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Reassign underperforming officers needs to be tweaked
lucho80
Member Posts: 6,600 Bug Hunter
Hi:
Ever since Season 7 started and the blue to purple reassign underperforming officers assignment's dilithium price got hiked up to 5000 dil, people lost any motivation to turn in blue doffs for purple ones. In its present state, the assignment is useless. It needs one of the following tweaks.
1) Guarantee doffs with the Resolve trait since the dil plus potential EC lost on not selling the blue doffs is so high (750,000-5,000,000 depending on the mix of doffs)
2) Lower the dil cost back down to something much more reasonable.
Ever since Season 7 started and the blue to purple reassign underperforming officers assignment's dilithium price got hiked up to 5000 dil, people lost any motivation to turn in blue doffs for purple ones. In its present state, the assignment is useless. It needs one of the following tweaks.
1) Guarantee doffs with the Resolve trait since the dil plus potential EC lost on not selling the blue doffs is so high (750,000-5,000,000 depending on the mix of doffs)
2) Lower the dil cost back down to something much more reasonable.
Post edited by lucho80 on
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My character Tsin'xing
How?
It costs 62.5% of a day's refining to convert 5 blues into one purple. I won't even go into the inefficiencies caused by the RNG and this "cost"...
Let's stick with this one situation. A decent DOffer can get 10 blues/day without breaking much sweat.
Day 1: spend 62.5% of dilithium income on converting 5 of the blues away. 5 leftover, 37.5% dil.
Day 2: spend 125% of dilithium income (aka reserves from day 1), convert the 10 new ones. Still 5 leftovers, 12.5% of a day's dilithium leftover...
Day 3: Can't afford another 125% of dilithium spending. Convert 5 of the 10, up to 10 blues in the backlog. And this is doing nothing but spending Dil on DOffing...
Therefore, IMO, it's not getting blues out of the system as efficiently as it should. If the "hardcore" DOffers backlog 10-15 blues a week diverting their entire dilithium income to DOffing only, there might be a problem...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
The costs actually make a lot of sense when you compare them to the costs to buy Doffs from Ferra. (500/2500/5000 and 1000/6000/12000)
If you choose to compact all your doffs, that's your problem. I see no reason why Cryptic should cater to you. In fact... people who were compacting everything are the reason the costs were increased.... You don't really think Cryptic will decrease them just because you can't afford to compact everything?
My character Tsin'xing
The day that change happened was the day I pretty much stopped upgrading them like that/using that 'feature'. Now-a-days, my 'regular' duty officers seem to consist more of Delta Quadrant species than Federation/Klingon/Romulan ones...
Seriously... free purples = not gonna happen...
My character Tsin'xing
Fully agree here... the doff you get shouldn't be random
If i give 5 blue security doff i should get a purple security doff
If i give 2 securuty, 2 biologist and 1 trader, then my chances should be 40% of getting a security, 40% of getting a biologist, and 20% of getting a trader
In every place,
The deeds of men remain the same..."
IMHO i don't think that cryptic will change the price, this is a long standing issue among DOFFers(cryptic overreacted a bit when they introduced the dilithium cost), but something has to be done, even if the System just upgrade the profession of the first dropped DOFF (blue security + 4 randoms? -> purple security with random chance to get resolve, 5 blue secuirty -> purple DOFF with guranteed resolve) so giving us our choice of DOFF we will get!
That isn't to say 6,000 and 12,000 are accurate values for the doffs. I don't know about others but I've never bought one single doff from Ferra. And remember those are for doffs you select yourself, not randoms. A random purple would be worth even less.
Maybe 5 freely-selectable blues for one random purple would be worth it on average (assuming of course that you pick only the cheapest blues to trade, or bound ones), if there was no dil cost. Maybe. But I wouldn't pay 5,000 dil for a random purple even if it didn't eat 5 blues along with it.
As it is, junk blues are best downgraded into whites or used in officer exchange. An officer exchange with a blue + 1 crit trait gives about 1 in 5 chance of a purple. Just like an upgrade, but you'll also get blues or greens for the other 4 that didn't crit and there is no dil cost.
And the game is full of "free" purples, it happens every day.
Truthfully, I could see them maybe halving the current cost.
Heretic's stated purpose behind adding this feature was to give people a use for doffs they would otherwise have to sell or dismiss. And quite frankly.... compacting 5 "worthless" biologists to get another "worthless" biologist seems fair to me....
I forget whether it was Heretic or Borticus who mentioned that Doff missions don't have code for looking at the stats of the doffs you put in when generating results. It's more of a "can this be slotted? {yes/no}" then it calculates % for success, etc... the routine for generating output is completely seperate from that. IIRC it did once get mentioned that he could reasonably easily make clones that, for example, required tactical doffs as inputs, and gave a tactical doff.
My character Tsin'xing
But you really should have some say over what department DOFF the grinder is going to spit back at you. At least let me narrow it down to "engineering" or "medical" or whatever.
Hell, I'd even accept a compromise of only letting you upgrade things within their own group. E.G. throw in five green medical DOFFS only, to get a blue Medical DOFF.
By the time you hit that sixth blue chef after putting in three security officers and two projectile officers your enthusiasm for continuing this process is shot to hell.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
You laugh, we profit.:D
As for Resolve... At present it has something like a 50% chance. It would actually be bad to make it 100% since that would rule out Feds getting Xindi Doffs.
My character Tsin'xing
With all the blue junk even this would be a major improvement.
I don't want free purples, but I do want to get DOFFs from the same branch, only better. Like if I put in 5 Diplomats, I'll get 1 diplomat of the next grade, 5 Quartersmasters for 1 next tier Quartermaster.... and let me get to select from a pool of randomly chosen purple QMs. Throwing away 5 pretty decent QMs for 1 purple who has traits that conflict with eachother and likely create a Disaster/Failure more likely to happen just drive me up the wall.
It's 5k Dilithium, very easy to get during a day, but the cap being 8k refined makes it more of a hassle than it's worth.
the problem is if they did it this way is it would make targeting the ultra-rares and getting them to drop easy, so they would have to remove them from dropping from the mission.
Or, make it out of 6 chance. I reassign 5 of the above, 4 sec, 1 sci, and I get a 4 out of 6 chance for a sec type, and a 1 out of 6 chance for a sci, with a 1 out of 6 chance for a wildcard, one of any type. That would give a reasonable chance of getting something back in the same fields, but also a chance that one of your preferred requests isn't available, and you get whoever is available.
-- Smoov
This would ruin it for me. I sell the useful categories and grind my blue/green chefs and bartenders into food. If I could only get back chefs and bartenders I'd never use it again.
Still, as it stands I find it very useful however the code is wonky where it relates to bound doffs. White and green bound doffs cannot be used. Bound blues can. Why?
Also on the cost, here's how I view it. right now 1k dil turned into uncomon unreps sells for 124k EC. thus 5 sell for 600k
turning 5 TRIBBLE blues (valued 80k to 110k each) into a purple and selling it for 1m gives a profit of very close but a bit below the value of the unreps. If you get lucky it is higher. And I have been doing this for a while. You can also get screwed and end up with something only worth 400k and actually lose both EC and dil. But then again I also sold one for 20m. Over more than 200 purple doff sales I've turned a profit.
If they reduce the price they shouldn't reduce it too much.
As for resolve... No, never. Purple doffs don't exists solely for the chance to craft consoles and they should never alter an entire system just around one tiny portion of the process like that. Far better would be to add a new officer exchange with a race that runs an 80% chance for resolve as the first trait.
Perhaps it could be done in the departments. Use the officer at the academy, and you have the chance to get anything. Use the officer in, say, engineering, and you have an increased chance to get an engineer category.
Giving us the choice of both, would probably make everyone happy...
(well, ok, almost everyone... seems some of us are never happy no matter what
-- Smoov
Other than that I do find it useless as an upgrade system. I do think it needs looking at again either for the rewards or the cost.
Nothing more left to say.
The latter, or they'll break also the Exchange with a flood of Resolve doffs that will make again more convenient to simply buy them with ECs.
Just like it is now, there is no reason to waste outrageous quantity of gold on random TRIBBLE while we can get exactly what we want with an over-inflated currency that need some serious sinking.
Also there is no need to complicate matter more while the problem is simple: cost is too high, please reduce it.
There has to be a cost, but this is simply too much it breaks the feature.
The doff system as a whole got scammed because of it, the ability to upgrade doffs via doffing itself is lost.
It is not true there was not a cost: time was the cost. It needed time to get purple, a lot of to make enough of them.
You can have enough whites to make a few green each day, but it takes days to have enough to have a single purple.
And you cannot simply turn in all the doffs for a few purple, better say a few copies of the same, to end up with an empty roster and no doffing capability for days again.
(you can't run them all with a few purple Biologist and Research Lab Scientist, given the randomness of the TRIBBLE you receive, always the same even with disaster traits)
Just keep in mind the rate for the exchange white/purple is still 125/1.
And it take many days to make that quantity.
Now multiply that for 100 roster slots (at least)
and add to that the fact you are wanting to keep many green (at least) to continue doffing in the meanwhile, thus slowing the pace even more.
And you now see there WAS a cost, just and fair, to upgrade doffs, time.
And we read all over the place that time is considered by devs like a sort of currency for which
"rewards are attributed related to game time with costant checking and calculating to adjust" and all that jazz.
I think several time spent on doffing should be enough to have your doffs upgraded with no any more cost other than the time you devoted to the game.
I play by a year now, with a lot of doffing, and it's not like I had a full roster of purple before the change: I had only a couple, random received
(since seeing random ones were TRIBBLE not worth 5 blues alone) .
So I am never been a "compactor". So why did I got this treatment?
Maybe you should have considered more precise intervention such as limiting the quantity of doffs you can turn in per time.
This could have been easily achieved by making the assignment recharge every 24 hours, cooling it down just like the recruitment ones to prevent misuse.
But no, this would have limited the dilithium sink capacity of the move. Like not enough were coming with the Fleet system. A shame.
Facts make us right, just right now the feature is abandones because unconvenient to say the least.
SO unless this was intentional it has to be changed back.
Problem is by that time it's been long clear it was intentional,
considering the concomitance of the fleet system: now fleets are your supposed source of purple.
So you basically got 3 pidgeons with a rock with
(a) forcing people to burn massive quantity of doffs in the fever minutes before the update short before they will become valuable (as contributions to fleets) and sold with money.
(b) give importance to the fleet as a source of doffs in the simplest, dumbest way possible - eliminating doffing itself from the list.
(c) taking away just more dilithium in the process thanks to those that seem to don't know what dilithium is for (I wouldn't want to be in their place when they'll discover)
So a long anticipated, promoted, beloved, successful and celebrated system - Doff system - has been basically destroyed on the altar of a new one - the Fleet one.
Which makes me wonder and fear for what will happen to the Fleet system itself the next round...
Why you cannot simply integrate the systems you add thinking about compatibility?
Why you broke existing content to add new, and repeat?
Ah, yeah, it cost so much less work and rewards more. Why bother? It's not like this community (read: costumers) is so full of hatred...
Too long, reduced down: the feature is broken by excessive cost: reduce them. Lower the greed by some degree.
The game has already enough (read: too much) dilithium sinks. No need for adding to the doff system too.
You could have saved the elargition of dilithium rewarded by the Mine (and replaced with something related to development, dunno, special doffs were enough) if you had not took too many.
Dilithium cost of doff exchange has to be lowered back to reasonable amounts, near the original amount.
This is what my sig stands for (and will remain until that day).
If it HAD to cost dil I could atleast go for that BUT refined ore NEVER. much better ways to get the doffs you need than doing it this way and spending your hard earned refined dil
the current dil costs are just plain nuts
My character Tsin'xing
Increasing the cost by a factor of 5 seemed reasonable to you?
I personally think that halving the current cost would be reasonable, but less than that would be too little cost.
My character Tsin'xing