Certainly is possible and something we've discussed. We are going to leave Nukara open 24/7 and have multiple hours a day when you can earn FMs for now.
Yeah, personally I'm still having trouble figuring out why the time-gating is being done instead of cooldowns. Unless the entire purpose is to keep us from getting the rewards as long as possible (or period for some people).
Even making the Vault Datacore and Tholian Fleet marks a Daily mission would be better. Obviously there's the ability to make a wrapper mission (ala Klingon Sorties) that encompasses multiple missions. Make a daily mission for the Tholian Interior and one for the Exterior.
It just seems silly to put this much effort into these things and then only encourage people to go there at random (and often terrible) times during the week. I'd think you'd have so much pride in your work that you'd want people to have a reason to go there and see/enjoy it. People won't do that after the first time just for kicks, they need a carrot, otherwise in a week people will say there's nothing to do (ie worth doing)...
I agree with adding long cooldown timers instead of time-gating. I don't play much anymore, I only get on once maybe twice if I feel like Doffing that day. So even when the hourlies are on, I hardly ever participate anymore.
I think these sort of things would work better as a Daily much like Kerrat. Access it anytime, but can only get Fleet Marks once a day.
I honestly don't see the issue of letting it reward marks all the time, at least it lets you still work towards a goal between cooldowns on the PvE queue. Its not like it was a super efficient way to get them anyways. Half an hour of queues was usually around 70-100 marks, where as the same time spent on invasion quests would be hard pressed to earn you more then 20-30.
Tholian rewards are just less compelling to me when the only use for it is to farm tholians more effectively and I don't even have a reason to do that outside of time-gated events anymore.
Really dropped my hype for this patch from a solid 9.9 to a 7.2
When did "putting more time in to a game puts you further ahead" become replaced by "play by our terms or fall behind"?
Theres a big difference between keeping the player engaged and rewarded for 5 hours of play, and making the player wait 5 hours to be rewarded.
Yeah, personally I'm still having trouble figuring out why the time-gating is being done instead of cooldowns. Unless the entire purpose is to keep us from getting the rewards as long as possible (or period for some people).
Even making the Vault Datacore and Tholian Fleet marks a Daily mission would be better. Obviously there's the ability to make a wrapper mission (ala Klingon Sorties) that encompasses multiple missions. Make a daily mission for the Tholian Interior and one for the Exterior.
It just seems silly to put this much effort into these things and then only encourage people to go there at random (and often terrible) times during the week. I'd think you'd have so much pride in your work that you'd want people to have a reason to go there and see/enjoy it. People won't do that after the first time just for kicks, they need a carrot, otherwise in a week people will say there's nothing to do (ie worth doing)...
I think the goal is to get the rewards gated to a set amount per day while encouraging social play.
Now...
What I think would be a more productive solution is this... and I'll get a bit technical with it:
Create a "Group Loot Bag" that has a chance of dropping anywhere.
Create an invisible buff on players, similar to the IDIC Buff. This stacks up to 5 times. More stacks of this invisible buff yield increased chance at "Group Loot Bags." (Basically, these Group Loot Bags would be constantly dropping but you'd need to be in a group to loot them.)
These bags would have a chance to contain:
Dilithium ore. (Most common. There's a rate at which you can refine dilithium.)
Team Consumables.
Salvage. (I'd drop the Borg from the name and look at adding Salvage vendors with different themes all around. This would include things like random Tholian bags as an item bought with Salvage.)
Fleet Marks.
Tiers of prototypes for a new variant of Omega Force/Honor Guard/MACO gear that are not Borg-specific. I have some ideas on how to do this without it being very art intensive by making these costumes largely kitbashes of existing costume options that are not available to players or not ordinarily available as a combination. This is kinda the equivalent of the non-raiding Tier equivalent they started doing in ********.
You don't see these items unless teamed. More people on the team increases the frequency of the items. Similar to how Foundry drops work from a player perspective, there's a point at which this cuts off. Basically, your invisible team loot buff would kick into cooldown periodically. So every time a team loot bag drops, everyone's invisible team loot buff gets replaced with a cooldown buff for a random amount between 3 and 15 minutes, which the player can't see.
Then you let people queue for a random event hub team on either Defera or Nukara Prime. But anywhere players are teamed and killing things, these special boxes are dropping.
Instead of getting people to group by saying, "Here is a place where everyone should be teaming right now!" I think it makes more sense to create places where teaming is natural and create an incentive to team everywhere and anywhere by offering special loot just for playing in a group and killing things.
If you do ever decide to join a fleet you have something to turn into fleed credits right away at least.
Anyway, not all rewards are for everyone. When a Featured Episode rewards a nice Phaser Beam and my ship is geared for Antiproton cannons, is it something to cry over? I do the Episode anyway since it's fun.
You can still run the Tholian ground invasion for the new ground set if you don't want the fleet marks. Then it's also not time gated if you don't care for the marks. Also I'm guessing there are new accolades. It's not like Defera has more to offer than accolades these days. When it hit Tribble I never considered this map to be primarily for fleet mark grinding.
Still I would have prefered it if the map would always give fleet marks but double during event hour. Best of both worlds.
That is a reason why each of my starships have a different type of energy weapon type. But even if I get equipment or weapons for my ships that are no upgrades over what I already have I still select "Need" through the STF roll and what I end up getting I put on the exchange for a reasonable price and then buy what I need with the EC I make.
My 4-man fleet has done well enough on Tribble. We're not blazing through the tiers, but we're making steady progress.
That being said, time gated rewards are not cool. I don't play the game around a schedule and neither do the other three in my fleet. We play when we have time, not when Cryptic says so. I get the need to slow progression to a certain extent so people don't plow through to max level Starbases in a week, but this whole concept of time gated anything is getting out of hand.
Time gated anything is not cool. When I get home from work I only have 5 hours at most to hop on STO if I am not too tired. Then that is just enough time for me to do the STF space missions once each, setup the Doff missions for the night and then its time to go to bed. Every time I check the active missions its always stuff that I dont take part in. Such as crafting which I still havent really taken part in cause I never figured it out when I first got the crafting tutorial. Or the vault shuttle event. I dont care to go through the vault in a shuttle after the first 4 times I ran the episode to get the rewards I wanted.
I understand the logic in this, but I still disagree with the decision. There is a massive number of fleet marks needed, and this will affect both small fleets and also those of us who WANT to participate, but have work schedules that are not amenable to these types of time-gates.
Yep, and then they will see the errors of their ways as people with work and daily activities that life calls upon them start to leave. I left for two months cause I just lost interest and I had too much going on to waste time on repetitive grinding for EDC`s to outfit a starship with borg weapons. I mean really 60 EDC`s just to get borg plasma beams for my starship is excessive considering I get between 1 and 3 EDC`s per mission and I only have the time to run those missions once a piece.
The various Tholian invasion missions on Nukara are intended to be available all the time so that you don't have to wait for an hourly event to access this content. (we want to make the Borg Defera Missions function similarly in the future as well).
Defera is useless without rewarding players with Borg salvage, tech drops, and prototypes. Its a grind fest for useless crafting items, which I normally end up throwing out. You guys took one of the best assets of this game, and turned it into a dull and mundane experience. Majority of the players are skipping the missions, for they realize the reward system is extremely lacking.
Most players go into Defera to randomly kill Borg, and many of them get bored rather quickly.
We are waiting for you folks to realize this conundrum.
I just things are upside down. The current philosophy seems to be to create group content and then to manage times for people to group to maximize the number of people grouping. It's leveraging a minimal demand for grouping to create timed groups rather than increasing demand for grouping.
What I think makes more sense to incentivize grouping everywhere through things like better loot for grouped players (and possibly reputation/commendation things that kick in only when in a group) and then leverage mission replay and these event zones as convenient playgrounds for grouped players.
Then, if you want to have calendar events, you have calendar events for UNGROUPED players.
So there's an hour a day where you get rewards for soloing these kinds of content and if you want the rewards outside the window, you group for them.
Personally I just think they should add a cooldown on the missions (maybe 30mins to an hour) to prevent people grinding the Fleet Marks to quickly, then during the event hours, increase the ammount of marks earnt. That way people can happily goto the instance to earn credits when they want. Far too many times I miss out on rewards due to the time gating. surely its better to 'always' offer the good rewarsd but offer 'more' of them in special event times? That way people are always getting some type of useful reward.
Personally I just think they should add a cooldown on the missions (maybe 30mins to an hour) to prevent people grinding the Fleet Marks to quickly, then during the event hours, increase the ammount of marks earnt. That way people can happily goto the instance to earn credits when they want. Far too many times I miss out on rewards due to the time gating. surely its better to 'always' offer the good rewarsd but offer 'more' of them in special event times? That way people are always getting some type of useful reward.
Oh here we go again, the very reason I don't do the Deferi mission will be the reason I wont be doing the Tholian mission.
When will they learn...
Same, and it really hurts too because i'm in a small fleet, i mean yeah it's supposed to take awhile to get our SB up but at the rate me and my other 3 fleetmates are able to get the fleetmarks now we might have have a T2 SB in 3 years.
i don't see the issue sure it would be nice if we could get fleet marks for it but as its not a fleet set of missions we should think are self's lucky that we have the time gated 1h what do you expect them to do add fleet marks to every mission in game?
The various Tholian invasion missions on Nukara are intended to be available all the time so that you don't have to wait for an hourly event to access this content. (we want to make the Borg Defera Missions function similarly in the future as well).
This set of missions was not originally intended to offer any Fleet Marks at all as it more about setting up the introduction of the Tholians than it was about Fleet Starbases or Fleet Actions. Plus remember, that not all players are in a Fleet. The reward struction in this Zone reflects the fact that Fleet Marks are not the focus. Any player (fleeted or not) can earn cool new Tholian rewards by playing missions in this zone.
However, after internal discussions we agreed that all of the new missions being released in Season 6 should offer Fleet Marks in some way to make it useful for max level Fleet Members. All the missions reward Fleet Marks in various increments, with the only difference in the Nukara Zone being that we wanted these missions to be constantly replayable and not an easy source of FMs.
To facilitate this, we are creating a single "Fleet Hour" event which (last I checked) will be running multiple times per day. During those hours, some events will be offering additional Fleet Marks, and some missions like the ones on Nukara will offer Fleet Marks where they previously did not.
As with anything, we reserve the right to change this in the future, but that is the plan right now.
TRIBBLE Fleetmarks, where is my DILITHIUM for any of this ( being the "time base currency " etc.)
Comments
some of this times are so bad for Eu Players ... so some event i never played like the shuttle event
Subscribed For: 4 years 5 months 20 days at 26.10.2014
Yeah, personally I'm still having trouble figuring out why the time-gating is being done instead of cooldowns. Unless the entire purpose is to keep us from getting the rewards as long as possible (or period for some people).
Even making the Vault Datacore and Tholian Fleet marks a Daily mission would be better. Obviously there's the ability to make a wrapper mission (ala Klingon Sorties) that encompasses multiple missions. Make a daily mission for the Tholian Interior and one for the Exterior.
It just seems silly to put this much effort into these things and then only encourage people to go there at random (and often terrible) times during the week. I'd think you'd have so much pride in your work that you'd want people to have a reason to go there and see/enjoy it. People won't do that after the first time just for kicks, they need a carrot, otherwise in a week people will say there's nothing to do (ie worth doing)...
I think these sort of things would work better as a Daily much like Kerrat. Access it anytime, but can only get Fleet Marks once a day.
Tholian rewards are just less compelling to me when the only use for it is to farm tholians more effectively and I don't even have a reason to do that outside of time-gated events anymore.
Really dropped my hype for this patch from a solid 9.9 to a 7.2
When did "putting more time in to a game puts you further ahead" become replaced by "play by our terms or fall behind"?
Theres a big difference between keeping the player engaged and rewarded for 5 hours of play, and making the player wait 5 hours to be rewarded.
I think the goal is to get the rewards gated to a set amount per day while encouraging social play.
Now...
What I think would be a more productive solution is this... and I'll get a bit technical with it:
Create a "Group Loot Bag" that has a chance of dropping anywhere.
Create an invisible buff on players, similar to the IDIC Buff. This stacks up to 5 times. More stacks of this invisible buff yield increased chance at "Group Loot Bags." (Basically, these Group Loot Bags would be constantly dropping but you'd need to be in a group to loot them.)
These bags would have a chance to contain:
Dilithium ore. (Most common. There's a rate at which you can refine dilithium.)
Team Consumables.
Salvage. (I'd drop the Borg from the name and look at adding Salvage vendors with different themes all around. This would include things like random Tholian bags as an item bought with Salvage.)
Fleet Marks.
Tiers of prototypes for a new variant of Omega Force/Honor Guard/MACO gear that are not Borg-specific. I have some ideas on how to do this without it being very art intensive by making these costumes largely kitbashes of existing costume options that are not available to players or not ordinarily available as a combination. This is kinda the equivalent of the non-raiding Tier equivalent they started doing in ********.
You don't see these items unless teamed. More people on the team increases the frequency of the items. Similar to how Foundry drops work from a player perspective, there's a point at which this cuts off. Basically, your invisible team loot buff would kick into cooldown periodically. So every time a team loot bag drops, everyone's invisible team loot buff gets replaced with a cooldown buff for a random amount between 3 and 15 minutes, which the player can't see.
Then you let people queue for a random event hub team on either Defera or Nukara Prime. But anywhere players are teamed and killing things, these special boxes are dropping.
Instead of getting people to group by saying, "Here is a place where everyone should be teaming right now!" I think it makes more sense to create places where teaming is natural and create an incentive to team everywhere and anywhere by offering special loot just for playing in a group and killing things.
That is a reason why each of my starships have a different type of energy weapon type. But even if I get equipment or weapons for my ships that are no upgrades over what I already have I still select "Need" through the STF roll and what I end up getting I put on the exchange for a reasonable price and then buy what I need with the EC I make.
Time gated anything is not cool. When I get home from work I only have 5 hours at most to hop on STO if I am not too tired. Then that is just enough time for me to do the STF space missions once each, setup the Doff missions for the night and then its time to go to bed. Every time I check the active missions its always stuff that I dont take part in. Such as crafting which I still havent really taken part in cause I never figured it out when I first got the crafting tutorial. Or the vault shuttle event. I dont care to go through the vault in a shuttle after the first 4 times I ran the episode to get the rewards I wanted.
Yep, and then they will see the errors of their ways as people with work and daily activities that life calls upon them start to leave. I left for two months cause I just lost interest and I had too much going on to waste time on repetitive grinding for EDC`s to outfit a starship with borg weapons. I mean really 60 EDC`s just to get borg plasma beams for my starship is excessive considering I get between 1 and 3 EDC`s per mission and I only have the time to run those missions once a piece.
Most players go into Defera to randomly kill Borg, and many of them get bored rather quickly.
We are waiting for you folks to realize this conundrum.
What I think makes more sense to incentivize grouping everywhere through things like better loot for grouped players (and possibly reputation/commendation things that kick in only when in a group) and then leverage mission replay and these event zones as convenient playgrounds for grouped players.
Then, if you want to have calendar events, you have calendar events for UNGROUPED players.
So there's an hour a day where you get rewards for soloing these kinds of content and if you want the rewards outside the window, you group for them.
+1 to these. Definitely.
When will they learn...
+1 /10charsplz
Same, and it really hurts too because i'm in a small fleet, i mean yeah it's supposed to take awhile to get our SB up but at the rate me and my other 3 fleetmates are able to get the fleetmarks now we might have have a T2 SB in 3 years.
I am Dissapoint.:(
Founder and Current CO of Gamma Strike Force
Player since December 2009
TRIBBLE Fleetmarks, where is my DILITHIUM for any of this ( being the "time base currency " etc.)