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Feedback: Borg Invasion: Temple
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
This is the thread for all feedback for theTemple section of the Defera Borg invasion map.
Discussion points:
Discussion points:
- How clear are the objectives here?
- Does the setup make sense?
- General mission bugs.
- General art bugs.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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20 minutes in now, there were/are no NPCs pointing out what objectives or minigames must be performed at the temple camp site, and the zone chat has a number of people asking what to do mingled with others who have figured it out.
It wasn't until I actually left the zone and re-entered that I found that the missions associated with each area were given back at the planet's rendezvous zone prior to entering the Temple. No indication of this is given in the hot zone itself.
Perhaps a notice to return to the rendezvous zone for instructions would better help players who transition from the 'tourist' mode of the action zones into the 'hot' mode of the zones.
I liked everything else. It all looks very snazzy.
I'll second that sentiment.
I did the isolinear chip encryption puzzle about 6 out of 10 times before I gave up and simply went with the other, less-redundant mission in order to progress to Medium. It's a clever idea that's akin to candy: Sweet taste, but a bit too much gets old really fast.
It also kind of rankles when you're stuck at a console poking chips on a screen for tens of minutes while explosions and weapons fire are going off twenty meters to your left.
For something more positive, however!
I enjoyed the event. It's definitely a good addition to engage in, and its strongest points I feel are in the whole 'warzone' feel to it, having other players around to assist against a common foe. The usual sort of thing that'd happen on PvE mass maps. Not everything can be seen in two hours, which is a good thing I feel as I personally wouldn't want to experience it all just in one go and be left with nothing.
Looking forward to digging deeper next time it rolls around, and seeing how it's refined over time.
At first, I didn't know you had to go to X NPC to get Y Mission. Took me an hour to figure things out. But after things were doable, but rather poor.
Scanning the Crates was more of trial and error, which felt like unnecessary tasking.
The Isolinear Chip game took forever to do for 10 times. Rather do the Isolinear Game when your at the crates.
Does the Setup make Sense?
No, you got Borg Attacking and your first reaction is to jump in, not go scan crates and relics.
And the Temple's location should make more sense too.
General Mission Bugs:
Borg falling underground due to the hilly terrain.
General Art Bugs:
None seen.
Furthermore, it would be great if you cut back the Borg Spam in the Hard Mission, even with 5 people it was still very overwhelming. And was further complicated without the ability to group with the Klingons and nobody able to resurrecting one another.
SO PLEASE CUT BACK THE SPAM!
Honestly Devs, if you can't figure out ways to make things challenging without spamming tons of NPCs and 1-shotting people, then STO is good as dead.
There did seem to be some issues in the yellow/medium difficulty section where Borg could potentially get stuck or in odd places. I saw one borg get stuck inside a hill, trying futilely to get out. Apparently /stuck is not a command they have in their nanobots. That said, my quantum mortar made short work of him. Similarly one of the priests managed to get knocked back onto one of the thin vertical walls, and got knocked out there. Luckily I could jump over to it to transport, but they probably shouldn't be up there in the first place.
Discussion points:
Easy: Both missions were rather confusing at first (or maybe we just didn't bother reading the descriptions well enough)
Medium: Clear and easy to understand.
Easy: I didn't get the point of setting up a turret that shoots at only one borg. Also the turrets placed at the upper ledge point the wrong direction. I liked marking the cargo containers but the puzzle part got really annoying after 4-5 times you did it. 1-3 should be a maximum.
Medium: No complaints.
Aside from crashes and no revive, none.
None noticed.
Mission Location: Temple
Mission Difficulty: Easy
Missions:
1) High Ground
2) Preserve Knowledge
High Ground (Easy).
This mission was pretty straight forward, though it took me a couple minutes the first time to figure out that you have to go and set turrets up. I know it is in the mission text, but for some reason it still eluded me for a bit the first time.
Once I figured out that the turrets need to be set up (Cleared?) it made somewhat more sense. However, It still seemed like there were times when no matter what I did, (in terms of positioning my toon near/on-top of) the turret locations, I could not get an interact button for the life of me--litterally, since you are seriously in the line of fire in those locations.
Not sure what the best option would be for this. Perhaps have a dummy turret set up near Julie in the Command area, and an optional mini-tutorial that lets you know what to do?
Over all, though it was a fun little mission, and being somewhat "Open" meant folks were helping eachother just be being there--I think.
Preserve Knowledge (Easy)
This was a little more straight forward (once I noticed an interact flag on a crate) the first time I attempted this mission, or the first part was anyway.
However, two potential issues for new folks;
a) if the first Interact-Flag shows up on crates that are on the far-side of the Borg gauntlet, they may not be easily seen or noticed leading to confusion about what to do, and
b) while the console for overriding the transporter (or whatever, I did not really read the text unfortunately), is prominantly placed, I did not see it right away. This lead to a bit of running around trying to figure out where to go next after I had gotten the initial 10 manifests sorted out.
In this case, again, perhaps an optional mini-tutorial in the command area might be useful.
Also, let me say, I was very glad to get to see a new puzzle type--very cool. The first pass was pretty straight forward, however, and this may just be me, I was never able to complete the second puzzle (as in you have to complete it ten times to clear the mission), so I wasted A LOT of time here, and ultimately was unable to complet the mission before time ran out. Which was a bit frustrating, perhaps five puzzle passes would be sufficient for the easy version?
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Regardless, I do see the long-term advantages to having a variety of challenges in place so that completionists will have lots of reasons to come back to the events. After all, if we can just pop in once and do everything, there would be little reason to come back.
Which brings me to the rewards.
The special Invasion Event items and tokens are clever. I like the idea of crafting with a new set of items, and having them be simple Borg-helpful buffs (and de-buffs) is cool. However, I found the number of drops (at least in this area) to be far too few.
Now as stated, I have only done this event twice, and in both cases I was circumstantially hindered by getting in to the zone with 20 minutes or so left on the clock. That said, at least in the case of the Temple missions, the loot was pretty sparse.
Out of two toons, I only managed to get 1 Borg-crafting token, which is pretty abysmal when you do the math;
*If* I got 1 token drop out of 40 minutes (roughly and spread over two seperate 20 minute instances), then that works out to less than 3 token drops in a given instance. And given that most of the craftable items require at least 30 (or so) tokens, this could be a very tedious process. Add to that, that most of the items are fairly mundane compared to other items in the game, and I am not sure I would be over-eager to try to complete a "Set" such as it is.
One option to help with this, might be to add a token (or perhaps several?) to each mission reward? In other words, while a few K in EC is nice, having the added incentive of a few tokens (Maybe random if possible?) tacked on to the basic mission rewards, could help build that stock pile of crafting tokens, and make it less painful to craft these special items. And I say special here, only in that they are fairly unique, but not extraordinary, and likely not worth (at least to me) potentially dozens if not hundreds of runs through in order to get each one. In fact possibly dozens to get a single fairly mundane item.
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The art and layout of the invasion zone are both very cool. I like that you can get around via transporter OR simply by hiking around the map, and that there is enough diversity in the design of each area to break up the otherwise potentially boring environment. Each encounter/mission area is distinct in that sense, and it's nice to have such a large play-area to explore.
So, overall, I like where this is going, and I look forward to getting to play some of the other missions. And again, since my experience is somewhat limited at this point it is hard to say what months (or years) will bring in terms of ease of the missions, collecting of tokens, and general replayability.
As of right now, I see some great potential for similar open mission locations, and I do hope to see more of these kinds of group PvE settings in the future. Not just with the Borg, but If this is the direction that Fleet Action-like content is headed for the future, I really think it will be a lot of fun.
Thanks for reading my Wall-of-Text, and for the time that has already gone into this project... Oh, and great job so far!
maj!
Just now I just soloed 2 Assimilated Priests and a couple of KDF players beamed them out, leaving me without credit! This really ticks me off! :mad:
get in a group of 5 and spam the area..
This... medium's are meant to be played in groups... solo'ing groups, and loosing your target is your own fault for not following directions
There seems to be something mission from the ruins, you can look nder the stone pavement.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-IZnhNkns1zc/Tr2FeScMO4I/AAAAAAAAA9c/EyW1s2hy7ME/s640/screenshot_2011-11-11-12-35-03.jpg
5 People are not enough on HARD and 15 was Overkill.
But when we won, we agreed that having multiple players there was a fun event and the Devs should start working on future multiple-group events with a common goal.
For an average player:
Some of you may find the hard encounters too easy, and we will look into it. Just keep in mind that our tribble testers are typically the most skilled STO players, so if we set encounters for what you guys find challenging average players will be stuck.
That's alright, everyone who wants a bit of a challenge can do it with 4 or even 3 instead of five.
Yep, I pulled it off with 4 as well, 2 Engs and 2 Tacticals. The AoEs really helped.
That much is true, we are experienced. But most of the Medium missions are really easy, just time consuming.
As for Hard, well I can't comment on the other missions since they are bugged. But the Temple would be very difficult with an inexperienced team.
On the last Defera Hotness during the last hour of the two, after completing the City easy missions, then completing the power plant easy missions... I went to the Temple and I completed both medium level Temple missions solo, most others in the area were busy with the easy missions. It took me about 25 minutes, 5 minutes of which was figuring out what I was doing with the artifacts and assimilated Deferi. I had enough time remaining to complete 1 and 1/4 of the easy missions at the Temple.
When me and my team got to the City, I did crash twice... a lot of players did with everything going on all at once. Setting the Visual FX Quality setting to low seemed to help, though not for one of my team mates who continued to crash.
Great idea. Let's just trample over all content with a huge mob. Fun?
Temple easy missions were quick and easy. I liked the new mini game... dont agree with most others, I found it simple enough to do, 5 minutes or so to get all 10 done, I dont see a problem with it.
Temple medium missions were also simple enough. I found that you dont really need to group at all for the scanning one, as a tactical, I can stealth to the back and scan before the borg even notice (no, I was not stealing anything from anyone). I did hte save the priest one once, but takes longer to solo.
Temple hard was fun, we need more missions like that that are simple, quick, and require a group.
Overall, I would rate it as very enjoyable. We need more missions/events like this. Solo play + group play that is enjoyable is very good.
Do it once for the puzzle, and then move on would be my vote.
I think we attempted the hard Temple mission with 4 players and lost the first time around. Then got a 5th and easily defeated the Borg within approximately 5 minutes from the point of interaction with the object that triggers the Borg to spawn.
It was fun, no issues and seemed to run as intended. I do like the waves of Borg that push you back up the steps of the Temple, though I didn't. My team got pushed back while I stayed near the bottom of the steps out flanking the Borg.
One thing is I did this several times with a team, and we got wiped the first couple times, but it still said the artifact was powering down and was safe. I only was able to get the data and complete the mission the last time, when we survived. Does it say this text when you win and when you lose? If so, it could use a little difference to indicate when the artifact powers down early, and when it powers down because you've completed your analysis.
The transporter encoding thing is the only one I found that wasn't clear. I ran around trying to figure out how to encode the transporter for several minutes before giving up and going to the transporter pad and discovering it by accident. Perhaps a transporter console with one of those icons above would help.
The transporter encoder is a great puzzle - but doing it 10 times is a simply too much.
Bug: When you're mowing down the borg moving towards the stairs there are a lot of borg that don't take damage, only some of them take damage. And yes, I checked to make sure they hadn't adapted to me.
Graphical issue, the ledge the far set of turrets is on is floating in the air, and the ground below is nicely lit where you can see all the details when it should be black. What is really needed is a vertical wall extending into the ground so you can't see under it at all.
The energy drain shield thing was quite cool, and with multiple people its fairly quick.