission.
I'm done, I will not be doing it again and I could care less if I ever get the Borg gear for my ship, the time investment and the frustration to do these STF's is not worth it. I 'm not a fan of forced grouping to begin with for the reasons I stated above. We should be able to do this mission solo with our bridge officers, with the caveat that your BOFF's and ship need to be decked out in the best gear available.
Until they come out with a version that is solo-able I will not be going back. Hell maybe instead of getting a "purple drop" at the end you when you are grouped, you get a "Blue" one instead when going it alone that would be fine with me. At least that way I would be able to enjoy the story.
What Iv never been able to understand is why in a game thats ment to uber casual friendly like STO the STF's are designed so badly as to be nothing more than long drawn out exercises in boredom. The bad old days of EQ1, EQ2 and early WOW where MMO end content consisted of hours spent killing trash mobs to spend a fraction of that facing down a boss are well and truly over.
.
The STF's are all relics of the first executive producer. Your first paragraph pretty much sums up his apparent design for STO. Looks like he stayed on for 1 game too long.
STF's are another item on DStahls long checklist of things to fix.....don't know how far down.
The only issues I have with infected is the difficulty joining/replacing mid run, groups that insist on running the last borg filled corridor instead of killing them, and the purple from the space part in the beginning.
I'll elaborate on the space purple, I've ran Infected 4 times, all 4 times my group has made it through with all the nodes intact, so we should have gotten the purple, even got a message saying not to forget the extra reward, but I've never got mine.
The only issues I have with infected is the difficulty joining/replacing mid run, groups that insist on running the last borg filled corridor instead of killing them, and the purple from the space part in the beginning.
I'll elaborate on the space purple, I've ran Infected 4 times, all 4 times my group has made it through with all the nodes intact, so we should have gotten the purple, even got a message saying not to forget the extra reward, but I've never got mine.
always check team setting for loot and ask lead to set to need or greed. I know some people who are greedy bums who master looter.so you dont have any chance to get anything
Comments
If they are hitting 1 and 2 only then thats why they are there for hours.Ive recently found that running dual stun pistols is quite fun and sets up exposes like craaaaazzyyyy.
This game is like lego. Lego inherently isnt fun but if you are imaginative its fun. Im starting to not even jump across the plasma I just run. I wonder how many people know a science officer can just run across it.
as for the people refusing to run it?
whens the last time you've sat in gamma?
Infected is a joke compared to it, because at Infected, only 3 people usually have to know what's really going on (eg. the jumpers), while Cure has 100+1 ways of TRIBBLE up, especially at the gates part.
And dont let me started on KA....
The OP makes very valid points about previous missions in the game not preparing you for the STF's. They are meant to be difficult and challenging and will require an investment of time to master.
However, there is a payoff that you cannot see because you are new at these missions. There are no other 5 man missions specifically made to offer a significant challenge in the game whatsoever. The payoff is that when you find some players that know what they are doing, the action is invigorating and very fulfilling and shows what the game can really be.
Mastering STF's is a long term goal that will be very painful to accomplish, but will be another feather in your STO cap. If you think infected is tough, don't try the rest of the STF's yet, you are not ready and will be very upset with your experience.
Many complain that these missions are Zerg fests - meaning that you just die and run back... this is totally un-true... there is no need to do this and if you are then you are doing something wrong. You need to work together in an orderly and organized fashion. Teamspeak is not needed for any STF and I've never used it myself, but Noobs will find it very helpful.
The whole idea is to teach players to be prepared, work as a team and to use strategies for dealing with difficult problems. This is a foreign concept in relation to the rest of the game and players will need to "go back to school" and un-learn the bad habits that have worked in the past.
If you care to put in the time and effort both in-game and socially to develop a good STF team your gaming experience will be greatly enriched and you will find these missions are actually a lot of fun to run through and won't take a lot of time.
The problem is that players expect to just run right through them and they constantly fail. This indicates that the STF's are working as intended... a humbling experience that shows just how far you still have to go before you truly are at the End-Game.
You should start a new thread. Posting in an older thread that hasn't seen an post in nearly sixty days generally mean the mods close it.
If you start a new thread, it's less likely to close and more likely to get the underlying issue addressed (and actually fixed).
I think part of the problem is the ground game is pretty much easy mode throughout the majority of the game, followed by a sudden difficulty increase toward the end which as the OP points out in some instances is nothing more than an increase in HP, which is annoying.
I haven't attempted Infected yet, but after the OP's post I'm not really looking forward to it.
There is a learning curve associated with "pulling" however, but that is true for any game. Just the only time you really need to deal with it is in the STFs here (though the assimilated-Undine mission is MUCH easier if you practice pulling in the last room).
Only fools run in and start shooting, expecting to fight where they are at...unless you can smoke everything around you in record time, which you typically can't in STFs.
Edit: Figures, I type out a thoughtful response to a year-old post. *******s.
But Task Forces are SUPPOSED to be tough.
naw, worst thing is buying c-store items in a P2P game or then not giving you c-store points each month for your sub like other games. 2nd worst thing is getting to the queen room and having complete morons that can't jump so always ask before taking a group in if they have common sense and the ability to actually, physically control their toon.
secondly, its not a 30 second window till your transported ground side, someone clicked it. you can stay up there for eternity if now one clicks to transport down..
thirdly, the epic loot only drops if you keep the three tranmisttes alive that are around the gate. also, set the loot to need or greed, anyone can loot it and its a roll to see who gets it.
and lastly for the space combat part, my team (all of us being specced half ground and half space, can down the entire gate in one sitting. which means we only get one wave of probes, spheres and cubes. you then retreat back without agroing everything and take it one group at a time.
planet side, drones and tac team esorts are useless as they run around agroing everything, the idea is to pull one group at a time, usually targetting the node first, and line of site pulling them behind a wall so no one grabs another group. the groups of borg are designed to be just beatable by a 5 man team, so grabbing three groups is suicide.
the captain fight you speak goes better if you pull him off the platform and all the way back to the hallway,
then from there you can skip all the mobs between him and the "queen" boss byt running streight through. (this takes a little getting used to).
the end is just needing 3 peeps who can jump, and two peaple in the middle, i find that a sci and a good dps tac in the middle do just fine.
the boss fight you need to get into the alcoves so you dont line of sight youru own players (as there is an aoe dmg that will kill you if you can see them).
all in all it sounds like your a pvper who tried to do pve with a pvp spec. also, it sounds like your group just pulled without thinking it out. it takes me and my friends a little less than a half hour to complete infected, we can do cure in about 40 minutes, and we can get ka done in about a half hour.
there are videos on you tube ( i think they are still up) that can show you how to play the stfs and show you strats...
give it a try again and see if it is a little more enjoyable ..
also, people who prefer single playing need to realize that nerfing an stf is unfair to us who like to play multiple player. remember, this game has many different players who prefer different sytles.
STF's im my opinion should be like the current WOW dungeons encounters where a bunch of strangers with some playing skill can hook up and spend 30 to 60 minutes running through the mission. Maybe the so callled ground combat revamp will sort this problem out but at the moment paying customers should be provided with viable content for their subscription fee and not have to always be looking forward to whats coming down the line months to half a year later.
Cryptic should be embarrassed wasting development time on C-Store items when a major part of the subscription game such as ground combat and end game content is so poor.
You hit the nail on the head, I've tried this mission at least 5 times now and everytime, we lose half the team before the last chamber. The 5th time was last night, half way thru, just before the Capt.'s chamber someone had to leave. "No problem", I say; we still had 4 VA1's, loaded for bear, so we pressed onward. We Kill lthe Capt. and suddenly 2 of the other player's just disappear, so three hours and some change wasted on a pointless, over-long and artificially difficult mission.
I'm done, I will not be doing it again and I could care less if I ever get the Borg gear for my ship, the time investment and the frustration to do these STF's is not worth it. I 'm not a fan of forced grouping to begin with for the reasons I stated above. We should be able to do this mission solo with our bridge officers, with the caveat that your BOFF's and ship need to be decked out in the best gear available.
Until they come out with a version that is solo-able I will not be going back. Hell maybe instead of getting a "purple drop" at the end you when you are grouped, you get a "Blue" one instead when going it alone that would be fine with me. At least that way I would be able to enjoy the story.
The STF's are all relics of the first executive producer. Your first paragraph pretty much sums up his apparent design for STO. Looks like he stayed on for 1 game too long.
STF's are another item on DStahls long checklist of things to fix.....don't know how far down.
Its not hard, its not boring, its a challenge.
If at first you don't succeed try try again.
I'll elaborate on the space purple, I've ran Infected 4 times, all 4 times my group has made it through with all the nodes intact, so we should have gotten the purple, even got a message saying not to forget the extra reward, but I've never got mine.
always check team setting for loot and ask lead to set to need or greed. I know some people who are greedy bums who master looter.so you dont have any chance to get anything