test content
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc

New Player Feedback

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Though I played in beta, I was not then tempted to pick up the game at launch. I'm happy to say that the game has improved a great deal and I'm having much more fun. Having said that, I do have some feedback and suggestions:

Itemization - Currently, I can level up into a new rank and go and purchase better gear. There is no other limitation. This makes the boost up in power enormous, and it needs to be as the content gets much more difficult at each of these points. However, I don't feel like I steadily upgrade items. Instead, I get a rare quest reward every now and again, but otherwise I'm using what I bought when I leveled up. I suggest you consider creating grade limitations on items too. For example, the IVversion of an item could be for LC Grade 6 or higher. Before that you could have a III+ item that has a limitation of LC Grade 3. Basically give us more opportunities to improve our characters.

Crafting - Either you've made the design choice to not allow players to level up their crafting in parity with their character's advancement or someone simply hasn't done the data-mining (or there is a problem with their algos or outliers. . . farmers or bots are throwing the data off). I'm earning nowhere near the amount of data I need to advance crafting quickly enough. I'm now collecting 3rd tier resources but I'm still on the first tier of crafting.

Skill System - There are several things I dislike about it.

1. The interface is bad. I understand wanting to have uniformly sized windows for the UI, but this one needs more space and should get it. Scrolling is bad. Not the end of the world obviously, but trying to give constructive feedback.

2. Front-loaded / Rewards Generalization - Okay, so you don't want min/maxers dominating your game. There are already caps. Having +30 in a skill isn't dominating. Right now, I try to put 4 points in all skills and 7 in the ones that I use. At the endgame, I'll respec and min/max anyway, but this makes us all cookie-cutter while we level. Please consider making this a uniform +3 bump for each point and giving us about 20% more skill points at the LC level (haven't leveled past Commander yet so I don't yet know if they also need more points at this rank). Not saying we should necessarily earn more points for tasks. I stopped doing patrols to focus on story missions (they were awesome and fun and I didn't want to level past them while doing patrols instead), so I know that there could be 20% more skill points added to rank without needing to add 20% more content.

3. Begs for streamlining - There are simply far too many things for players to put points into. This makes items that boost all these individual stats less useful as there are such a plethora of stats that modifying one has a minor effect at best. Plus, it's like the designer is too timid to let players excel and we don't really know what the numbers mean. IHow about in the box to the right, it shows us stats on how much OUR actual torpedoes will hit for when we put a point into torpedo weapons. How much is that increase? Maybe it has an increase in the crit chance? There are all these numbers that seem like they would be a meta-gamers paradise, but you've gone to such lengths to obscure what's under the hood that we are left with a complicated system that normal users can't understand. I'm sure I could parse out the details through tests and build a little app that tells people what their points actually do, but I'm not that interested and I'm worried that it is obscured because the boosts are disappointing. If players paid more for each skill boost, but the boosts actually had some impact, I think the game would get more crunchy goodness.

Content Creation and Design Supervision

I found the diplomacy quests contained numerous typos and often were simple fetch and carries or had NPCs placed annoyingly far from one another so that the fun part of the quest. . . puzzling out how to fix a situation was diluted by the chore of running about a starbase to talk to each of them. This makes it seem like the content is coming out with only one set of eyes on it. Surely someone at Cryptic played these quests and saw the typos or though that running about a starbase was a chore that took away from the fun bits? The strongest diplomacy mission (and one of the strongest missions in the game) is the one that you pick up when orbiting Bajor. It takes place inside the player's ship (which is great and so like the show - we should be inside our own ships for diplomacy missions often), and all of the pieces of the puzzle are within one room. The focus then becomes the puzzle rather than running about. It was well-written and shown love. I'd like to see more stuff like this.

Having criticized the design team for being sloppy or not prioritizing the player having fun, I have to say that the game's tools seem to lend themselves to the traditional missions we've seen where you go into a star system and blow some things up or land and click glowies after murdering everyone in sight. The design team is going to need help from engineers to make good diplomacy content. Linking up NPCs to work intelligently after a sequence of inquiries isn't brain surgery, but making tools that intuitively allow content creators to do so and have the content then work reliably is a big deal.

Game Flow and Hitches - There are a lot of concepts that could be explained better. A new user/flow pass to content would help the game. Hire a couple of college students for a few weeks at minimum wage (interns). Their job is to sit in a room for 3-5 hours/day and play STO. Whenever they have a question about something that they have to ask in zone chat or that they have to look up on the net, they type it out for their EOS report. Ask a local CIS professor to send over applicants and you will probably get many applicants. Have them do an hour shift (more if that doesn't get them out of the tutorial as it is pretty decent) and you'll find your two people by seeing who is the most articulate in their EOS report.
Sign In or Register to comment.