Bravo, Cryptic, Bravo! Your ability to absorb criticism and turn it into positive, meaningful changes will keep this game around for a long time provided you continue to do so. While I was a bit bummed about the initial changes in Season 7, your ability to change for the better has redeemed you in my eyes. Keep up the good work!
Still no adjustment to the cost of the doff grinders? What does your data say about that?
I believe you said that cost increase was to bring the doff grinding prices in line with other means of obtaining doffs, but I don't think that flies, for two reasons:
1) The extreme randomness of the grinder. You must de-grind and re-grind many times to get the doff you want.
2) Other doff sources- Lt. Ferra, the Fleet base, C-Store doff packs- seem to be, frankly, overpriced. Although at least with Ferra you know exactly what you're buying.
Cool! I like it, at a stroke you wiped away half of my unhappiness with were STO currently is. It also makesm e happy that last time I was feeling like this you listened and corrected what I was getting unhappy about. So keep it up.
Finally an Andorian ship! I think that last appeared, what, two years ago? I think I still have my Andorian somewhere round here. No longer are you kowtowing to those Evil Green blooded pointy ears!
Thanks
(In case your curious the only thing I'm less than chuffed about is those annoying three little letters that people keep mentioning... But we'll see what happens in the next little while. Thanks again.)
I would say I am in the 1% when all I read in that update was the release of an ANDORIAN FED SHIP!!, I have been waiting for my own Kumari for soo looong!
The original Thy'lek Shran - Original forum poster
Proud member of SSC Starfleet Strategic Command
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"I prefer to be called a LTP 'Long Term Player' not a 'Lifetime Subscriber' that term no longer has any meaning"
U.S.S. Mugwomp and soon to be in the hotseat of my own ANDORIAN ship, DAN U THE MAN!
Salt in the wound much Dan? I sold off all my EDCs, Borg Techs and Salvage before season 7, because I didn't want to be pressured into having to make it to T3 to use them, and now here we have it that it's open at our leisure. T_T Daaan!!! Daaan!!! Daaan!!!
I'm feeling worse than the hang over left after downing a bottle of a Romulan Ale.
Unless you are dead opposed to playing STFs, you definitely made the best move to sell off your EDC and salvage before Season 7. Getting the crate faster doesn't change the equation.
Still no adjustment to the cost of the doff grinders? What does your data say about that?
I believe you said that cost increase was to bring the doff grinding prices in line with other means of obtaining doffs, but I don't think that flies, for two reasons:
1) The extreme randomness of the grinder. You must de-grind and re-grind many times to get the doff you want.
2) Other doff sources- Lt. Ferra, the Fleet base, C-Store doff packs- seem to be, frankly, overpriced. Although at least with Ferra you know exactly what you're buying.
+1 This does take a lot of our daily dilithium now for growing fleets..
I wouldn't mind a reduced Dilithium reward from the Daily, but i'd also like to see Fleet Marks given as an OPTION when accepting the Daily reward. Instead of removing the Dilithium completely from the Daily, let us choose whether we want "50 Fleet Marks" OR "xxxx Dilithium". Obviously, the possibility that players would choose Dilithium (and get Dilithium for Fleet Action Completion) would exist. But it would also allow us as players to choose which reward we desire most at the time.
Agreed. Making Fleet Actions give Fleet Marks means there is now absolutely no reason for me to do them. Getting nerfed down to 480 was bad enough, but now there's zero rewards in my eyes. My fleet has so many people who have stockpiled Fleet Marks and fill up the projects so fast I never even get to look at them before they're "Filled". That means Fleet Marks have no value to my characters.
Please give us the option to get either 1440 Dilithium from Fleet Actions OR 50 Fleet Marks for the daily. Then I will have a reason to participate.
_____________________________________________________
Original Username - njdss4 - Original Join Date - July 28, 2008 (Official Forum Launch Date)
Agreed. Making Fleet Actions give Fleet Marks means there is now absolutely no reason for me to do them. Getting nerfed down to 480 was bad enough, but now there's zero rewards in my eyes. My fleet has so many people who have stockpiled Fleet Marks and fill up the projects so fast I never even get to look at them before they're "Filled". That means Fleet Marks have no value to my characters.
Please give us the option to get either 1440 Dilithium from Fleet Actions OR 50 Fleet Marks for the daily. Then I will have a reason to participate.
You read this wrong. Only the daily has changed. The regular reward (Dilithium + random item) is still there.
I want to say, to Star Trek Online, all you good folk whom work so hard on this wonderful universe !! (which is brought to us free-to-play, kindly), THANK YOUUUU!!!!
The fleet action daily im a little unsure about. we do need more ways to earn fleet marks, but would you consider either giving every fleet action its own daily so people can really earn some good marks, or giving people the option to either pick marks or dilithium on the one current daily so people have a choice?
also can fleet marks in general be increased across the board? with only one use its not like giving people a few more is going to harm anything. it will just make base construction easier, especially for small fleets.
some of the events like starbase red alert give quite small amounts even with bonus hours and boosts.
You read this wrong. Only the daily has changed. The regular reward (Dilithium + random item) is still there.
The regular reward is only 480 Dilithium, which is not worth the time when compared to Empire Defense, which can be done in the same amount of time while solo and net 1440 Dilithium.
_____________________________________________________
Original Username - njdss4 - Original Join Date - July 28, 2008 (Official Forum Launch Date)
Well actually nice to see you are implementing changes that don't TRIBBLE players as originally designed, there's actually hope now that it will turn for the better of STO as a MMO, now you need to send some e-mails to all the playerbase in hopes those who left might give it a try after these changes are implemented.
My fleet is startting to resemble a ghost town, and it's a 480+ member one!
Keep Vulcan Boob Chick, only baktag likes to stare at guys in MMOs
Meow, do you know if we get the chance to cumplete our Winter Event accolades from last year? There are still pending accolades cluttering up my to-do list in the accolade window and I always think "oh wow this will prully never get cleared".
"Everything about the Jham'Hadar is lethal!" - Eris
Original Join Date: January 30th, 2010
That should be in the patch notes, but forgot to mention that we are changing the Fleet Action daily to reward 50 Fleet Marks instead of Dilithium now that we're added Dilithium for completing every Reputation Project.
We will continue to add ways to earn Fleet Marks where needed as we continue to monitor the overall economy.
Hi Dan, kudos on the changes. That's bought S7 back to life for me.
On the foundry exploit, if I'm honest it isnt the lack of dilithium that I miss its the fleet marks as one poster has already stated.
Small fleets need quick ways to gain FM. You've given us much more to do in game now so our time to gather FM is now very diluted.
Can I make a simple suggestion, and I apologise if this has already been put forward elsewhere, but the "officer of the watch" mission available at starbases....make it 50 FM instead of 5. Thats all the foundry clickies gave us and it would REALLY help our small fleet and I'm sure others.
Well, this was unexpected news, but also most welcome news.
Now I can finally begin to enjoy S 7 more indeed.
But one small thing Dan, please have some EC rewards for missions/STF's. It's a bit expensive to have to buy commodities and other required stuff for the rep system....
Also, how about some sort of rep system for the low level players?? Would be great to have something to do other than just doing missions...
If there is anyone that deserves the shame, it is me because ultimately the buck stops here and if something goes live, I approved it.
Luckily, I can also change it
So... it's your fault then that PVP is in the shape that it's in?
Sure it's more balanced, but where's the leaderboards? The new maps? The Ranking systems?
Why didn't Omega Marks get added to the Ker'rat/N'vak/Otha/etc Daily? It is fighting against the Borg in a very open and group way..
And what about the Foundry? Making your own PVP maps would have been a new and outstanding way to make use of the foundry and kept PVPing fresh and exciting IMHO.
And for God Sakes why is there no Timers for Disconnecting in order to reduce DC griefing/Kill avoidance in PVP?????
If the Buck stops with you. And if you are truelly the one who approves the changes that go into STO, then why aren't you trying to help STO's PVP more? When Season 7 was released, it felt like instead of doing more to help pvp, you've done more to push PVP away from STO.. Is this your final goal? Are you going to try to fade PVP to the point where instead of working on it, your going to simply Eliminate it?
I can't speak for everyone in the game, but personally, I have been hurt and upset with the state of STO's PVP part of the game. No, upset is to nice of a word, Betrayed is better.
I'm not expecting a response, and more likely expecting flaming. But at least I'm getting my opinion out there.. And even if it's not the most popular, if it even helped to bring about a positive change towards PVP in STO, I'd be happy. And don't you think 3 Years is long enough of a drought for PVP?
You think that your beta test was bad?
Think about this: American Football has been in open beta for 144 years. ~Kotaku
Dan, you once said the Borg and Romulan story missions would earn their respective Marks.
Story missions in the eye of the playerbase, are the Reman featured series and associated Romulan story missions, and Borg story missions such as Asset Recovery/Assimilation etc....
First off, Happy Holidays from the STO Team! It has been pretty hectic around here and we can't believe it has already been a week since the launch of Season 7! Before we go into the Holiday Weekend, the team and I would like to give you a status update.
Season 7 is doing great. Lots of new players are logging in. Plenty of returning players are coming back to check out the new update. Concurrency is up across the board and generally speaking the team is very proud of the work that went into this Season and we are thrilled by all of the wonderful comments about New Romulus and the new Events. You can expect more large zones like this in future Seasons.
Not everything is sunshine and roses, though. As we mentioned in previous posts, we continue to monitor the Dilithium economy reaction to the changes in Season 7 and as previously stated, we will be making some additional adjustments which we feel will address issues that have been discussed. Some of those changes are going to happen in an update tomorrow (Wednesday Nov 21) and some of them are going to happen in the following week's update on Nov 29. If we feel more changes are necessary after that, we will certainly make them because our goal is to keep the game balanced while ensuring that players are having fun. Even though we've managed to get more Dilithium into more players hands, we agree that STF runs and Dilithium have been a challenging change that needs to be addressed and we are going to continue to do so.
First up, we expect to turn Foundry play back on with tomorrow's update. This is great news for Foundry fans and anyone looking to run the Foundry Dilithium Daily mission. We expect to have Foundry editing online in the following week after we've finalized all of our mission regression testing. So far everything looks good and we are in much better shape than we were after Season 6.
Private Queues are going to remain off for another week so that we can get the cool down timers for the missions to be in synch with the cool down timers in the public queues. Once that is confirmed, we'll turn the private queues back on.
The Reputation System, including the STFs are getting some major changes over the next two weeks. Here is a rundown of what is going to happen over the next several Holodeck updates.
Omega Conversion Crates can be opened immediately. You will no longer need to achieve T3 in Omega Fleet to open these.
Reputation XP Project timers are dropping from 40 hours to 20 hours across all Tiers. If you have a project in progress, it will not change, but any new projects after the update will be adjusted. We are also looking into adding the ability to drop a project.
All XP Reputation Projects (projects that reward progress towards your next Tier) will now grant 240 Dilithium (on average) upon completion. If you complete 4 XP Rep Projects a day, you should earn about 960 Dilithium per day from it. These are in addition to the Marks to Dilithium conversion Projects. Once you've completed a Reputation System, these XP Projects will go away, but the Marks to Dilithium conversion projects will remain.
Reputation Projects that convert Marks to Dilithium are being moved from unlocking at T5 to being available immediately. This allows you to convert Omega Marks and Romulan Marks to Dilithium similar to how you could trade STF items for Dilithium previously.
Loot drops are getting added to STF mobs as well as to bosses.
End of STF Loot Rolls are returning. There will once again be a chance to earn special rewards at the end of STFs or Romulan Mark events. These special rewards will be Bonus marks, Borg Neural Processors, or other items needed for Reputation rewards.
Reputation Advancement Projects (the ones that unlock each tier) are having their timers reduced from 1 hour to 15 mins. and we are removing Dilithium inputs from these Tier Up projects.
The amount of commodities needed for Romulan Reputation projects is being reduced due to the lack of drops on New Romulus. We will be adding more drops to New Romulus in the future either through enemy kills or daily missions.
All Reputation Projects are being changed so that you need to claim the reward upon completion. This puts it in line with how Duty Officer assignments work so you can see the rewards you are getting from each project.
We expect all of the above changes to be live before December. A few will be live by tomorrow, with the rest live around Nov 29th.
Thank you for your patience. We realize that players have been asking for many of these changes since Season 7 first started appearing on Tribble. We feel much better about making these changes now that we have a week's worth of data on a full Shard (there were only a hundred or so players on Tribble) and are able to see how a full server load of players are interacting with the new Reputation system. We're confident that the above approach will still achieve our balance goals, while putting more of the fun back in the economy. Our end goal has always been to put more Dilithium into the hands of the average player. The above changes should help get us there and put more Dilithium back into STFs.
Season 7 is just getting started and we hope that you'll enjoy all the updates that will come with this Season. Tomorrow we are releasing the next Duty Officer pack which has been specifically tuned to help with Starbase and Embassy construction. Shortly after the Winter Event will begin around December 6th. Last year's Winter Wonderland has been updated to include new missions, a new track, new rewards, a new ship, and plenty of fun that will run through the new year.
We will also be running a full month of Feature Episode Replay where all the limited time rewards from all four series will be available all month long. So if you've got some new characters that need these special items, December is going to be your chance to catch up.
In January we'll be releasing an Andorian Ship on the Federation side to be quickly followed by the STO 3 Year Anniversary Event. This special celebration will be released with a new one-off Feature Episode. If you were at the Star Trek convention in San Francisco this last weekend, Denise Crosby would have you believe that this episode is going to be all about Tasha Yar and Sela. We'll see... anything can happen.
The anniversary event will also offer a new special free ship for both Fed and Kdf players much like we gave away the Odyssey during last year's event.
Moving into February and March we expect to have some more events to talk about and we will begin to start teasing the next Season.
So there is plenty to look forward to in Season 7 and we thank you for continuing to share your feedback and comments with us. Thank you for the both the kudos and the criticism (although some of you need to learn some manners). We get better with every season and we have you to thank for that. We do listen, and while we don't always immediately react, we do deliberate and make changes based on ideas and feedback you submit. The QA team is still crunching through all of your bug reports and we expect to have major issues ironed out soon.
MMOs are wonderful because everything can change and there is almost always a way to improve things. We will continue to grow and evolve.
Keep an eye on the patch notes for when the above changes will hit Holodeck and thank you for making STO awesome.
See you online and Happy Holidays!
Daniel Stahl
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online
Thanks for the update. Glad to see you're listening to at least some of the player's feedback.
Ok, these changes sound nice, but if you expect people to do 3 missions of at least 15 minutes for the foundry-daily, then you should think about a fair reward.
Doing a little bit math and knowing the Crystalline Entity 2 minutes 28 seconds run (let's say round about 3 minutes), you should think about giving us 3x (for 3 Missions) 5x (for duration of the missions)=15 times the reward in Dilithium one would get for beating the CE.
I know, the CE isn't available at the moment because of the disabled private queues...
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
If Star Trek Online was an Open-Source (GPL) Game, we would have a low-grind fork.
Fortunately, Season 6 (and now Season 7) have been such positive improvements to the game (and the health of the business), I've been able to increase my staff and for the first time in Season 8 - tackle something awesome and on my long standing engineering report to do list.
If things keep going this way - the team will be able to start knocking off all of the features and content goals we've had since day one. It really is a good time for STO and we hope that with your support - it continues!
Are we finally going to see the full implementation of the department heads and the first officer system(s)?
I hate to break it to ya but STO was never balanced or created around a PvP focus. PvP was tacked on from the beginning and instead of complaining about it or the lack of PvP-focused updates, be glad it is still there and not flat-out disabled.
You want to know why PvP hasn't been updated? Simple. PvP is the most unpopular content in the entirety of STO.
It caters purely to the hardcore extremists who participate in some of the most willfully malicious trolling in the history of online MMOs. And don't you DARE try to link me to any damn 'guide to PvP' because each and every one of those is horribly outdated or has purposefully-misleading information in order to deny any potential opponents the avenue to compete on a fair level.
Yes, PvP is hated even more than the New Romulus stuff that the forum kids are whining about. Hardly anyone participates because it is severely imbalanced against newcomers. People don't want to line up to get their ships destroyed over and over with little to no recourse.
They have the metrics and data but they aren't stupid to flat out ignore PvP without a reason. In fact, PWE probably wants more emphasis on PvP if that would get people to grind for better gear and so on.
Cryptic is doing what they can to PROTECT us from the evils of PWE. Lemme break it down for you since you must not be familiar with how this works in other PWE (and most asian-developed) games.
This is what a PvP focused game from PWE will look like:
-Addition of Enchantment System to enhance your gear to +15 based on RNG
-Addition of 'destruction' mechanic to make your gear go poof when (not if) enchantment fails
-Addition of cash shop items to guarantee success of enchantment and/or prevent destruction of your precious gear.
-Addition of 'gears' (gems) to socket into gear. Perhaps requiring a cash shop item to create the socket (and perhaps destroy the gear on failure w/o another cash shop item...)
Anyhow, I'll stop that there. That's your PvP focus right there. Thankfully Cryptic knows this and has done its best to delay the inevitable (and PWE will mandate this or Cryptic will be out of jobs, just watch).
Enjoy things while you can because it is EASY MODE FUN without paying (much) real money compared to what it will be like in a few months.
STO never has been about a PvP focus and hopefully never will go down that route. If you want PvP-focused sci fi games there are some that may meet your needs; one of them recently went F2P and takes place in a galaxy far far away....
You think the grind is bad here? The dil and restrictions are bad HERE? HA!
Silly kids, time for you to get thrown out into the real harsh world of F2P if you think this is bad.
Heard and understood. It is still tough for fleets under 25 players to achieve Starbase goals in a reasonable time. We will look more into this and see if there are other things we can do to help. We've already adjusted the top tier projects down a few times and we may do so even more in the future.
While Warhammer Online did a few things wrong I liked that the guild advancement system there scaled to the number of players inside the guild.
Obviously something that scales immediately is ermm 'exploitable' but lets spend some thoughts on it.
Assumption: Fleets with less than 25 players need development aid.
So you either can reduce the requirements for low player fleets further, or somehow buff their actual contributions.
First problem to tackle is how to make fleets qualify for development aid.
As stated above you cannot grant aid as soon as the fleet falls below the threshold because people would just get below that everytime they have to fill an expensive project. So we need something like 'if fleet stays below 25 members for 30 days gain x'. And we need something that checks everytime someone joins the fleet if it needs to remove x.
Second problem: What aid is exactly given?
Option One - Reduced project costs. Given how painful changing starbase project contributions is (hello white bridge officer contribution bug) I would pity the poor person who needed to work on that.
Option Two - A development aid buff. Contribute 1 fleet mark, counts as 2 fleet marks. Use for other appropriate inputs as well. Main difficulty would be to make the 'bonus' input don't grant fleet credits. If it is a granted buff like the fleet transwarp it should be rather safe to stay with people who actually should have it.
I have been upset by the lack of dil from SB24 (which hurt lowbies more than anyone else) but I understand why it was done.
I feel that most of the whining is about perception issues rather than implementation issues.
Example, in WoW (yes I know but shush) you have the concept of 'rested xp' which gives you a 'boost' in XP if you stay logged off for a certain amount of time.
Did you know that originally this was a penalty rather than a boost? The original concept was that if you played too much your XP rate would decrease and when that was communicated to the player it caused a great deal of 'discomfort' in the beta testers. Feedback was severely negative all around.
The original death penalty was also so harsh (about an hour of res sickness) that priests actually used to have TALENTS in order to REDUCE this penalty!
So what Blizz did was instead of a penalty they just changed it to be a 'benefit' without changing the mechanic at all. Now you have 'bonus rested XP' instead of 'you've been playing too long so here's a nerf hahaha' like before. All they did was change the perception of you being rewarded and buffed with rested XP instead of penalized for playing too long.
The devs made it obvious they want to stop/prevent easy farming of tons of dilithium (at least for the Fed side) perhaps to reduce certain exploits they've seen being done that they don't want to tell us about (until they fix it).
Dilithium = ZEN and thus Dilithium = premium currency. Thus, the need for Dil for all the high end stuff in order to create money sinks to prevent players from burning through all this content so fast. Otherwise players will be whining about a lack of content (with some players already doing just that).
Content takes a *lot* of money. They could either improve the game features or add in content that'll just be burned through in a week or two (but takes 2-3 months to create). That isn't sustainable so it is obvious they've focused on features before massive content updates.
The dil sinks serve two purposes. It gets rid of dil that was exploited/farmed by most higher-level characters (through the fleet stuff primarily). It also drains dil from the in-game economy (through necessity) so that both dil and Zen are valuable and players actually have to EARN their way through.
Admit it, all of you that were farming Elite STFs and having everything handed to you on a silver platter in easy-mode...admit it. Elite STFs were meant to be ELITE and HARD and make you work for every bit of effort. Things feel less rewarding only because you had it easier than needed. Things were shoved in your mouth with a silver spoon. Once that spoon is taken you all cry your damn eyes out like babies.
Kindly grow up. Stop whining and be grateful for the ONE decent player-focused sci-fi game with a Star Trek aesthetic and (some) lore-focused story. You lose this due to whining and what do you have? SWTOR? LOL...good luck with 2 damn quickslots and denied access to the best gear in the game. Imagine if they flat out changed it to require people to convert their refined dil to ZEN to buy most of these things instead of just keeping it as a refined dil cost. Just imagine that.
TLDR: Gamers be entitled, yo! Cut dat TRIBBLE out! :P
Comments
I believe you said that cost increase was to bring the doff grinding prices in line with other means of obtaining doffs, but I don't think that flies, for two reasons:
1) The extreme randomness of the grinder. You must de-grind and re-grind many times to get the doff you want.
2) Other doff sources- Lt. Ferra, the Fleet base, C-Store doff packs- seem to be, frankly, overpriced. Although at least with Ferra you know exactly what you're buying.
Finally an Andorian ship! I think that last appeared, what, two years ago? I think I still have my Andorian somewhere round here. No longer are you kowtowing to those Evil Green blooded pointy ears!
Thanks
(In case your curious the only thing I'm less than chuffed about is those annoying three little letters that people keep mentioning... But we'll see what happens in the next little while. Thanks again.)
Unless you are dead opposed to playing STFs, you definitely made the best move to sell off your EDC and salvage before Season 7. Getting the crate faster doesn't change the equation.
My STOwiki page | Reachable in-game @PhyrexianHero
Fed Armada: Section 31 (level 730, 2700+ members)
KDF Armada: Klingon Intelligence (level 699, 2100+ members)
+1 This does take a lot of our daily dilithium now for growing fleets..
Agreed. Making Fleet Actions give Fleet Marks means there is now absolutely no reason for me to do them. Getting nerfed down to 480 was bad enough, but now there's zero rewards in my eyes. My fleet has so many people who have stockpiled Fleet Marks and fill up the projects so fast I never even get to look at them before they're "Filled". That means Fleet Marks have no value to my characters.
Please give us the option to get either 1440 Dilithium from Fleet Actions OR 50 Fleet Marks for the daily. Then I will have a reason to participate.
Original Username - njdss4 - Original Join Date - July 28, 2008 (Official Forum Launch Date)
You read this wrong. Only the daily has changed. The regular reward (Dilithium + random item) is still there.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
The fleet action daily im a little unsure about. we do need more ways to earn fleet marks, but would you consider either giving every fleet action its own daily so people can really earn some good marks, or giving people the option to either pick marks or dilithium on the one current daily so people have a choice?
also can fleet marks in general be increased across the board? with only one use its not like giving people a few more is going to harm anything. it will just make base construction easier, especially for small fleets.
some of the events like starbase red alert give quite small amounts even with bonus hours and boosts.
The regular reward is only 480 Dilithium, which is not worth the time when compared to Empire Defense, which can be done in the same amount of time while solo and net 1440 Dilithium.
Original Username - njdss4 - Original Join Date - July 28, 2008 (Official Forum Launch Date)
My fleet is startting to resemble a ghost town, and it's a 480+ member one!
Original Join Date: January 30th, 2010
Hi Dan, kudos on the changes. That's bought S7 back to life for me.
On the foundry exploit, if I'm honest it isnt the lack of dilithium that I miss its the fleet marks as one poster has already stated.
Small fleets need quick ways to gain FM. You've given us much more to do in game now so our time to gather FM is now very diluted.
Can I make a simple suggestion, and I apologise if this has already been put forward elsewhere, but the "officer of the watch" mission available at starbases....make it 50 FM instead of 5. Thats all the foundry clickies gave us and it would REALLY help our small fleet and I'm sure others.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and the team.
With these changes, it may well be something to be enjoyed
Now I can finally begin to enjoy S 7 more indeed.
But one small thing Dan, please have some EC rewards for missions/STF's. It's a bit expensive to have to buy commodities and other required stuff for the rep system....
Also, how about some sort of rep system for the low level players?? Would be great to have something to do other than just doing missions...
Now you only need to add Fleet Marks to PVP.
Division Hispana
www.divisionhispana.com
So... it's your fault then that PVP is in the shape that it's in?
Sure it's more balanced, but where's the leaderboards? The new maps? The Ranking systems?
Why didn't Omega Marks get added to the Ker'rat/N'vak/Otha/etc Daily? It is fighting against the Borg in a very open and group way..
And what about the Foundry? Making your own PVP maps would have been a new and outstanding way to make use of the foundry and kept PVPing fresh and exciting IMHO.
And for God Sakes why is there no Timers for Disconnecting in order to reduce DC griefing/Kill avoidance in PVP?????
If the Buck stops with you. And if you are truelly the one who approves the changes that go into STO, then why aren't you trying to help STO's PVP more? When Season 7 was released, it felt like instead of doing more to help pvp, you've done more to push PVP away from STO.. Is this your final goal? Are you going to try to fade PVP to the point where instead of working on it, your going to simply Eliminate it?
I can't speak for everyone in the game, but personally, I have been hurt and upset with the state of STO's PVP part of the game. No, upset is to nice of a word, Betrayed is better.
I'm not expecting a response, and more likely expecting flaming. But at least I'm getting my opinion out there.. And even if it's not the most popular, if it even helped to bring about a positive change towards PVP in STO, I'd be happy. And don't you think 3 Years is long enough of a drought for PVP?
Think about this:
American Football has been in open beta for 144 years. ~Kotaku
Story missions in the eye of the playerbase, are the Reman featured series and associated Romulan story missions, and Borg story missions such as Asset Recovery/Assimilation etc....
Can you tell us when this will happen if at all?
Thanks for the update. Glad to see you're listening to at least some of the player's feedback.
Doing a little bit math and knowing the Crystalline Entity 2 minutes 28 seconds run (let's say round about 3 minutes), you should think about giving us 3x (for 3 Missions) 5x (for duration of the missions)=15 times the reward in Dilithium one would get for beating the CE.
I know, the CE isn't available at the moment because of the disabled private queues...
If Star Trek Online was an Open-Source (GPL) Game, we would have a low-grind fork.
Are we finally going to see the full implementation of the department heads and the first officer system(s)?
Please.
I hate to break it to ya but STO was never balanced or created around a PvP focus. PvP was tacked on from the beginning and instead of complaining about it or the lack of PvP-focused updates, be glad it is still there and not flat-out disabled.
You want to know why PvP hasn't been updated? Simple.
PvP is the most unpopular content in the entirety of STO.
It caters purely to the hardcore extremists who participate in some of the most willfully malicious trolling in the history of online MMOs. And don't you DARE try to link me to any damn 'guide to PvP' because each and every one of those is horribly outdated or has purposefully-misleading information in order to deny any potential opponents the avenue to compete on a fair level.
Yes, PvP is hated even more than the New Romulus stuff that the forum kids are whining about. Hardly anyone participates because it is severely imbalanced against newcomers. People don't want to line up to get their ships destroyed over and over with little to no recourse.
They have the metrics and data but they aren't stupid to flat out ignore PvP without a reason. In fact, PWE probably wants more emphasis on PvP if that would get people to grind for better gear and so on.
Cryptic is doing what they can to PROTECT us from the evils of PWE. Lemme break it down for you since you must not be familiar with how this works in other PWE (and most asian-developed) games.
This is what a PvP focused game from PWE will look like:
-Addition of Enchantment System to enhance your gear to +15 based on RNG
-Addition of 'destruction' mechanic to make your gear go poof when (not if) enchantment fails
-Addition of cash shop items to guarantee success of enchantment and/or prevent destruction of your precious gear.
-Addition of 'gears' (gems) to socket into gear. Perhaps requiring a cash shop item to create the socket (and perhaps destroy the gear on failure w/o another cash shop item...)
Anyhow, I'll stop that there. That's your PvP focus right there. Thankfully Cryptic knows this and has done its best to delay the inevitable (and PWE will mandate this or Cryptic will be out of jobs, just watch).
Enjoy things while you can because it is EASY MODE FUN without paying (much) real money compared to what it will be like in a few months.
STO never has been about a PvP focus and hopefully never will go down that route. If you want PvP-focused sci fi games there are some that may meet your needs; one of them recently went F2P and takes place in a galaxy far far away....
You think the grind is bad here? The dil and restrictions are bad HERE? HA!
Silly kids, time for you to get thrown out into the real harsh world of F2P if you think this is bad.
Why Season 7 is better than you realize
Raise Refining Cap for Gold/Lifetime!
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
While Warhammer Online did a few things wrong I liked that the guild advancement system there scaled to the number of players inside the guild.
Obviously something that scales immediately is ermm 'exploitable' but lets spend some thoughts on it.
Assumption: Fleets with less than 25 players need development aid.
So you either can reduce the requirements for low player fleets further, or somehow buff their actual contributions.
First problem to tackle is how to make fleets qualify for development aid.
As stated above you cannot grant aid as soon as the fleet falls below the threshold because people would just get below that everytime they have to fill an expensive project. So we need something like 'if fleet stays below 25 members for 30 days gain x'. And we need something that checks everytime someone joins the fleet if it needs to remove x.
Second problem: What aid is exactly given?
Option One - Reduced project costs. Given how painful changing starbase project contributions is (hello white bridge officer contribution bug) I would pity the poor person who needed to work on that.
Option Two - A development aid buff. Contribute 1 fleet mark, counts as 2 fleet marks. Use for other appropriate inputs as well. Main difficulty would be to make the 'bonus' input don't grant fleet credits. If it is a granted buff like the fleet transwarp it should be rather safe to stay with people who actually should have it.
Enjoy.
https://youtube.com/user/MyBalkanGaming
I have been upset by the lack of dil from SB24 (which hurt lowbies more than anyone else) but I understand why it was done.
I feel that most of the whining is about perception issues rather than implementation issues.
Example, in WoW (yes I know but shush) you have the concept of 'rested xp' which gives you a 'boost' in XP if you stay logged off for a certain amount of time.
Did you know that originally this was a penalty rather than a boost? The original concept was that if you played too much your XP rate would decrease and when that was communicated to the player it caused a great deal of 'discomfort' in the beta testers. Feedback was severely negative all around.
The original death penalty was also so harsh (about an hour of res sickness) that priests actually used to have TALENTS in order to REDUCE this penalty!
So what Blizz did was instead of a penalty they just changed it to be a 'benefit' without changing the mechanic at all. Now you have 'bonus rested XP' instead of 'you've been playing too long so here's a nerf hahaha' like before. All they did was change the perception of you being rewarded and buffed with rested XP instead of penalized for playing too long.
The devs made it obvious they want to stop/prevent easy farming of tons of dilithium (at least for the Fed side) perhaps to reduce certain exploits they've seen being done that they don't want to tell us about (until they fix it).
Dilithium = ZEN and thus Dilithium = premium currency. Thus, the need for Dil for all the high end stuff in order to create money sinks to prevent players from burning through all this content so fast. Otherwise players will be whining about a lack of content (with some players already doing just that).
Content takes a *lot* of money. They could either improve the game features or add in content that'll just be burned through in a week or two (but takes 2-3 months to create). That isn't sustainable so it is obvious they've focused on features before massive content updates.
The dil sinks serve two purposes. It gets rid of dil that was exploited/farmed by most higher-level characters (through the fleet stuff primarily). It also drains dil from the in-game economy (through necessity) so that both dil and Zen are valuable and players actually have to EARN their way through.
Admit it, all of you that were farming Elite STFs and having everything handed to you on a silver platter in easy-mode...admit it. Elite STFs were meant to be ELITE and HARD and make you work for every bit of effort. Things feel less rewarding only because you had it easier than needed. Things were shoved in your mouth with a silver spoon. Once that spoon is taken you all cry your damn eyes out like babies.
Kindly grow up. Stop whining and be grateful for the ONE decent player-focused sci-fi game with a Star Trek aesthetic and (some) lore-focused story. You lose this due to whining and what do you have? SWTOR? LOL...good luck with 2 damn quickslots and denied access to the best gear in the game. Imagine if they flat out changed it to require people to convert their refined dil to ZEN to buy most of these things instead of just keeping it as a refined dil cost. Just imagine that.
TLDR: Gamers be entitled, yo! Cut dat TRIBBLE out! :P
/ranting wall o text
Why Season 7 is better than you realize
Raise Refining Cap for Gold/Lifetime!
Captain Ellisa Varr
The 12th Fleet
Section 31, Captain of Gamma Squad
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