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"Merge Fleets" feature?
sophlogimo
Member Posts: 6,507 Arc User
Wouldn't it be great if we had the opportunity to merge fleets and all their holdings?
Meaning, you have to fleets merge with each other, and their accumulated holding and fleet XP get added up?
Case in point:
I have somehow ended up as being the House General of my fleet's Klingon mirror fleet, but we are far behind what we have on the fed side (with much fewer people being active there). We are almost at tier 3 on the fed side, but only tier 1 on the Klingon side. In fact, activity on the Klingon side is so low that it would make sense to dissolve the Klingon side and join some other fleet... but still, the tier 1 starbase is a heavy investment that no one (not me and no one I know, at least) would want to just drop, so it doesn't happen.
With a fleet merge function, we'd join a different fleet, and give them something out of our past efforts.
What do you think about it?
Meaning, you have to fleets merge with each other, and their accumulated holding and fleet XP get added up?
Case in point:
I have somehow ended up as being the House General of my fleet's Klingon mirror fleet, but we are far behind what we have on the fed side (with much fewer people being active there). We are almost at tier 3 on the fed side, but only tier 1 on the Klingon side. In fact, activity on the Klingon side is so low that it would make sense to dissolve the Klingon side and join some other fleet... but still, the tier 1 starbase is a heavy investment that no one (not me and no one I know, at least) would want to just drop, so it doesn't happen.
With a fleet merge function, we'd join a different fleet, and give them something out of our past efforts.
What do you think about it?
Remember, STO is nothing but a cosmetics game, where only the rule of cool matters. The game mechanics are intentionally out of balance, don't try to "optimize" anything, as it would just frustrate you.
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I don't like the stories of small fleets of close-knit friends having to abandon their months work, just to join a larger fleet, to experience the good stuff at Tier 5. And large fleets with satellite fleets could benefit as well.
Right there turns a small community into a larger one, where everyone mutually benefits.
cryptic would loose on revenues..
And doubt there would be any impact on the Dilithium market.
That being said, it became very obvious that something like this would happen and that KDF fleets would suffer the most. Hence there was an effort to make SVR a fleet open to all that like their kdf toons, and the pew.
I don't want to post this in the forums in detail. This is not an exploit, but some people, the same that rob fleet banks, might find a way to use it towards their selfish ends. There are ways in which your fleet gets to use its provisions, but "merges" with another fleet.
If you are seriously considering this, please mail me in game, and we can discuss the details. Bottom line you get to use up your provisions, but we ask for a contribution to our base. Should you run out of provisions, there are solutions as well. We have completed T3 SB and are currently working on the Tailor and other upgrades.
In the long run Crytpic will probably lower the cost of SB construction, since non constructing small bases, are worse then ongoing active fleets. If we all were in just one fleet, there would be hardly any money for Cryptic to be made.
Again any kdf fleet, finding itself in the same spot as the OP and are open to ways of combining forces. @havam in game. I ll get back to you as soon as i can (might take a day or two)
a history of sto pvp: 2010 - 2011
a history of sto pvp: 2012 - 2013
Well, I suppose I can imagine a 'Request Merger' button that sends a request to the fleet you'll be merging into, but there are problems.
Not everyone is going to be at the same level. The obvious answer would be to update the final fleet with the highest values of the two. Say fleet A is further along in Tactical than Fleet B, and Fleet B is ahead in engineering and science, you get the Tac XP from fleet A, and the Sci and Eng XP of fleet B. Same with interior projects. Ones and zeroes, copy the ones.
There can be no projects in progress in at least one of the fleets. Alternatively, the fleet sending the request has its in-progress projects discarded, as these will be almost always be completely impossible to merge into whatever (other) projects the other fleet has going on.
Or rather, permissions. Your fleet might have fairly small differences between ranks 2 through 5, while the other fleet might attribute massive advantages and responsibilities to the higher ones. If you merge your two fleets, and Fleet B, with a few rank 5 members, suddenly gets a dozen or more new rank 5 members who were never trusted with any privileges in the first place, disaster will almost certainly ensue.
Therefor, all members of the fleet requesting the merger will need to be introduced into the new fleet at rank 1. This may include said fleet's leader. We've had more than a few incidents in this game where the top rank in a fleet was held by more than one person, and one of those backstabbed the rest, through demotion or dismissal. If this isn't dealt with preemptively, you're not going to find that many people jumping at the chance to merge their fleets.
Obviously, which fleetbank is bigger is the one that stays. But then, it only costs something like ten million credits to upgrade a fleet bank to its maximum size, and almost any fleet in existence has done so. The problem comes from the content of the fleet bank. You can't merge two full fleet banks into one.
So one of the fleet banks has to be emptied of everything, except perhaps credits, before the attempt is made. Or the contents will need to be discarded (either poof, gone, or auto-vendored at 40% and added to the credit pool) in the process.
Five hundred members is it. This is not much of a problem, since you're asking for mergers for smaller fleets. I doubt though the process should only be available to fleets below a certain member count, so that's another check that needs to be made. Though the large fleets have been asking for larger fleets. If you could accidentally merge two fleets to make a fleet with more than five hundred members, say six hundred, and the cap remains in place, you would not be able to have anyone new join it unless one hundred and one people packed up and left.
So the short version is, this might be possible, but it'd be a hell of a lot of work, and Cryptic's position will probably be: How hard is it, really, to take the handful of members of a small fleet and join another one (the generally better developed of the two) manually? You're asking for a fairly small benefit at the cost of an awful lot of work and the potential for exciting, new, gamebreaking bugs.
And this is just the quick way to do it. If you want to be able to negotiate your rank in the other fleet ahead of time, or set other conditions for the process, it's going to be that much more complicated, time consuming and prone to bugs.
What's more interesting, I think, as well as more doable and less prone to mistakes, abuse and bugs, is something I've seen and heard discussed more recently. A sort of vassal or satellite fleet system, alliances if you will.
Say you create a fleet alliance system where small fleets may ally themselves to a large fleet. Then the large fleet, through this alliance, grants the small fleet access to all of its unlocks, so the small fleets, on their own station or by making the trip to the alliance HQ, can requisition things their own fleet hasn't unlocked yet. But they'll still use their own starbase provisions.
And to make all this worthwile for the large fleet that the smaller ones are benefitting from, a percentage (20%) of all starbase provisions generated by the small fleet is automatically donated to the large fleet.
Once a fleet starts unlocking the tier II shipyards etc, the time invested for a small fleet is such that you don't want to leave it due to the effort originally input.
I think your idea is worth exploring, having a way to convert the base into "base" componants that could be used by the new fleet would certainly encourage a lot of the solo fleets out there to merge together. you'd need to have some of the items unrecoverable to make it fair but that would be a conversion balance issue for a developer to decide.
Shouldn't be too hard to work out :-
Dilithium input, general Doff types input, FM's input are known. Just spit out a "The new fleet will get "45000 FM's, 800000 Dilithium, 500 tactical common Doffs etc" and then have these items ringfenced for the new fleet so they need to be used in progressing the base.
some fleets (no names naturally) would offer mergers to smaller fleets or similarly sized fleets absorb the advantages and resources and Boot EVERYONE
Other fleets would be chewed up and spat out due to personality clashes
Perhaps allow larger fleets to donate resources to a Subfleet or allied fleet
If you could merge XP or provisions, large fleets will simply create new small sub fleets in order to cash in, even if the merge was only a percentage, it would be economically smarter to go away and complete a new tier starbase using only the provisioning projects, and then merge it back into the larger starbase.
For members of small or solo fleets, there is only one realistic and logical choice - don't throw good money after bad, accept that the costs are unrealistic and take yourself to a larger fleet where the burden falls on many shoulders. Season 8 will undoubtably come with a new rep system, and fleet holding to gobble up more resources.
The fleet/starbase system has one key failing IMHO - they don't really serve a purpose in gameplay terms other than being a convenient mail terminal that you can transwarp to - if starbases allowed fleets to compete/co-operate with each other in some way (PvP combat, trading, exploration etc) with meaningful rewards/prestige, or they had directly linked content(starbase defense/blockade scenarios and single player PvE missions that actually contributed in a way that players would care about beyond being a simple source of fleetmarks) they would be much more compelling.
At the moment starbases and embassies are just a generic mechanism to make you pay a billion dil for access to slightly better stuff. The devs really need to bring something fresh to make people care about them - new gameplay, the ability to edit the textures so creative fleet members can give the bases some real identity or foundry functionality that allows fleets to develope content tied directly to their base, or available to other fleets through theirs.
Tier <1 projects are the cheapest per 1kxp
Large Fleet "builds" new T1 SB with a small number of volunteers to T1
Then folds the new small fleet into their Larger one, for a "discounted" gain of XP
Registered: Oct/2009 , LTS : Feb/2011
Fleets: Warriors of the Phoenix, Kirian Industries[/SIGPIC]
Three years and still no Captain Klaa hair...
Yup, you'd need it all balanced to prevent the abuse, conveerting back to basic materials then removing some as a penalty would get around this. You'd always end up with less than you put in and it's value would depend on the new base.
Make fleets that existed before the update able to merge.
Either from say the Start of Season 7 or the update allowing mergers itself.
Any new fleets would have to be active fleets for say 3-6 months before being given the option to merge.
Also instead or merging per-say make it so that one fleet absorbs the membership and EXP from the other but as a base value, aka all members of one fleet turn into the lowest fleet rank of the "leader" fleet. Depending on the selection done of who becomes the leader fleet based on the two fleet leaders during the merge process.
So Fleet A and Fleet B must agree that Fleet B will become the leader fleet, then everyone from Fleet A becomes Ensigns (or what have you) in Fleet B, and Fleet B gains all the EXP produced by Fleet A, in Tactical/Science/Engineering Tiers only, the Star Base Tier projects can be unlocked if not already done in Fleet B, but the tier's themselves I don't think should be unlocked.
Jim
Easy fix. Tier 2 is the lowest tier that can be merged. This eliminates the idea that fleet would go build a base just canabalise it.
No to the op. not a fan. I mean what would happen is capitalism. The large fleets would just offer monies to smaller fleets to be incorporated. We would have a bunch of walmarts. No mom n pops.
My kdf fleet is great. Workin towards tier 4. Its large and people treat each other with respect. But ive been in some nightmare fleets where people were treated like slaves in labor camps. And lets be honest here. It is those kind of fleets that would enjoy this if it came to fruition.
Time limits do the same - only slow down the exploit, not eliminate it. It's always going to be more cost effective to cannibalize throwaway fleets, and for large fleets the ability to run multiple concurrent feeder fleets makes a major bypass to the time gating of the system.
Yakumosmith's option is the only really viable way - keeping the higher level of each holding and getting back a resource pool based from the lower, with the pooled resources filling all new inputs to 50% until exhasted (not to 100% so as not to halt fleet credit generation). Allows you to keep part of the investment, but doesn't allow cheating on cost or time gating.
Cryptic has implied they have some kind of metric for determining relative value between different inputs, so this resource pool doesn't even have to track specific inputs, but just that overall value metric and applying it to all inputs at the appropriate conversion rate. This greatly simplifies the data storage needed, as only a single resource needs to be tracked, either universally or separately per holding, and as Cryptic already has this overall cost metric, it only needs to be ported into the game (assuming it doesn't exist in there somewhere already and is in balance spreadsheets or some such).
Put Fleet mark packs in the Z store
Put Dilith in the Z store (1000 zen = 200,000 dilith)
Do away with the TIMERS and allow people to pick upgrades from a menu
1. Actually quite viable.
2. Not a chance, you're proposing increasing the price of zen by a factor of more than 1000. They'd never agree to it, and neither would I.
3. Never going to happen, though it doesn't seem bad.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
it would be a fixed and simple option for those with Large amounts to buy
think of it as a way to make thousands of dollars for cryptic AND stabilise the market
Ok, my mistake, didn't calculate correctly. But still, it's not very likely to happen. Not by a long shot.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
and Grind is killing the game (as it has killed other games)
its the big and medium ones with the problem
But who cares if someone drops $1000 and goes t5 (its not $200 you can't actually hit t3 for that)
Is that like when you used to argue that it was the Vet players and not the newbies that were the problem in fleet actions? That all vet players did zero damage while newbies were NPC killing machines? That was you right? I'm not remembering things wrong am I?
and yes some "vets" are useless
Large fleets with more resources can choose to keep them all to themselves, or be friendly and ally with smaller fleets to allow them the opportunity to access tier 5 rewards. They could even sell tier 5 access if they wanted to, for EC or what have you.