How about getting a few more people in the fleet to contribute so you do not have to do 600+ doffs a day? Or are you running a fleet solo and looking to make T5 all by your lonesome? Thats a serious question btw. I myself do not understand why someone would want to do a whole fleet and spend everyday grinding to upgrade it solo. just 10 people makes that 600 doffs just 60 each so the math screams group effort for the reward. Also having more than yourself in the fleet you get more to help grind for fleet contributions and have time to actualy do something for fun.
we have 120+ active players in our fleet. Adding anymore will cause a morale issue due to competition for fleet credits.
The reason why I open so many doff packs, is because we typically fall 60 short of the 90 medical and 90 security doffs we need each day. If it wasn't for this imbalance I wouldn't care.
If we added another 200 people to the roster, we would likely be able to meet the medical and security doff needs but will have overages in all other areas. People would leave the fleet because they are competing with the rest of the fleet for credits.
Right now at our size we are at equilibrium, with starbase requirements being met through normal gameplay, except for medical and security doffs.
Tying this back into the original subject. The mailbox was the best place to store excess doffs being generated by trying to meet the ridiculous demand of medical/security doffs. And yes I was using every reasonable way to rid myself of excess doffs. However it is no longer feasible to transfer large amounts of doffs between toons to share amongst multiple fleets or sell on the exchange
I suppose if/when they make I so instead of say, 90 sci and 90 med that it's just 180 sci or med that'll fix that issue, though the 100 limit is still an annoyance.
oh god damn it cryptic!
how am i supposed to store all those unemployed Bridge Officers now?
i already have 10 or 20 BOffs clocking up inventory slots on every single char that i dont want to dismiss.
if i at least could save them inside the Bank it would not be a problem (i bought all the bank + inventory slots, have plenty of empty slots to work with. but they can't be stored in the Bank!!! can't even move the BOffs inside the inventory)
i cant believe nobody is making a big deal about this..
i currently have about 200+ items for sale on the exchange..
i have 30+ on about 7 chars..
some are loot items, some are contraband i sell 5 at a time to the dumb people the cant search lowest price per unit and buy mine at a higher cost..
sometimes they expire.. i usually just throw them back up..
if i lose these items i will be really angry, as they are valuable..
[12:35] Vessel Two of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 225232 (271723) Plasma Damage to you with Plasma Lance.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
In this particular situation, can we please get a dev response on what happens with exchange items if we've 100 items in our bin already? What about multiple toons? I have several all with various expired excchange items that my main toon can't see unless I log on to them - do those count towards the limit?
I wish the devs were more honest with some of the patches they put in. I have a list of about 3-4 fixes they have put in since season 7 and not published. Some of them, I do not care for. For example when they changed it so that when you cancel an assignment, it defaults back to the first running assignment on the list instead of the last one as before. That particular one has caused me to unintendedly cancel the wrong assignment more than once when I want to cancel multiples. Makes no sense to point back to the assignment that is about to finish. Dear devs, I know some changes you do not put in your patch notes because you think people don't give a damn about them, but we do.
I wish the devs were more honest with some of the patches they put in. I have a list of about 3-4 fixes they have put in since season 7 and not published. Some of them, I do not care for. For example when they changed it so that when you cancel an assignment, it defaults back to the first running assignment on the list instead of the last one as before. That particular one has caused me to unintendedly cancel the wrong assignment more than once when I want to cancel multiples. Makes no sense to point back to the assignment that is about to finish. Dear devs, I know some changes you do not put in your patch notes because you think people don't give a damn about them, but we do.
did you add in mail not switching back to inbox after sending? thats super annoying for me now when I have to do lots of replies
my mail is full of doffs and boffs. they still better be there. the piles of sci and civi doffs I'm not too concerned with, but those boffs are there for when I need to retrain someone!
I used to just grind the white doffs to greens till cryptic made it WAY to expensive. So my mail full of doffs is cryptic's fault.
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
I am curious about how wide spread this problem is. Do we need a Hoarders: STO Edition?
Cryptic has created the problem with the fleet doffpack imbalances. For every 5 science doffboxes I open I'm going to get an average of 4 science doffs and 1 medical doff. Well I need 90 of each for my T5 science project on the starbase! So if I open up enough doffpacks to get the 90 medical doffs I need, I'm going to end up with hundreds of extra science doffs. Even if you're maxed out on doff slots you're going to get quickly overwhelmed. The only solutions are to dismiss them (wasteful) or find somewhere else to stash them until you need them (mailbox).
If Cryptic were to even up the doff ratios this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it's currently extremely frustrating when you need hundreds of doffs for your T5 projects.
It appears that there is now a limit of 100 items stored in your mailbox as attachments. This was not announced in any of the patch notes. Items stored in your mailbox before LoR don't seem to count towards the limit, and one mail with 5 attachments counts as 5/100. 20 mails with 5 attachments each will take you to the limit.
This is a "feature" in neverwinter as well, and it was imported to STO. I really hope it was an accident, or at least something the devs will reconsider. I can't comment as to whether it's an appropriate limit on neverwinter, but there are myriad reasons why it's inappropriate for STO.
The biggest problem is Duty Officers. There is no way to store them besides putting them in the mail. 100 is simply way to low of a limit to be able to effectively manage a tier 4 starbase that consumes 540 doffs/day (90 from each of six specialties). Anyone trying to manage a small fleet is going to be totally screwed by this change.
Additionally, what will happen to items that expire from the exchange? will they just disappear into nothingness if you've reached your 100 item limit? I anticipate a lot of player anger when their high-priced lockbox ships disappear without warning.
It also opens a pandora's box of possibilities for trolling, which I won't discuss any further.
Finally, the only reason I can think of for why this would have been done is to reduce server load. But the response from many of the players who had been extensively using mail will be to create an army of alt accounts, putting MORE strain on the server.
Please reconsider this foolish and crippling change.
EDIT (5/24/13 1:30PM PDT) Cryptic seems to be quietly ignoring this issue and hoping it will go away. I assure you that it will not. Players, please try to spread the word (and outrage) about this.
Cryptic: At least do us the courtesy of an official response to this issue on your own website or forums. Please clarify exactly what the limit is, and what happens when you go over the limit. There are many questions still left unanswered.
Is the limit per character or per account?
If we reach the limit, will we receive a notification?
What happens if we try to send mail with attachments to ourselves after we've reached the limit?
What happens if someone else mails us an item after we've reached the limit?
What happens if we're less than 5 items below the limit, and try to mail ourselves 5 items?
What happens if an item listed on the exchange expires, and we're at the limit?
Do items stored in the mail before the change count towards the limit?
Is there a potential for losing items currently stored in our mail?
If not, what mechanisms do you have in place to keep items from disappearing into nothingness?
Do items mailed from Tribble (and not accessible from holodeck) count towards the limit?
What do we have to do to make items no longer count towards the limit? Is taking the items enough, or do we also have to delete the mail?
Finally, and most importantly, where are we supposed to store all our excess science and civilian duty officers?
Brandon has mentioned some sort of queue for undelivered mail. How will this work? Will we be notified that we have mail waiting to be delivered?
This is a major change to a core component of the game, and it demands an explanation. I assume you didn't include it in the patch notes because you considered it an "exploit", but you should at least acknowledge that reasonable minds may differ on that point. As far as I could tell, I wasn't breaking any rules by storing things in the mail. In fact, the mail system seemed to be designed for storing duty officers, and possibly other things too, because there was no other system for storing large numbers of duty officers.
In my view, making such a massive and disruptive change to the game under cover of darkness, without providing any warning, or details of how it works, is dishonest. The lack of an official response (other than the twitter post I linked above) makes it seem like you're trying to cover it up.
This is horribly unfair! I have a lot of items and DOFFs stored in mail. What I am supposed to do with them? I have already lost some items from Exchange Sales that expired. Cryptic needs to remove this mail attachment limit!
Well of the games I played they did have a limit on the mail and even how long it is stored, for example WoW after 30 days the mail is deleted along with all attachments. They do this precisely to stop the mail system being used as extra storage. Given that Cryptic charge for extra storage space it is suprising they didn't limit it earlier.
Saying that they do need to allow for the moving of DOFFs to the band or even being able to reararange them in your inventory.
Basically people are going to have to adapt and stop using it as free storage. However exchange mails should not count towards your limit for a while to let the system bed in and allow people to adapt to it.
I am in a small fleet and currently use my mailbox to store doffs. I buy 100+ from fleet stores each time a new project starts to be able to get the required combinations asked for. I then put the extras in the mail to go towards the next project.
If we can't store them in mail, then please create a storage place/area for these doffs. I can't afford, in-game to keep buying the officers and then trying to sell the extras every 20 hours or so.
Well, Cryptic are already selling DOFF crew extensions for Zen. Looks like it is time for them to start selling Mail extensions as well... the greedy ******** they are (auto-censored because I don't want to get banned, lol).
example- people that open 500 lock boxes have to store the stuff somewhere. Finite bank space, finite market slots, finite mail slots.
1) Work around it by making alts and fleets - mail cap fails its purpose, increase in lost item complaints to customer service (bound to happen)
2) People reduce the amount of boxes they purchase due to lack of space or lack of profit because exchange is flooded - mail cap works, reduced key sales cut profits
3) People limit the number of boxes they open daily until they have a place to sell or store it - (unlikely due to #1 but probably the best solution of the 3) key sales are more flat, exchange item prices lower over all including key prices, people buy less keys for EC gain, people encouraged to buy from exchange due to lower prices
Pretty much a lose/lose anyway you look at it.
As for the Doff imbalance the drop rates seem about to right to me... prolly use a little tweaking. It's the Doff sink (starbase) that is the biggest problem.
I am wondering if this isn't something that accidentally snuck over from NW, which simply does not work in STO due to the need to file and process 1080 doffs a day. You can't even buy space for that kind of thing. At this point we're forced to resort to creating mule accounts JUST to process this, which undoubtedly has even more overhead than a textless mail storing maybe 10 numbers in it, since no item or doff in STO has unique attributes to be recorded.
Well, I just lost a few items with the new update. The Exchange mailed me saying it was returning items that didn't sell... and no items were attached.
I lost a LOT of potential EC because of this, when (had I known this was going into effect) I could have sold them for half at a vendor.
This conduct on the part of Cryptic/PWE is very bad faith. You don't make changes and count any coincidental consequences as justified attrition without making it up to the customers. Especially when no mention of the change is announced ahead of time to allow for customers to set things in order to prevent losses.
This change is also a bit under-handed, as well, since it is not mentioned at all in the update notes.
Just a matter of time b4 u get accused of trolling a thread u made and/or flaming same thread. Nobody can take a joke anymore. Who's snarky and sarcastic? 99.9% of us on here!
Heh, it's become easy for me to keep a sense of humor, my game was broken 6 weeks a go by a patch and the reply to my submitted ticket was along the lines of " welcome to the que, your issue will be dealt with when it's your turn, and after the barrage of LoR issues are dealth with".
Yup, still waiting for support to get me back up and running, while reading all the goodies LoR brings to the game and deletes over a years worth of progress on my toons.
i have multiple characters and often i have over 100 items in the exchange from those.
if they all expire.. which a lot do.. i will lose them?
[12:35] Vessel Two of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 225232 (271723) Plasma Damage to you with Plasma Lance.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
this was a sneaky and really crappy thing to implement with no warning or explanation.
[12:35] Vessel Two of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 225232 (271723) Plasma Damage to you with Plasma Lance.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Comments
we have 120+ active players in our fleet. Adding anymore will cause a morale issue due to competition for fleet credits.
The reason why I open so many doff packs, is because we typically fall 60 short of the 90 medical and 90 security doffs we need each day. If it wasn't for this imbalance I wouldn't care.
If we added another 200 people to the roster, we would likely be able to meet the medical and security doff needs but will have overages in all other areas. People would leave the fleet because they are competing with the rest of the fleet for credits.
Right now at our size we are at equilibrium, with starbase requirements being met through normal gameplay, except for medical and security doffs.
Tying this back into the original subject. The mailbox was the best place to store excess doffs being generated by trying to meet the ridiculous demand of medical/security doffs. And yes I was using every reasonable way to rid myself of excess doffs. However it is no longer feasible to transfer large amounts of doffs between toons to share amongst multiple fleets or sell on the exchange
My STOwiki page | Reachable in-game @PhyrexianHero
Fed Armada: Section 31 (level 730, 2700+ members)
KDF Armada: Klingon Intelligence (level 699, 2100+ members)
how am i supposed to store all those unemployed Bridge Officers now?
i already have 10 or 20 BOffs clocking up inventory slots on every single char that i dont want to dismiss.
if i at least could save them inside the Bank it would not be a problem (i bought all the bank + inventory slots, have plenty of empty slots to work with. but they can't be stored in the Bank!!! can't even move the BOffs inside the inventory)
i currently have about 200+ items for sale on the exchange..
i have 30+ on about 7 chars..
some are loot items, some are contraband i sell 5 at a time to the dumb people the cant search lowest price per unit and buy mine at a higher cost..
sometimes they expire.. i usually just throw them back up..
if i lose these items i will be really angry, as they are valuable..
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Learn to patch note please.
Oh..they know how to patch note..they were just too cowardly to publicise this decision and rightly take the complaints made by players
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did you add in mail not switching back to inbox after sending? thats super annoying for me now when I have to do lots of replies
I wasted so many keys on those. I was hoping to get a Kim or a Kourtney but only ended up with a ton of Khloes. I can't give those away for free.
I just delete the stuff that has zero value or when the inventory is full.
Peaceful exploration? I have a heavily armed ship and a phaser with a kill setting, how peaceful is that?
I used to just grind the white doffs to greens till cryptic made it WAY to expensive. So my mail full of doffs is cryptic's fault.
Cryptic has created the problem with the fleet doffpack imbalances. For every 5 science doffboxes I open I'm going to get an average of 4 science doffs and 1 medical doff. Well I need 90 of each for my T5 science project on the starbase! So if I open up enough doffpacks to get the 90 medical doffs I need, I'm going to end up with hundreds of extra science doffs. Even if you're maxed out on doff slots you're going to get quickly overwhelmed. The only solutions are to dismiss them (wasteful) or find somewhere else to stash them until you need them (mailbox).
If Cryptic were to even up the doff ratios this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it's currently extremely frustrating when you need hundreds of doffs for your T5 projects.
This is a "feature" in neverwinter as well, and it was imported to STO. I really hope it was an accident, or at least something the devs will reconsider. I can't comment as to whether it's an appropriate limit on neverwinter, but there are myriad reasons why it's inappropriate for STO.
EDIT: This is intentional. See the twitter conversation at https://twitter.com/trekonlinegame/status/337558776494321664
The biggest problem is Duty Officers. There is no way to store them besides putting them in the mail. 100 is simply way to low of a limit to be able to effectively manage a tier 4 starbase that consumes 540 doffs/day (90 from each of six specialties). Anyone trying to manage a small fleet is going to be totally screwed by this change.
Additionally, what will happen to items that expire from the exchange? will they just disappear into nothingness if you've reached your 100 item limit? I anticipate a lot of player anger when their high-priced lockbox ships disappear without warning.
It also opens a pandora's box of possibilities for trolling, which I won't discuss any further.
Finally, the only reason I can think of for why this would have been done is to reduce server load. But the response from many of the players who had been extensively using mail will be to create an army of alt accounts, putting MORE strain on the server.
Please reconsider this foolish and crippling change.
EDIT (5/24/13 1:30PM PDT) Cryptic seems to be quietly ignoring this issue and hoping it will go away. I assure you that it will not. Players, please try to spread the word (and outrage) about this.
Cryptic: At least do us the courtesy of an official response to this issue on your own website or forums. Please clarify exactly what the limit is, and what happens when you go over the limit. There are many questions still left unanswered.
Is the limit per character or per account?
If we reach the limit, will we receive a notification?
What happens if we try to send mail with attachments to ourselves after we've reached the limit?
What happens if someone else mails us an item after we've reached the limit?
What happens if we're less than 5 items below the limit, and try to mail ourselves 5 items?
What happens if an item listed on the exchange expires, and we're at the limit?
Do items stored in the mail before the change count towards the limit?
Is there a potential for losing items currently stored in our mail?
If not, what mechanisms do you have in place to keep items from disappearing into nothingness?
Do items mailed from Tribble (and not accessible from holodeck) count towards the limit?
What do we have to do to make items no longer count towards the limit? Is taking the items enough, or do we also have to delete the mail?
Finally, and most importantly, where are we supposed to store all our excess science and civilian duty officers?
Brandon has mentioned some sort of queue for undelivered mail. How will this work? Will we be notified that we have mail waiting to be delivered?
This is a major change to a core component of the game, and it demands an explanation. I assume you didn't include it in the patch notes because you considered it an "exploit", but you should at least acknowledge that reasonable minds may differ on that point. As far as I could tell, I wasn't breaking any rules by storing things in the mail. In fact, the mail system seemed to be designed for storing duty officers, and possibly other things too, because there was no other system for storing large numbers of duty officers.
In my view, making such a massive and disruptive change to the game under cover of darkness, without providing any warning, or details of how it works, is dishonest. The lack of an official response (other than the twitter post I linked above) makes it seem like you're trying to cover it up.
CRUISERS NEED A 206% HULL BUFF
Saying that they do need to allow for the moving of DOFFs to the band or even being able to reararange them in your inventory.
Basically people are going to have to adapt and stop using it as free storage. However exchange mails should not count towards your limit for a while to let the system bed in and allow people to adapt to it.
If we can't store them in mail, then please create a storage place/area for these doffs. I can't afford, in-game to keep buying the officers and then trying to sell the extras every 20 hours or so.
example- people that open 500 lock boxes have to store the stuff somewhere. Finite bank space, finite market slots, finite mail slots.
1) Work around it by making alts and fleets - mail cap fails its purpose, increase in lost item complaints to customer service (bound to happen)
2) People reduce the amount of boxes they purchase due to lack of space or lack of profit because exchange is flooded - mail cap works, reduced key sales cut profits
3) People limit the number of boxes they open daily until they have a place to sell or store it - (unlikely due to #1 but probably the best solution of the 3) key sales are more flat, exchange item prices lower over all including key prices, people buy less keys for EC gain, people encouraged to buy from exchange due to lower prices
Pretty much a lose/lose anyway you look at it.
As for the Doff imbalance the drop rates seem about to right to me... prolly use a little tweaking. It's the Doff sink (starbase) that is the biggest problem.
https://youtube.com/channel/UCJZ5FBJ9bFaZ6yAFiNpZiRQ/featured?view_as=subscriber
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/CaptainCidStorm
Better still, the cryptic store still shows the zen on my account, but no toons.
Guess I can't complain, my forum account hasn't been banned yet.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
I lost a LOT of potential EC because of this, when (had I known this was going into effect) I could have sold them for half at a vendor.
This conduct on the part of Cryptic/PWE is very bad faith. You don't make changes and count any coincidental consequences as justified attrition without making it up to the customers. Especially when no mention of the change is announced ahead of time to allow for customers to set things in order to prevent losses.
This change is also a bit under-handed, as well, since it is not mentioned at all in the update notes.
Heh, it's become easy for me to keep a sense of humor, my game was broken 6 weeks a go by a patch and the reply to my submitted ticket was along the lines of " welcome to the que, your issue will be dealt with when it's your turn, and after the barrage of LoR issues are dealth with".
Yup, still waiting for support to get me back up and running, while reading all the goodies LoR brings to the game and deletes over a years worth of progress on my toons.
Good times.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
if they all expire.. which a lot do.. i will lose them?
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.