With the way it was before, we got so many fleet marks from redshirt farming that marks were never an issue for any fleet that had members doing it. This means that projects were getting started really fast. This leads to more and more dilithium taken out of the economy at a faster rate, as well as duty officers.
Cryptic / PWE clearly don't want anyone ending up, like, um you know, buying Zen to trade for dilithium because they've spent so much in projects and could use a boost, and they certainly don't want us buying duty officer packs and being happy about getting whites and greens in them to use in projects. Basically, they don't want another, clever way of getting our money..... lulz.
[6:07] [Combat (Self)] Your Dual Antiproton Banks - Overload III deals 166213 (61268) Antiproton Damage(Critical) to Gateway.
Being able to get 800 marks per person in 2 hours of doing nothing but the Red Shirt mission shouldn't have been there in the first place, and you guys are complaining that an exploit has been patched? How small of a fleet are you guys talking about having problems? If your fleet is so small you can't complete these projects you need to recruit or give your members a swift kick in the butt. It would be rather hard for other fleet members to contribute marks if a few lazy people farmed that many marks and filled all the projects before they got a chance. And seriously, it's been 2 weeks. You guys are acting like you should have a tier 5 base by now. Guess you want to rush through everything so you can whine in another thread about there not being anything to do. How is giving a 30 minute cooldown on a mission timegating it? It will take you more than 30 minutes to run all of the Tholian missions. Don't you think they made these missions with the intent on you playing more than just one of them?
My question would be why redshirt farming was so good. A medium difficulty mission that can be completed so quickly is a flawed design in the first place. Slapping a cooldown on it doesn't fix the fact that it's badly designed.
They could have made redshirt farming less attractive through other means, but instead chose the unimaginative cooldown system.
And your 'should have a tier 5 base' argument is pure strawman garbage. Nobody has even remotely suggested that. Try again when you're not trolling.
And the timegating comes from the fact that even getting Fleet Marks from these missions is tied to the Fleet Mark Event on the calendar.
My question would be why redshirt farming was so good. A medium difficulty mission that can be completed so quickly is a flawed design in the first place. Slapping a cooldown on it doesn't fix the fact that it's badly designed.
They could have made redshirt farming less attractive through other means, but instead chose the unimaginative cooldown system.
And your 'should have a tier 5 base' argument is pure strawman garbage. Nobody has even remotely suggested that. Try again when you're not trolling.
And the timegating comes from the fact that even getting Fleet Marks from these missions is tied to the Fleet Mark Event on the calendar.
Yes there should have been a cooldown on it in the first place, but the Nukara missions are not timegated at all since you can play them anytime. The fact that they don't always give marks does not make it timegated. It's a bonus reward at a certain time. The Tier 5 comment was an exaggeration but people are still treating the starbase system like it's a race. It has still only been 2 weeks and people are complaining about how long it is taking. Also, for the record, me not agreeing with your whining doesn't make me a troll. I seriously believe that the majority of people on these forums are childish. You cry for changes whenever something doesn't go your way. The same way that people cry and get any degree of difficulty taken out of the game because they don't want to use their brain and actually learn how to play. Call me a troll all you want, but you are still a baby that wants everything fed to him with a nipple.
I think if we are honest we all know that the huge amount of FM from these missions was wrong from the get go. My previous story post was to highlight the lack of communication from these guys. It is almost as if they are afraid to tell us something we will not like to hear. I would sooner them say something like:
"guys, we screwed up and the FM rewards from Nukara are not in balance with everything else. You have had a good couple of weeks but we will have to now reset it to how it was supposed to be originally. The amount of FM awarded for ALL missions will be scrutinized over the coming weeks relative to starbase build speed and if necessary ALL events will be adjusted up or down depending on our findings"
The problem here is the lack of feedback from Cryptic and the surreptitious way the change was made, one can almost imagine them saying, "do it now and by the time Monday has arrived they'll have found something else to whine about".
I don't understand why they didn't foresee the exploitation of it. Things like this have happened before. Maybe they wait and see if we'll cheat or not, and when we do, they punish us with bugs and high priced EV suits. If so, we all deserve it. Essentially what this thread is, is the equivalent of a student complaining that he got an F on a test after he was caught cheating by the teacher. Hey, let's all get together for 2 hours and farm a 3 minute mission and get 800 marks in a manner that is so obviously not intended. Clearly that's cheating, but we're going to throw a fit on the forums when we get caught and have that ability to cheat taken away. Lol ridiculous.
Yes there should have been a cooldown on it in the first place, but the Nukara missions are not timegated at all since you can play them anytime. The fact that they don't always give marks does not make it timegated. It's a bonus reward at a certain time. The Tier 5 comment was an exaggeration but people are still treating the starbase system like it's a race. It has still only been 2 weeks and people are complaining about how long it is taking. Also, for the record, me not agreeing with your whining doesn't make me a troll. I seriously believe that the majority of people on these forums are childish. You cry for changes whenever something doesn't go your way. The same way that people cry and get any degree of difficulty taken out of the game because they don't want to use their brain and actually learn how to play. Call me a troll all you want, but you are still a baby that wants everything fed to him with a nipple.
The rewards are timegated. You're just being deliberately obtuse now.
I didn't call you a troll for disagreeing with me. Saying I did is misleading and trollish in itself.
I called you a troll for your silly strawman argument which you admitted was done as an exaggeration.
And your ad hominem attack at the end? That also makes you a troll.
The rewards are timegated. You're just being deliberately obtuse now.
I didn't call you a troll for disagreeing with me. Saying I did is misleading and trollish in itself.
I called you a troll for your silly strawman argument which you admitted was done as an exaggeration.
And your ad hominem attack at the end? That also makes you a troll.
Making an obvious exaggeration to make a point that is still true doesn't make it strawman. Some fleets I guess are at tier 3, so saying tier 5 really isn't that much of an exaggeration anyway. You're the one clutching at straws in this argument. You called me a troll, so I can call you a baby. And if I'm a troll for calling you a baby, you're a troll for calling me a troll. What is it with you people and putting labels on everyone? Do you get a cookie if you identify a troll everyday? Mommy, that guy didn't agree with my childish antics, he must be a troll! Anyway, you just said the reward was timegated. Well, what we were talking about was whether or not the missions were timegated, you know, like how the Vault used to be. At least I was talking about the missions. Try to follow along. Besides, the reward really isn't timegated since you can earn marks 24/7. Thanks for playing, enjoy that cookie.
Making an obvious exaggeration to make a point that is still true doesn't make it strawman. Some fleets I guess are at tier 3, so saying tier 5 really isn't that much of an exaggeration anyway. You're the one clutching at straws in this argument. You called me a troll, so I can call you a baby. And if I'm a troll for calling you a baby, you're a troll for calling me a troll. What is it with you people and putting labels on everyone? Do you get a cookie if you identify a troll everyday? Mommy, that guy didn't agree with my childish antics, he must be a troll! Anyway, you just said the reward was timegated. Well, what we were talking about was whether or not the missions were timegated, you know, like how the Vault used to be. At least I was talking about the missions. Try to follow along. Besides, the reward really isn't timegated since you can earn marks 24/7. Thanks for playing, enjoy that cookie.
Making an obvious exaggeration is pretty much the basic definition for a strawman.
And more obtuseness. The Fleet Mark rewards for the Tholian Incursion are timegated. If anyone needs help to follow the argument, it's you. You have deliberately ignored the argument in favor of your interpretation of it.
Your temper tantrum and calling everyone else a baby has grown tiresome. Come back when you can discuss the actual topic at hand instead of propping up strawmen.
Making an obvious exaggeration is pretty much the basic definition for a strawman.
And more obtuseness. The Fleet Mark rewards for the Tholian Incursion are timegated. If anyone needs help to follow the argument, it's you. You have deliberately ignored the argument in favor of your interpretation of it.
Your temper tantrum and calling everyone else a baby has grown tiresome. Come back when you can discuss the actual topic at hand instead of propping up strawmen.
Ok, grab some aspirin because I'm going to once again try to walk your simple mind through this. For the record, you internet debaters that think you can argue because you have the "fallacy terminology" is really quite ridiculous. You're actually not disproving anything I say.
Anyhow, me saying an "obvious exaggeration" means that it is a humorous stretch to point out the ridiculousness of the subject I'm pointing out. Anyone with half a brain knew what I was saying. I'm still right, because people are acting like they should be farther along on what is apparently a 6 month minimum project after only 2 weeks. They're also arguing that their extremely small fleets should be progressing at the same rate as a large fleet. (I was going to say two man fleets, but even though that may be true, you might throw one of your clever terms at me that you read on a website)
The fleet marks are not timegated, it doesn't matter if you can earn them during the Tholian Incursion all the time or not, you can still earn them anytime by several other means. A timegated reward would be like how the Vault rewards are with the Reman set. That you can only earn at specific times. It's not like the Tholian Incursion doesn't have other rewards.
What your complaint actually is, is that you can no longer farm Nukara and be lazy. I'm not the one whining that I can't cheat anymore, so the temper tantrum is on you. Am I tired of you whiny babies ruining the game? You're damn right buddy and I'm going to call you on it.
Grow up and grow a brain. If you do choose to embarrass yourself with another reply, see if you can do it without using the words "troll" and "strawman" and come up with original and intelligent thoughts that are your own. Also, please keep in mind that you're arguing that you should be able to cheat in this game, then think about the fact that makes you a cheater. No one likes a cheater.
It is absolutely fair to suggest that this exploit shouldn't have existed in the first place. If it was a standalone issue, I'd agree with you. We shouldn't have been able to exploit it and closing it off was the right thing to do.
However, I can perfectly understand why players are unhappy over this.
1) The fact that it you could do it in the first place is reflective of how shallow the mission design is. I dislike being a backseat developer, but Redshirt Rescue feels like it was planned and approved during a coffee break. And the fix is not a change to the mission design to make it less exploitable. The fix is an arbitrary thirty minute cooldown, which given the length of the mission in the first place (even with the recommended 2-3 players rather than 5, it doesn't take long) is excessive. And let's be honest, this will be a long-term fix. If they ever change the mission itself rather than just restrict it, it'll be months down the line. There was a reason that 90% of the traffic on Nukara was Redshirt farmers. And it's not purely because the playerbase is greedy. It's because the Nukara missions are only fun a few times at most.
Of course the ideal change would be longer, deeper, and more complicated missions that give you a lot of Fleet Marks. But we can't have that because long ago some more vocal elements of the playerbase used to cry and cry and cry about having to organise themselves and some friends to play a mission for longer than 40 minutes, which resulted in certain game design decisions. We'll come back to that later.
2) That members of the playerbase are so annoyed about it is reflective of bigger issues with starbase design, currency and the game in general.
If you could stroll into Nukara at your leisure and get your Fleet Marks, people wouldn't be as bothered. But you can't. You want Fleet Marks you have to go at a specific time dictated by the game. Which you may not always be on for. Worse than that, unless there's something I'm missing, you can't check more than 24 hours in advance when the times are. Want to organise an exterior easy, medium and hard run-through with your fleet for next Wednesday, and time it to coincide with the Fleet Event so you all get a few marks out of it? Too bad. You can't.
EDIT: Actually, I'm not done on this point. I had a player who was out of STO long-term in my gaming guild who wanted to do try the Vault when it came out. He couldn't, because he never got his own schedule (married man with kids, after all) to coincide with the arbitrary Vault times on 24 hours notice. He lost interest after a couple of weeks of it being on at the wrong time. That's a potential returning player gone because of time-gating.
So when you are on for one, you're going to want to get in there and do as much as possible in a short length of time in case you miss Fleet Events for the next three days. Which resulted in people figuring out that the best way to get Fleet Marks quickly was grinding the hell out of Redshirt. And grind it they did.
Okay, DStahl or Gozer (can't remember which) said it wasn't supposed to be a Fleet Mark mission and the Fleet Event is just there to give it a bonus. Okay fine, if you really want the FM reward gated, then gate it. I think your insane to do that, but nonetheless. If you don't want people to knock out 20 Redshirt Rescues in under an hour, but still insist on time-gating the thing: Make one of the Easy missions a pre-requisite to Redshirt Rescue, and shorten the cooldown to 10 minutes or so. That way people won't be able to knock out a completed Redshirt Rescue every 3 minutes, but people will still be able to do it more than twice in an hour.
And then there's the big, grindy elephant in the room. And that elephant is the grind. Fleet Mark missions are relatively short and relatively simple with low rewards so you have to do them a lot. That wears thin fairly quickly. Yes, you need short, PuGgable missions for Fleet Marks so small fleets who can't have 5 people on simultaneously that often can still earn them. But do they all have to be like that? You can get a respectable haul of FM from pretty much all the missions apart from No-Win with a PuG. We're in a situation where you do 2 or 3 short missions in half an hour for the sake of 35-50 FM or up to 100 in an hour if you feel like doing FM missions for that long on end. I would much rather play one more complicated mission in that same space of time for the same reward. I'm sure people will argue that doing one mission is more boring than doing 2 or more in the same period, and you'd be right if we were only doing the missions once. But anyone who wants their starbase will be doing them hundreds of times. And in my opinion, the more complicated a mission is, in terms of objectives, required team co-ordination, scope for different tactics etc. (maybe you could get really daring and give us more than one way to complete the mission), the better it'll stand up to being played to death. Because that's what we're talking about here, playing mission to death. The FM missions have already worn thin for me much more quickly than the more complicated STFs.
Speaking of which, this mission design philosophy started with the STF changes - once you've learned them and know what you're doing, you can autopilot them in under 15 minutes. And this is the most advanced and difficult multiplayer content in the game. And people still complain that PuGs fail. I don't expect PWE to pander to my tastes, or the tastes of any individual player, but if they did on this one, no doubt loads of people be whine about how the missions are too hard, too long and how they can't get 4 random people they never met to do what they want.
Still, it would be nice to at least have the option.
In response to Skhc, I agree with you on many points. I just don't understand why people are mad about the fix. Doing red shirt 100 times in an hour turns the starbase system into even more of a grind. This thing is only a major grind if you turn it into one. And really, it's only a major grind if you're in a small fleet. Join a larger fleet, or recruit more people. If you're in a fleet and you're pugging, your fleet is too small. This thing is also meant to take a while, so why complain that it does? As I said earlier, I don't agree that the reward is timegated, because it isn't. You can still earn marks anytime. What reason they have for not letting us get marks all the time at nukara? I don't know. I wish you could, because the fleet missions do get old pretty quick (though it sounds like we shall be getting more ways to earn marks before season 7 at least, here's hoping). I also don't agree that the Redshirt missions was bad design, it's just something extra there to do while you're doing the other missions. Yeah grinding isn't fun, but I choose not to grind. It'll take as long as it takes. Go play a different game and take a break if you get burned out. People get way too mad on these forums. It is just a game. If you don't like it don't play it. If you like it but you're frustrated, take a break from it. Come back when season 7 starts. See if it's better. If they deliver season 7 the way the talk, it will be a step in the right direction. If not, well maybe this is gonna be business as usual. Either way, it's a game, calm down. Not directed at you Skhc, your post is rational, unlike some other people around here...lol
Oddy, I have no issue whatsoever with Starbases taking time. I actually think that putting something into the game that doesn't give you instant satisfaction of completion is a good move.
But it's still a fairly savage grind. Whether you do one mission a day or 20 in an hour using an exploit, you still ultimately have to do the same few missions over and over again to complete the base. Outside Nukara there are 6 (I think) Fleet Mark missions. I don't know how many FM a completed base takes, but I would think it to be in the order of hundreds of thousands.
So unless you have 100+ active members, which creates its own issues with provisioning, that's a lot of Colony Invasions. The missions themselves mostly aren't bad missions, it's just with the way they are designed, they're going to struggle mightily to still be engaging on the 93rd playthrough. We have this situation already with STFs, and the Fleet Mark missions are shorter and simpler than those. And I think a lot of people may end up needing to do even more of them.
It's a design choice in the game that I'm not happy with and results in players depending on things like exploiting Redshirt for their Fleet Mark fix.
If the missions were longer, required more thinking and you needed to do them less, I wouldn't consider it as much of a problem. Even if Nukara gave Fleet Marks the whole time, so you had another 12 missions to choose from to get your Fleet Marks around the clock, it'd be less of an issue for me.
And speaking of doing other missions? The easy mission 'Scientific Sabotage' is still bugged, you can not repeat the mission without leaving the planet and returning in order to be able to sabotage more portal devices.
In response to Skhc, I agree with you on many points. I just don't understand why people are mad about the fix. Doing red shirt 100 times in an hour turns the starbase system into even more of a grind. This thing is only a major grind if you turn it into one. And really, it's only a major grind if you're in a small fleet. Join a larger fleet, or recruit more people. If you're in a fleet and you're pugging, your fleet is too small. This thing is also meant to take a while, so why complain that it does? As I said earlier, I don't agree that the reward is timegated, because it isn't. You can still earn marks anytime. What reason they have for not letting us get marks all the time at nukara? I don't know. I wish you could, because the fleet missions do get old pretty quick (though it sounds like we shall be getting more ways to earn marks before season 7 at least, here's hoping). I also don't agree that the Redshirt missions was bad design, it's just something extra there to do while you're doing the other missions. Yeah grinding isn't fun, but I choose not to grind. It'll take as long as it takes. Go play a different game and take a break if you get burned out. People get way too mad on these forums. It is just a game. If you don't like it don't play it. If you like it but you're frustrated, take a break from it. Come back when season 7 starts. See if it's better. If they deliver season 7 the way the talk, it will be a step in the right direction. If not, well maybe this is gonna be business as usual. Either way, it's a game, calm down. Not directed at you Skhc, your post is rational, unlike some other people around here...lol
The issues are plain and simple
Assuming:
* People want to play the game the way they like to play it
* Some ppl may want to be in large fleets
* Some ppl may want to stay in small fleets
And when I say people, please read "paying customers" cause that's what they are. And as paying customers people assume that they can voice their opinions about something in the game that they don't like, and they want to change it for the better.
As of current, let me repeat myself again:
* the new currency system was introduced which sole purpose was to enforce long time span to achieve some goals within the game.
* the only way to get that currency was trhough playing new and unbalanced content.
And the main argument as I see it to:
* bring more balance into the game system,
* provide ability for small fleets to advance the starbases
* and to open a civilized dialog between the population and the devs to (again) bring the balance into the game world.
Because right now Gozer or whoever is playing god: "I decided that the sweet spot for starbases is 50 ppl fleet". And the playerbase is saying "Hey, dude, we are your paying customers, our money is the reason that game is still afloat, and you're getting your paycheck. We deserve respect, and the ability to play the game the way we want to play it, not the way that you dictate us."
And let me repeat myself again:
* pvp folk would like to get marks for pvp
* I'm sure roleplaying folk would like to get marks for whatever they do
* and manchkins like me would like to get marks from stf or whatever.
Previous nukara situation allowed all groups to get their marks and get on with whatever it they want to do in a time efficient manner. Current timegates enfore everyone to spend full two hours in full attention to get 100 marks in a group of 5 poeple during the time gated period. And nobody likes it. Especially the small fleets. This is what this tread is about.
I do agree they need to scale the project requirements for exactly that reason, but mainly for the large fleets. There's not enough to go around for the large fleets. Especially for the people that only get to play a couple hours. Are the amounts needed really the same no matter how big the fleet is? But I guess there's more later, but that just makes a problem for the smaller fleets. It just definitely needs to scale. I thought it was supposed to. As far as pvp, hopefully they'll give us fleet vs fleet pvp. If and when they do we can get some marks for that. Still, despite these issues, the point of this thread is whether or not we should be able to get 600 or whatever marks per person in 2 hours by farming the same little mission. The answer is no, and not having a cooldown on that was an obvious oversight on their part. Yes being able to grind that much marks is helpful for you, but for the other fleet members, particularly in larger fleet, they won't be able to contribute. This is a serious balancing act that they've failed to balance at all. Again, the project requirements need to scale.
Or : open defera during a 3h FM event there, with appropriate FM rewards, since most of the missions last longer ans since we have to run all missiosn prior to the hard ones. Maybe 10 for easy, 20 for meds and 30 for the hard ones.
It sucks, 10 minutes for easy.
I guess its now Tholians then pass time in PvP in some form or STFs till timer is up.
Damnit I hate my short game times..
This is a bug. I refuse to accept this as a fix. Please don't call it a feature. >_<
Currently feel like asking everyone to report it as a bug. ^_^
The cooldown have totally ruined Nukara's re-farmability. Played all the missions once doing the fleet mark event, and then got nothing to do other then stand around and wait for all the cooldowns to end.
It have ruined the rhythm and flow of the missions.
Nukara is the only place I really enjoyed farming for fleet marks. The PvE queue mission stuff isn't that interesting to me. They takes to long for such a tiny reward.
Do not limit the already few options to farm fleet marks. Add more please.
Remove the cooldown bug entirely please.
No one wanna spend most of the fleet mark event just sitting around and waiting.
This is Nukara, no one can cooling down there..
"Please, Captain, not in front of the Klingons." Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
If there only was a daily mission, that required you to finish all easy missions on nukara and one for each difficulty, and the reward was additional fleetmarks and boxes i might go and do them once a day. for the foreseeable future.
but grinding the same mission over and over is something for a lab rat.
all it needs is a daily that requires you to do some diverse playing (some space missions, some ground missions) with apropriate rewards.
I think if we are honest we all know that the huge amount of FM from these missions was wrong from the get go. My previous story post was to highlight the lack of communication from these guys. It is almost as if they are afraid to tell us something we will not like to hear. I would sooner them say something like:
"guys, we screwed up and the FM rewards from Nukara are not in balance with everything else. You have had a good couple of weeks but we will have to now reset it to how it was supposed to be originally. The amount of FM awarded for ALL missions will be scrutinized over the coming weeks relative to starbase build speed and if necessary ALL events will be adjusted up or down depending on our findings"
The problem here is the lack of feedback from Cryptic and the surreptitious way the change was made, one can almost imagine them saying, "do it now and by the time Monday has arrived they'll have found something else to whine about".
I also hate this change. I don't have time to play this game for hours on end. I liked coming on for a couple hours twice a week or so and grinding out my contribution to my fleet. I'd rather be PVP'ing (which doesn't give FM rewards even though Fleets are battling each other for supremacy) than doing your stupid endless FM grind any day. At least the old Nakura missions made it bearable.
i say get rid of fleetmarks completely and use the useless expertise instead. i don't know why they changed the name of this overflow XP to expertise without any meaningfull use for it still. or atleast add some NPC takes takes your expertise and sells you fleetmarks for it.
For those of you who haven't heard, there is (eventually) going to be a starbase contact who will allow you to trade in excess Commendation XP for Fleet Marks. Any amount of Commendation XP you have over 100,000 (Rank 4) can be converted. Unfortunately, no other details are forthcoming other than the rumor that the exchange rate will be 1000 Commendation XP to 1 Fleet Mark. Here's hoping that is implemented soon and that the exchange rate will be something a bit easier to swallow (1:100 sounds about right to me, though 1:500 might be more likely)
It seems to me that they should add FMs to all fleet actions (Starbase 24, The Big Dig, etc.). Techically, these are (PUG) Fleet events, and it would add some variety to people's play. Plus, some of those missions have been under-played for years.
Oddy, I have no issue whatsoever with Starbases taking time. I actually think that putting something into the game that doesn't give you instant satisfaction of completion is a good move.
But it's still a fairly savage grind. Whether you do one mission a day or 20 in an hour using an exploit, you still ultimately have to do the same few missions over and over again to complete the base. Outside Nukara there are 6 (I think) Fleet Mark missions. I don't know how many FM a completed base takes, but I would think it to be in the order of hundreds of thousands.
So unless you have 100+ active members, which creates its own issues with provisioning, that's a lot of Colony Invasions. The missions themselves mostly aren't bad missions, it's just with the way they are designed, they're going to struggle mightily to still be engaging on the 93rd playthrough. We have this situation already with STFs, and the Fleet Mark missions are shorter and simpler than those. And I think a lot of people may end up needing to do even more of them.
It's a design choice in the game that I'm not happy with and results in players depending on things like exploiting Redshirt for their Fleet Mark fix.
If the missions were longer, required more thinking and you needed to do them less, I wouldn't consider it as much of a problem. Even if Nukara gave Fleet Marks the whole time, so you had another 12 missions to choose from to get your Fleet Marks around the clock, it'd be less of an issue for me.
I honestly think they should have added fleet marks as rewards for all missions, PvE campaigns, PvP, STF's. We have to grind fleet marks so make it more wide spread so you can collect them while levelling a character, trying to get that prototype salvage etc.
* bring more balance into the game system,
* provide ability for small fleets to advance the starbases
* and to open a civilized dialog between the population and the devs to (again) bring the balance into the game world.
Because right now Gozer or whoever is playing god: "I decided that the sweet spot for starbases is 50 ppl fleet". And the playerbase is saying "Hey, dude, we are your paying customers, our money is the reason that game is still afloat, and you're getting your paycheck. We deserve respect, and the ability to play the game the way we want to play it, not the way that you dictate us."
The Dev communication is terrible at best. They have pretty much zero communication with us, it's a reason they are flamed so much as we start to see them as not real people as they never communicate with us. I feel if they were communicating us us on a weekly basis on your issues there wouldn't be even half the problems we now have. Communication is the key here, a key they obviously don't have.
I also fell they need to scale the projects for smaller fleets so smaller fleets can advance at the same or similar pace as larger ones, something they promised in the podcast before S6 came out but obviously continently forgotten about.
I don't mind taking time to advance my fleet's base but look at tier 0, there is absolutely nothing do do, you can't even log in and out from the base, nor have the basic features that ESD, the Academy etc have.
I do agree they need to scale the project requirements for exactly that reason, but mainly for the large fleets. There's not enough to go around for the large fleets. Especially for the people that only get to play a couple hours. Are the amounts needed really the same no matter how big the fleet is? But I guess there's more later, but that just makes a problem for the smaller fleets. It just definitely needs to scale. I thought it was supposed to.
I feel small fleets have the bigger issue, my fleet isn't even half way through tier 0, I've heard some big fleets are almost to tier 3, which is a joke. They need to really scale them for smaller fleets. The idea isn't to have the most fleet credits or the high name of the leader-board but as a fleet to progress together which is what large fleets seem to have no issue with.
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Remove cooldowns on all fleetmark rewarding missions, atleast doing fleetmark events.
Its not fun having an event that last 2 hours where you can get more and then still spend most of the time sitting around waiting for cooldowns to end.
Make regular missions and/or explore missions reward a small amount of fleetmarks.
And not just doing fleetmark events. Really the game needs more options to farm fleetmarks. Not everyone like the PvE queue mission stuff.
Up the amount of fleetmarks rewarded, both during and outside of fleetmark events.
The effort and time needed to gain them aren't being rewarded.
"Please, Captain, not in front of the Klingons." Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
It seems to me that they should add FMs to all fleet actions (Starbase 24, The Big Dig, etc.). Techically, these are (PUG) Fleet events, and it would add some variety to people's play. Plus, some of those missions have been under-played for years.
Agreed, but they also have to yet fix the ground portion of Starbase 24...how long has that been broken?
In addition, they really should add Fleet marks to the Explore missions, not the daily the explore and well a few other rewards because they are pretty useless right now as it is.
hey if you guys think that a timegate within a timegate is bad, one of my fleetmates, says that everytime you repeat a mission on Nukara, the FM reward decreases by FIVE!!!!
Comments
Cryptic / PWE clearly don't want anyone ending up, like, um you know, buying Zen to trade for dilithium because they've spent so much in projects and could use a boost, and they certainly don't want us buying duty officer packs and being happy about getting whites and greens in them to use in projects. Basically, they don't want another, clever way of getting our money..... lulz.
My question would be why redshirt farming was so good. A medium difficulty mission that can be completed so quickly is a flawed design in the first place. Slapping a cooldown on it doesn't fix the fact that it's badly designed.
They could have made redshirt farming less attractive through other means, but instead chose the unimaginative cooldown system.
And your 'should have a tier 5 base' argument is pure strawman garbage. Nobody has even remotely suggested that. Try again when you're not trolling.
And the timegating comes from the fact that even getting Fleet Marks from these missions is tied to the Fleet Mark Event on the calendar.
Yes there should have been a cooldown on it in the first place, but the Nukara missions are not timegated at all since you can play them anytime. The fact that they don't always give marks does not make it timegated. It's a bonus reward at a certain time. The Tier 5 comment was an exaggeration but people are still treating the starbase system like it's a race. It has still only been 2 weeks and people are complaining about how long it is taking. Also, for the record, me not agreeing with your whining doesn't make me a troll. I seriously believe that the majority of people on these forums are childish. You cry for changes whenever something doesn't go your way. The same way that people cry and get any degree of difficulty taken out of the game because they don't want to use their brain and actually learn how to play. Call me a troll all you want, but you are still a baby that wants everything fed to him with a nipple.
I don't understand why they didn't foresee the exploitation of it. Things like this have happened before. Maybe they wait and see if we'll cheat or not, and when we do, they punish us with bugs and high priced EV suits. If so, we all deserve it. Essentially what this thread is, is the equivalent of a student complaining that he got an F on a test after he was caught cheating by the teacher. Hey, let's all get together for 2 hours and farm a 3 minute mission and get 800 marks in a manner that is so obviously not intended. Clearly that's cheating, but we're going to throw a fit on the forums when we get caught and have that ability to cheat taken away. Lol ridiculous.
I didn't call you a troll for disagreeing with me. Saying I did is misleading and trollish in itself.
I called you a troll for your silly strawman argument which you admitted was done as an exaggeration.
And your ad hominem attack at the end? That also makes you a troll.
Making an obvious exaggeration to make a point that is still true doesn't make it strawman. Some fleets I guess are at tier 3, so saying tier 5 really isn't that much of an exaggeration anyway. You're the one clutching at straws in this argument. You called me a troll, so I can call you a baby. And if I'm a troll for calling you a baby, you're a troll for calling me a troll. What is it with you people and putting labels on everyone? Do you get a cookie if you identify a troll everyday? Mommy, that guy didn't agree with my childish antics, he must be a troll! Anyway, you just said the reward was timegated. Well, what we were talking about was whether or not the missions were timegated, you know, like how the Vault used to be. At least I was talking about the missions. Try to follow along. Besides, the reward really isn't timegated since you can earn marks 24/7. Thanks for playing, enjoy that cookie.
Making an obvious exaggeration is pretty much the basic definition for a strawman.
And more obtuseness. The Fleet Mark rewards for the Tholian Incursion are timegated. If anyone needs help to follow the argument, it's you. You have deliberately ignored the argument in favor of your interpretation of it.
Your temper tantrum and calling everyone else a baby has grown tiresome. Come back when you can discuss the actual topic at hand instead of propping up strawmen.
Ok, grab some aspirin because I'm going to once again try to walk your simple mind through this. For the record, you internet debaters that think you can argue because you have the "fallacy terminology" is really quite ridiculous. You're actually not disproving anything I say.
Anyhow, me saying an "obvious exaggeration" means that it is a humorous stretch to point out the ridiculousness of the subject I'm pointing out. Anyone with half a brain knew what I was saying. I'm still right, because people are acting like they should be farther along on what is apparently a 6 month minimum project after only 2 weeks. They're also arguing that their extremely small fleets should be progressing at the same rate as a large fleet. (I was going to say two man fleets, but even though that may be true, you might throw one of your clever terms at me that you read on a website)
The fleet marks are not timegated, it doesn't matter if you can earn them during the Tholian Incursion all the time or not, you can still earn them anytime by several other means. A timegated reward would be like how the Vault rewards are with the Reman set. That you can only earn at specific times. It's not like the Tholian Incursion doesn't have other rewards.
What your complaint actually is, is that you can no longer farm Nukara and be lazy. I'm not the one whining that I can't cheat anymore, so the temper tantrum is on you. Am I tired of you whiny babies ruining the game? You're damn right buddy and I'm going to call you on it.
Grow up and grow a brain. If you do choose to embarrass yourself with another reply, see if you can do it without using the words "troll" and "strawman" and come up with original and intelligent thoughts that are your own. Also, please keep in mind that you're arguing that you should be able to cheat in this game, then think about the fact that makes you a cheater. No one likes a cheater.
However, I can perfectly understand why players are unhappy over this.
1) The fact that it you could do it in the first place is reflective of how shallow the mission design is. I dislike being a backseat developer, but Redshirt Rescue feels like it was planned and approved during a coffee break. And the fix is not a change to the mission design to make it less exploitable. The fix is an arbitrary thirty minute cooldown, which given the length of the mission in the first place (even with the recommended 2-3 players rather than 5, it doesn't take long) is excessive. And let's be honest, this will be a long-term fix. If they ever change the mission itself rather than just restrict it, it'll be months down the line. There was a reason that 90% of the traffic on Nukara was Redshirt farmers. And it's not purely because the playerbase is greedy. It's because the Nukara missions are only fun a few times at most.
Of course the ideal change would be longer, deeper, and more complicated missions that give you a lot of Fleet Marks. But we can't have that because long ago some more vocal elements of the playerbase used to cry and cry and cry about having to organise themselves and some friends to play a mission for longer than 40 minutes, which resulted in certain game design decisions. We'll come back to that later.
2) That members of the playerbase are so annoyed about it is reflective of bigger issues with starbase design, currency and the game in general.
If you could stroll into Nukara at your leisure and get your Fleet Marks, people wouldn't be as bothered. But you can't. You want Fleet Marks you have to go at a specific time dictated by the game. Which you may not always be on for. Worse than that, unless there's something I'm missing, you can't check more than 24 hours in advance when the times are. Want to organise an exterior easy, medium and hard run-through with your fleet for next Wednesday, and time it to coincide with the Fleet Event so you all get a few marks out of it? Too bad. You can't.
EDIT: Actually, I'm not done on this point. I had a player who was out of STO long-term in my gaming guild who wanted to do try the Vault when it came out. He couldn't, because he never got his own schedule (married man with kids, after all) to coincide with the arbitrary Vault times on 24 hours notice. He lost interest after a couple of weeks of it being on at the wrong time. That's a potential returning player gone because of time-gating.
So when you are on for one, you're going to want to get in there and do as much as possible in a short length of time in case you miss Fleet Events for the next three days. Which resulted in people figuring out that the best way to get Fleet Marks quickly was grinding the hell out of Redshirt. And grind it they did.
Okay, DStahl or Gozer (can't remember which) said it wasn't supposed to be a Fleet Mark mission and the Fleet Event is just there to give it a bonus. Okay fine, if you really want the FM reward gated, then gate it. I think your insane to do that, but nonetheless. If you don't want people to knock out 20 Redshirt Rescues in under an hour, but still insist on time-gating the thing: Make one of the Easy missions a pre-requisite to Redshirt Rescue, and shorten the cooldown to 10 minutes or so. That way people won't be able to knock out a completed Redshirt Rescue every 3 minutes, but people will still be able to do it more than twice in an hour.
And then there's the big, grindy elephant in the room. And that elephant is the grind. Fleet Mark missions are relatively short and relatively simple with low rewards so you have to do them a lot. That wears thin fairly quickly. Yes, you need short, PuGgable missions for Fleet Marks so small fleets who can't have 5 people on simultaneously that often can still earn them. But do they all have to be like that? You can get a respectable haul of FM from pretty much all the missions apart from No-Win with a PuG. We're in a situation where you do 2 or 3 short missions in half an hour for the sake of 35-50 FM or up to 100 in an hour if you feel like doing FM missions for that long on end. I would much rather play one more complicated mission in that same space of time for the same reward. I'm sure people will argue that doing one mission is more boring than doing 2 or more in the same period, and you'd be right if we were only doing the missions once. But anyone who wants their starbase will be doing them hundreds of times. And in my opinion, the more complicated a mission is, in terms of objectives, required team co-ordination, scope for different tactics etc. (maybe you could get really daring and give us more than one way to complete the mission), the better it'll stand up to being played to death. Because that's what we're talking about here, playing mission to death. The FM missions have already worn thin for me much more quickly than the more complicated STFs.
Speaking of which, this mission design philosophy started with the STF changes - once you've learned them and know what you're doing, you can autopilot them in under 15 minutes. And this is the most advanced and difficult multiplayer content in the game. And people still complain that PuGs fail. I don't expect PWE to pander to my tastes, or the tastes of any individual player, but if they did on this one, no doubt loads of people be whine about how the missions are too hard, too long and how they can't get 4 random people they never met to do what they want.
Still, it would be nice to at least have the option.
I'm done now. Flame away.
But it's still a fairly savage grind. Whether you do one mission a day or 20 in an hour using an exploit, you still ultimately have to do the same few missions over and over again to complete the base. Outside Nukara there are 6 (I think) Fleet Mark missions. I don't know how many FM a completed base takes, but I would think it to be in the order of hundreds of thousands.
So unless you have 100+ active members, which creates its own issues with provisioning, that's a lot of Colony Invasions. The missions themselves mostly aren't bad missions, it's just with the way they are designed, they're going to struggle mightily to still be engaging on the 93rd playthrough. We have this situation already with STFs, and the Fleet Mark missions are shorter and simpler than those. And I think a lot of people may end up needing to do even more of them.
It's a design choice in the game that I'm not happy with and results in players depending on things like exploiting Redshirt for their Fleet Mark fix.
If the missions were longer, required more thinking and you needed to do them less, I wouldn't consider it as much of a problem. Even if Nukara gave Fleet Marks the whole time, so you had another 12 missions to choose from to get your Fleet Marks around the clock, it'd be less of an issue for me.
The issues are plain and simple
Assuming:
* People want to play the game the way they like to play it
* Some ppl may want to be in large fleets
* Some ppl may want to stay in small fleets
And when I say people, please read "paying customers" cause that's what they are. And as paying customers people assume that they can voice their opinions about something in the game that they don't like, and they want to change it for the better.
As of current, let me repeat myself again:
* the new currency system was introduced which sole purpose was to enforce long time span to achieve some goals within the game.
* the only way to get that currency was trhough playing new and unbalanced content.
And the main argument as I see it to:
* bring more balance into the game system,
* provide ability for small fleets to advance the starbases
* and to open a civilized dialog between the population and the devs to (again) bring the balance into the game world.
Because right now Gozer or whoever is playing god: "I decided that the sweet spot for starbases is 50 ppl fleet". And the playerbase is saying "Hey, dude, we are your paying customers, our money is the reason that game is still afloat, and you're getting your paycheck. We deserve respect, and the ability to play the game the way we want to play it, not the way that you dictate us."
And let me repeat myself again:
* pvp folk would like to get marks for pvp
* I'm sure roleplaying folk would like to get marks for whatever they do
* and manchkins like me would like to get marks from stf or whatever.
Previous nukara situation allowed all groups to get their marks and get on with whatever it they want to do in a time efficient manner. Current timegates enfore everyone to spend full two hours in full attention to get 100 marks in a group of 5 poeple during the time gated period. And nobody likes it. Especially the small fleets. This is what this tread is about.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
I guess its now Tholians then pass time in PvP in some form or STFs till timer is up.
Damnit I hate my short game times..
R.I.P
This for me too. Ah well. Guess getting 100 fmarks whenever the event was on while I was (every few days) was too much....
The doors, Mister Scott!
Currently feel like asking everyone to report it as a bug. ^_^
The cooldown have totally ruined Nukara's re-farmability. Played all the missions once doing the fleet mark event, and then got nothing to do other then stand around and wait for all the cooldowns to end.
It have ruined the rhythm and flow of the missions.
Nukara is the only place I really enjoyed farming for fleet marks. The PvE queue mission stuff isn't that interesting to me. They takes to long for such a tiny reward.
Do not limit the already few options to farm fleet marks. Add more please.
Remove the cooldown bug entirely please.
No one wanna spend most of the fleet mark event just sitting around and waiting.
This is Nukara, no one can cooling down there..
Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
but grinding the same mission over and over is something for a lab rat.
all it needs is a daily that requires you to do some diverse playing (some space missions, some ground missions) with apropriate rewards.
This 100 times over!
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
TRIBBLE.
I honestly think they should have added fleet marks as rewards for all missions, PvE campaigns, PvP, STF's. We have to grind fleet marks so make it more wide spread so you can collect them while levelling a character, trying to get that prototype salvage etc.
The Dev communication is terrible at best. They have pretty much zero communication with us, it's a reason they are flamed so much as we start to see them as not real people as they never communicate with us. I feel if they were communicating us us on a weekly basis on your issues there wouldn't be even half the problems we now have. Communication is the key here, a key they obviously don't have.
I also fell they need to scale the projects for smaller fleets so smaller fleets can advance at the same or similar pace as larger ones, something they promised in the podcast before S6 came out but obviously continently forgotten about.
I don't mind taking time to advance my fleet's base but look at tier 0, there is absolutely nothing do do, you can't even log in and out from the base, nor have the basic features that ESD, the Academy etc have.
I feel small fleets have the bigger issue, my fleet isn't even half way through tier 0, I've heard some big fleets are almost to tier 3, which is a joke. They need to really scale them for smaller fleets. The idea isn't to have the most fleet credits or the high name of the leader-board but as a fleet to progress together which is what large fleets seem to have no issue with.
- Remove cooldowns on all fleetmark rewarding missions, atleast doing fleetmark events.
Its not fun having an event that last 2 hours where you can get more and then still spend most of the time sitting around waiting for cooldowns to end.- Make regular missions and/or explore missions reward a small amount of fleetmarks.
And not just doing fleetmark events. Really the game needs more options to farm fleetmarks. Not everyone like the PvE queue mission stuff.- Up the amount of fleetmarks rewarded, both during and outside of fleetmark events.
The effort and time needed to gain them aren't being rewarded.Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
Agreed, but they also have to yet fix the ground portion of Starbase 24...how long has that been broken?
In addition, they really should add Fleet marks to the Explore missions, not the daily the explore and well a few other rewards because they are pretty useless right now as it is.