I love Accolades, they are great. The thing is, what makes them great is earning them! Some of the Accolades are just far too easy to obtain. I mean getting an Accolade
just for completing a
standard mission objective has so little worth. Everyone will have it.
The whole point of Accolades (to me at the least) is showing off how well you play the game (or, sometimes for a joke, how badly). There are a few great Accolades and there is much to be praised, but they need a rethink.
I suggest, and I would like to know who agrees, that accolades not be given out for ordinary play. Accolades should be "hard" or at least "not easy" to obtain and have to be "sought". Sure, throw a few easy ones in for the Nubies, make them feel great about the game, but once they make Lt Commander, make it hard (or at least, make it not a given).
Examples of accolades which are great are:
Serving up some Liquid Courage - Stand behind the bar at the U.S.S Rapier
Golden - Win 100,000 Latinum
Examples of accoldes which are so pointless are:
Isn't this all one big Anomoly? (entertaining title but pointless because you always get it.. now if this was given for maybe scanning ALL the Anomolys in the worm hole then it would be more worth while as not everyone would get it).
What does everyone else think?
Comments
They exist in all flavours, from the super easy ones to the truly challenging and unique ones.
Thats the kinds of thing that I like. Like the ones for getting a pounding repeatedly! Nothing wrong with those
I just hate the stupid accolades, the "well done, your playing the game!" sort of accolades. Whenever any award becomes a "given" for me it loses its potency and most of its value. Who would covet an award everyone was bound to get if they play long enough?
Also, I hade wading through tons of "stupid" (not to be confused with Comic) accolades to see something i'm actually interested in and proud of earning [or makes me laugh] (maybe a search facility and accolade rarity levels would be a solution).
Infact, thats my prefered solution, have a fliter like for equipment (common, uncommon, rare, vary rare) and appropriately tag the accolades. I could set my level to only show rare and above to satisfy my sense of "earning".
That's a real good idea... and would be pretty cool if Cryptic could add it to our captain pages here on the STO site.
As a frequent visitor to www.xbox.com to view my achievements, I'm a huge fan of this idea. I'll bring it up next time I'm talking to the web team.
I sort of like how CoH/CoV did the 'cool' and long cooldown powers (some were available every half hour) based off of combinations of accolades achieved.
I think that may also give players an incentive to complete certain objectives and see more content of the game. But, they should be incentives that are 'neat' rather than required for gameplay. This way, it's optional, but a cool kind of optional. (A meta-accolade if you will. An example: 2% increased turn rate for completing x, y, z story accolades. Or new ship skins available based on same.)
I agree they should be left as is, except please fix the broken ones.
Ew! An XBox fan?
My faith in Cryptic has plummeted =P
Only some provide ability, 0.2% is it ?
However, some don't have multiple levels I think that needs sorted.
100 borg, 1000 borg, 5000 borg, 10,000 borg.
A further 0.2% damage against borg for each accolade. Thats kind of what I want. Maybe have final ones that give a large bonus of 1.0% 10k borg kind of makes you an expert, almost Janeway huh! Your stats should resemble it.
I would love to see more advance ones that have less to do with grind (kill 1,000 souls) and more to do with specific actions, puzzles, mysteries, etc. Keep, and continue to add, all the ones you have now such as give/receive X damage flavor, kills of creature type X, so many satellites repaired (Deferi Satellite Repairman - LOL!!!)... So, yeah, we're grinding anyways in this game, give us something for it. Yeah.
However, my favorites are ones like Above and Beyond, Hunting for Holograms, and Fire Suppressor. These are 'lades that were given for going, well, above and beyond the mission's requirement. Or for figuring out something. The Star Map (which, I guess is disabled now) on the Deferi planet is a perfect example. That should have been (perhaps will be?) an Accolade. And if it's only "part one of X" then show us the 'lade as In Progress in our list (I'm constantly checking mine for new ones to do).
There's an old Patrol Mission (I want to say Celes?) where your player teams up with another ship to get some Klingons out of a base. You and Ship X have to fight through some defenses, then X beams down an away team, while you keep the sky clear. Defeat a few more ships and you get a message that they can take it from here and mission over. However, there are 2-3 more Klingon ships around the map, and the Captain invites you to stay and clean up as you please... I was really expecting an Accolade for that, and there should have been one, alas there was not.
It's ok that everyone gets Isn't This All One Big Anomaly, just so they can all have a warmfuzzy. But add another 'lade if, as the OP suggests, the player scans all the anomalies.
I would again invite the STO Devs to play the Star Wars Lego games, or Batman, Indiana Jones, or even Harry Potter (the later, less so). That SW game is so full of puzzles and hunt/find objects 1/x, it's a real mind teaser at times. And once you get the hang of it, you think it's getting easy, then you get to another level and they change the rules and it's suddenly challenging again. I think STO would do well to learn some of these tricks. Add some as basic game/missions (pefect for FDC!), but also add them to other missions as optional playouts that turn into Accolades.
Another place that needs to be 'laded, would be Memory Alpha:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=173705
I'm also for having a player's Accolades be visible, I tried to get that to pass a while back, but found no interest at that time, maybe now?
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=164494
And yes, please, let's fix these!
PvP Dailies:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=172204
Aid the Deferi:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=179046
This would really make my day.
I can see that. Its good that Cryptic have that kind of data. I don't mind the n damge accolades even. They are somewhat an acheivement. Its the pointless ones I mentioned I don't.
I like the Medal Rack idea. Prehaps this could be where "quality" accolades could appear. Leave the "easy" accolades for those who enjoy getting congratualted for breathing or logging in, but have the "earned" and "worked for" accolades appear in the medal rack
My thinking is, there should be a few of something valuable. If it becomes ubiuitous its got reduced value. Accolades value is very low (you get an accolade just for finishing the beginning mission... oooh).
Exploration Accolades:
I'm really happy that Cryptic made some use of us returning to old Exploration Zones with the Diplomacy Missions. But instead of creating a B'Tran (Elite) or for Klingons - Azlesa (Elite), it would've been great if we could have Emblem missions taking us to these older exploration zones like the diplomacy missions.
That way it's not so much of a boring grind in going there for accolade grinding.
DSEs: My only problem is that when you become too high for DSEs, you are locked out and have to wait for an instance in session to do it. I would like the ability for us to go in at will.
But I have to ask that they retain their proper rank, so that if Lower tiers enter, they don't get quickly overwhelmed.
Another that's somewhat being worked on is the Kill Accolades and some Races arn't able to be completed. Like Federation killing fellow Federation or Klingons killing Klingon NPCs, Orion, Nausicaan, or Gorn NPCs.
Granted the new Klingon exploration handles the Klingon aspect, but not the other races. And player-created missions might be able to cover that. So hopefully we won't see any incomplete accolades sometime soon.
Could be worse. What if he said Playstation 3? Ewwww.
my favorite comedy one is the one accolade in one of the regular missions were ur suppose to follow the orion girl around and fight off the klingons. u get an accolade for jumping in the pot thats on fire...
It'd also be neat to see some kind of account-wide "costume unlocks" for the Alien Creator from certain kill accolades, ala Champions Online.
Wouldn't mind killing 1000 Hirogen for their face complexion pattern
Or 1000 Breen for one of their helmets...
My favourite is the Accolade for buzzing the DS9 tower in the latter part of the Wormhole mission. That one had me falling off my chair with laughter
Things to suggest for them, fleet-based accolades. it would be nice to be able to reward fleet members for actions taken on behalf of the fleet, perhaps by depositing samples in a bank, or trade training another fleet member's Boff.
Doable now with aborting the mission and returning after the instance respawn. However, for those that came in prior to the accolade system and for those who just breeze through, we have to wait for the episode replay to do so.
Azurian, subscribe to the Accolades chat channel in game, you can find people in there who can Share an old mission with you. I recently achieved Order of the Bat'leth because someone shared Crack in the Mirror with me. I still have it too, so if I'm on when you ask for it, I could hook you up.
Indeed, that's actually how I managed to complete the Fed Space Kill accolade done, a member of my fleet shared the mission with me and I just started grinding the "O'Brien's Folly" part of the mission. Moves so much faster if you are on a team.
I recently joined the Accolades myself since I'm starting to run into problems getting accolades on my own... though thankfully I managed to get all the Kill accolades that the Feds can get done, with the exception of the Breen Capital Ships since the only I have found so far is the Desna.
Byte me.
Just because some of us choose not to PvP...doesn't mean we are all Care Bears.
I choose not to PvP....I am not against it...Just don't really care for this game's PvP setup.
As for the topic....
I don't have a problem with the current setup. I rather like it. Just wish the Accolades page was a bit better organized....
I had a thought about this....but it will take too long to post it right now....but it boils down to streamlining the accolades window....