Department Disparity

wesleycrasher · October 2012

Aside from a couple of unanswered posts in August, I wasn't able to find a real thread addressing this issue. What is the deal with the skewed doff generation? Starbases have put huge demands on white & green doffs, but their availability is completely out of proportion. It was bad enough for Tier 1-3, but now seeing the T4 project costs, its ridiculous. As it stands, Engineers are pretty uncommon, Medical doffs are exceedingly rare, and Security guys are virtually nonexistant. Starbases, however, want them in equal numbers for the first three tiers... then you get to T4 and see your science project wants 140 medical doffs?

There have been a few posts made showing the ridiculous disparity in doff generation, especially with Starbase doffs granting disproportionately high numbers of Flight Deck Officers and Warfare Specialists. Has any of this been addressed by a dev? I did my best to search, but it looks like they are just quietly ignoring this one. It can't be that hard to tweak the generation algorithm to balance it out, can it?

dabelgrave · October 2012

I'm not sure how the game decides to pass out certain specialties, but I've noticed the discrepancy between departments. You're more likely to get a Tactical duty officer than a Security duty officer, and I think I know why.

There are three Security specialties:
-Armory Officer
-Assault Squad Officer
-Security Officer

There are five (11) Tactical specialties:
-Conn Officer (Evasive, Tactical Team)
-Energy Weapons Officer
-Ground Warfare Specialist (Borg, Tholian, Undine)
-Projectile Weapons Officer
-Shield Distribution Officer
-Space Warfare Specialist (Borg, Tholian, Undine)

The game seems to be trying to provide these proportionally, but it ends up being disproportionate to individual needs. I have no problems with the current pricing for duty officers, but we need to be able to request Starfleet send us the specialties we need, not have crew randomly assigned. We are not the Borg Collective, but someone needs to bring order to this chaos!

nicha0 · October 2012

Yes, the problem occurs because each variation of a Boff's powers is another department, this is why sci/med are more closely balanced than the ridiculousness of the tac/security departments with all those warfare specials. The operations side gets flooded with flight deck officers instead of engineers.

They could easily balance them by adding in the newer, alternate power Boffs (that already exist) to the starbase reqs but they won't, instead they'll add in a huge dilithium tax for grinding Doffs and make people leave the game out of frustration. The personnel officer is sitting on very outdated lists of Doffs, so you can't get newer powered Doffs but you also can't get stuck with flight decks and warfare specialists.

willy01pwe · November 2012

I've noticed on the common Tactical Personnel box you buy for 750 fleet credits from the base vendor that the drop rates drastically changed about a month or so back (stealth nerf or stealth bug, unsure of which).

Before this time period, you pretty much were guaranteed a common Security DOFF of some variety at roughly 25-30% ratio to Tactical commons.

After this time period, the drop rate dropped DRASTICALLY, to where you were lucky to get a Security officer 10% of the time, OR LESS.

I've purchased 35 of the Tactical personnel boxes and was lucky to get 3 Security DOFFs.

I've also noticed a similar disparity in drop rate reduction in the common Engineer personnel boxes and I assume the reduction followed suit for the Science boxes, but I hit Tier 3 Science and haven't bought any of those recently.

I've opened several tickets complaining at the drastic changes and gotten the stock answer "The game is an ongoing blah blah blah RNG deal with it ... " answer. So, they obviously don't know or don't care.

rodentmaster · November 2012

You're missing the obvious answer: They're doing it on purpose. Reduce the drop rates on things you actually need. That's why they updated all the old lockboxes to drop 75% doff packs (which nobody wants) because folks were scrounging the old boxes for better prizes. Instead they changed the rates on the old boxes to match new ones.

They're doing everything in their power to make you suffer for playing this game. They want to stop starbase expansion. I guess they weren't expecting folks to grind so hard, but grindgrindgrind we did. So they're TRIBBLE you over with the rates of the doffs you NEED for starbase projects, thus killing starbase progress unless you pay 200,000 dil per project (which you would be forced to pay real money for zen to convert).

Then folks weren't doing it. Folks also saw through the BS special projects and the "limited time, get them now!" bogus-ness. So now they're TRIBBLE the doff system up intentionally to slow it down, to sour your options. They're herding you all towards the dilithium-only method, and they're cutting dilithium rewards and exponentially increasing dilithium prices on EVERYTHING from doffs and doff grinding to STF rewards, which now are just rewarding you with the option of grinding more dilithium for nothingness, to the "embassy" nonsense which is futher dilithium drains for little reward.

They're intentionally removing your options so you have to buy zen to play the game. Free-2-Play was a failure, IMO, because they can't survive and they're moving it all to a zen-to-dil conversion.

artfulmerkage · November 2012

Sadly I think rodent has a point. The disparity is evident to anyone who has tried to grind duty officers at one point or another, and from what Cryptic are upto lately, it wouldn't surprise me that they stack the odds.

Department Disparity

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