The way it used to work:
Public Team: The first two people to leave got the STF leaver penalty. Any who left after that did not.
Private Instance (where you invite 4 others and launch the map yourself): Anyone can leave at any time with no penalty.
Now for Public teams, if you quit BEFORE 15 minutes have passed -- you get the STF Leaver penalty. Private Instances still are penalty free if you leave.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I hope I am not the first to bring this issue up as it's happened to me on a good few occasions now and it ruins the game for me to the extent that I cannot play....
The issue is this.
A few times now I have played the Elite Borg STF's and during these games someone has decided to leave the game, a minute or 2 later another guy leaves....
This now leaves 3 of us on an Elite STF trying to take down a gate transformer while dozens of Nanite spheres come trhough the gate and repair it.
3 People doing this is totally impossible.
We tried for as long as we could and we got it down to 28% and then suddenly 5 spheres came through the gate and rocketed over to us and withing a fraction of a second the transformer was back up to 100%
So...
Our only option was to leave as with the 3 of us it was IMPOSSIBLE. Not to mention we were all cruisers, Hehehe.
Upon leaving, we also recieved the ban which i find incredibly unfair as we had no intention of leaving the game had there been a full team.
i was the LAST one to leave and still I get the ban....
Is it not unfair to ban people this way ?
Can it not only apply to the first leaver ? And maybe the second leaver ?
Why punish evetryone for the actions of other people ?
It's now bonus time for the rep system which is why I was doing the Elite's but now it's been wrecked for me due to an unfair system, and now the time I had put aside to try and get some Omega marks to get the rest of my Borg kit is wasted....
And the worst part about all this ?
I now have to sit and watch TV with the girlfriend :mad:
Yes this need to be fixed, stop giving us leaver penalties when the group isn't full.
Unfortunatley the only way around this is to leave the STF after aroound 10-15 min has passed, not sure exactly how much time but I usually don't get penalties then. You can also let the STF fail, but thats not possible in infected.
Many have pointed out a flaw in the current leaver penalty system with regards to incomplete teams leaving early and being penalized.
I assume the system was started to discourage people from leaving in the first place. Like your situation, if the first person never left, you would not have had a problem at all.
I do not have any STF experience myself, but from reading the forums, There is a big problem with people leaving STFs early, usually because they missed the optional objective, and then leaving their team in undermanned.
The system was designed to hopefully discourage these types of activities, and yes some others are unfortunately getting unjustly penalized along with this. My only suggestion to you is to come up with a solution that both addresses the true early leavers, but at the same time doesn't penalize the group for effectively disbanding after an early leaver.
Again, since I haven't done any STFs, I don't have that solution.
The leaver penalty is a flawed but necessary feature. There are an insane number of griefers and utter scumbags in the STF community (I play lots of STFs) and they will constantly leave groups short-handed for no reason except to be jerks.
I have been in more than one ISE where someone deliberately sabotages the mission and, before going, gives some lame reason like "There are Odies in this group--Odies suck" for doing so.
The negitive un-intended consequences of removing the leaver penalty would far out-weigh any benifit. This is what is meant by "Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Only the first person to go gets the penalty anyhow I believe. It's an imperfect system but better than not having one. And it's not like your barred for the day or anything, an hour is nothing. Do another mission and you are usually fine to go back after.
People seem a bit hung up about the optional objectives in the STFs; the rewards for the task force omega ones are still good. The Romulan ones maybe are annoying, but the rewards for those are pathetic regardless; you're better off just not playing them until the rewards are brought to an actually useful level compared to Epohh farming which, although slow initially, is way better in the long run than grinding for hour after hour for little return.
Still, the leaver penalty should at the very least not apply if you're the only one in the mission! I was doing Hive (Elite) and I'm not sure what happened but the rest of the team dropped or crashed or something, leaving me on my own to deal with two unimatrix ships! I don't have the damage output to keep hurting them while destroying the endless plasma bolts and regeneration probes! But when I dropped I got an hour long cooldown!
Sage advice, but it's people that end up stuck in elite STFs on their own that are having the real trouble
I can well understand penalising players for leaving, but at the very least it should scale based on how many times you've done it, with a fall off over time (so leaving now and then isn't penalised too hard in case they had a valid reason).
For example if the penalty were simply 10 minutes for a first offence, then 30 for a second offence, an hour for a third and so-on, with offences being dropped every 48 hours or so? I dunno, or if it were based on percentage; for example if in your entire time on STO you've only dropped out of less than 1% of all multiplayer missions played, then that's probably okay, but if it's creeping up then bigger penalties would make sense.
In my opinion an hour is nothing just go and do some thing in the game for an hour and bye the time your done it will be lifted i still do not see the big deal.You can find stuff that will occupied that hour in game.
Like for instance Foundry now that it is every 20 mins.
I no it can be upseting at some times but it really is not a big deal unless it bug's on you.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
It would be useful to know the exact conditions under which the penalty is applied.
I know from many pug ground STFs that you can leave without penalty if you've played the mission and find your team is just incapable of completing it. Is this time-based? If so what is the limit?
Not sure if this is the right forum for this particular subject matter, however this has became an increasingly big pain in the TRIBBLE! The severs are currently lagging quite severely and I reckon that's why it has been quite dead as of late.
So to summaries, I was in an STF with my group and the lag was horrendous to the point of ruining game play, eventually I get dc/ed out the game. Cool fair enough, I then return to the game to be put back in the map were i'm booted and slammed with a penalty due to the servers lag.
This is highly unimpressive, what happened to all the new tech? Quite frankly as a player of three years these empty promises are starting to become annoying. My question really is are the devs planning at any point in fixing this STF leavers penalty problems as I can assure you i'm not the only one experiencing it.
What is up with this hour ban from all pve Qs if you leave a mission. I joined Infected Space elite and i was the only one there the mission was already going on i stayed for 15 mins trying to fight the borg by myself a few people log in and then out. There was no way i could have finished that mission with 2 people so i left and i take a hour ban from all pve Qs really. After gaming with STO for 3 years im so pissed off with how things keep going down hill. You give out bans for leaving a STF but you wont let us kick someone who just sets back and wont help in the stf.
I do agree that there are times you really have to drop, because it's obvious you're not going to win. That does happen on elites. If your team is absolute garbage (hello, escorts that can't blow up spheres, I'm looking at you), you're better off saving your time and doing an IOR or something.
The idea people should always stick it out is just childish. Public games come with the risk of TRIBBLE teams. And rarely walking out on them is by far the best option you've got.
I probably don't have to do that more than once a week, at most, but it does happen rarely. People who quit at the first sign of resistance are absolute scum.
Having said that if the penalty got more severe for those that drop say too many times in a week I'd fully support that. An invisible 7-day timer thingie where it gets worse for doing it over and over. Like if you've left 8 matches in three days... well enjoy your 24 hour ban. Or something. And if that's being caused by your internet connection sucking, then maybe you should look into getting a real internet connection before joining a multiplayer game, instead of blaming the game for having enough common sense to punish you for having none.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
I do agree that there are times you really have to drop, because it's obvious you're not going to win. That does happen on elites. If your team is absolute garbage (hello, escorts that can't blow up spheres, I'm looking at you), you're better off saving your time and doing an IOR or something.
The idea people should always stick it out is just childish. Public games come with the risk of TRIBBLE teams. And rarely walking out on them is by far the best option you've got.
I probably don't have to do that more than once a week, at most, but it does happen rarely. People who quit at the first sign of resistance are absolute scum.
Well like I said, at some point it is possible to leave without penalty. I've done it many a times in IGE when it turns out at the end the rest of the team is utterly incapable of a) jumping the platforms without falling, b) hitting the buttons anywhere near the same time, c) refraining from aggroing the roomful of respawning tac drones or d) all of the above. Usually at that point everyone agrees it's a lost cause, and we leave. I've never got a penalty for that.
The fact is that no one has ever come up with a better way to handle the problem. There are an endless march of threads full of complaining about this but the only "solutions" ever offered are clearly flawed ones that would only make the STFs unbearable because you will almost never have full groups if they are implemented or involve "votes" that are:
a) Pointless, you don't have time in an STF to have a discussion and vote; you barely have time to do the mission itself and
b) Would simply be used by griefers to grief.
The leaver penalty is there for a reason--it is necessary. This is, at worst, an inconvenience you might suffer once or twice a week if you do them several times a day, every day. There are real issues with this game that need to be addressed; the STF leaver penalty is not among them and obsessing about it is just petulant.
The devs penalize the Active players, those who leave or not, with an leaver penalty and or a weakened team. Thos who are in obvious violation of the game rules, the afk'ers and leeches suffer no penalty..NONE WHATSOEVER wtf are ya smokin? What kind of alternate reality is this?
This is absolutely unacceptable.
I leave often when i see those who are there to ruin the game experience and or are leechers/afk'ers...and I am penalized....as a brit would say BULLOCKS.
Those who stay are not troopers/good eggs or great players...they simply choose to stay and complain at those who wish to leave and will not tolerate it ...
I am not a fan of 15 minute stfs taking 30 minutes or longer because people insist we should 4 man it...3 man it or duo it because they feel they are troopers and feel badmouthing others who chhose to drop.
If you dont want this issue dont pug.....the same could be said to those who complain at people who leave..if you dont like it leave...
I prefer to wait til my leaver penalty expires in about 10-15 minutes. I know that one earns much ire...dont blame me..blame the devs for making a absolutely stupid way to deal with afkers......
OHHHH if you go afk we will punsih those who leave because they wont feed the leeches....logic baby
Today we fight the GAULS......monstrous and HAIRY beyond reason.
I can understand people leaving. You select the wrong misson by mistake, phone goes off, or even your connection fails or you get a CTD. A hundred legit reasons why you would want to or have to leave.
What i don't like is leechers. In this case to deal with leechers who waste other peoples time by not participating and still getting the rewards at the end. The way to deal with it is to give them a financial penalty for just sitting there or using a bot.
In World of Tanks leechers are fined Xp and money for not participating. Its treated as a greater sin than leaving a game early. They are not fined much, a few XP and a little in game money chump change but the bottom line is you are fined for wasting your team mates time.
Cryptic could do similar for STF's. You get 2 mins grace to get in and start playing, after two mins rewards are deducted from your final total. If by the end of the match you failed to participate at all you get fined say 10 dill and 1 bnp. Not much chump change but the fact is you waste your team mates time. We'll waste yours.
Monkey see, Monkey do. Monkey flings Feathered Monkey poo...
I've noticed that increasingly players are bailing out of the two fleet mark events Federation Fleet Alert and Federation Starbase Blockade. I'm not going to guess why this is happening, but it seems to coincide with the action getting heavy, which it almost always does. At least one, or as many as 3 leavers is becoming common. I suggest adding a 1-hour penalty for this behavior, as is standard.
Also, about these two maps, how about normal and elite versions? Until I looked at the requirements, I was constantly amazed to see light cruisers show up. As it is now, it isn't fair to those of us who use these maps to generate a stream of fleet marks to have functionaly useless ships as part of the team. VA only maps would help to ameliorate this situation.
Actually at the current difficulty it's quite possible for a team comprised of 2 admirals and 3 commanders to fend off the attacks in Federation Fleet Alert if the commanders know what they're doing if memory serves. I recall that I could quite easily take on one attack group with support from a single vice admiral when I was a commander. But this is with more than 60% of the team being VAs. In theory if the average level of the team is below 35-37 it doesn't matter if people know what they're doing for Federation Fleet Alert, it's just impossible to win without at least Commander level gear
Comments
Public Team: The first two people to leave got the STF leaver penalty. Any who left after that did not.
Private Instance (where you invite 4 others and launch the map yourself): Anyone can leave at any time with no penalty.
Now for Public teams, if you quit BEFORE 15 minutes have passed -- you get the STF Leaver penalty. Private Instances still are penalty free if you leave.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
they just sit at spawn point and collect their marks.
I can see why they made the loot drop on your location, but it makes farming soo easy that i swear instance of farming has risen massively.
Take a guess at what Cryptic did.
He's dead, Jim.
The issue is this.
A few times now I have played the Elite Borg STF's and during these games someone has decided to leave the game, a minute or 2 later another guy leaves....
This now leaves 3 of us on an Elite STF trying to take down a gate transformer while dozens of Nanite spheres come trhough the gate and repair it.
3 People doing this is totally impossible.
We tried for as long as we could and we got it down to 28% and then suddenly 5 spheres came through the gate and rocketed over to us and withing a fraction of a second the transformer was back up to 100%
So...
Our only option was to leave as with the 3 of us it was IMPOSSIBLE. Not to mention we were all cruisers, Hehehe.
Upon leaving, we also recieved the ban which i find incredibly unfair as we had no intention of leaving the game had there been a full team.
i was the LAST one to leave and still I get the ban....
Is it not unfair to ban people this way ?
Can it not only apply to the first leaver ? And maybe the second leaver ?
Why punish evetryone for the actions of other people ?
It's now bonus time for the rep system which is why I was doing the Elite's but now it's been wrecked for me due to an unfair system, and now the time I had put aside to try and get some Omega marks to get the rest of my Borg kit is wasted....
And the worst part about all this ?
I now have to sit and watch TV with the girlfriend :mad:
Thanks for listening....
Unfortunatley the only way around this is to leave the STF after aroound 10-15 min has passed, not sure exactly how much time but I usually don't get penalties then. You can also let the STF fail, but thats not possible in infected.
I assume the system was started to discourage people from leaving in the first place. Like your situation, if the first person never left, you would not have had a problem at all.
I do not have any STF experience myself, but from reading the forums, There is a big problem with people leaving STFs early, usually because they missed the optional objective, and then leaving their team in undermanned.
The system was designed to hopefully discourage these types of activities, and yes some others are unfortunately getting unjustly penalized along with this. My only suggestion to you is to come up with a solution that both addresses the true early leavers, but at the same time doesn't penalize the group for effectively disbanding after an early leaver.
Again, since I haven't done any STFs, I don't have that solution.
I have been in more than one ISE where someone deliberately sabotages the mission and, before going, gives some lame reason like "There are Odies in this group--Odies suck" for doing so.
The negitive un-intended consequences of removing the leaver penalty would far out-weigh any benifit. This is what is meant by "Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Didn't it used to work like that? Ugh.
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?
I beamed up to my ship just after accepting a STF. I then lost the window, couldn't requeue. And then I found myself with a leaver penalty.
Mmph.
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?
Still, the leaver penalty should at the very least not apply if you're the only one in the mission! I was doing Hive (Elite) and I'm not sure what happened but the rest of the team dropped or crashed or something, leaving me on my own to deal with two unimatrix ships! I don't have the damage output to keep hurting them while destroying the endless plasma bolts and regeneration probes! But when I dropped I got an hour long cooldown!
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
If you can not handle Elite STF then stay away.Elite and normal have way different tactics to complete them properly.
But i do know that some times it does bug on people and that does need fixed.
I can well understand penalising players for leaving, but at the very least it should scale based on how many times you've done it, with a fall off over time (so leaving now and then isn't penalised too hard in case they had a valid reason).
For example if the penalty were simply 10 minutes for a first offence, then 30 for a second offence, an hour for a third and so-on, with offences being dropped every 48 hours or so? I dunno, or if it were based on percentage; for example if in your entire time on STO you've only dropped out of less than 1% of all multiplayer missions played, then that's probably okay, but if it's creeping up then bigger penalties would make sense.
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
Like for instance Foundry now that it is every 20 mins.
I no it can be upseting at some times but it really is not a big deal unless it bug's on you.
I know from many pug ground STFs that you can leave without penalty if you've played the mission and find your team is just incapable of completing it. Is this time-based? If so what is the limit?
Not sure if this is the right forum for this particular subject matter, however this has became an increasingly big pain in the TRIBBLE! The severs are currently lagging quite severely and I reckon that's why it has been quite dead as of late.
So to summaries, I was in an STF with my group and the lag was horrendous to the point of ruining game play, eventually I get dc/ed out the game. Cool fair enough, I then return to the game to be put back in the map were i'm booted and slammed with a penalty due to the servers lag.
This is highly unimpressive, what happened to all the new tech? Quite frankly as a player of three years these empty promises are starting to become annoying. My question really is are the devs planning at any point in fixing this STF leavers penalty problems as I can assure you i'm not the only one experiencing it.
/ End Rant.
think twice before going into elite
what makes me made is when you get it with a bug aka cure spce
The official reply from CS (4 days later) was "do something else for an hour"
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?
The idea people should always stick it out is just childish. Public games come with the risk of TRIBBLE teams. And rarely walking out on them is by far the best option you've got.
I probably don't have to do that more than once a week, at most, but it does happen rarely. People who quit at the first sign of resistance are absolute scum.
Having said that if the penalty got more severe for those that drop say too many times in a week I'd fully support that. An invisible 7-day timer thingie where it gets worse for doing it over and over. Like if you've left 8 matches in three days... well enjoy your 24 hour ban. Or something. And if that's being caused by your internet connection sucking, then maybe you should look into getting a real internet connection before joining a multiplayer game, instead of blaming the game for having enough common sense to punish you for having none.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
I just don't know what the condition is.
a) Pointless, you don't have time in an STF to have a discussion and vote; you barely have time to do the mission itself and
b) Would simply be used by griefers to grief.
The leaver penalty is there for a reason--it is necessary. This is, at worst, an inconvenience you might suffer once or twice a week if you do them several times a day, every day. There are real issues with this game that need to be addressed; the STF leaver penalty is not among them and obsessing about it is just petulant.
The devs penalize the Active players, those who leave or not, with an leaver penalty and or a weakened team. Thos who are in obvious violation of the game rules, the afk'ers and leeches suffer no penalty..NONE WHATSOEVER wtf are ya smokin? What kind of alternate reality is this?
This is absolutely unacceptable.
I leave often when i see those who are there to ruin the game experience and or are leechers/afk'ers...and I am penalized....as a brit would say BULLOCKS.
Those who stay are not troopers/good eggs or great players...they simply choose to stay and complain at those who wish to leave and will not tolerate it ...
I am not a fan of 15 minute stfs taking 30 minutes or longer because people insist we should 4 man it...3 man it or duo it because they feel they are troopers and feel badmouthing others who chhose to drop.
If you dont want this issue dont pug.....the same could be said to those who complain at people who leave..if you dont like it leave...
I prefer to wait til my leaver penalty expires in about 10-15 minutes. I know that one earns much ire...dont blame me..blame the devs for making a absolutely stupid way to deal with afkers......
OHHHH if you go afk we will punsih those who leave because they wont feed the leeches....logic baby
What i don't like is leechers. In this case to deal with leechers who waste other peoples time by not participating and still getting the rewards at the end. The way to deal with it is to give them a financial penalty for just sitting there or using a bot.
In World of Tanks leechers are fined Xp and money for not participating. Its treated as a greater sin than leaving a game early. They are not fined much, a few XP and a little in game money chump change but the bottom line is you are fined for wasting your team mates time.
Cryptic could do similar for STF's. You get 2 mins grace to get in and start playing, after two mins rewards are deducted from your final total. If by the end of the match you failed to participate at all you get fined say 10 dill and 1 bnp. Not much chump change but the fact is you waste your team mates time. We'll waste yours.
Actually at the current difficulty it's quite possible for a team comprised of 2 admirals and 3 commanders to fend off the attacks in Federation Fleet Alert if the commanders know what they're doing if memory serves. I recall that I could quite easily take on one attack group with support from a single vice admiral when I was a commander. But this is with more than 60% of the team being VAs. In theory if the average level of the team is below 35-37 it doesn't matter if people know what they're doing for Federation Fleet Alert, it's just impossible to win without at least Commander level gear