- Abort Mission and Beam to Ship buttons are now disabled on all PvP maps in anticipation of a quitting penalty for PvP.
This above is from the Tribble change posted
here.
I love this idea conceptually, and it makes a lot of sense. However I have a major concern.
Nothing personal, but the STO queue system is not efficient enough at this time to support this change, and I can foresee dozens of problems where a player gets penalized for leaving a map for legitimize reasons that the game mechanics allow for. I'll use several examples.
It is late at night and only a handful of queues are popping. After playing in some nebula someplace a PvP queue finally pops for a FvK ground PvP match. Big problem - three Klingon players join the match, but no Feds do. At 2am EST the probability that someone is going to randomly enter the queue is not going to be very high, particularly at certain levels like LT - where Fed LTs have dozens of other options. What do the Klingons do, wait until someone else comes? Oh, you can simply leave and find a more active queue - but you will be penalized for it.

I have been queued in many ground PvP instances where I am the only person there. Then what? Sit by myself or go try to find another que? Usually I just leave to find a more active queue. Well, the change implies I take a penalty for trying to find a PvP queue that has other players in it - even though it is the queue system itself that put me there by myself - an undocumented feature no doubt.
I have been in more than a few queues where a there are 5 Klingons and 1 Fed, and the Fed dies and stays dead for many - sometimes a great many minutes - and no other feds come. Uhm... if I am the one Fed guy, I get to grief the active Klingons by encouraging them to leave - thus take the penalty. Best of all, I grief by doing nothing more than keeping myself from logging off due to being idle.
What a novel idea - we can now grief PvPers by... taunting them and not PvPing in the queues, and best of all, they take the penalty by mechanic should they want to walk away from the griefing.
I am currently leveling a Fed character optimized for ground PvP. At LT7 my guy is in solid blue gear top to bottom, race traits specific to more damage in ground PvP, a Tactical Officer, and full inventory of shields, hypos, and power cells. I pop a queue to deserted facility the other night, and there is one Klingon. I kill the guy 8 times in a row, and to be honest the guy never had a chance. He left after the 8th kill. 5 minutes later a second Klingon comes in, and I kill him 5 times before he leaves. A few minutes later a third Klingon comes in and I killed him 7 times before he left. Another Klingon shows up after 10 minutes of sitting there by myself and I kill him 12 times before he leaves. Finally a fifth Klingon shows up, nearly an hour after the original queue popped, and I kill him the remaining 8 times to finish with a 40/0 score.
Now I have no idea how many of those Klingons were new players. This is LT level, but none of them have the 3 months ground PvP experience, the gear, the character optimization, nor the experience to kill me 1v1. The number of players in the entire game that could beat my LT 1v1 with another LT one time given 10 tries is probably limited to a few dozen. Are you telling me Cryptic is thinking about implementing a change to PvP that will punish new players from leaving a fight against someone like me? What if there had been 5 guys like me on one team vs a single guy on the other? I wouldn't want to fight my LT in ground PvP without help, and when some new player is dieing 40 times to guys like me - that isn't going to win Cryptic any positive reviews in PvP from new players.
Is it my responsibility as a player to go easy on other players for the sake of Cryptics broken system?
What about Otha? Anyone in the entire game who ground PvPs at BG5/RA5 with any consistency knows who Semtuk is, and Feds in particular who try to play on Otha know exactly who Semtuk is. My BG5 may not be the best ground PvP Engineer in STO, but I think any Fed who ground PvPs against me will agree I'm a real pain in the butt to kill - and the group I regularly run with is 105/0 in the last 105 queued PvP matches (when I started counting almost a month ago). Will the penalty apply to Otha too? I got news for you, you are going to punish every single casual gamer who tries to play Otha when I'm (or someone like me) on the planet if the penalty applies there, because I already camp the Fed spawn spot and will take out a group of Feds geared to fight Borg without breaking a sweat - because camping the spot gives me a better change to win the reward under the CURRENT system. The constant Fed beam out during a match is going to add up to some heavy duty penalties for someone. At least 10 Feds would have taken a penalty there yesterday alone.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a penalty for leaving a PvP map, but there are a lot of problems with the existing PvP queue system right now, and when you start adding a penalty with a system that already has serious issues - you are basically encouraging abuse.
I'll be glad to jump on Tribble and grief the living TRIBBLE out of any DEV who needs a lesson in how easy it is to abuse the current queue system. I don't think I will have trouble finding 4 volunteers on these forums ready to spit in the face of some DEVs in game with me either. PvP can sometimes be like the forum fights between the whiner class of the STO forums and the DEVs, and when you don't like someone - some can/will do whatever it takes to get at them.
Right now there is no incentive for me to grief another player in STO PvP - even if I don't like them - but give me a reason to TRIBBLE another player and I might do it. If you have played your own game at the high end, then it should be fairly obvious the options for griefing are nearly endless but what holds it back is that there is no reward in it (except Otha, where it is a competition and race - but it isn't technically griefing to keep the other players from begin successful).
I just want the DEVs to be careful when thinking about penalties in PvP, because when you TRIBBLE around with the ends in PvP, expect players to TRIBBLE around with the means of PvP accordingly.
Comments
:cool:
Think about it man, not fighting now griefs the enemy and potentially applies a penalty to the enemy should they leave due to boredom. The change can potentially reward not fighting...
Suggesting someone to "man up" and "fight" is akin making an emotional appeal for reasonable behavior within a system. Unfortunately, emotions and reason mix like oil and water when there are emotional rewards to take an alternative path.
OP is spot on here. I would hope the problems with the queques get corrected before this is implemented.
This change would unfairly penalize pplayers by forcing them to sit and wait yet again for at least one player to zone in who can complete the match when no one from the opposite faction shows up.
I've had similar experiences to the OP with being the only person who zoned in and been in matches where the other faction is outnumbered 5 to 1. When that has happened to me, I let everyone know via zone chat no one else zoned in and then I'll decloak and let them shoot me 15 times to complete the match. No reason wasting everyone's time waiting for another queque to pop and get the skillpoints. I've seen a few people do this on the Federation side as well. But that kind of behavior is the exception, not the rule.
.Man up...' etc - good grief, that's too foolish a comment to even be a good bit of trolling...
The game is NOT ready for mechanics like this.
Will you get the penalty when you diconect? Or imagine something not concerning the game in the strange parallel world called "real life" happens.... you get penalized?
What is if another time the match stucks like it happened with capture and hold after season one where the points just stoped counting? Have you wait a few days online there to avoid penalty?
There is one and just one way to solute the problem with leaving players: If all players of one team have left, the other team wins. End.
But, like I'm meanwhile used to it from cryptic side, they just come arround with TRIBBLE.
Dear Design Team: RED ALERT! We don't like the change!!!
My team was stuck in a match that was 5v1 last night and the guy wouldn't respawn. NO ONE COULD JOIN TO BALANCE THE GAME. What are we supposed to do? I feel like this is a bug rather than an update.
i had a bug the other day, and its only happened once, but in capture and hold the counter that goes down from 1200 to 0 stopped working, meaning no one could win the match and we had to leave
Additional discussion here...
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=154260