Add more fun, not more grind. There is so much I'd want to do each day I log on, but grind takes away my time.
I want to explore the quadrant and seek out new life... No, I'd better go slave away mining.
I want to discuss Star Trek or roleplay my characters... No, I'd better be doing something to benefit myself or my fleet.
I want to PvP... No, I'd better grind reputation marks so I can get competitive gear.
I want to be creative and make new characters... No, my main characters will suffer if I don't maintain their grinds.
I want my fleet to enjoy working together and try different activities... No, it isn't efficient or fun to work together anymore.
I want to do so many things, but end up needing to focus on:
The Dilithium Grind - Needed for reputation gear, fleet gear, and fleet projects.
The Reputation Grind - Needed to remain competitive.
The Duty Officer Grind - Needed to remain competitive, and also provides a decent source of Energy Credits.
The Fleet Mark Grind - Needed to advance my fleet.
As the leader of a smaller fleet, I find many members are torn between working on personal progression and fleet progression. I have watched as the number of regular contributors to fleet holdings went from almost 100% to 50% to only a select few. My fleet members have limited time to play, and end up choosing to focus their efforts on improving their own characters instead of the fleet. Want to hold a fleet social event? Good luck. Everyone is too busy grinding their Omega or Dilithium. I thought the goal of MMOs was to build a game that improves a social experience, not provide a game where advancement occurs at the expense of the social experience.
I think Fleet progress should be similar to reputation progress.
No project takes longer than twenty hours, and upgrades take even less time.
There should be at least two XP-only projects for each fleet holding subsection, and neither of them should require dilithium.
Upgrade projects should also not require dilithium.
The only projects that should require dilithium should be the projects that lead to unlocks and requisitions, just like it is with the reputation system.
There needs to be ways to earn greater amounts of Fleet Marks in shorter times.
Small fleets need goals that are readily obtainable even if they're composed of mostly casual players. Individually, the reputation system does this, but as a fleet, the fleet holdings do not. Time-gate progression if you must, but do not make it harder to obtain the necessary inputs. If anything, make it easier. Changes like removing an easier source of Fleet Marks put small fleets one step closer to growing discouraged and breaking up. Folks want their T4/T5 fleet gear, and are willing to pay for it if we'd just have an easier road access. What we don't have is more time for more grind.
Well Devs just go to ESD and see all the anger at this change, And after reading all the posts here it looks like 3 people like it, (i'm not going to call them out ) and the rest hate it. So how long until we get the IOR back with the reward it previously had? Or many would be happy to have rewards increased in other missions and the Foundry can just wither away. As it sits the Foundry will no get used anymore except for Authors playing other Authors missions and then posting about it on the Foundry forum. If they want the Foundry all to themselves fine. We just want our source of FM back.
IMO, no. They just didn't enforce "no queue jumping", but let those who did get in first. Now they are finally getting around to doing so, and people are unhappy.
But rather than blame the owners of the venue, the bouncers, etc, they're turning to the weedy little guy at the front of the line who was feebly protesting and blaming him. Because he's clearly the one at fault, not the owners and their goon squad. (Even if he's really not, because who do you think you have a better chance of beating in a fight?)
That's epic. I have two Foundry spotlights. I am also the leader of a small < 5 person fleet, and will suffer from this.
I never mentioned the word exploit anywhere in my post. I merely stated that the reward had a detrimental effect on other sources of FM as they weren't popping as often due to people choosing to run Foundry missions over doing other PvE content for FM.
Other sources of fleet marks almost never popped on the KDF side even when IOR was still a daily. What are you supposed to do now? Grind Nukara and Defera?
IMO, no. They just didn't enforce "no queue jumping", but let those who did get in first. Now they are finally getting around to doing so, and people are unhappy.
But rather than blame the owners of the venue, the bouncers, etc, they're turning to the weedy little guy at the front of the line who was feebly protesting and blaming him. Because he's clearly the one at fault, not the owners and their goon squad. (Even if he's really not, because who do you think you have a better chance of beating in a fight?)
But no one, absolutely no one was being harmed in anyway when FM were a Foundry reward. It was live and let live.
Now, KDF and small fleets might as well contact Remax (or Century 24 I guess) and put for sale sighs on their starbases. Solo players with limited time that still wanted to contribute something to their fleets are screwed as well.
How the Devs see Star Trek, apparently:
Star Trek: The Original Grind
Star Trek: The Next Grind
Star Trek: Deep Space Grind
Star Trek: Voyage to the Grind
LOL, to the genious that decided to take the foundry marks away.
having a fast way to earn marks was the only reason i needed to purchase dilithium via zen exchange, and obviously i had to buy zen with real money first to get that dilithium
to spend on fleet missions. LOL now i don't have to because it will take longer to earn the marks giving me enough time to milk it for dilithium, no more spending my hard earned money
Again thx alot PWE, well played
It's like my grandfather always said, " It's working great, now lets break it"
until now i had always wondered why he would say such a thing. LOL
I logged onto the game with the intention of resetting my character assignments and just ended up logging off. It all feels sort of pointless now.
I used to logon with a goal in mind and part of that goal was the fleet marks. I was so happy that I didn't have to deal with a bunch of AFKers anymore and could just run solo missions on my own and move at my own pace. Now that that's gone, I do not want to go back and subject myself to the public que or have to search for a half hour to find 4 capable people to run a single instance with.
I am not trying to be over dramatic. I am just saying how it feels and right now, I don't see any reason to be on the game. Before the change of allowing the IOR mission to be repeatable, I was starting to burn out on the public que to the point where I would just stand around in ESD chat and BS with everyone rather than sit in an STF or fleet action for an hour while me and perhaps two other people carried the group to the end.
I think we're all learning a hard lesson here.
No, I am not who you think I am. I am someone different. I am instead a banana.
This will kill fleet progression in the kdf.
During the day the fleet queues are about an hour.
And there is only 1% kdf or whatever stats cryptic uses so it can take a kdf fleet many times longer to get to t5.
The foundry was the only way to get fm's.
If cryptic removes a way to acquire something I would appreciate if they could replace it with something new.
My KDF fleet Beautiful Orions will do just fine without this because we actually run the Fleet mark events together as a fleet. We do the 20 man starbase defense flawlessly and thats around 100 marks per person for 20 people each time and we can get groups for this together several times a day if needed.
The idea behind having a fleet and starbase is you are supposed to grow your fleet big enough so you can also do stuff like this and not have to rely on the public queues.
The idea behind having a fleet and starbase is you are supposed to grow your fleet big enough so you can also do stuff like this and not have to rely on the public queues.
And I thought they didn't want to kill off small fleets.
I don't really understand the WHY Cryptic removed the FM reward. I mean look at it from the broader perspective. As fleets progress the requirements needed to advance grow larger and larger, that much is certain. So the need for Fleet Marks is ever daunting and never ending. So the need for repeatable missions that reward fleet marks was happily received.
Upon that happening people commenced to develop grinder missions that created a loop hole, that allowed players to farm these missions within the ALLOWED time limit set forth by Cryptic itself. Standard missions even grinding missions will take time to finish, and in the nature of every game players will always find ways to finish these missions faster, be it by using specific gear, abilities or tactics. So it has always been pretty obvious that these missions are designed so they can be finished as quickly as possible. You cannot possibly expect players to spend 45min to over an hour on a single mission just so he can collect a bare minimum reward just so he needs to do it again again and again.
Maybe your not really understanding that a player that does a grinding mission in the foundry can take what, 10 min to 20 min depending on gear, boff abilities, ship etc. But an STF can be done in as little as 6 minutes and usually never goes over the 15 minute marks because of the time requirement for the optional, granted you doing it with 4 other players, but that is irrelevant. A 15 minute mission is still a 15 minute missions be it STF, Fleet Action or RED ALERT. Anything over 15 minutes let alone an hour to complete is pretty much content that players are not willing to do on a repetitive basis.
To all the foundry mission developers out there and the creators of spotlight missions, Kudos to you for creating content players can learn to love, and enjoy. But get serious if you make a story driven mission, that contains multiple parts. Did u really expect people to do your missions continuously? Does Cryptic think that people are going to 1-2 hr long missions every day, multiple times a day so that they can get a 50 FM reward? Get serious, we put up with long missions while we level cause we want to experience all the game has to offer, but at max level, when most players already have multiple characters, when the need for grinding missions is at an all time NECESSITY. Of course people are going to do those missions over anything that takes too long. People work for a living, they have families, responsibilities, hell even other games to play. There is only so much time in the day to play STO and do missions, and for damn sure no one wants to spend an hours doing a single mission to get a specific reward.
Compare STF's (ELITE), Fleet Actions, and Red Alerts. STF's, take 15-20 min to finish. and the reward for doing them is extremely well received, 100 Omega marks more or less nice quantity of DIL(900+) and the chance for a MK 12 VR item, plus BNP's. Red alerts give over 400 DIL and take just 10 min to finish, even if you had a group of lowbies and you were the only one doing large amounts of dps, you could still finish the event in time <20 min. So I really don't see what the issue is with grinding missions, simply because people designed some of them so that you had to put little to no effort in doing them. If you are so against this, why have you not penalized afk'ers in STF and other events, why implement Auto Fire for ships, why continuously keep increasing the need and prices on items for Refined Dilithium, but limit the quantity we can refine per day to a number created and assigned back when the system first started and the need was much lower. This list can go on and on sorry.
Back to this PSA lol, Any foundry developer or Cryptic member that thinks that at any point in time Spotlight mission were going to be more popular than short, quick and easy grinding missions your just kidding yourselfs. This game is a giant grinding machine, players are rushing to finish fleet projects, complete reputations, and level the embassy. So we cannot, we will not waste our time doing missions that give us crappy rewards and take much of the time we need to grind for the resources we need. You cant argue that because you spent hours making a foundry your upset cause another person pieced together a grinding missions in a fraction of the time. You cant complain that your mission isn't on the top of the list cause of all the stupid grinding missions. LOOK AT YOUR RATING, that's what tells you if your mission is good or not, missions listed at the top aren't the best ones they are the most frequented ones, period. Player created content is rated by players and it should be pretty damn clear what players want and need, and that's BAM grinding missions, because everyone knows STO atm is a grinding game plain and simple.
I still don't understand why cryptic is so afraid of people burning through reputation and fleet projects too quickly, are they afraid we are going to leave the game once we finish everything??? are they afraid people will realize their is nothing to do in STO. Guess what we already know and we have been with you for 3 years now and stuck with you when there was no content, when there was no grind, when there was little to nothing to do in end game and we are still here. Thankfully you realized some of the bad decisions you made when season 7 came out, and you saw the wisdom from the player base so you took action and modified your choices. Listen to us now again, what you just did is bad, bad for the economy of STO, bad for the players, bad for gameplay.
You want a normal solution for this, fine here it is. Put back the IOR repeatable quest just like it was before, you already hot fixed the grinding missions so that its not a AFK grind fest so the problem was solved. Now ADD in these extra dailies you are implementing as a extra way to reward players and foundry developers for their hard work. Doing RP foundry missions should be a choice not a necessity.
Removing the Fleetmarks for Foundry-Missions was never the goal of the Foundry-Authors, we just wished to take away rewards from afk-missions - the so called Boff-grinders.
Now the Foundry-Repeatable no longer exists and the Fleetmarks won't return to the Foundry, because it's not "team-/group-based content".
The thing that makes it even worse is that there is no compensation for taking away these Fleetmarks, we are still waiting for a PvP-Daily or something similar, also the STFs could reward Fleetmarks - since those are "team-/group-based content". But giving us these Fleetmarks another way isn't the only possibility to compensate, Cryptic has still the possibility to push a few buttons to reduce the Fleetmarks-Costs for Starbase Projects to 10% of their current value or another few buttons to switch the Embassy-Projects to need Romulan-Marks - the currency those projects should cost, because Romulan-Marks indicate how much we've helped the people/Epohhs of New Romulus.
Sorry for that wall of text, but I thought it could be important for a discussion, not just whining.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
If Star Trek Online was an Open-Source (GPL) Game, we would have a low-grind fork.
My KDF fleet Beautiful Orions will do just fine without this because we actually run the Fleet mark events together as a fleet. We do the 20 man starbase defense flawlessly and thats around 100 marks per person for 20 people each time and we can get groups for this together several times a day if needed.
The idea behind having a fleet and starbase is you are supposed to grow your fleet big enough so you can also do stuff like this and not have to rely on the public queues.
Congratulations on your success.
I've seen you guys around, impressive squad. In fact I dare say you can always see a Beautiful Orion somewhere in a zone.
But there are people who don't play well with others. I'm primarily a solo player. I've also contributed more to my fleet than anyone else save the founder. Why should we who don't want to "play together" be punished and hamstringed for having a different play style? especially if we're willing to put in the work? There should be a balance. The IOR Fleet Marks was a good balance. Narrow, but effective.
In addition, if I go into a fleet alert, I usually suffer lag. And that hampers my performance and hurts the team. So I don't like to and it isn't fun.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
I am not sure of the purpose of removing fleet marks from the foundry, but i do believe its short sighted.
The idea of fleets is to work together for a common goal, And taking away a place to do that like the foundry is a loss to the community as a whole.
If they were to add more content at a faster pace to earn fleet marks. it would not matter.
We need more options since you run the same missions over and over again to earn fleet marks. Gets old after a couple of months.
There are some many places cryptic could add fleet marks. If they were to go back and add fleet marks to the older missions that would give fleets a reason to do those and again without creating new content.
Like I said in my previous post I think this will be the end of the Foundry from a fleet point view.
Personally, this won't affect me at all. My fleet actually likes running the fleet alerts, blockades, etc, and I have no problem getting marks from the cxp report turn-ins. Plus, I've been burned too many times with craptastic foundry missions that I don't even bother w/ the spotlight missions or (former) officer report daily.
That being said, I understand the small fleeter's concern their main, consistent source of fm's is being eliminated. If these rewards were removed in one place, they need to be added elsewhere. Otherwise, it looks like Cryptic is manipulating its customers, and that's something I have a real problem with.
I am not sure of the purpose of removing fleet marks from the foundry, but i do believe its short sighted.
The idea of fleets is to work together for a common goal, And taking away a place to do that like the foundry is a loss to the community as a whole.
If they were to add more content at a faster pace to earn fleet marks. it would not matter.
We need more options since you run the same missions over and over again to earn fleet marks. Gets old after a couple of months.
There are some many places cryptic could add fleet marks. If they were to go back and add fleet marks to the older missions that would give fleets a reason to do those and again without creating new content.
Like I said in my previous post I think this will be the end of the Foundry from a fleet point view.
But no one, absolutely no one was being harmed in anyway when FM were a Foundry reward. It was live and let live.
The only answer I can give to this is to repeat my personal belief that Cryptic felt that we were earning Fleet Marks faster than they wanted/expected us to, and not in the ways that they wanted/expected us to. They have the power ("right" doesn't matter, "right" is irrelevant) to change this, to enforce it, and they have now done so. Until they change things again, all we can do is play the game their way... or leave.
IMO, some people are looking for a scapegoat, someone they can actually reach and blame, because (consciously or not) they realize they have no real power or influence over Cryptic or PWE. They can complain, or leave... and that's all. And if they do leave, no one will care, because there are so many others.
It's a very sad thing to realize you're powerless, so most people will do anything to pretend otherwise as long as they can.
I only have a limited amount of time to spend on this game. I chose to do foundry missions as they ofered Fleet marks. I ended up finding out that I like doing other people's missions, too.
Now that Fleet Marks have been removed I feel that I don't like other peoples' missions enough to do them at the detriment of me getting fleet marks using another method.
As such, I won't be playing foundry missions any more. To all of the great foundry mission authors, I salute your hard work and will miss your offerings. You have Cryptic to blame for my cessation of patronage.
Now I find myself forced to do those fleet missions that I really don'y like. Quite frankly, compared to the Borg missions, they suck. And blow. At the same time.
The idea behind having a fleet and starbase is you are supposed to grow your fleet big enough so you can also do stuff like this and not have to rely on the public queues.
Not everyone wants to be in a big fleet. I want to know everyone in my fleet on a first name basis, know their ships by name and build, and have fleet chat small enough for everyone to participate if they wanted to. I've quit several fleets that got too busy and crowded or ended up with an officer core who decided they knew best for everyone. While, I acknowledge that it limits me to likely never seeing certain things in this game, I would like to be able to at least make slow steady progress to more attainable goals. That just got harder.
I am not sure of the purpose of removing fleet marks from the foundry, but i do believe its short sighted.
The idea of fleets is to work together for a common goal, And taking away a place to do that like the foundry is a loss to the community as a whole.
If they were to add more content at a faster pace to earn fleet marks. it would not matter.
We need more options since you run the same missions over and over again to earn fleet marks. Gets old after a couple of months.
There are some many places cryptic could add fleet marks. If they were to go back and add fleet marks to the older missions that would give fleets a reason to do those and again without creating new content.
Like I said in my previous post I think this will be the end of the Foundry from a fleet point view.
Agreed. Earning fleet marks that way would be excellent and enjoyable. Especially with my Admiral ship, which is my RP ship.
The only answer I can give to this is to repeat my personal belief that Cryptic felt that we were earning Fleet Marks faster than they wanted/expected us to, and not in the ways that they wanted/expected us to. They have the power ("right" doesn't matter, "right" is irrelevant) to change this, to enforce it, and they have now done so. Until they change things again, all we can do is play the game their way... or leave.
As a member of an effectively small fleet, I understand this logic, but my fleet had only made significant progress after this last change went into effect, being able to get the Starbase to tier 1 and complete a holding project AFTER season 7, when we started at the beginning of Season 6. In fact much of the fleet we started Season 6 with doesn't play anymore. Cryptic initially said that fleets were supposed to take seven months of grinding to complete the starbase, I just opened my Transwarp conduit on Tuesday. I also received my tractor beam and photon torpedoes.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
It's already been stated more eloquently, but if people think that by taking away the means by which people were grinding for necessary fleet starbase resources will encourage them to spend the same time they were grinding on a relatively reward-less endeavor (i.e., the story-driven foundry missions), they're a few drones short of a Collective.
I only have a limited amount of time to spend on this game. I chose to do foundry missions as they ofered Fleet marks. I ended up finding out that I like doing other people's missions, too.
Now that Fleet Marks have been removed I feel that I don't like other peoples' missions enough to do them at the detriment of me getting fleet marks using another method.
As such, I won't be playing foundry missions any more. To all of the great foundry mission authors, I salute your hard work and will miss your offerings. You have Cryptic to blame for my cessation of patronage.
Now I find myself forced to do those fleet missions that I really don'y like. Quite frankly, compared to the Borg missions, they suck. And blow. At the same time.
This is exactly my point, Since fleets need fleet marks and time is limited. Fleets will have to skip the foundry all together in order to achieve fleets goals. And we are stuck with same old content over and over.
Once every 24 hours, the first spotlight mission completed in that time frame will get a bonus 1440 Dilithium.
Once every 24 hours, the first spotlight mission completed in that time frame will get a scaling amount of Energy Credits, based on the player's level.
Got the dil but not the ec
[System] [NumericReceived] You received 992 Expertise
[System] [NumericReceived] You received 866 Expertise
[System] [NumericReceived] You received 1,440 Dilithium Ore
I am part of a small fleet. 4 of us just finished Tier 2. We felt pretty good about that, considering all the steep requirements. We worked together, and got it done. Now however, with the new changes, we are thinking about taking a break.
Sometimes I wonder if the Dev's even play STO. They seem to want to make grinding harder with every other patch. It's getting to the point why even play STO... I already have a job.
BS.... more like the devs finally came up with a plan to kill grinders once and for all.
Seriously... it's not the Authors who decided that Foundry should be used to tell stories. Cryptic did. We just do things the way Cryptic set it up.
I personally think since the foundry is such a problem, all rewards should be removed from it entirely, No DIL no EC no XP nothing. that way it can't be grinded, exploited or anything. It can go away as it should since its clearly a major problem for the game.
Would some of you be happy if they put fleet marks back, but set them to scale with dilithium rewards?
The trick might be if the scaling rewards length.
Ex:
15 min mission = 10 FM
30 min mission = 30 FM
45 min mission = 65 FM
60 min mission = 100 FM
This would grant FMs, but at the same time encourage the play of longer stories, since repeating a boff grinders would earn less than sitting down and playing a story mission. Or it would encourage some authors to make long and epic grinds, instead of ones where you lay behind a fence and shootz stuffz.
Comments
Best post Ive read all day.
Other sources of fleet marks almost never popped on the KDF side even when IOR was still a daily. What are you supposed to do now? Grind Nukara and Defera?
But no one, absolutely no one was being harmed in anyway when FM were a Foundry reward. It was live and let live.
Now, KDF and small fleets might as well contact Remax (or Century 24 I guess) and put for sale sighs on their starbases. Solo players with limited time that still wanted to contribute something to their fleets are screwed as well.
Star Trek: The Original Grind
Star Trek: The Next Grind
Star Trek: Deep Space Grind
Star Trek: Voyage to the Grind
Is this not a Mute point now (pardon the pun) Since no buddy will be playing Foundry missions anymore.
having a fast way to earn marks was the only reason i needed to purchase dilithium via zen exchange, and obviously i had to buy zen with real money first to get that dilithium
to spend on fleet missions. LOL now i don't have to because it will take longer to earn the marks giving me enough time to milk it for dilithium, no more spending my hard earned money
Again thx alot PWE, well played
It's like my grandfather always said, " It's working great, now lets break it"
until now i had always wondered why he would say such a thing. LOL
I used to logon with a goal in mind and part of that goal was the fleet marks. I was so happy that I didn't have to deal with a bunch of AFKers anymore and could just run solo missions on my own and move at my own pace. Now that that's gone, I do not want to go back and subject myself to the public que or have to search for a half hour to find 4 capable people to run a single instance with.
I am not trying to be over dramatic. I am just saying how it feels and right now, I don't see any reason to be on the game. Before the change of allowing the IOR mission to be repeatable, I was starting to burn out on the public que to the point where I would just stand around in ESD chat and BS with everyone rather than sit in an STF or fleet action for an hour while me and perhaps two other people carried the group to the end.
I think we're all learning a hard lesson here.
My KDF fleet Beautiful Orions will do just fine without this because we actually run the Fleet mark events together as a fleet. We do the 20 man starbase defense flawlessly and thats around 100 marks per person for 20 people each time and we can get groups for this together several times a day if needed.
The idea behind having a fleet and starbase is you are supposed to grow your fleet big enough so you can also do stuff like this and not have to rely on the public queues.
And I thought they didn't want to kill off small fleets.
Upon that happening people commenced to develop grinder missions that created a loop hole, that allowed players to farm these missions within the ALLOWED time limit set forth by Cryptic itself. Standard missions even grinding missions will take time to finish, and in the nature of every game players will always find ways to finish these missions faster, be it by using specific gear, abilities or tactics. So it has always been pretty obvious that these missions are designed so they can be finished as quickly as possible. You cannot possibly expect players to spend 45min to over an hour on a single mission just so he can collect a bare minimum reward just so he needs to do it again again and again.
Maybe your not really understanding that a player that does a grinding mission in the foundry can take what, 10 min to 20 min depending on gear, boff abilities, ship etc. But an STF can be done in as little as 6 minutes and usually never goes over the 15 minute marks because of the time requirement for the optional, granted you doing it with 4 other players, but that is irrelevant. A 15 minute mission is still a 15 minute missions be it STF, Fleet Action or RED ALERT. Anything over 15 minutes let alone an hour to complete is pretty much content that players are not willing to do on a repetitive basis.
To all the foundry mission developers out there and the creators of spotlight missions, Kudos to you for creating content players can learn to love, and enjoy. But get serious if you make a story driven mission, that contains multiple parts. Did u really expect people to do your missions continuously? Does Cryptic think that people are going to 1-2 hr long missions every day, multiple times a day so that they can get a 50 FM reward? Get serious, we put up with long missions while we level cause we want to experience all the game has to offer, but at max level, when most players already have multiple characters, when the need for grinding missions is at an all time NECESSITY. Of course people are going to do those missions over anything that takes too long. People work for a living, they have families, responsibilities, hell even other games to play. There is only so much time in the day to play STO and do missions, and for damn sure no one wants to spend an hours doing a single mission to get a specific reward.
Compare STF's (ELITE), Fleet Actions, and Red Alerts. STF's, take 15-20 min to finish. and the reward for doing them is extremely well received, 100 Omega marks more or less nice quantity of DIL(900+) and the chance for a MK 12 VR item, plus BNP's. Red alerts give over 400 DIL and take just 10 min to finish, even if you had a group of lowbies and you were the only one doing large amounts of dps, you could still finish the event in time <20 min. So I really don't see what the issue is with grinding missions, simply because people designed some of them so that you had to put little to no effort in doing them. If you are so against this, why have you not penalized afk'ers in STF and other events, why implement Auto Fire for ships, why continuously keep increasing the need and prices on items for Refined Dilithium, but limit the quantity we can refine per day to a number created and assigned back when the system first started and the need was much lower. This list can go on and on sorry.
Back to this PSA lol, Any foundry developer or Cryptic member that thinks that at any point in time Spotlight mission were going to be more popular than short, quick and easy grinding missions your just kidding yourselfs. This game is a giant grinding machine, players are rushing to finish fleet projects, complete reputations, and level the embassy. So we cannot, we will not waste our time doing missions that give us crappy rewards and take much of the time we need to grind for the resources we need. You cant argue that because you spent hours making a foundry your upset cause another person pieced together a grinding missions in a fraction of the time. You cant complain that your mission isn't on the top of the list cause of all the stupid grinding missions. LOOK AT YOUR RATING, that's what tells you if your mission is good or not, missions listed at the top aren't the best ones they are the most frequented ones, period. Player created content is rated by players and it should be pretty damn clear what players want and need, and that's BAM grinding missions, because everyone knows STO atm is a grinding game plain and simple.
I still don't understand why cryptic is so afraid of people burning through reputation and fleet projects too quickly, are they afraid we are going to leave the game once we finish everything??? are they afraid people will realize their is nothing to do in STO. Guess what we already know and we have been with you for 3 years now and stuck with you when there was no content, when there was no grind, when there was little to nothing to do in end game and we are still here. Thankfully you realized some of the bad decisions you made when season 7 came out, and you saw the wisdom from the player base so you took action and modified your choices. Listen to us now again, what you just did is bad, bad for the economy of STO, bad for the players, bad for gameplay.
You want a normal solution for this, fine here it is. Put back the IOR repeatable quest just like it was before, you already hot fixed the grinding missions so that its not a AFK grind fest so the problem was solved. Now ADD in these extra dailies you are implementing as a extra way to reward players and foundry developers for their hard work. Doing RP foundry missions should be a choice not a necessity.
Now the Foundry-Repeatable no longer exists and the Fleetmarks won't return to the Foundry, because it's not "team-/group-based content".
The thing that makes it even worse is that there is no compensation for taking away these Fleetmarks, we are still waiting for a PvP-Daily or something similar, also the STFs could reward Fleetmarks - since those are "team-/group-based content". But giving us these Fleetmarks another way isn't the only possibility to compensate, Cryptic has still the possibility to push a few buttons to reduce the Fleetmarks-Costs for Starbase Projects to 10% of their current value or another few buttons to switch the Embassy-Projects to need Romulan-Marks - the currency those projects should cost, because Romulan-Marks indicate how much we've helped the people/Epohhs of New Romulus.
Sorry for that wall of text, but I thought it could be important for a discussion, not just whining.
If Star Trek Online was an Open-Source (GPL) Game, we would have a low-grind fork.
Congratulations on your success.
I've seen you guys around, impressive squad. In fact I dare say you can always see a Beautiful Orion somewhere in a zone.
But there are people who don't play well with others. I'm primarily a solo player. I've also contributed more to my fleet than anyone else save the founder. Why should we who don't want to "play together" be punished and hamstringed for having a different play style? especially if we're willing to put in the work? There should be a balance. The IOR Fleet Marks was a good balance. Narrow, but effective.
In addition, if I go into a fleet alert, I usually suffer lag. And that hampers my performance and hurts the team. So I don't like to and it isn't fun.
The idea of fleets is to work together for a common goal, And taking away a place to do that like the foundry is a loss to the community as a whole.
If they were to add more content at a faster pace to earn fleet marks. it would not matter.
We need more options since you run the same missions over and over again to earn fleet marks. Gets old after a couple of months.
There are some many places cryptic could add fleet marks. If they were to go back and add fleet marks to the older missions that would give fleets a reason to do those and again without creating new content.
Like I said in my previous post I think this will be the end of the Foundry from a fleet point view.
I started playing foundry missions only recently as a FLEET activity, scheduled once a week.
We were quite happy to make our fleet marks that way.
Thanks for removing my last incentive to play regularly, I'm done grinding until new content arrives.
fourteen@fuldry.
THIS x 100.
U.S.S. Maelstrom, NCC-71417 (Constitution III-class/flagship) --- Fleet Admiral Hauk' --|-- Dahar Master Hauk --- I.K.S. qu'In 'an bortaS (D7-class / flagship)
The only answer I can give to this is to repeat my personal belief that Cryptic felt that we were earning Fleet Marks faster than they wanted/expected us to, and not in the ways that they wanted/expected us to. They have the power ("right" doesn't matter, "right" is irrelevant) to change this, to enforce it, and they have now done so. Until they change things again, all we can do is play the game their way... or leave.
IMO, some people are looking for a scapegoat, someone they can actually reach and blame, because (consciously or not) they realize they have no real power or influence over Cryptic or PWE. They can complain, or leave... and that's all. And if they do leave, no one will care, because there are so many others.
It's a very sad thing to realize you're powerless, so most people will do anything to pretend otherwise as long as they can.
Now that Fleet Marks have been removed I feel that I don't like other peoples' missions enough to do them at the detriment of me getting fleet marks using another method.
As such, I won't be playing foundry missions any more. To all of the great foundry mission authors, I salute your hard work and will miss your offerings. You have Cryptic to blame for my cessation of patronage.
Now I find myself forced to do those fleet missions that I really don'y like. Quite frankly, compared to the Borg missions, they suck. And blow. At the same time.
Not everyone wants to be in a big fleet. I want to know everyone in my fleet on a first name basis, know their ships by name and build, and have fleet chat small enough for everyone to participate if they wanted to. I've quit several fleets that got too busy and crowded or ended up with an officer core who decided they knew best for everyone. While, I acknowledge that it limits me to likely never seeing certain things in this game, I would like to be able to at least make slow steady progress to more attainable goals. That just got harder.
As a member of an effectively small fleet, I understand this logic, but my fleet had only made significant progress after this last change went into effect, being able to get the Starbase to tier 1 and complete a holding project AFTER season 7, when we started at the beginning of Season 6. In fact much of the fleet we started Season 6 with doesn't play anymore. Cryptic initially said that fleets were supposed to take seven months of grinding to complete the starbase, I just opened my Transwarp conduit on Tuesday. I also received my tractor beam and photon torpedoes.
This is exactly my point, Since fleets need fleet marks and time is limited. Fleets will have to skip the foundry all together in order to achieve fleets goals. And we are stuck with same old content over and over.
Once every 24 hours, the first spotlight mission completed in that time frame will get a scaling amount of Energy Credits, based on the player's level.
Got the dil but not the ec
[System] [NumericReceived] You received 992 Expertise
[System] [NumericReceived] You received 866 Expertise
[System] [NumericReceived] You received 1,440 Dilithium Ore
Sometimes I wonder if the Dev's even play STO. They seem to want to make grinding harder with every other patch. It's getting to the point why even play STO... I already have a job.
I personally think since the foundry is such a problem, all rewards should be removed from it entirely, No DIL no EC no XP nothing. that way it can't be grinded, exploited or anything. It can go away as it should since its clearly a major problem for the game.
This post has been edited to remove content which violates the Perfect World Entertainment Community Rules and Policies . ~Bluegeek
I had more to write but... it's not going to be heard anyway, so I'm only wasting my own time.
But it needs to be said, because it does deserve better.
I will miss the zone chat. Often awful, usually stupid, but always fun in one way or another.
Such a shame the same cannot be said for the game.
.... you're choice is to report it up the chain.
The trick might be if the scaling rewards length.
Ex:
15 min mission = 10 FM
30 min mission = 30 FM
45 min mission = 65 FM
60 min mission = 100 FM
This would grant FMs, but at the same time encourage the play of longer stories, since repeating a boff grinders would earn less than sitting down and playing a story mission. Or it would encourage some authors to make long and epic grinds, instead of ones where you lay behind a fence and shootz stuffz.