OP here. I have nothing against fleets nor am I an "anti-fleeter". I just have no desire to be in one atm. I can only log on and play for an hour or so a day and feel I would not have much to contribute right now. I'm sure many solo players have the same problem.
So why am I glad I can build a starbase solo? Simple; its something to do in between story missions and other events, which for players like me represent the meat and potatoes of the this game. Yes, it would take quite a long time, but isn't that the point? That I can't do it all in a week and start pining for something else?
I really think that Cryptic has done a great job so far, and I apologize to Tumerboy an Co. if I gave an impression otherwise.
I wish this starbase stuff was ship stuff instead and we had the exploration revamp. The game has been much more of a me and my ship thing for me. The base is ok, I'll work on mine, but I'd have been lots happier if my ship was getting the upgrades.
I'm curious as to what some of you would have us do?
Fleets exist in the game. Some of those fleets are tiny (1-5 people) some of them are huge 300 + people.
Solo players exist in game.
People who don't want to be in a fleet are in game.
As many have pointed out, we haven't done much to support fleets lately. What we have put out has largely been easily accessible to solo players.
Do you feel that we simply shouldn't support fleets?
Is there anything we could uniquely give to fleets without alienating you anti-fleeters?
IMO we've made starbases nearly as solo-accessible as they could possibly be without making them entirely trivial for larger fleets. I think Heretic has done a fine job of figuring out that whole system.
You can be in a fleet of one, and have your own starbase. There is a VERY low barrier to entry in the acquiring of 4 friends/total strangers to help you form your fleet. Then you can continue on your singular little way.
I guess I just get a feeling of damned if you do, damned if you don't here. Though admittedly that's the feeling I get 90% of the time.
I personally don't get why a single/solo player would expect to have the resources, or everything that a fleet has. I know many a solo player, and thats fine... but to expect that a a solo player have a starbase? Next will be the upgrade cost of the starbase (too high for a solo player, as pointed out previously), rather, I am sure a single player can aquire all of the materials necessary to build/upgrade a base, the complain will then become about the time required.
A starbase for 1 simply doesn't make sense. IMHO.
There are things that should come from joining and participating in a fleet... a fleet will have higher levels of resources, many minds working together (theroretically). So I would imagine that a fleet would be able to produce higer tier ships, that they make available to their membership... why make the same available to solo/non-fleeters (and please dont say because its not fair).
Yeah of course, but IT IS AN MMORPG!! I mean, you typically play those with PEOPLE! right? I don't mean to be combative by any means but honestly like the previous poster said maybe you just had goofs in that fleet? Some of the major appeal of these online games comes from the fact you are playing with friends and able to socialize with others, so being just a single player has never really made much sense to me for games like this imho.
There are many different levels of interaction, and different people enjoy different types of this.
Some like to play it like a solo game.
Some like to play it like a game with built-in chat.
Some like to play with others sometimes.
Some like to play with others all the time.
Some like to play with strangers, some friends, etc. etc. Really, there are major aspects of this game, and presumably many MMOs, that appeal to both solo and group gamers. Myself, I tend to do the missions solo, multiplayer-mandatory parts with PUGs, chatter with people in the chat box, and occasionally go out with people I know to cause the Borg pain.
I'm curious as to what some of you would have us do?
Fleets exist in the game. Some of those fleets are tiny (1-5 people) some of them are huge 300 + people.
Solo players exist in game.
People who don't want to be in a fleet are in game.
As many have pointed out, we haven't done much to support fleets lately. What we have put out has largely been easily accessible to solo players.
Do you feel that we simply shouldn't support fleets?
Is there anything we could uniquely give to fleets without alienating you anti-fleeters?
IMO we've made starbases nearly as solo-accessible as they could possibly be without making them entirely trivial for larger fleets. I think Heretic has done a fine job of figuring out that whole system.
You can be in a fleet of one, and have your own starbase. There is a VERY low barrier to entry in the acquiring of 4 friends/total strangers to help you form your fleet. Then you can continue on your singular little way.
I guess I just get a feeling of damned if you do, damned if you don't here. Though admittedly that's the feeling I get 90% of the time.
I believe I should clarify myself. I am not trying to needlessly rag on the starbase idea, nor am I trying to be jumping on the bandwagon of things to complain about. I actually think I've been fairly supportive of the devs, and I think I understand what kind of pressure they face in terms of resources and time, and their lack of both.
However, the starbase thing gets me in one particular area that I am aware of - the ships. Why is this? Simply enough, the ships are essential to the Star Trek experience. The only things more important than the ships, IMO, are MAYBE the career and race.
In that vein, let's look at it from the perspective of just that situation.
"OK, after your fleet sinks in a million dilithium, you can change your career to a Tactical-Engineering Hybrid, but only five of the 250 of you can at a time, you have to pay a ton to do it, it takes a week to do each batch, the fleet leader/officers can keep you from getting it, and if it takes 15 batches to get everyone, and you're the odd man out at #76 and the remaining members want to start building Tactical-Science hybrids, good bye 250K dilithium and 2 months of crafting mats, enjoy your fleet marks, even though everyone will have oodles of those giving you little special to offer to other fleets, and better luck next fleet. Oh yeah, and every toon you want it on has to do this entire process over again from scratch."
I didn't even include scenarios wherein the fleet becomes intolerable, you get stabbed in the back, or you want to/have to leave. Nevertheless, I don't think a lot of people would like that situation, nor if it were so for races. The main differences are that races and careers can't currently be changed, and it would be more difficult to come up with in-character justification for either.
Additionally, it is arguable that ships like this are not, in truth, content, in the sense of "something to do." They're content in the sense of specific rewards, yes, but it's not really something you do WITH your fleet. You just gather things up doing whatever and pour them into the fleet resource pool in hopes you might get what you want. It seems more gamble-tastic than the lockboxes, to me. In fact, the thought of having to go through all of this to get a ship I want badly enough to do all this work for, and NOT get it, makes me shudder.
I believe that someone raised a point with the STF system and the constant concern for loot drops, that your 'fleetmates' there consist of the random number generator. Well, that situation is not good, though it's less serious - the Mk X, Mk XI, and Mk XII have minor differences between successive iterations. An entirely new ability can change your game a great deal more in a ship (e.g. different BOff slots). Now I'm not saying this is GOOD. In fact, from what I hear (I don't do Elite STFs usually), it pretty much sucks. But this time your opponent isn't the RNG, this time it's other people, people you may have to continue to deal with, which makes it worse. It also may require you to end up being a total rat to your fellow players to get what you want as you hop to your seventh or eighth fleet. If I wanted to be a rat, I'd play Eve. This dilutes one of STO's major selling points for me.
If I HAD to put in a fleet refit system, I would mostly focus on EXTREME modifications of ships (e.g. if you want to turn a Sovereign into a major science ship), and possibly ship gimmicks, right off the top of my head. For instance, you want that shiny point-defense console? Buy Ship XYZ and refit it at a starbase. Either that or have the requirements in terms of resources, starbase level, and the like, for this particular feature, be very low. Or at the VERY LEAST make it possible to do a refit/ship building project solo (even within a larger fleet - if you're the aforementioned #76, for instance), with reasonable resource requirements for this.
As per solo fleets, it's going to be very, very difficult to get together solo fleets when everyone wants them. As-is you require four people who are willing to help you out. I've seen people recruiting on ESD - it can take hours at least, even if you pay someone in EC to fill a slot, and you also have to convince the people helping you start your fleet to stick around for those hours while you gather up enough support. If you could generate your own solo fleet at will, it would help this a lot, although it would still run into the resource problem that has been mentioned already.
There are a number of other things I could get into, but if I do I'll do it in a separate post. However, here is the bottom line, at least for me: there are a lot of things I've heard about the starbase system that sound good. I am curious to see what it will yield. And I also realize there may be things that I have not thought of. For instance, it may be that the Sovvy-R (my personal sacred cow) may be a C-Store ship, the "refit" system may be much more reasonable and have alternate (and reasonable) ways of attaining these ships, the starbase system has been thoroughly examined and is rid of most of these problems, and so forth. In other words I may be wrong, and I hope that I am. But I have heard things that make me very leery (e.g. that fleet politics are INTENDED to be part of this from one of the devs), and decisions are still presumably being made on how it will run. I figure that it is far better to make my voice heard NOW while things are more flexible rather than try to change the system once it goes live.
1 you are teamed with people you can trust 1000%
2 you know when everyone is online
3 you can be sure no one will rob the bank
This is exactly how my Federation and Klingon fleet are 3 Feds and 3 KDFs. Although I trust my FEDs characters 66.67% of the time because the last character is a Ferengi.
Comments
As a member of an active and growing smaller fleet ... I say ... "No."
Fleets need to come in all shapes, sizes and colors.
So why am I glad I can build a starbase solo? Simple; its something to do in between story missions and other events, which for players like me represent the meat and potatoes of the this game. Yes, it would take quite a long time, but isn't that the point? That I can't do it all in a week and start pining for something else?
I really think that Cryptic has done a great job so far, and I apologize to Tumerboy an Co. if I gave an impression otherwise.
I personally don't get why a single/solo player would expect to have the resources, or everything that a fleet has. I know many a solo player, and thats fine... but to expect that a a solo player have a starbase? Next will be the upgrade cost of the starbase (too high for a solo player, as pointed out previously), rather, I am sure a single player can aquire all of the materials necessary to build/upgrade a base, the complain will then become about the time required.
A starbase for 1 simply doesn't make sense. IMHO.
There are things that should come from joining and participating in a fleet... a fleet will have higher levels of resources, many minds working together (theroretically). So I would imagine that a fleet would be able to produce higer tier ships, that they make available to their membership... why make the same available to solo/non-fleeters (and please dont say because its not fair).
JMHO
There are many different levels of interaction, and different people enjoy different types of this.
Some like to play it like a solo game.
Some like to play it like a game with built-in chat.
Some like to play with others sometimes.
Some like to play with others all the time.
Some like to play with strangers, some friends, etc. etc. Really, there are major aspects of this game, and presumably many MMOs, that appeal to both solo and group gamers. Myself, I tend to do the missions solo, multiplayer-mandatory parts with PUGs, chatter with people in the chat box, and occasionally go out with people I know to cause the Borg pain.
The same argument could be made for starships, could it not?
I believe I should clarify myself. I am not trying to needlessly rag on the starbase idea, nor am I trying to be jumping on the bandwagon of things to complain about. I actually think I've been fairly supportive of the devs, and I think I understand what kind of pressure they face in terms of resources and time, and their lack of both.
However, the starbase thing gets me in one particular area that I am aware of - the ships. Why is this? Simply enough, the ships are essential to the Star Trek experience. The only things more important than the ships, IMO, are MAYBE the career and race.
In that vein, let's look at it from the perspective of just that situation.
"OK, after your fleet sinks in a million dilithium, you can change your career to a Tactical-Engineering Hybrid, but only five of the 250 of you can at a time, you have to pay a ton to do it, it takes a week to do each batch, the fleet leader/officers can keep you from getting it, and if it takes 15 batches to get everyone, and you're the odd man out at #76 and the remaining members want to start building Tactical-Science hybrids, good bye 250K dilithium and 2 months of crafting mats, enjoy your fleet marks, even though everyone will have oodles of those giving you little special to offer to other fleets, and better luck next fleet. Oh yeah, and every toon you want it on has to do this entire process over again from scratch."
I didn't even include scenarios wherein the fleet becomes intolerable, you get stabbed in the back, or you want to/have to leave. Nevertheless, I don't think a lot of people would like that situation, nor if it were so for races. The main differences are that races and careers can't currently be changed, and it would be more difficult to come up with in-character justification for either.
Additionally, it is arguable that ships like this are not, in truth, content, in the sense of "something to do." They're content in the sense of specific rewards, yes, but it's not really something you do WITH your fleet. You just gather things up doing whatever and pour them into the fleet resource pool in hopes you might get what you want. It seems more gamble-tastic than the lockboxes, to me. In fact, the thought of having to go through all of this to get a ship I want badly enough to do all this work for, and NOT get it, makes me shudder.
I believe that someone raised a point with the STF system and the constant concern for loot drops, that your 'fleetmates' there consist of the random number generator. Well, that situation is not good, though it's less serious - the Mk X, Mk XI, and Mk XII have minor differences between successive iterations. An entirely new ability can change your game a great deal more in a ship (e.g. different BOff slots). Now I'm not saying this is GOOD. In fact, from what I hear (I don't do Elite STFs usually), it pretty much sucks. But this time your opponent isn't the RNG, this time it's other people, people you may have to continue to deal with, which makes it worse. It also may require you to end up being a total rat to your fellow players to get what you want as you hop to your seventh or eighth fleet. If I wanted to be a rat, I'd play Eve. This dilutes one of STO's major selling points for me.
If I HAD to put in a fleet refit system, I would mostly focus on EXTREME modifications of ships (e.g. if you want to turn a Sovereign into a major science ship), and possibly ship gimmicks, right off the top of my head. For instance, you want that shiny point-defense console? Buy Ship XYZ and refit it at a starbase. Either that or have the requirements in terms of resources, starbase level, and the like, for this particular feature, be very low. Or at the VERY LEAST make it possible to do a refit/ship building project solo (even within a larger fleet - if you're the aforementioned #76, for instance), with reasonable resource requirements for this.
As per solo fleets, it's going to be very, very difficult to get together solo fleets when everyone wants them. As-is you require four people who are willing to help you out. I've seen people recruiting on ESD - it can take hours at least, even if you pay someone in EC to fill a slot, and you also have to convince the people helping you start your fleet to stick around for those hours while you gather up enough support. If you could generate your own solo fleet at will, it would help this a lot, although it would still run into the resource problem that has been mentioned already.
There are a number of other things I could get into, but if I do I'll do it in a separate post. However, here is the bottom line, at least for me: there are a lot of things I've heard about the starbase system that sound good. I am curious to see what it will yield. And I also realize there may be things that I have not thought of. For instance, it may be that the Sovvy-R (my personal sacred cow) may be a C-Store ship, the "refit" system may be much more reasonable and have alternate (and reasonable) ways of attaining these ships, the starbase system has been thoroughly examined and is rid of most of these problems, and so forth. In other words I may be wrong, and I hope that I am. But I have heard things that make me very leery (e.g. that fleet politics are INTENDED to be part of this from one of the devs), and decisions are still presumably being made on how it will run. I figure that it is far better to make my voice heard NOW while things are more flexible rather than try to change the system once it goes live.
I second this, im also a a member of a casual fleet.
This is exactly how my Federation and Klingon fleet are 3 Feds and 3 KDFs. Although I trust my FEDs characters 66.67% of the time because the last character is a Ferengi.
Maybe some of us like me need a starbase for ourself because of our evil plans.
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