Actually... STO used to be a much UN-grindy MMO.
It was that very feature that made me stop paying for Warhammer online and switch to STO.
Yes. I switched here because for an MMO, STO had little grind.
You could craft top tier gear easily, and could reach max level without having to play 15 hours a day.
I stopped crafting when it got its dilithium cost.
If I have to grind, I'll grind out the fleet weapons or the Rep systems weapons, so crafting is now useless.
Actually i would say it is still less grindy then what World of ******** was on its initial release. At least STFs are 30 minutes, not 6 hours.
Still.... I appreciate that the fleet marks have been fixed. This is a step in the right direction, and I once again started playing them.
This is general advice. Grind does not equal fun.
STO still isn't very grindy outside of STFs and Starbase stuff. And the latter is now remedied more or less. :P
Anyone who says that STO is the grindiest game they've ever played needs to play DDO for a while. Or FFO. STF's will feel like fluffy kittens. :P
Just did Azure Nebula and managed to free a few BoPs and Mogais but also 3 Scimitars YAY. Reward for our efforts = 18 Romulan marks and 13 Fleet marks. Is this some sort of joke?
That's.... double what it used to be! :P Azure Nebula sucks.
In 4h i earned more than 2000 fleetmarks on two characters. I hope it's working as intended.
That's not too far off.. 500/toon per hour. Before the change I could avg 300-350/hr during the event times with fleet mark boost, incursion, invasion, outside nukara easy/medium. Rinse and Repeat. Today I got about 500-550/toon per hr depending on the team and only had two AFKers today but I'm sure that will change. I team up on Nukara to get done faster as well.
Gold Sub since March 2010
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
Generally speaking, most of those who join the Fleet Actions and Events are not members of the same fleet. It would be a good idea to give more rewards to those who are all members of the same fleet.
Just did Azure Nebula and managed to free a few BoPs and Mogais but also 3 Scimitars YAY. Reward for our efforts = 18 Romulan marks and 13 Fleet marks. Is this some sort of joke?
wasnt it capped at 15 romulan marks before?
and 18 is still pitiful, especially for 3 scimitars
hopefully they will reevaluate the rewards on azure and others to make them more rewarding
i havent done a fleet action yet, but at least reading the patch notes it seems they are going the in right direction.
also would like to know why they didnt announce these changes before when IOR was nerfed. they said it would be months before changes took effect.
i just hope its not another knee jerk reaction, then in a few months they decide to nerf it again.
"Tickle us, do we not laugh? Prick us, do we not bleed? Wrong us, shall we not revenge?" -General Chang
In 4h i earned more than 2000 fleetmarks on two characters. I hope it's working as intended.
Good thing they took care of those vicious foundry "exploiters" who woulda made what, 800 in that same time period... Wonder how many plays those 2 hour masterpieces are getting.
That's not too far off.. 500/toon per hour. Before the change I could avg 300-350/hr during the event times with fleet mark boost, incursion, invasion, outside nukara easy/medium. Rinse and Repeat. Today I got about 500-550/toon per hr depending on the team and only had two AFKers today but I'm sure that will change. I team up on Nukara to get done faster as well.
I also have done my daily dil cap on one char in this 4h timeframe and i had time to get some accolades on defera too. I'm starting to think to an ideal run where you could earn 1k fleetmarks in 1h-1h30, depending on your gaming abilities, during the mark event, with a mix of starbase incursion, colony invasion, nukara and defera (hards/meds), and a dedicated 5 men team.
With the new changes in place, I am finding a reason to play fleet actions again. Just did Starbase Incursion and got a good number of marks (62). Still seeing AFKers, but that's to be expected.
Makes 0 difference to me since they killed off small fleets. But then I'm also totally boycotting the game until I see an improvement in Systems balancing, QA and communication.
Funny how losing money spurs them into instant action :rolleyes:
*Edit* and just to be clear - I think it's great customer service that they're doing this - the Andorian Escort is broken, they've prepared a patch and they're deploying it ASAP - I think that's great.
I only wish they applied the same level of diligence to the things in this game that aren't costing them sales but are costing them consumer confidence and goodwill.
Thats not even anywhere near the worst of it have you forgotten that they left a completely game breaking pathing bug for a whole week on Holodeck. The pathing bug made all STF ground missions impossible, wrecked about 40% of all episode missions including the starter missions for the Federation.
End-Game content and introductory content both borked for 7 days... how many first time players logged on during those days and immediatly thought: "This company can't even get their opening content working, TRIBBLE this"... beggers belief. It also underlines a subtlety here, Stahl talks about growth and yet they left the first mission in the game broken for a whole week, yet a ship for VA's (i.e. stable customers) is fixed almost immediatly, to me that says they are more interested in sucking the money out of the wallets of the players who are LTS or Gold and not all that worried about new players...
Having said all this it is good that they have applied a fix to an extremely expensive product in a small time period, it's just a shame that they have been inconsistent in doing so with other far more gamebreaking bugs in the past and it's also a shame they it's partly because of the pressure we have exerted the past week that they have done so.
Thats not even anywhere near the worst of it have you forgotten that they left a completely game breaking pathing bug for a whole week on Holodeck. The pathing bug made all STF ground missions impossible, wrecked about 40% of all episode missions including the starter missions for the Federation.
End-Game content and introductory content both borked for 7 days... how many first time players logged on during those days and immediatly thought: "This company can't even get their opening content working, TRIBBLE this"... beggers belief. It also underlines a subtlety here, Stahl talks about growth and yet they left the first mission in the game broken for a whole week, yet a ship for VA's (i.e. stable customers) is fixed almost immediatly, to me that says they are more interested in sucking the money out of the wallets of the players who are LTS or Gold and not all that worried about new players...
I've been complaining about how those missions are broke and bugged for months. The bugs show a level of contempt for new players that is appalling. "Suffer through this, and give us your money."
They won't give a hoot about "new customers" until they realize they've run off all the paying customers and no one is logging on.
Imagine for a moment the look on DStahl's face , after he ran all over the forums with a fire extinguisher -- when he was told that their glorious new Kumari money maker was bugged big time .
I hope someone was there to take a picture .
Makes 0 difference to me since they killed off small fleets.
I'm honestly wondering how you seem to think that the current situation where five dedicated people can generate literally thousands of marks during a bonus hour means that small fleets are dead.
Are they still majorly screwed by inherent design flaws in the starbase system? Absofrakkinglutely.
Are they incapable of making progress at all? Not in the least.
I'm honestly wondering how you seem to think that the current situation where five dedicated people can generate literally thousands of marks during a bonus hour means that small fleets are dead.
Are they still majorly screwed by inherent design flaws in the starbase system? Absofrakkinglutely.
Are they incapable of making progress at all? Not in the least.
If you have 5 ppl who can continuously be online at the same time then you might be right .
The beauty of the wrapper mission was that you could log in at your convenience , not at the convenience of 4 more ppl .
The larger the fleet the more chance there is that someone from your fleet will be online .
Sadly the opposite is quite true as well .
If you have 5 ppl who can continuously be online at the same time then you might be right .
The beauty of the wrapper mission was that you could log in at your convenience , not at the convenience of 4 more ppl .
The larger the fleet the more chance there is that someone from your fleet will be online .
Sadly the opposite is quite true as well .
You don't need to have them on concurrently. During bonus hour, with a boost, a disciplined player is able to bring in about 1k marks, plus or minus a few hundred depending on length of matches and outcomes.
Even without the bonus hour, or boost, you're still talking several hundred marks per player for that hour of playtime.
The difference between STO and other western mmo games is the other games might have grind but STO has so little content that it feels there is nothing but grind. TBH it's shameful how little content it has. All the content here would equal 1 zone in another game. It's 3 years in and the content now should have been there at launch and increasing since then. I love the ships and space combat but I'm just grinding dil to buy ships to grind dil.:(
think you for got to add to grind tribbles
i know wot mean ive respec all 4 of my toons in the past 10 days with the dilith ive been grinding just for somthing diffrent to do
i would love to know are cryptic even looking in sorting out AFKers in team missions or are there ignoreing it.
Imagine for a moment the look on DStahl's face , after he ran all over the forums with a fire extinguisher -- when he was told that their glorious new Kumari money maker was bugged big time .
I hope someone was there to take a picture .
Even better I hope someone lost his/her job over it. Better believe if I apologized to a customer and 48 hours later the customer was dealing with another defective product caused by the same core issue (*) head would roll.
(*) in this case, lack of testing on a live production build. Again... it is possible that this was tested in-house on the ultra-smooth ultra-tuned Development Shard... and it failed on the "production" shard. The problem could be as simple as that. Somewhere along the line the two shards diverged code-wise... what works in the back office doesn't work "on the street." Even so, the ship should have hit Tribble for a few hours at least. No more excuses after this though! I expect cash-store items to work flawlessly.
Even better I hope someone lost his/her job over it. Better believe if I apologized to a customer and 48 hours later the customer was dealing with another defective product caused by the same core issue (*) head would roll.
(*) in this case, lack of testing on a live production build. Again... it is possible that this was tested in-house on the ultra-smooth ultra-tuned Development Shard... and it failed on the "production" shard. The problem could be as simple as that. Somewhere along the line the two shards diverged code-wise... what works in the back office doesn't work "on the street." Even so, the ship should have hit Tribble for a few hours at least. No more excuses after this though! I expect cash-store items to work flawlessly.
It all goes back to the "rush to market" development pattern. Tribble does allow for them to test, but not when you only give 48 hrs to test all that was in the patch and fail to heed the feedback.
I know about this first hand as my job depends on "getting it right the first time".
If anyone casues an "outage" and does not learn from that and repeats it, then they need more training in QA and customer care or given a box to load their personal items in.
There is no excuse for a lack of QA! Even it does delay something!
"If what you produce is defective, then rushing it to market will not generate the result you want unless the result you want is failure!" ~ Zeus 02/22/2013
PWE/Crytpic Why do you repeat the same mistakes?
PWE/Crytpic Why do you NOT listen to your Customers?
I'm honestly wondering how you seem to think that the current situation where five dedicated people can generate literally thousands of marks during a bonus hour means that small fleets are dead.
Are they still majorly screwed by inherent design flaws in the starbase system? Absofrakkinglutely.
Are they incapable of making progress at all? Not in the least.
Fleet Marks are not the sole issue with small fleets, here is a list of other issues:
Dilithium grind
Doff Grind
EC Grind
Lack of supply in players willing to join a T1, T2 or even T3 fleet.
I have at various times during Season 7 attempted to resurrect my fleet, which was killed off due to people leaving the game or moving to bigger fleets as a result of Season 7 changes. However I have met with no success at all in garnering interest mainly because of the final issue in the list, so no for me at the moment the change in Fleet Mark volume makes no difference to my particular predicament.
Whilst I made the point that the Season 7 changes killed a number small fleets off, I did not say that the changes made in the past few days to Fleet Marks would not benefit those small fleets that still have a core membership of 5 or more players in-tact. I merely stated that it did not benefit my fleet in any way, or any other small fleet that lost nearly all of it's players as a result of the changes in Season 7.
Maybe I should hone my wording for you "for small fleets that were killed off by the Season 7 changes"
You don't need to have them on concurrently. During bonus hour, with a boost, a disciplined player is able to bring in about 1k marks, plus or minus a few hundred depending on length of matches and outcomes.
Even without the bonus hour, or boost, you're still talking several hundred marks per player for that hour of playtime.
As a Fleet admiral of a small fleet, I have to agree with this statement. In 2 hours I did 4 Colony invasions, 2 No wins, 2 FFA's and acquired approx 500 fleet marks. There were 3 of us collecting fleet marks to start our embassy upgrade and we were able to get the fleet marks we needed that would have taken at least a few days. We normally have 5 people online every night.
I have to say that I am happy with the Fleet Mark increases. It is definitely making things easier for us.
1) Develop good code
2) Test internally on Alpha platform
3) Take Alpha test results and correct code
4) Repeat Alpha test until all errors found are corrected.
5) Release to Beta test with select testers from customer base
6) Take Beta test results and correct code
7) Repeat Beta test until all errors found are corrected
8) Release code to customers knowing you have done all that is possible to protect your customers and the Company. 9) Roll back to previous code if any more errors show up and repeat Step 2 thru 8
That is QA and the proper way to protect your customers and keep the Company profits and reputation safe!
Fleet Marks are not the sole issue with small fleets, here is a list of other issues:
Dilithium grind
Doff Grind
EC Grind
Lack of supply in players willing to join a T1, T2 or even T3 fleet.
I also agree with these to a point. The Dilithium grind works hand in hand with the lack of players portion. Obviously the less amount of player you have, the harder for the dililthium contributions will be. Dilithium, imo, is actually not that hard to get now, but its more the cap of refining that is more of the issue. My fleet and I do so many STF's together that we could easily get 20k of dil in a night each. If 5 people are online stead each night, and you could refined all 20k in a night instead of 8k, then projects could be finished faster.
Doff grind isn't that big of an issue for our fleet either. We use our fleet credits to purchase the doff from the fleet base and go from there. What ever ones we don't need, we sell on the Exchange and usually bring in some good EC.
But I think I am lucky to have dedicated players in my small fleet. Everyone hates to grind, but when you do it with your fleet mates its not so bad. Some of the other smaller fleets have people who just don't really care, or have lost that passion would could effect the outcome of the base.
Comments
It feels like people are trying again, not just sitting and hoping for it to be over.
Starts the Nerf countdown timer of doom...
***Disenchanted***
Real Join Date: Monday, 17 May 2010
That's the reason why two years ago I paid for a LTS -- it was the promise of a steady stream of Featured Episodes.
If I had known then that STO would devolve into an eastern grind, I would have stayed away.
STO still isn't very grindy outside of STFs and Starbase stuff. And the latter is now remedied more or less. :P
Anyone who says that STO is the grindiest game they've ever played needs to play DDO for a while. Or FFO. STF's will feel like fluffy kittens. :P
That's.... double what it used to be! :P Azure Nebula sucks.
I agree... Nukara was quite busy today a lot more than usual.
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
That's not too far off.. 500/toon per hour. Before the change I could avg 300-350/hr during the event times with fleet mark boost, incursion, invasion, outside nukara easy/medium. Rinse and Repeat. Today I got about 500-550/toon per hr depending on the team and only had two AFKers today but I'm sure that will change. I team up on Nukara to get done faster as well.
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
Indeed. We managed to get a full 20-man KDF Defense going and came out with 113 marks each. Everyone had a blast.
Now it feels like you are actually making progress instead of grinding your TRIBBLE off and getting nowhere.
Take back your home,end the grind!
Volunteer moderators policing the forums is like a mall cop trying to solve a murder.
wasnt it capped at 15 romulan marks before?
and 18 is still pitiful, especially for 3 scimitars
hopefully they will reevaluate the rewards on azure and others to make them more rewarding
i havent done a fleet action yet, but at least reading the patch notes it seems they are going the in right direction.
also would like to know why they didnt announce these changes before when IOR was nerfed. they said it would be months before changes took effect.
i just hope its not another knee jerk reaction, then in a few months they decide to nerf it again.
-General Chang
Good thing they took care of those vicious foundry "exploiters" who woulda made what, 800 in that same time period... Wonder how many plays those 2 hour masterpieces are getting.
The doors, Mister Scott!
I don't think sarcasm comes across without the proper emoticon ... :P
+1
I also have done my daily dil cap on one char in this 4h timeframe and i had time to get some accolades on defera too. I'm starting to think to an ideal run where you could earn 1k fleetmarks in 1h-1h30, depending on your gaming abilities, during the mark event, with a mix of starbase incursion, colony invasion, nukara and defera (hards/meds), and a dedicated 5 men team.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
Makes 0 difference to me since they killed off small fleets. But then I'm also totally boycotting the game until I see an improvement in Systems balancing, QA and communication.
Thats not even anywhere near the worst of it have you forgotten that they left a completely game breaking pathing bug for a whole week on Holodeck. The pathing bug made all STF ground missions impossible, wrecked about 40% of all episode missions including the starter missions for the Federation.
End-Game content and introductory content both borked for 7 days... how many first time players logged on during those days and immediatly thought: "This company can't even get their opening content working, TRIBBLE this"... beggers belief. It also underlines a subtlety here, Stahl talks about growth and yet they left the first mission in the game broken for a whole week, yet a ship for VA's (i.e. stable customers) is fixed almost immediatly, to me that says they are more interested in sucking the money out of the wallets of the players who are LTS or Gold and not all that worried about new players...
Having said all this it is good that they have applied a fix to an extremely expensive product in a small time period, it's just a shame that they have been inconsistent in doing so with other far more gamebreaking bugs in the past and it's also a shame they it's partly because of the pressure we have exerted the past week that they have done so.
#2311#2700#2316#2500
Yeahhhhh no. I don't believe that is all of what was changed.
I've been complaining about how those missions are broke and bugged for months. The bugs show a level of contempt for new players that is appalling. "Suffer through this, and give us your money."
They won't give a hoot about "new customers" until they realize they've run off all the paying customers and no one is logging on.
I hope someone was there to take a picture .
I'm honestly wondering how you seem to think that the current situation where five dedicated people can generate literally thousands of marks during a bonus hour means that small fleets are dead.
Are they still majorly screwed by inherent design flaws in the starbase system? Absofrakkinglutely.
Are they incapable of making progress at all? Not in the least.
If you have 5 ppl who can continuously be online at the same time then you might be right .
The beauty of the wrapper mission was that you could log in at your convenience , not at the convenience of 4 more ppl .
The larger the fleet the more chance there is that someone from your fleet will be online .
Sadly the opposite is quite true as well .
You don't need to have them on concurrently. During bonus hour, with a boost, a disciplined player is able to bring in about 1k marks, plus or minus a few hundred depending on length of matches and outcomes.
Even without the bonus hour, or boost, you're still talking several hundred marks per player for that hour of playtime.
think you for got to add to grind tribbles
i know wot mean ive respec all 4 of my toons in the past 10 days with the dilith ive been grinding just for somthing diffrent to do
i would love to know are cryptic even looking in sorting out AFKers in team missions or are there ignoreing it.
Even better I hope someone lost his/her job over it. Better believe if I apologized to a customer and 48 hours later the customer was dealing with another defective product caused by the same core issue (*) head would roll.
(*) in this case, lack of testing on a live production build. Again... it is possible that this was tested in-house on the ultra-smooth ultra-tuned Development Shard... and it failed on the "production" shard. The problem could be as simple as that. Somewhere along the line the two shards diverged code-wise... what works in the back office doesn't work "on the street." Even so, the ship should have hit Tribble for a few hours at least. No more excuses after this though! I expect cash-store items to work flawlessly.
Not disagreeing with the sentiment, but the Kumari is far from the only C-store (or Lobi) ship to go live with serious issues.
Vesta hangar cooldown?
Armitage unable to slot entire weapons categories?
Recluse launching stupidly bugged amounts of fighters?
And that's just off the top of my head...
It all goes back to the "rush to market" development pattern. Tribble does allow for them to test, but not when you only give 48 hrs to test all that was in the patch and fail to heed the feedback.
I know about this first hand as my job depends on "getting it right the first time".
If anyone casues an "outage" and does not learn from that and repeats it, then they need more training in QA and customer care or given a box to load their personal items in.
There is no excuse for a lack of QA! Even it does delay something!
"If what you produce is defective, then rushing it to market will not generate the result you want unless the result you want is failure!" ~ Zeus 02/22/2013
PWE/Crytpic Why do you repeat the same mistakes?
PWE/Crytpic Why do you NOT listen to your Customers?
PWE/Cryptic Stop the PUBAR, Bring back the FUN!
PUBAR = Patched Up Beyond All Recognition
Zeus
Fleet Marks are not the sole issue with small fleets, here is a list of other issues:
Dilithium grind
Doff Grind
EC Grind
Lack of supply in players willing to join a T1, T2 or even T3 fleet.
I have at various times during Season 7 attempted to resurrect my fleet, which was killed off due to people leaving the game or moving to bigger fleets as a result of Season 7 changes. However I have met with no success at all in garnering interest mainly because of the final issue in the list, so no for me at the moment the change in Fleet Mark volume makes no difference to my particular predicament.
Whilst I made the point that the Season 7 changes killed a number small fleets off, I did not say that the changes made in the past few days to Fleet Marks would not benefit those small fleets that still have a core membership of 5 or more players in-tact. I merely stated that it did not benefit my fleet in any way, or any other small fleet that lost nearly all of it's players as a result of the changes in Season 7.
Maybe I should hone my wording for you "for small fleets that were killed off by the Season 7 changes"
#2311#2700#2316#2500
As a Fleet admiral of a small fleet, I have to agree with this statement. In 2 hours I did 4 Colony invasions, 2 No wins, 2 FFA's and acquired approx 500 fleet marks. There were 3 of us collecting fleet marks to start our embassy upgrade and we were able to get the fleet marks we needed that would have taken at least a few days. We normally have 5 people online every night.
I have to say that I am happy with the Fleet Mark increases. It is definitely making things easier for us.
Follow me on Twitter: @ZEFilms_STO
1) Develop good code
2) Test internally on Alpha platform
3) Take Alpha test results and correct code
4) Repeat Alpha test until all errors found are corrected.
5) Release to Beta test with select testers from customer base
6) Take Beta test results and correct code
7) Repeat Beta test until all errors found are corrected
8) Release code to customers knowing you have done all that is possible to protect your customers and the Company.
9) Roll back to previous code if any more errors show up and repeat Step 2 thru 8
That is QA and the proper way to protect your customers and keep the Company profits and reputation safe!
Zeus
I also agree with these to a point. The Dilithium grind works hand in hand with the lack of players portion. Obviously the less amount of player you have, the harder for the dililthium contributions will be. Dilithium, imo, is actually not that hard to get now, but its more the cap of refining that is more of the issue. My fleet and I do so many STF's together that we could easily get 20k of dil in a night each. If 5 people are online stead each night, and you could refined all 20k in a night instead of 8k, then projects could be finished faster.
Doff grind isn't that big of an issue for our fleet either. We use our fleet credits to purchase the doff from the fleet base and go from there. What ever ones we don't need, we sell on the Exchange and usually bring in some good EC.
But I think I am lucky to have dedicated players in my small fleet. Everyone hates to grind, but when you do it with your fleet mates its not so bad. Some of the other smaller fleets have people who just don't really care, or have lost that passion would could effect the outcome of the base.
Follow me on Twitter: @ZEFilms_STO