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Rep System Gear Costs
carl103
Member Posts: 1 Arc User
The dilithium costs of the new STF gear acquisition have been repeatedly raised as an issue. And I agree. For the romulan rep system and romulan gear I foresee few issues beyond the consumables, there?s only one set til cap and only 2 there.
The Omega system however is generating large amounts of concern for me, and for others. There's separate ground and space gear there, 3 sets of each, and obviously oodles of normal weapon choices.
People are almost certainly going to want at least 1 ground and 1 space set, plus weaponry. That?s a lot more dilithium than the reman set + weapons will ask for. And some people for obvious reasons will want more than one set, (the whole MACO vs OMEGA situation being an obvious example as one is tanky, the other is dps'y, but people changing ships over time is another). This could quickly see the Dil costs for gear spiraling out of control. And that?s before you get to boffs, or the proposed ability to call in our other ships when we get the new admiral rank.
Whilst others are going nuts about it i can live with the idea of paying dil for the gear, but I think with Omega at least your risking making them too steep. This goes double for the countless players, (myself included), who have a number of alts. They face an even more insane grind. With the current suggested set prices your looking at a 648K dil grind for all sets. Or just under 3 months at 8K a day. That?s on top of the rep costs and the costs on gear on the way up, and it's virtually impossible for you to cap every character out every day. Hell i have trouble capping one out. Starting even contemplating boff's and/or other ship gearing and it goes utterly stupid. With weapons added in the system could quickly spiral beyond the 2 million dil mark per character. Then there's the need for gear sets on the way up, eve at one set and cheaper costs it add's steeply to things.
So what?s the solution IMHO? Obviously you can't go and just cut prices. So here's my idea based on my current understanding of how the rep system works.
1. Do your projects, get to the relevant teir.
2. Now do a Store Access project, this is a high Dil cost, (and other costs), project that unlocks access to a particular requisition project.
3. Now you have access to fairly cheap requisition project for the actual gear.
That way you still get people laying down a big chunk of dilithium in stage 2, appropriate to what you want to ask of people, but you don't penalize people who want more than 1 set for the obvious reasons.
One other issue I see is weapons. If it's a 40Hr project per weapon it's going to be even less viable that the dil costs for a full set would already make it. Since even at 2 projects a time your talking over a week for a full set of space weapons. This would make the lower tiers fairly unattractive in reality.
The Omega system however is generating large amounts of concern for me, and for others. There's separate ground and space gear there, 3 sets of each, and obviously oodles of normal weapon choices.
People are almost certainly going to want at least 1 ground and 1 space set, plus weaponry. That?s a lot more dilithium than the reman set + weapons will ask for. And some people for obvious reasons will want more than one set, (the whole MACO vs OMEGA situation being an obvious example as one is tanky, the other is dps'y, but people changing ships over time is another). This could quickly see the Dil costs for gear spiraling out of control. And that?s before you get to boffs, or the proposed ability to call in our other ships when we get the new admiral rank.
Whilst others are going nuts about it i can live with the idea of paying dil for the gear, but I think with Omega at least your risking making them too steep. This goes double for the countless players, (myself included), who have a number of alts. They face an even more insane grind. With the current suggested set prices your looking at a 648K dil grind for all sets. Or just under 3 months at 8K a day. That?s on top of the rep costs and the costs on gear on the way up, and it's virtually impossible for you to cap every character out every day. Hell i have trouble capping one out. Starting even contemplating boff's and/or other ship gearing and it goes utterly stupid. With weapons added in the system could quickly spiral beyond the 2 million dil mark per character. Then there's the need for gear sets on the way up, eve at one set and cheaper costs it add's steeply to things.
So what?s the solution IMHO? Obviously you can't go and just cut prices. So here's my idea based on my current understanding of how the rep system works.
1. Do your projects, get to the relevant teir.
2. Now do a Store Access project, this is a high Dil cost, (and other costs), project that unlocks access to a particular requisition project.
3. Now you have access to fairly cheap requisition project for the actual gear.
That way you still get people laying down a big chunk of dilithium in stage 2, appropriate to what you want to ask of people, but you don't penalize people who want more than 1 set for the obvious reasons.
One other issue I see is weapons. If it's a 40Hr project per weapon it's going to be even less viable that the dil costs for a full set would already make it. Since even at 2 projects a time your talking over a week for a full set of space weapons. This would make the lower tiers fairly unattractive in reality.
Post edited by carl103 on
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I'd like to point out that Store Unlock projects have no Dilithium cost in the project itself. So, should you choose to unlock the store, and then end up deciding not to purchase any of the items you now have access to, these actions won't deplete your Dilithium reserves.
Thanks for the feedback!
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
My only issue, but I haven't expressed it as a sticking point, is that no matter how much time you want to put IN, you still have to wait months to get to t5 etc. Surely, as a personal rep system, it should not be important to have such a time lock on progress - if that progress was earned through playing the game.
Thank you.
On a related issue, are dilithium costs for the Personnel Officer doff pack and the 'grinder' (5 lower rank for 1 higher rank) being looked at? A 5000% increase in some of these costs seems far more than necessary -- there's nothing wrong with small adjustments and see what happens from there.
My STOwiki page | Reachable in-game @PhyrexianHero
Fed Armada: Section 31 (level 730, 2700+ members)
KDF Armada: Klingon Intelligence (level 699, 2100+ members)
Is there any way for us to view store and get things out of it for testing purposes since you did mention theres no way we can get to tier 5 before it goes live for both reputation systems?
Is mostly what I want to test out but can't find any way to access these items.
Yeah, it'd be nice if they tweaked the values instead of completely changing them. A 100% increase wouldn't have been that bad.
you need to Run the Projects after you upgraded one Tier to Unlock the Items in the Store.
This was my understanding of how the system works. I'm glad your looking at the costs. But the issue i see is that no mount of nerfing the base gear cost will be workable, especially once admiral rank hits and we've got several ships to equip, (my guess, limited to same number as ground boffs, so an extra 4). You'd have to get them down at a bare minimum to about 8K per piece tops, and that?s if you don't expect most people to acquire the weapons. If you adding weapons in 4K might be too much, (and that?s assuming a sub 1K cost for weapons).
Even 8K per piece is obviously far too cheap a surcharge IMHO. This is why i suggested moving much of the cost to a "pre-project" that you get after gaining access to the store but before being able to do the gear requisition project. It puts the majority of your gear costs in the pre-project, so that people are still paying a suitable cost, but not so expensive for the actual gear the extra sets and weapons, (for all he mydrid reasons i outlined), will be super expensive.
TBH none of m,y characters have even got to T1 yet, so I haven?t seen the details of the store, just working off reports and the math on your given dil cost numbrs.
I'm not talking about the costs to get your first set, those are fine based on what we know. I'm talking about outfitting boff,s the extra ships where supposed to be getting at admiral rank, or BoFF's for the new BoFF friendly ground content.
One set is going to be 108K at current values. Weapons are around dl store prices. So call that 20K apiece. That for a single science vessel is 120K Dil. Again expensive, but bearable. Now a ground set, another 108K Again bearable, even with the other 3 add on if getting a bit harsher.
Now start having to outfit 4 more boffs and an unknown number of ships when we get the admiral rank. basically take those costs and multiply them several times over, (assuming we get as many ships at admiral in our personal fleet as we get boffs on ground it's a 5X multiplier).
That?s my point, several 100K to outfit one ship fully is ok. But having to repay that for every boff, extra ship, or alternate build is WAY too harsh. Though alternate builds could be handled I guess by allowing a project that lets you turn in one set piece for another different one.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
I know that much... You are missing the whole point...
Borticus stated in one post I read they will be having testing on the high end items that are not on holodeck that will be new to season 7 and that being we will never get to tier 5 before testing is over that those items will be made available on tribble for testing. So that is what I was referring too. I'm no noob.
As an example, Rare Borg Engine Tech can be traded for either 1056 dil or it can be traded for a MK 11 MACO engine.
So, in a way, the MK11 MACO engine DOES cost 1056 dil.
My character Tsin'xing
Staggering.
That's great Bort, thank you.
Figured i was the only one to do the math
Oh indeed, i just want them to get the sloution right and come up with a system that works for multipule set users and single set users alike as well as scaling with future updates that might well require more sets anyway;).
I see this coming up a lot on the forums recently, and it's not really an accurate measurement of the value of the item.
The ability to trade in a tech drop for Dilithium is a way of giving players who get a drop they don't want or need something for the time they've spent, due to the randomness of the current system. If we had allowed people to simply purchase Omega gear with Dilithium, the cost associated with them would have been higher than Diltihium store items, since the Omega/MACO/Honor Guard gear is superior to Dilithium store gear.
Now that we're moving to a system with fewer random elements, we can price Omega items, Romulan reputation items, etc. proportionately to one another based on the relative power of the items. There are several factors to take into account in pricing these items, and we're doing our best to make the costs reasonable.
As Borticus already mentioned, we're in the process of evaluating Dilithium costs in general.
My character Tsin'xing
why does Dstore cost more than fleet store 10000 for 12 while 11 is 22000 huh when will that be lowered
what woulld like 3 stacks of 99 EDC get me that is just 1 toon 3 others with 2 I am ready for it
I thought we wer suposed to get c the conversion rate last week
I would say probably a 16k to 20k cap would be better...with gold members and LTS members getting a 25 to 30k cap increase. (because they PAY for the F2P to have fun)
since i started this game 6-7 months ago I've put down at least $150..compared to what i played before hand, *********, I only paid $80 a YEAR.
thats my $0.02
Edit: your kidding me...how the heck is a GAME a bad word???? *sigh*
I remember when the dilithium system came out there was a lot of talk from the developers that made it seem like the cap was just a temporary check that would be raised, if not eliminated, once they had assured the system was stable. Well, 10 months later...
My STOwiki page | Reachable in-game @PhyrexianHero
Fed Armada: Section 31 (level 730, 2700+ members)
KDF Armada: Klingon Intelligence (level 699, 2100+ members)
I think this is, overall, something they're thinking about. There need to be things *everyone* wants to spend dilithium on, all the time. Not necessarily a lot of dilithium, but there needs to be something that every player looks at and says 'this item that costs dilithium would be an upgrade'. Right now if you can get borg gear (which everyone can) there only thing you need dilithium for is doff stuff or converting into other currencies. That conversion is only going to work if people want the thing you're selling (crafting mats for crafting that is generally not very good). The guy buying dilithium for zen needs to actually want that dilithium.
Now fleet projects and so on are interesting, because not everyone is in a fleet, so you could create an economy that way as dilithium as something fleet people want and non fleet people supply to them, but that seriously constrains the market.
Okay, let me say -- and I'm totally chill on this point, which I find requires explaining on these forums -- that I disagree with you and the other guy.
Because Cryptic designers seem to want to bend the basic laws of economics in order to support internally constructed "fair" design principles all the time anymore (and, really, players aren't mind readers so they don't know what the paradigm for fairness is supposed to be)...
And players keep constructed value equivalencies that try to treat any two things of equal work as having the same value, usually in a way that seems concerned with making everything cheap and easy (which is bad because it cheapens any need to play) or make things they already own valuable and expensive (which is also bad because it decreases the need to play).
Okay. Here's my perspective. I'm sure almost everyone reading this post studied this somewhere but here's a refresher:
Opportunity Cost
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Next best. As in, for these purposes, most expensive other option. Not "not meant to be equivalent and it was a consolation prize that we determined would..." Not "cheapest other option" or "any other option that costs that amount" as so many posters here want to argue.
Next best. Singular.
So the value of any prototype tech deflector, assuming you have one, is a deflector that the player doesn't own. Until the player doesn't need deflectors. Then the value of the prototype drop is 2034 dilithium.
EXCEPT. EXCEPT that's the value if you already have one, not the value of getting one.
Because it's a drop, it can vary, yes. Half of people get it by 75 runs at 1%. So let's say 75. That's about 18 hours, 45 minutes. or a 94k-ish dilithium value. Except the person who did 75 STF runs before got 94k dilithium and the deflector. The whole thing becomes a mess when trying to value the time any way that involves dilithium because the player also received dilithium. But 20 hours of focused activity.
*sigh* My issue is that devs don't seem interested in economic equitability of different transactions (every trade in of any kind is a trade down, often massive -- including for dilithium) and players seem to want things cheap.
Everybody is distorting this economy to push their goals, both developer and player alike, and nobody is trying to simulate a fair economic system where things are reasonably costly but where the market is healthy. Because this should be a fair, balanced, simulated economic system.
Players shouldn't get ripped off on the dilithium hand-in (which they have been) nor should players be trying to game this to make everything easy. Everybody else having this discussion is acting as a participant in the economy rather than as an observer trying to construct an illustration of a fair economy. And I at least think that last role should be one that developers and a few players who can look beyond self-interest should be discussing.
This goes back to my Lobi thing. Lobi items' value should be equal to the opportunity cost of acquiring the Lobi used to purchase the item or roughly equivalent to items with a market value of 250,000 EC per Lobi spent. Because that's roughly the stable market rate for acquiring one Lobi.
There should be a power balance/cost/trade in chart somewhere that is consistent as well as an overall policy on how much, maximum, Cryptic will undervalue something on trade in for currency.