of course If I were to do something insane like this I would do all KDF toons because it would take 2 hours max to get each one to open up the lore and investgate report dailies and doff to - unlike Fed which takes much more effort to get to lvl 7+
If we're talking KDF then add in a contraband turn in (we'll say ONE for argument's sake as you only need to do this once per day, and go a few seconds out of your way.) that's 3,920 dil per toon, for a grand total of 157,600 dil PER DAY.
At current exchange rates that is 973 Z, or >>29,190Z<< per month.
I.E. - that's almost $300/month, and that's assuming we're talking 40 toons, even at HALF of that (20 for those that are not math aficionados), that is still 14,595 Z per month.
To the OP: Believe me I agree it is an inconvenience, and I get your frustration, but was necessary as some people WERE exploiting this six ways from sunday. Hell, I got one of my toons a 4-day backlog using the splitter trying to fill projects, selling the valuables for EC, and chucking the rest, while still coming out ahead on EC (Hence, the selling of securities, assaults, armories, QMs, and sens officers that I didn't need)
Sigh ... why do you post things like that at all?
Do you want Cryptic to nerf those easy-Dil opportunities ... and antagonize the player-base even more?
Or do you just want to see some people actually try it ... and probably end up with a full-scale burn-out within weeks?
Yes, that option exists. Has existed since this game went F2P. And yes, that's what I hinted at in one of my earlier posts, as a reason why the Dil-contribution from daily DOffs really is no issue at all, and even less an "exploit". Now, though, I'll have to argue the other side of this issue:
Congratulations. You've just taken what's basically a 2nd or 3rd (or 4th ...) job, that takes 23h 20min per week, and pays a total of 1.44$ per hour. 23h 20min spent each week on a game that you're not even playing, really.
Yeah, that's how the successful people do it ... wait, no, they don't. You'd be working your TRIBBLE off at 1/3 the minimum wage.
And by the way: Cryptic knows that is possible. That's part of their justification for F2P, that you don't NEED to spent money on this game, but can still get everything. They want that option to exist. Just annoying enough to make buying Zen seem easier - which is certainly true.
And even IF someone does it, Cryptic/PWE are still making money - Zen has to be bought by someone, and they really, really don't care if you spent YOUR money ... or rather someone else'.
Not to mention that, unless you've already been playing this game for ages, it's not as easy as you make it sound to actually set it up ('should be a couple weeks if you started from scratch, my estimate was around 2 months if you don't do anything but farm dil and buy character slots, all the while pretty much no-life'ing, unless you fork over 100$ - but if you can simply do so, there's really little need to use it on building such a Dil-machine, is there?) - few people are in a position to abuse this system to hell and back, and even fewer are actually mad enough to do so.
It's even easy to PROVE that very few people do it: the Dil-to-Zen ratio proves it, without a doubt. If people were doing it, Dil would be flooding the market, but instead Dil is getting so pretty rare and quite expensive.
Not that such a machine wouldn't be nice to have. Aside from the Zen/Dil, you'd get around 1600 DOffs per week, and mid- to long-term could generate something like 3000 Fleet Marks per day, just from DOff'ing. Get a free T5 starbase and all the Fleet Ships in the world right along with it.
Yes, this game allows insane levels of growth. True. But the effort overshadows the gain for ... pretty much any sane person. A few veterans aside, who already have the whole machine running anyway.
So, again, to get back on topic:
- We have established that there's more effective ways to make Dil than dismissing DOffs.
- We have established that dismissing DOffs for Dil was wasteful even before the nerf, both in EC value and in Dil/CXP value.
- We still don't really have anyone negatively effected by the change. Nor anyone really profiting.
- We still don't really have a clue why they did this change.
So ... Why?
First thing it was an insane example - it does not take a genius to figure it out - it would equal burn-out bordom pretty quickly just doing half that amount of toons so I would not worry what Cryptic thinks - as you said its been in place for awhile and it does not seem to be a problem.
Let me give another example - I am building a starbase of 1 - before the first nerf I had over 4 million fleet credits
so I don`t want any ships till T3 I get rid of them all into doffs 4,000,000 divided by 500 = 8000 doffs times 75 dilth = 600,000 dilth
now Cryptic looked at the data that we don`t have and say that billions of FC was being spent on fleet doffs and they were being dismissed for dilth
Because really what else could you use the FC for - so they reacted quickly and stupidly and nerfed them.
The same was happening with the grinder- degrinder if you went to SFA you would see a crowd around there at ALL times
except for the colonist and prisoner problem due to the 20 cap space I don`t see a big problem with nerfing the dilth from commons - they were never ment to be dismissed anyway - they were ment to be re-sold to other newbies or changed into greens
I am sorry but i just don`t see this as a big problem - and if you have followed any of my posts I put up threads with things I think are big problems and they become big threads
the OP just wants his quick and easy dilithium back.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing, like somehow he was stealing it? Maybe we should ask the same of Cryptic, they really need to start giving us value for our money don't you think?
Actually, the real reason is the way we're accumulating fleet credits. I'm not in the the top contributors in my fleet and after getting a fleet ship, several ship and ground weapons to experiment with and fleet PSG AND 150-ish fleet doffs I still have over 200K fleet credits. Its not unthinkable that someone would've spend it all on white doffs to dismiss them for Dil.
Basically Fleet credits were too easy a way to generate Dil. Especially given how there really isn't anything else worth spending fleet credits on... so why not convert them to Dil? I think the real problem here is how little worth the Starbases bring to the game from the player's perspective, the fleet weapons, provisions, etc, are so worthless people prefer to not spend fleet credits, even though everyone will be or already is swimming in them.
Hrm. That kinda sucks. Can you guys unbind the purple DOff you get from crit'ing the nebulae/expanse support missions then so I can at least sell them?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
500 years in the future and we still look like schmucks when getting our ID photos taken...
Hrm. That kinda sucks. Can you guys unbind the purple DOff you get from crit'ing the nebulae/expanse support missions then so I can at least sell them?
Grind it and sell the Blues.
Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
Or grind 5 of them, and merge the resulting 15 blues into 3 new unbound purples, and sell those. Sometimes that'll net you more. Sometimes it'll net you less. And sometimes it nets you a neat purple you won't want to sell.
It just costs a little dilithium to do. (250 per 5 blues turned into 1 purple.) Maybe more (hopefully) if Cryptic comes to its senses, fixes the doff values and just puts a charge on using the grinder, to be consistent and maintain some semblance of sanity.
This whole thing'd be fixed if:
1 Purple (Value: 500) -converts2-> 3 Blues (Value: 250) at a cost of 250 Dilithium
1 Blue (Value:250) -converts2-> 3 Uncommons (NewValue: 125) at a cost of 125 Dilithium
1 Uncommon (NewValue: 125) -converts2-> 3 Commons (NewValue: 50) at a cost of 25 or 50 Dilithium
(That last one really depends on whether you care more about the cosmetic aspect, matching the value of the products, or the mathematic aspect, matching the difference. Not something I'd fight over.)
The merger can be left as is. It already charges you. Unnecessarily, amusingly enough, since each 'upgrade' already nets a FrankenDoff considerably less valuable than its combined 5 components. But at least that's the way it's always been.
It seems like it boils down to a tech issue to me. They didn't seem to have a problem with people dismissing their doffs for dilithium before they released the deluge of doffs that is the fleet doff vendor. Their first attempt to limit this mechanic by separating the fleet doffs from the regular doffs ended up in breaking the exchange. It feels like they didn't have many options available to them without changing the basic coding of how the the doff system worked. If they could have just made fleet base doffs identifiable with an icon or something of the sort it seems that they could have solved many problems and still allowed the regular doffs to be dismissed for the established amount of dilithium while not allowing the fleet doffs the same privilege.
I have read this entire thread and come to a few conclusions:
I) I have still have no clear idea on what either side is trying to say.
II) ummmmm.....
.....I guess that pretty much covers it. It seems a lot of energy is being expended in this thread trying to be "right", or rather "more right" then someone else.
From where I sit, I still don't get the whole trade DOFFS for DIL thing. I see it being argued in a number of threads and just don't see how it "maths" out.
Some not so random numbers to consider (what they mean, I don`t know. Math ain`t my bag.)
Common Doffs used to be traded for 75 DIL
Turning in 5 Contraband nets 2000 DIL
2000/75 = 26.6666
26.6666 DOFFS would cost (on average 20000 EC each) 533320 EC
26.6666 DOFFS would cost (on average 15000 EC each) 399999 EC
Contraband can be purchase for as little as 40000 EC each on the exchange.
You need 5 Contraband to complete the contraband mission (200000 EC)
To me, it costs half as much to turn over contraband for DIL as it does to dismiss 26.6666 DOFFS.
Yes, you CAN get DOFFS for free thru a number of means, however you can also acquire CONTRABAND very quickly and very easily in a number of ways for free. Guess which side of this arguement I fall on.....
As for aquiring those DOFFS via FC and turning them in for DIL? Well, again, you can get much better value exchanging the DOFFS you don't need for Fleet projects on the exchange. Those you can't get good value for on the exchange can still be turned in to the Personel officer for Greens which you can then break back down, hold for furtue Fleet use, or continue to trade up.
Given the above, I really don't see how dismissing DOFFS for DIL offered a particularly good return on either EC or FC. About the only cost benefit would be in real time (ie. for a quick DIL infusion), but this seems a lot like getting one of those PAYDAY or short term loans. yes, you get DIL now, but if you invest time and resources better, you will get a much greater return for the same investment over time. Of course, the point is mute now that they have NERFED DOFF DIL value.:)
Yep, it seems I have argued myself to a particular side here, though I really don't know which side I have chosen.
More to the point, I DON'T CARE.
It's my game, I play it the way I want to.
You should too. I'm not going to tell you how you play is wrong just because I happen to play differently.
Yes, the return on Doffs was never that amazing. Yes, the way things were, and should've stayed, you'd have to be completely insane to go around buying up Doffs just to dismiss them. And that's where your misconception is...
Not everyone who's annoyed with this is insane and buying up Doffs on the exchange to exchange for dilithium. Most of us just pick these things up, as we do our thing, as a side product of doing doff assignments. Sometimes we need to make room in our inventories for a new doff. We can either dismiss doffs, or sell them on the exchange, or dump them in the mail. I, for one, never cared to make the trip to list anything on the exchange that wouldn't bring in at least 100K, so I'd just settle for the quick 75 or 150 dilithium. It's not much, but it was something nonetheless, and that something is now reduced to virtually nothing, because...
Well, because Cryptic put in a doffbreaker, turning 1 doff into 3 lower quality doffs free of charge. It was meant to help people get the low tier doffs for fleet assignments, but they apparently hadn't thought this through beyond that. (Surprise surprise!) One purple doff, as obtained from critting the repeatable final stage of starcluster colonization assignments, once upon a time worth 500 dilithium, could now be ground down, free of charge, into 27 common doffs worth 75 dilithium each, for a 2025 dilithium total.
And then they overreacted. Rather than fix the new feature they put in, by adding a cost, as exists (though unnecessarily in that particular case) in its doff-merging counterpart, or striking a middle ground between costs and values as I drew up in a previous post, they slashed the values of all duty officers so the crazies at the doff-grinder wouldn't get more dilithium out of the doff system than they did before. In fact, they get considerably less. As does everyone. It's a 90% cut for very rares, down to a 98.7% cut on the commons.
I just don't get how this seems like a sensible approach to anyone. From a pure game development, problem-solving point of view it's just pointless. The only thing that can make this make sense to me, aside from a lot of bicycle and football helmets sticking out over Cryptic cubicals, would be if the problem was seen as an opportunity. If Cryptic set out to gut dilithium generation. But as has been said, the Doff system accounts for relatively little, so if that's the case, don't be too surprised when they'll be 'fixing exploits' in other areas, such as the starcluster wrapper and the STF dilithium rewards, soon.
Or maybe, hopefully, the new values are just a temporary measure while they figure out a more permanent, and more reasonable, solution. Though I'd have expected a hint as to that being the case to be found somewhere. And while hope and optimism go against my nature (and everything I stand for!), I suppose anything is possible.
Oh, and by the way, the exploit this change people say is supposed to combat, isn't fixed by the new values. The current 50 dilithium very rare doff is still worth more split into 3 rares, 75 dilithium, or 9 uncommons, at 90 dilithium. Only when you go from uncommon to common does the end result lose value.
Yes, the return on Doffs was never that amazing. Yes, the way things were, and should've stayed, you'd have to be completely insane to go around buying up Doffs just to dismiss them. And that's where your misconception is...
Not everyone who's annoyed with this is insane and buying up Doffs on the exchange to exchange for dilithium. Most of us just pick these things up, as we do our thing, as a side product of doing doff assignments. Sometimes we need to make room in our inventories for a new doff. We can either dismiss doffs, or sell them on the exchange, or dump them in the mail. I, for one, never cared to make the trip to list anything on the exchange that wouldn't bring in at least 100K, so I'd just settle for the quick 75 or 150 dilithium. It's not much, but it was something nonetheless, and that something is now reduced to virtually nothing, because...
Well, because Cryptic put in a doffbreaker, turning 1 doff into 3 lower quality doffs free of charge. It was meant to help people get the low tier doffs for fleet assignments, but they apparently hadn't thought this through beyond that. (Surprise surprise!) One purple doff, as obtained from critting the repeatable final stage of starcluster colonization assignments, once upon a time worth 500 dilithium, could now be ground down, free of charge, into 27 common doffs worth 75 dilithium each, for a 2025 dilithium total.
And then they overreacted. Rather than fix the new feature they put in, by adding a cost, as exists (though unnecessarily in that particular case) in its doff-merging counterpart, or striking a middle ground between costs and values as I drew up in a previous post, they slashed the values of all duty officers so the crazies at the doff-grinder wouldn't get more dilithium out of the doff system than they did before. In fact, they get considerably less. As does everyone. It's a 90% cut for very rares, down to a 98.7% cut on the commons.
I just don't get how this seems like a sensible approach to anyone. From a pure game development, problem-solving point of view it's just pointless. The only thing that can make this make sense to me, aside from a lot of bicycle and football helmets sticking out over Cryptic cubicals, would be if the problem was seen as an opportunity. If Cryptic set out to gut dilithium generation. But as has been said, the Doff system accounts for relatively little, so if that's the case, don't be too surprised when they'll be 'fixing exploits' in other areas, such as the starcluster wrapper and the STF dilithium rewards, soon.
Or maybe, hopefully, the new values are just a temporary measure while they figure out a more permanent, and more reasonable, solution. Though I'd have expected a hint as to that being the case to be found somewhere. And while hope and optimism go against my nature (and everything I stand for!), I suppose anything is possible.
Thank you, that was what I was getting at. Really no point me saying any more as you have covered it for me.
Though I would like to add I wouldn't have much of a problem if they also reduced/scaled the requirement (by the same ratio/percentage) of dilithium to do the assignment to get higher duty officers. I used to dismiss a duty officer or two to pay for the service, something no longer available to me. Yes I could use my other dilithium for it, but I grind for that, which is used for other purposes.
I never buy doff's off the exchange unless they are purple ones that I intend to use on my characters, any other purpose is rather pointless, at least for me.
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Comments
If we're talking KDF then add in a contraband turn in (we'll say ONE for argument's sake as you only need to do this once per day, and go a few seconds out of your way.) that's 3,920 dil per toon, for a grand total of 157,600 dil PER DAY.
At current exchange rates that is 973 Z, or >>29,190Z<< per month.
I.E. - that's almost $300/month, and that's assuming we're talking 40 toons, even at HALF of that (20 for those that are not math aficionados), that is still 14,595 Z per month.
To the OP: Believe me I agree it is an inconvenience, and I get your frustration, but was necessary as some people WERE exploiting this six ways from sunday. Hell, I got one of my toons a 4-day backlog using the splitter trying to fill projects, selling the valuables for EC, and chucking the rest, while still coming out ahead on EC (Hence, the selling of securities, assaults, armories, QMs, and sens officers that I didn't need)
Sigh ... why do you post things like that at all?
Do you want Cryptic to nerf those easy-Dil opportunities ... and antagonize the player-base even more?
Or do you just want to see some people actually try it ... and probably end up with a full-scale burn-out within weeks?
Yes, that option exists. Has existed since this game went F2P. And yes, that's what I hinted at in one of my earlier posts, as a reason why the Dil-contribution from daily DOffs really is no issue at all, and even less an "exploit". Now, though, I'll have to argue the other side of this issue:
Congratulations. You've just taken what's basically a 2nd or 3rd (or 4th ...) job, that takes 23h 20min per week, and pays a total of 1.44$ per hour. 23h 20min spent each week on a game that you're not even playing, really.
Yeah, that's how the successful people do it ... wait, no, they don't. You'd be working your TRIBBLE off at 1/3 the minimum wage.
And by the way: Cryptic knows that is possible. That's part of their justification for F2P, that you don't NEED to spent money on this game, but can still get everything. They want that option to exist. Just annoying enough to make buying Zen seem easier - which is certainly true.
And even IF someone does it, Cryptic/PWE are still making money - Zen has to be bought by someone, and they really, really don't care if you spent YOUR money ... or rather someone else'.
Not to mention that, unless you've already been playing this game for ages, it's not as easy as you make it sound to actually set it up ('should be a couple weeks if you started from scratch, my estimate was around 2 months if you don't do anything but farm dil and buy character slots, all the while pretty much no-life'ing, unless you fork over 100$ - but if you can simply do so, there's really little need to use it on building such a Dil-machine, is there?) - few people are in a position to abuse this system to hell and back, and even fewer are actually mad enough to do so.
It's even easy to PROVE that very few people do it: the Dil-to-Zen ratio proves it, without a doubt. If people were doing it, Dil would be flooding the market, but instead Dil is getting so pretty rare and quite expensive.
Not that such a machine wouldn't be nice to have. Aside from the Zen/Dil, you'd get around 1600 DOffs per week, and mid- to long-term could generate something like 3000 Fleet Marks per day, just from DOff'ing. Get a free T5 starbase and all the Fleet Ships in the world right along with it.
Yes, this game allows insane levels of growth. True. But the effort overshadows the gain for ... pretty much any sane person. A few veterans aside, who already have the whole machine running anyway.
So, again, to get back on topic:
- We have established that there's more effective ways to make Dil than dismissing DOffs.
- We have established that dismissing DOffs for Dil was wasteful even before the nerf, both in EC value and in Dil/CXP value.
- We still don't really have anyone negatively effected by the change. Nor anyone really profiting.
- We still don't really have a clue why they did this change.
So ... Why?
Are we going to get more colonization missions into rotation so we can get rid of the excess of passengers now that dismissing them gets you nothing?
First thing it was an insane example - it does not take a genius to figure it out - it would equal burn-out bordom pretty quickly just doing half that amount of toons so I would not worry what Cryptic thinks - as you said its been in place for awhile and it does not seem to be a problem.
Let me give another example - I am building a starbase of 1 - before the first nerf I had over 4 million fleet credits
so I don`t want any ships till T3 I get rid of them all into doffs 4,000,000 divided by 500 = 8000 doffs times 75 dilth = 600,000 dilth
now Cryptic looked at the data that we don`t have and say that billions of FC was being spent on fleet doffs and they were being dismissed for dilth
Because really what else could you use the FC for - so they reacted quickly and stupidly and nerfed them.
The same was happening with the grinder- degrinder if you went to SFA you would see a crowd around there at ALL times
except for the colonist and prisoner problem due to the 20 cap space I don`t see a big problem with nerfing the dilth from commons - they were never ment to be dismissed anyway - they were ment to be re-sold to other newbies or changed into greens
I am sorry but i just don`t see this as a big problem - and if you have followed any of my posts I put up threads with things I think are big problems and they become big threads
You make it sound like that's a bad thing, like somehow he was stealing it? Maybe we should ask the same of Cryptic, they really need to start giving us value for our money don't you think?
Actually, the real reason is the way we're accumulating fleet credits. I'm not in the the top contributors in my fleet and after getting a fleet ship, several ship and ground weapons to experiment with and fleet PSG AND 150-ish fleet doffs I still have over 200K fleet credits. Its not unthinkable that someone would've spend it all on white doffs to dismiss them for Dil.
Basically Fleet credits were too easy a way to generate Dil. Especially given how there really isn't anything else worth spending fleet credits on... so why not convert them to Dil? I think the real problem here is how little worth the Starbases bring to the game from the player's perspective, the fleet weapons, provisions, etc, are so worthless people prefer to not spend fleet credits, even though everyone will be or already is swimming in them.
500 years in the future and we still look like schmucks when getting our ID photos taken...
Grind it and sell the Blues.
It just costs a little dilithium to do. (250 per 5 blues turned into 1 purple.) Maybe more (hopefully) if Cryptic comes to its senses, fixes the doff values and just puts a charge on using the grinder, to be consistent and maintain some semblance of sanity.
This whole thing'd be fixed if:
1 Purple (Value: 500) -converts2-> 3 Blues (Value: 250) at a cost of 250 Dilithium
1 Blue (Value:250) -converts2-> 3 Uncommons (NewValue: 125) at a cost of 125 Dilithium
1 Uncommon (NewValue: 125) -converts2-> 3 Commons (NewValue: 50) at a cost of 25 or 50 Dilithium
(That last one really depends on whether you care more about the cosmetic aspect, matching the value of the products, or the mathematic aspect, matching the difference. Not something I'd fight over.)
The merger can be left as is. It already charges you. Unnecessarily, amusingly enough, since each 'upgrade' already nets a FrankenDoff considerably less valuable than its combined 5 components. But at least that's the way it's always been.
@DevolvedOne
I) I have still have no clear idea on what either side is trying to say.
II) ummmmm.....
.....I guess that pretty much covers it. It seems a lot of energy is being expended in this thread trying to be "right", or rather "more right" then someone else.
From where I sit, I still don't get the whole trade DOFFS for DIL thing. I see it being argued in a number of threads and just don't see how it "maths" out.
Some not so random numbers to consider (what they mean, I don`t know. Math ain`t my bag.)
Common Doffs used to be traded for 75 DIL
Turning in 5 Contraband nets 2000 DIL
2000/75 = 26.6666
26.6666 DOFFS would cost (on average 20000 EC each) 533320 EC
26.6666 DOFFS would cost (on average 15000 EC each) 399999 EC
Contraband can be purchase for as little as 40000 EC each on the exchange.
You need 5 Contraband to complete the contraband mission (200000 EC)
To me, it costs half as much to turn over contraband for DIL as it does to dismiss 26.6666 DOFFS.
Yes, you CAN get DOFFS for free thru a number of means, however you can also acquire CONTRABAND very quickly and very easily in a number of ways for free. Guess which side of this arguement I fall on.....
As for aquiring those DOFFS via FC and turning them in for DIL? Well, again, you can get much better value exchanging the DOFFS you don't need for Fleet projects on the exchange. Those you can't get good value for on the exchange can still be turned in to the Personel officer for Greens which you can then break back down, hold for furtue Fleet use, or continue to trade up.
Given the above, I really don't see how dismissing DOFFS for DIL offered a particularly good return on either EC or FC. About the only cost benefit would be in real time (ie. for a quick DIL infusion), but this seems a lot like getting one of those PAYDAY or short term loans. yes, you get DIL now, but if you invest time and resources better, you will get a much greater return for the same investment over time. Of course, the point is mute now that they have NERFED DOFF DIL value.:)
Yep, it seems I have argued myself to a particular side here, though I really don't know which side I have chosen.
More to the point, I DON'T CARE.
It's my game, I play it the way I want to.
You should too. I'm not going to tell you how you play is wrong just because I happen to play differently.
Peace or pieces. Makes no difference to me.
My character Tsin'xing
Yes, the return on Doffs was never that amazing. Yes, the way things were, and should've stayed, you'd have to be completely insane to go around buying up Doffs just to dismiss them. And that's where your misconception is...
Not everyone who's annoyed with this is insane and buying up Doffs on the exchange to exchange for dilithium. Most of us just pick these things up, as we do our thing, as a side product of doing doff assignments. Sometimes we need to make room in our inventories for a new doff. We can either dismiss doffs, or sell them on the exchange, or dump them in the mail. I, for one, never cared to make the trip to list anything on the exchange that wouldn't bring in at least 100K, so I'd just settle for the quick 75 or 150 dilithium. It's not much, but it was something nonetheless, and that something is now reduced to virtually nothing, because...
Well, because Cryptic put in a doffbreaker, turning 1 doff into 3 lower quality doffs free of charge. It was meant to help people get the low tier doffs for fleet assignments, but they apparently hadn't thought this through beyond that. (Surprise surprise!) One purple doff, as obtained from critting the repeatable final stage of starcluster colonization assignments, once upon a time worth 500 dilithium, could now be ground down, free of charge, into 27 common doffs worth 75 dilithium each, for a 2025 dilithium total.
And then they overreacted. Rather than fix the new feature they put in, by adding a cost, as exists (though unnecessarily in that particular case) in its doff-merging counterpart, or striking a middle ground between costs and values as I drew up in a previous post, they slashed the values of all duty officers so the crazies at the doff-grinder wouldn't get more dilithium out of the doff system than they did before. In fact, they get considerably less. As does everyone. It's a 90% cut for very rares, down to a 98.7% cut on the commons.
I just don't get how this seems like a sensible approach to anyone. From a pure game development, problem-solving point of view it's just pointless. The only thing that can make this make sense to me, aside from a lot of bicycle and football helmets sticking out over Cryptic cubicals, would be if the problem was seen as an opportunity. If Cryptic set out to gut dilithium generation. But as has been said, the Doff system accounts for relatively little, so if that's the case, don't be too surprised when they'll be 'fixing exploits' in other areas, such as the starcluster wrapper and the STF dilithium rewards, soon.
Or maybe, hopefully, the new values are just a temporary measure while they figure out a more permanent, and more reasonable, solution. Though I'd have expected a hint as to that being the case to be found somewhere. And while hope and optimism go against my nature (and everything I stand for!), I suppose anything is possible.
So... whatever.
Thank you, that was what I was getting at. Really no point me saying any more as you have covered it for me.
Though I would like to add I wouldn't have much of a problem if they also reduced/scaled the requirement (by the same ratio/percentage) of dilithium to do the assignment to get higher duty officers. I used to dismiss a duty officer or two to pay for the service, something no longer available to me. Yes I could use my other dilithium for it, but I grind for that, which is used for other purposes.
I never buy doff's off the exchange unless they are purple ones that I intend to use on my characters, any other purpose is rather pointless, at least for me.