Ground STFs are not hard. They are as difficult as space ones and as easy to fail. The only one that is difficult is Infected and that's mainly because of the time pressure.
In space it may be all about having the "cookie cutter builds" but ground is a different thing. People also don't seem to realise you need to spec into ground as well and if you only spec the minimum you will only get the minimum and so they resent ground combat more.
The key here is to not min/max as much as people recommend and look at your skill tree and powers that you like to use and spec into them in the same way as you would in space.
Ground STFs optionals are easier to fail as they require a greater degree of teamwork than space. You might be able to tank a tactical cube in your Fleet Defiant, but your tac officer on the ground is a different story. In infected you NEED 3 people to open the forcefield as opposed to space. This makes it a challenge and ultimately more rewarding.
Ground STFs offer the same amount of marks, dilithium and borg neural processors as you might have got from a space mission. I don't see the complaint from that angle to be perfectly honest.
I don't its much harder than, more challenging, more rewarding ( as in play time) than space.
The only issue I know is some spacers are whining about it.
What I find very very funny is spacers spend hours learning, tweaking, and buying better gear for space.
Then they don't put the same effort or resources into the ground efforts and complain its hard.
It's the same as buying a new ship and playing the STFs with default gear.
Let's just say what you put in you get out.
In one respect I can agree with what your saying. However no matter how geared up myself and my boffs are, it still doesn't seem like ground stuff works as it should. My only real complaint and reason why I don't do grounds very much is because of the whole set up. At least in space you have more of a chance of survival when things get too heated. On grounds its a whole different ball game, not to mention some of the controls I still can't get used to. I do wish the set up was similar to that of the Space, I would definitely do much much better then. . . But in my own failure I suppose I just never got around to learning more ground strategy's, I probably should before complaining any more.
When I first started playing STO, ground missions were actually my favourite.
But once you reach endgame, and you figure out the ins-and-outs of the game, I find that space combat varies more. Yes there are cookie cutters and min/maxers, but on the whole, most people fly their ships differently, with different ships and different gear, all customised to their personal taste. On the ground however, there's very little variety.
Not only that, ground combat always feels so lengthy. You don't get that 'badass' feeling you get in space, when you pwn some mobs. I think if they removed shields from NPCs, and made all ground mobs HP-only, that could go someway to making ground more fun. Also, adding more customisation to ground gear - more slots (maybe split armour up into head/chest/legs for example).
Ground STFs optionals are easier to fail as they require a greater degree of teamwork than space. You might be able to tank a tactical cube in your Fleet Defiant, but your tac officer on the ground is a different story. In infected you NEED 3 people to open the forcefield as opposed to space. This makes it a challenge and ultimately more rewarding.
Ground STFs offer the same amount of marks, dilithium and borg neural processors as you might have got from a space mission. I don't see the complaint from that angle to be perfectly honest.
based on the time to complete listed in the pve queue, ground STFs take significantly longer to finish. But the reward is the same numerically, meaning lower over time. Add in vastly higher chance to fail and the effective reward drops lower still. Finally, tack on that ground loot is 1/10 the value of space loot.
Overall, ground combat events, (all of them not just STFs, but big dig, mine event, etc) need to have their rewards pretty significantly upped.
And I'm saying this as one who prefers ground over space.
I don't hate ground combat I actually like it as space combat doesn't feel like Star Trek only range I don't think so.The tractor beam is not like it is in the show no hold or rebel buttons.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Age StarTrek-Gamers Administrator
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer Star Trek Gamers
I hate ground because the A.I. is the worst I've seen in any game since pre-1990. And I mean that. The NPCs are a bunch of lobotomized gutter monkeys.
I was doing a mission where I get sucked into a wormhole and have to board my captor's ship.
In the first room, the dribbling muck puppets who call themselves officers of the federation manage to pull THREE waves of enemies at once, while falling into the lowered area and running up the stairs repeatedly. One of them dies, then when all the fighting is over, my idiot Starfleet Academy laureates decides the enemies trapped behind the force fields (Klingon Targs in this case) had to be aggressively walked at! So they run up and hump the force field while the Targs just stand there and look at them! I never actually GET OUT of combat because of this, and have to do the entire freaking mission with only 3 of my Commodore 64-level drones to help me.
Space is great, because I never have a "friendly" neanderthal AI to mess up what I'm doing.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] bloodpact.net
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
Since my post got page-parsed within a second of me posting:
I hate ground because the A.I. is the worst I've seen in any game since pre-1990. And I mean that. The NPCs are a bunch of lobotomized gutter monkeys.
I was doing a mission where I get sucked into a wormhole and have to board my captor's ship.
In the first room, the dribbling muck puppets who call themselves officers of the federation manage to pull THREE waves of enemies at once, while falling into the lowered area and running up the stairs repeatedly. One of them dies, then when all the fighting is over, my idiot Starfleet Academy laureates decides the enemies trapped behind the force fields (Klingon Targs in this case) had to be aggressively walked at! So they run up and hump the force field while the Targs just stand there and look at them! I never actually GET OUT of combat because of this, and have to do the entire freaking mission with only 3 of my Commodore 64-level drones to help me.
Space is great, because I never have a "friendly" neanderthal AI to mess up what I'm doing.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] bloodpact.net
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
1.bad AI
2.bad pathing (fire caves)
3.Boffs dont know how to stay out of the fire(plasma,cold)
4.grenades thrown tend to blow up in my face(grenades ive thrown)
5.Boffs/enemies fall through floors/ground
6.Transporting from one place to another leaves my boffs behind(replaying Azure rescue)
id post more but cant think of any, havent played since the 31st of December.
There aren't nearly enough ground sets. We have what, over a dozen space sets now? We have like 2 or 3 ground sets. And one of them is just for Nukara. What am I going to do with a hazardous environment suit set?
Add about 10 new ground sets to the game, and make 4 or 5 of them mission reward sets so everyone can get them. Then I think ground combat won't suck so much anymore.
Fire cave is playable again, its not perfect, they do get hooked up still but you can get them out now.
The ground AI needs some major work, any abilities/devices they can use seem randomly applied. Buff damage and attack? nope, buff damage and use fire extinguisher 7 times in a row? Right. The AI has no clue what anything does or how to use it, its really sad.
simply because i HATE any kind of game where it takes an age continualy shooting something to kill them where it takes not even a fraction of that time to kill you...
also it felt more like your useualy third person grinder.
- The ground AI is a joke, this really is like playing an old 1990's game
- The pathing is still bad, they run into walls and objects still, the "fix" was to just give them super jumping powers so the LEAP over stuff, but it's still BAD. The just need to figure out how to get the officers to walk around stuff.
- The agro mechanics is out of control, the pull when the are not supposed to, possibly this could be a quick UI fix to have keybinds for 'passive', 'agressive', 'defend', etc.
I suggest adding toggle on/off formation commands to the UI such as
- 'line abreast' for wide open areas
- 'single file' for closed-quarters fighting and navigating tight areas
- 'wedge' for general purpose
- 'regroup' for a huddle on the captain to reorganize if/when they go crazy in an extended combat
- 'take cover' run to an area with no enemies, so they don't pull more agro, but also has objects/walls inbetween to diliberately break enemy LOS. - ok, this one could be damn hard to code, but this is supposed to be a modern game after all.
Also, they should just revive the captain if he/she is down without asking for help, or an option for on/off.
For me, it's because ground combat isn't any different from any other MMO out there, and quite honestly, other MMOs do ground combat better. In STO, I have at most a dozen abilities on the ground and very few tactical options, and enemies just aren't particularly interesting or challenging. The only reason I play ground combat at all is because it's Star Trek, and even then, that'll only get me through a ground mission once or twice before I never want to play it again. If all of STO was like ground combat, I'd have quit playing years ago because other games are more compelling.
Space combat is what sets STO apart from all the other MMOs. No game I've ever encountered has anything like it. It''s a refreshing change from all the other space combat games that are basically just first-person shooters in space or Star Fox clones. I love the slow movement, the tactical forethought, the power management, the huge array of options in customizing my abilities. I love that the focus is on capital ship combat, not one-man fighter combat. The AI could be better, but I find some enemy groups like Romulans and Tholians pretty challenging, even after playing this game for three years.
I ma not sure many of you played a real space combat game.The space combat in this game doesn't feel anything like Trek.The range is to close and the torps are to slow as well as the tractot beam doesn't work right.
The ground combat feel a lot like Trek.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Age StarTrek-Gamers Administrator
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer Star Trek Gamers
I like the ground combat. I think the movement could be a little more fluid, and the controls a little more crisp, but overall, I think it's a lot of fun, and feels different from a lot of other games out there.
Just wanted to add that the most fun I think I've had on the ground in the past six months is in Q's winter wonderland killing the Snowman overlord.
Having 20+ people attack a boss at the same time is awesome and its a shame nothing in any of the ground STFs feels as good as throwing snowballs at snowman.
If you think ground combat is bad now you were not around during beta when ground combat was much slower and certain combos ruled the field.
The never ending Romulans: You drop one Rom only to have him raised by a medic the fully healed of both shield and life energy.
In short the medic was allways the first to die.
The Darha Master who did over 1,500 points with a batlith.
The Sword Master who did over 1,000 points with a batlith.
Borg drones that would beam in more drones so you in the end had to kill 10 drones to end a mission.
I ma not sure many of you played a real space combat game.The space combat in this game doesn't feel anything like Trek.The range is to close and the torps are to slow as well as the tractot beam doesn't work right.
The ground combat feel a lot like Trek.
I don't know what Trek you watched, but in the TV series' I watched, the ships were a lot closer than we get in this game. Sometimes they were clearly hundreds of meters apart at most.
Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
I ma not sure many of you played a real space combat game.The space combat in this game doesn't feel anything like Trek.The range is to close and the torps are to slow as well as the tractot beam doesn't work right.
The ground combat feel a lot like Trek.
You surely haven't watched the same Trek as I did. In the Trek I saw, they don't use armor, turret, mines, personal shield, and their phaser insta kill/stun a target. Except on some "immune" target, like adapted borg.
In this game, you can spawn turret, use armor and shield, and need several shoot from an away team to kill something.
I was going to qoute some posters, but rather than be tedious:
To the "OMG play in shooter mode or you stink" guy: WRONG!
I can safely say that the VAST majority of fail players I encounter in ground missions are playing in shooter mode. You can MISS in shooter mode, you can only shoot what you are facing etc. etc. etc. READ THE INFORMATION on shooter mode. It may seem really cool to you if you are used to playing FPS games, but in THIS game it makes you a liability to your team, unless you are just an epic player in the first place. Even then, learn to play in RPG mode and you will be more epic. (need I even mention the shooter mode guys who blindly fire for no reason, causing an enemy group to become aggro while the rest of the team is trying to get set up properly for a strategic attack?)
I personally enjoy the ground game but will definitely add support to the many posters that ask for it to have more than just "shoot this" shoot that" objectives. Sadly I do not think the game engine actually allows for multiple possible outcomes, but that would be a great start to making ground more interesting.
That said, my personal pet peave about STO in general, the cumbersome "need -vs- greed" looting system is massively irritating on ground, even more so than in space. It should not require six key clicks to resolve one item of loot. (one click from the person who "takes items" and one from each team member to choose need/greed/pass) I think going to a simple true autoloot with random distribution system would be an incredible enhancement to ground combat. (hate it in space too, but in space it is a lot easier to ignore until you have time to pick it up)
I also would like to see a little more attention made to putting safeguards against bugginess like spawning in to rocks, getting stuck etc. by the dev team.
Comments
In space it may be all about having the "cookie cutter builds" but ground is a different thing. People also don't seem to realise you need to spec into ground as well and if you only spec the minimum you will only get the minimum and so they resent ground combat more.
The key here is to not min/max as much as people recommend and look at your skill tree and powers that you like to use and spec into them in the same way as you would in space.
Ground STFs optionals are easier to fail as they require a greater degree of teamwork than space. You might be able to tank a tactical cube in your Fleet Defiant, but your tac officer on the ground is a different story. In infected you NEED 3 people to open the forcefield as opposed to space. This makes it a challenge and ultimately more rewarding.
Ground STFs offer the same amount of marks, dilithium and borg neural processors as you might have got from a space mission. I don't see the complaint from that angle to be perfectly honest.
Generally, goals are easier to get to, visualize, and guess at in Space than on Ground.
Maps are easier to negotiate in space.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
In one respect I can agree with what your saying. However no matter how geared up myself and my boffs are, it still doesn't seem like ground stuff works as it should. My only real complaint and reason why I don't do grounds very much is because of the whole set up. At least in space you have more of a chance of survival when things get too heated. On grounds its a whole different ball game, not to mention some of the controls I still can't get used to. I do wish the set up was similar to that of the Space, I would definitely do much much better then. . . But in my own failure I suppose I just never got around to learning more ground strategy's, I probably should before complaining any more.
But once you reach endgame, and you figure out the ins-and-outs of the game, I find that space combat varies more. Yes there are cookie cutters and min/maxers, but on the whole, most people fly their ships differently, with different ships and different gear, all customised to their personal taste. On the ground however, there's very little variety.
Not only that, ground combat always feels so lengthy. You don't get that 'badass' feeling you get in space, when you pwn some mobs. I think if they removed shields from NPCs, and made all ground mobs HP-only, that could go someway to making ground more fun. Also, adding more customisation to ground gear - more slots (maybe split armour up into head/chest/legs for example).
based on the time to complete listed in the pve queue, ground STFs take significantly longer to finish. But the reward is the same numerically, meaning lower over time. Add in vastly higher chance to fail and the effective reward drops lower still. Finally, tack on that ground loot is 1/10 the value of space loot.
Overall, ground combat events, (all of them not just STFs, but big dig, mine event, etc) need to have their rewards pretty significantly upped.
And I'm saying this as one who prefers ground over space.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
I was doing a mission where I get sucked into a wormhole and have to board my captor's ship.
In the first room, the dribbling muck puppets who call themselves officers of the federation manage to pull THREE waves of enemies at once, while falling into the lowered area and running up the stairs repeatedly. One of them dies, then when all the fighting is over, my idiot Starfleet Academy laureates decides the enemies trapped behind the force fields (Klingon Targs in this case) had to be aggressively walked at! So they run up and hump the force field while the Targs just stand there and look at them! I never actually GET OUT of combat because of this, and have to do the entire freaking mission with only 3 of my Commodore 64-level drones to help me.
Space is great, because I never have a "friendly" neanderthal AI to mess up what I'm doing.
bloodpact.net
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
-Michelangelo
And by saying that, Space combat is much more fun for me, but the odd Ground combat can go a treat as well. User Preff.
I hate ground because the A.I. is the worst I've seen in any game since pre-1990. And I mean that. The NPCs are a bunch of lobotomized gutter monkeys.
I was doing a mission where I get sucked into a wormhole and have to board my captor's ship.
In the first room, the dribbling muck puppets who call themselves officers of the federation manage to pull THREE waves of enemies at once, while falling into the lowered area and running up the stairs repeatedly. One of them dies, then when all the fighting is over, my idiot Starfleet Academy laureates decides the enemies trapped behind the force fields (Klingon Targs in this case) had to be aggressively walked at! So they run up and hump the force field while the Targs just stand there and look at them! I never actually GET OUT of combat because of this, and have to do the entire freaking mission with only 3 of my Commodore 64-level drones to help me.
Space is great, because I never have a "friendly" neanderthal AI to mess up what I'm doing.
bloodpact.net
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
-Michelangelo
2.bad pathing (fire caves)
3.Boffs dont know how to stay out of the fire(plasma,cold)
4.grenades thrown tend to blow up in my face(grenades ive thrown)
5.Boffs/enemies fall through floors/ground
6.Transporting from one place to another leaves my boffs behind(replaying Azure rescue)
id post more but cant think of any, havent played since the 31st of December.
Add about 10 new ground sets to the game, and make 4 or 5 of them mission reward sets so everyone can get them. Then I think ground combat won't suck so much anymore.
The ground AI needs some major work, any abilities/devices they can use seem randomly applied. Buff damage and attack? nope, buff damage and use fire extinguisher 7 times in a row? Right. The AI has no clue what anything does or how to use it, its really sad.
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Nothing to do anymore.
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They always used cover on the show. The lack of a cover system is silly.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
also it felt more like your useualy third person grinder.
- The pathing is still bad, they run into walls and objects still, the "fix" was to just give them super jumping powers so the LEAP over stuff, but it's still BAD. The just need to figure out how to get the officers to walk around stuff.
- The agro mechanics is out of control, the pull when the are not supposed to, possibly this could be a quick UI fix to have keybinds for 'passive', 'agressive', 'defend', etc.
I suggest adding toggle on/off formation commands to the UI such as
- 'line abreast' for wide open areas
- 'single file' for closed-quarters fighting and navigating tight areas
- 'wedge' for general purpose
- 'regroup' for a huddle on the captain to reorganize if/when they go crazy in an extended combat
- 'take cover' run to an area with no enemies, so they don't pull more agro, but also has objects/walls inbetween to diliberately break enemy LOS. - ok, this one could be damn hard to code, but this is supposed to be a modern game after all.
Also, they should just revive the captain if he/she is down without asking for help, or an option for on/off.
For me, it's because ground combat isn't any different from any other MMO out there, and quite honestly, other MMOs do ground combat better. In STO, I have at most a dozen abilities on the ground and very few tactical options, and enemies just aren't particularly interesting or challenging. The only reason I play ground combat at all is because it's Star Trek, and even then, that'll only get me through a ground mission once or twice before I never want to play it again. If all of STO was like ground combat, I'd have quit playing years ago because other games are more compelling.
Space combat is what sets STO apart from all the other MMOs. No game I've ever encountered has anything like it. It''s a refreshing change from all the other space combat games that are basically just first-person shooters in space or Star Fox clones. I love the slow movement, the tactical forethought, the power management, the huge array of options in customizing my abilities. I love that the focus is on capital ship combat, not one-man fighter combat. The AI could be better, but I find some enemy groups like Romulans and Tholians pretty challenging, even after playing this game for three years.
The ground combat feel a lot like Trek.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
We saw them shooting around corners, over crates, etc.
Assault Cruiser Refit U.S.S Crown Royal
Multi-Vector Adv. Escort U.S.S Crown Royal-B
Heavy Escort Carrier U.S.S. Crown Royal-C
Oddy Tac. Cruiser U.S.S. Beam Boat
Having 20+ people attack a boss at the same time is awesome and its a shame nothing in any of the ground STFs feels as good as throwing snowballs at snowman.
You can run through some plants and not others.
You can get stuck on stuff.
PvE enemies only attack you, walking over your BOffs to get to you.
PvP it's all about the knockback. Once on your but, you will soon be dead.
The never ending Romulans: You drop one Rom only to have him raised by a medic the fully healed of both shield and life energy.
In short the medic was allways the first to die.
The Darha Master who did over 1,500 points with a batlith.
The Sword Master who did over 1,000 points with a batlith.
Borg drones that would beam in more drones so you in the end had to kill 10 drones to end a mission.
I don't know what Trek you watched, but in the TV series' I watched, the ships were a lot closer than we get in this game. Sometimes they were clearly hundreds of meters apart at most.
In this game, you can spawn turret, use armor and shield, and need several shoot from an away team to kill something.
To the "OMG play in shooter mode or you stink" guy: WRONG!
I can safely say that the VAST majority of fail players I encounter in ground missions are playing in shooter mode. You can MISS in shooter mode, you can only shoot what you are facing etc. etc. etc. READ THE INFORMATION on shooter mode. It may seem really cool to you if you are used to playing FPS games, but in THIS game it makes you a liability to your team, unless you are just an epic player in the first place. Even then, learn to play in RPG mode and you will be more epic. (need I even mention the shooter mode guys who blindly fire for no reason, causing an enemy group to become aggro while the rest of the team is trying to get set up properly for a strategic attack?)
I personally enjoy the ground game but will definitely add support to the many posters that ask for it to have more than just "shoot this" shoot that" objectives. Sadly I do not think the game engine actually allows for multiple possible outcomes, but that would be a great start to making ground more interesting.
That said, my personal pet peave about STO in general, the cumbersome "need -vs- greed" looting system is massively irritating on ground, even more so than in space. It should not require six key clicks to resolve one item of loot. (one click from the person who "takes items" and one from each team member to choose need/greed/pass) I think going to a simple true autoloot with random distribution system would be an incredible enhancement to ground combat. (hate it in space too, but in space it is a lot easier to ignore until you have time to pick it up)
I also would like to see a little more attention made to putting safeguards against bugginess like spawning in to rocks, getting stuck etc. by the dev team.
in STO 30 phaser hits kill