Ok it surely cant just be me, but does anybody else hate these stupid f*****g STF missions? They are bordering on the impossible, and frankly I resent wasting 3+ hours of my life per attempt only to fail or for somebody to drop out. (not that I blame them) Not only that but, (and correct me if I'm wrong) I was under the clearly false assumption that these missions where meant to be fun?. Well I've never at any point had fun playing these missions. This has left me wondering why the hell I'm paying a monthly fee to play a game that really is'nt any fun to play.:mad:
I think they can be fun but what we really need are easier and more casual STFs as a build-up, preferably level-scaling ones that can be done by players as they're developing their play habits.
These make sense to me as mid-to-late endgame but there's no early endgame to train people and acclimate them to challenging group play.
Personally, I'd retune the Fleet Actions (which were dead last I checked) into beginner STFs.
The problem wit STF's is most teams are unorganized groups of players who have never played together and want to hurry the mission, with time and patience they are a cake wake with the right team and a good equipment set up helps to.
They have lots of issues, bugs, boring tedious time after time play, but they can be done. People are doing them. Just finished the Cure for the second time. First time took 6 hours. This time only took a bit over 2 hours.
Infected and the cure took my fleet just over an hour to do, but KA took about 3-4 hours. It wasn't hard, but the final boss just took a long time to kill (also didn't help that we were down to 4 players for that fight).
Good question. Why are you playing a game that you don't find fun?
On the topic of STFs, I find them lots of fun. My fleet runs them just about everyday and none take more than 2 hours, maybe a bit more if we have some new players along. That is what makes a good fleet, people helping each other with the game and progressing together. A good fleet makes this a great game more than anything else. The STFs are the only PvE challenge in the game. If you want to just blow through things with no teamwork or thought there are plenty of missions available through mission replay. It's not like the STF loot is so great you feel you have to do them. The borg gear is nice for some builds but hardly game changing, besides it's about time there was some reward for those that like to take on a challenge. Maybe someday they will add rewards for those that are really good at PvP too
Contrary to the rest of the game, STF's are fun if you are willing to work together with your team-mates. You should not rush in like most of the missions in STO allow us to do, but most of all, you should be willing to repeatedly die and respawn while you and your team learn what works for you to defeat the enemies. In essence,like PvP, STF's are a team-sport.
Only issue I have with the runs are, the cure... for some reason.. I hate running so far if you die at times.. to me that has to be fixed.. theres no save points at times... such lonnggg runs
The problem wit STF's is most teams are unorganized groups of players who have never played together and want to hurry the mission, with time and patience they are a cake wake with the right team and a good equipment set up helps to.
Why would you put something like that in a game that is predominantly NOT that type of game style/difficulty???
They should all have Pop-up Warnings added to them that say they are "Mother-F**king Hard and don't try them unless you are a seasoned MMO Group Player". :eek:
I've always felt that games designed like this at that kind of difficulty level, are more about the designers Ego, than actual playability.
That may be far-fetched, but it helps when MY Ego is down cause I can't do it.
last night me and a bunch of fleetmates did the cure. After several hours we got to the last boss and i tanked him with my batleth medic, took him down after 3 trys. Everyone cheered knowing only a short spacebattle and we were done. Then bam the quest bugs. "Eliminate Borg Threat" wouldnt complete we had done everything nessary so we spent HOURS for us to get 5mins from the end and be screwed. Filed a ticket and the stupid gm says "try bugging it this isnt a gm problem" when we asked for advancement/quest completion as compensation.
STO - If a quest bugs drop and redo it. DOESNT APPLY TO STF!!! So for our time and massive effort we got nothing. STF not worth doing by long shot.
They hard some what hard to they should be. I did 2 STFs today and over the past day or two I have done more but, I and a lot of people I was group with did not have a lot of FUN doing them. I do find that they do take a lot of time to do and for what this game is they should not be as long as they are.
Infected isnt to bad time wise, but the cure was just brutal on time. 3 hours or more. We talked quite a bit about how long it was and that it should have 2 gates not 4. The length of that level is just far to much to make it fun. I hated that raids in WoW took 4 hours a night for 3-4 nights straight to get through with a good guild. 1-2 hours is ok any more and fun factor takes a sharp turn downward especially when it bugs and you get nothing.
I think they can be fun but what we really need are easier and more casual STFs as a build-up, preferably level-scaling ones that can be done by players as they're developing their play habits.
These make sense to me as mid-to-late endgame but there's no early endgame to train people and acclimate them to challenging group play.
Personally, I'd retune the Fleet Actions (which were dead last I checked) into beginner STFs.
This is such a GREAT idea! I have been posting forever about how badly we need mid-level STFs. Allowing people to experience stfs at commander and captain, gets people prepared and used to that type of gameplay.
They have lots of issues, bugs, boring tedious time after time play, but they can be done. People are doing them. Just finished the Cure for the second time. First time took 6 hours. This time only took a bit over 2 hours.
this is why i'm not playing them, read to many horror stories like this to want to put myself into the same situation with a pug group.
sry, but nothing in the game should take this amount of continuous torture time to play. because if it takes that long then no one is going to enjoy it.
Ok it surely cant just be me, but does anybody else hate these stupid f*****g STF missions? They are bordering on the impossible, and frankly I resent wasting 3+ hours of my life per attempt only to fail or for somebody to drop out. (not that I blame them) Not only that but, (and correct me if I'm wrong) I was under the clearly false assumption that these missions where meant to be fun?. Well I've never at any point had fun playing these missions. This has left me wondering why the hell I'm paying a monthly fee to play a game that really is'nt any fun to play.:mad:
I did Cure and KA back to back with almost the exact same group. These are designed for you to work well with your group and are not a very good pug endgame scenario. KA seems to be the most difficult yet funnest of the STFs that I have played but I have enjoyed them all so far actually. As long as you got a good group to run with often they are not bad at all.
The STFs aren't really hard, in my opinion, at least if the team uses a slight bit of common sense, some basic tactics. Well, except the Cure, there you should fight in a way the designers most likely didn't intend. But on the whole, they contain too much filler, repetition for my taste.
Another major detraction from them is the loot tables, or rather, lack there of, providing no incentive to run them more than once per character. Even the emblem/mark rewards are just bad, worse per time period than other dailies that take considerably less time. Path of the Warrior done by a level 45, for example, will net you 15 marks of exploration, 5 for the daily, 5 for each sortie. And that takes about half an hour. 24 of those marks will buy you a purple Mk X kit. You get about 1/3rd of that many marks of whatever from doing the STF, it takes longer, requires a team, and, oh yeah, it takes 70 of them to buy the same kit. Anyone see a problem here?
And this, in turn, means less people run them, so there's less experienced people running them for a newbie to slip into and see how easy they really are.
So, anyway, I think the devs need to give a little bit of love to make them a bit less annoying and take another look at the rewards versus what we get from dailies and make sure there's some balance there.
We couldn't finish The Cure till about two days ago. When we finally had enough of it, and the Team respecced to Ground.
Does the phrase Red Shirt army mean anything to you? 3 Tacs properly using Tac Initiative to spam the red shirts in sequence. With full ground spec= Rambo Shirts with Army Numbers.
We in most cases out numbered the borg. couple that with our ground DPS being so insane and you have one finished instance.
Can't wait to do Terradome again with this ground team, should go by loads quicker.
The Cure still sucks. Infected is a cakewalk (specced into ground or not) But we are beating the cure faster and faster.
Every time one of these threads come up the tiny minority of players who have groups to do them with pipe up and say how easy they are. I seriously doubt 10% of the players have ever completed one, let alone all of them. There is no doubt that there are game ending bugs in some of them and that if you attempt it with a PUG you are likely to fail because of people who quit after several hours of attempting. The one post here about getting 5 minutes from completion and not being able to finish is enough to convince me to wait until they are dealt with by the dev team. There is also likely going to be easier versions of these made in the future so most of us will be well served to just wait until they are fixed or improved to do them.
A few people offer to let newbies play through with them, but if everyone took them up on it they would be helping newbies for the next six years. It's simply not worth the risk of wasted time and effort for rewards that can easily be foregone. The Aegis set is easily a replacement for the Borg set so no one needs do do the STFs at all.
My main gripe about them though is they made them the continuation of the storyline we spent many missions leading to and most of us hit the wall right there with the story unfinished. They should have been designed like fleet actions; an adjunct but not the main storyline. For that matter, they should have been made like fleet actions so 20 people can play them at once and when someone goes home the team isn't screwed. I'd do them then even if they are way too zerg-like with far too many trash mobs and long, long runs back after your frequent deaths because of poor design.
I really enjoy infected and KA, but especially KA. KA had fun space parts, a ground part that required some knowledge of how to play right, and had a great atmosphere all the way through. Infected is just easy and straight forward with a slight learning curve.
I believe I offered to take you through Infected some time ago, and my offer still stands. Being New Year's Eve, I'm not sure if I will have enough fleeties online tonight, but send me a /tell if you're interested. We usually run it after 9 pm PST (GMT-8). (Oh and it helps to have vent, even if you don't have/won't use a mic. Giving out info and instructions on vent is SOOO much faster than typing it all out in chat. I lead PUG groups through some times, and I find that typing out what to do in chat is one of the main reasons why PUG runs take so long.)
Only reason why I'm trying STF's again is solely for the Borg ship parts.....otherwise I quit doing STF's due to the fact that they are horribly built and the bugs that came with them were never fixed.....
I believe I offered to take you through Infected some time ago, and my offer still stands. Being New Year's Eve, I'm not sure if I will have enough fleeties online tonight, but send me a /tell if you're interested. We usually run it after 9 pm PST (GMT-8). (Oh and it helps to have vent, even if you don't have/won't use a mic. Giving out info and instructions on vent is SOOO much faster than typing it all out in chat. I lead PUG groups through some times, and I find that typing out what to do in chat is one of the main reasons why PUG runs take so long.)
No need for us to do it on New Years Eve, though I'll probably stay home for the holiday. Infected is one that I know is actually completable in a reasonable length of time so i do have an interest in doing it. I have both rear admiral and vice admiral versions of it available.
The same people on this forum defending the STF missions and in the meanwhile Cryptic losing subs because the fact is that the missions stink as end game content because most players are not in a fleet that do these missions all the time and knows how to do them.Keep going Cryptic, how many more subs will you lose because of these missions and the fact that players have nothing else to do when they reach end game.
OH and what ever you do dont allow the feds and kdf to do them together, remember the key word is , they are not supposed to be fun.
Comments
These make sense to me as mid-to-late endgame but there's no early endgame to train people and acclimate them to challenging group play.
Personally, I'd retune the Fleet Actions (which were dead last I checked) into beginner STFs.
On the topic of STFs, I find them lots of fun. My fleet runs them just about everyday and none take more than 2 hours, maybe a bit more if we have some new players along. That is what makes a good fleet, people helping each other with the game and progressing together. A good fleet makes this a great game more than anything else. The STFs are the only PvE challenge in the game. If you want to just blow through things with no teamwork or thought there are plenty of missions available through mission replay. It's not like the STF loot is so great you feel you have to do them. The borg gear is nice for some builds but hardly game changing, besides it's about time there was some reward for those that like to take on a challenge. Maybe someday they will add rewards for those that are really good at PvP too
and there not that hard
Why would you put something like that in a game that is predominantly NOT that type of game style/difficulty???
They should all have Pop-up Warnings added to them that say they are "Mother-F**king Hard and don't try them unless you are a seasoned MMO Group Player". :eek:
I've always felt that games designed like this at that kind of difficulty level, are more about the designers Ego, than actual playability.
That may be far-fetched, but it helps when MY Ego is down cause I can't do it.
STO - If a quest bugs drop and redo it. DOESNT APPLY TO STF!!! So for our time and massive effort we got nothing. STF not worth doing by long shot.
This is such a GREAT idea! I have been posting forever about how badly we need mid-level STFs. Allowing people to experience stfs at commander and captain, gets people prepared and used to that type of gameplay.
100% undeniable fact there.
this is why i'm not playing them, read to many horror stories like this to want to put myself into the same situation with a pug group.
sry, but nothing in the game should take this amount of continuous torture time to play. because if it takes that long then no one is going to enjoy it.
I did Cure and KA back to back with almost the exact same group. These are designed for you to work well with your group and are not a very good pug endgame scenario. KA seems to be the most difficult yet funnest of the STFs that I have played but I have enjoyed them all so far actually. As long as you got a good group to run with often they are not bad at all.
STF's with people who actually know what the hell they're doing, yes please.
Another major detraction from them is the loot tables, or rather, lack there of, providing no incentive to run them more than once per character. Even the emblem/mark rewards are just bad, worse per time period than other dailies that take considerably less time. Path of the Warrior done by a level 45, for example, will net you 15 marks of exploration, 5 for the daily, 5 for each sortie. And that takes about half an hour. 24 of those marks will buy you a purple Mk X kit. You get about 1/3rd of that many marks of whatever from doing the STF, it takes longer, requires a team, and, oh yeah, it takes 70 of them to buy the same kit. Anyone see a problem here?
And this, in turn, means less people run them, so there's less experienced people running them for a newbie to slip into and see how easy they really are.
So, anyway, I think the devs need to give a little bit of love to make them a bit less annoying and take another look at the rewards versus what we get from dailies and make sure there's some balance there.
Does the phrase Red Shirt army mean anything to you? 3 Tacs properly using Tac Initiative to spam the red shirts in sequence. With full ground spec= Rambo Shirts with Army Numbers.
We in most cases out numbered the borg. couple that with our ground DPS being so insane and you have one finished instance.
Can't wait to do Terradome again with this ground team, should go by loads quicker.
The Cure still sucks. Infected is a cakewalk (specced into ground or not) But we are beating the cure faster and faster.
A few people offer to let newbies play through with them, but if everyone took them up on it they would be helping newbies for the next six years. It's simply not worth the risk of wasted time and effort for rewards that can easily be foregone. The Aegis set is easily a replacement for the Borg set so no one needs do do the STFs at all.
My main gripe about them though is they made them the continuation of the storyline we spent many missions leading to and most of us hit the wall right there with the story unfinished. They should have been designed like fleet actions; an adjunct but not the main storyline. For that matter, they should have been made like fleet actions so 20 people can play them at once and when someone goes home the team isn't screwed. I'd do them then even if they are way too zerg-like with far too many trash mobs and long, long runs back after your frequent deaths because of poor design.
I believe I offered to take you through Infected some time ago, and my offer still stands. Being New Year's Eve, I'm not sure if I will have enough fleeties online tonight, but send me a /tell if you're interested. We usually run it after 9 pm PST (GMT-8). (Oh and it helps to have vent, even if you don't have/won't use a mic. Giving out info and instructions on vent is SOOO much faster than typing it all out in chat. I lead PUG groups through some times, and I find that typing out what to do in chat is one of the main reasons why PUG runs take so long.)
No need for us to do it on New Years Eve, though I'll probably stay home for the holiday. Infected is one that I know is actually completable in a reasonable length of time so i do have an interest in doing it. I have both rear admiral and vice admiral versions of it available.
OH and what ever you do dont allow the feds and kdf to do them together, remember the key word is , they are not supposed to be fun.
The cure ground is before KA so how did you do that one without finishing the cure?