As a Manager deciding sales for a major chain in my past career I can tell you one thing for sure: consumers don't consider they are getting ANY kind of deal/benefit unless the discount is in the double digits.
Basic rule of thumb is sales start at bare minimum 10% - anything less in pointless as people preceive the opposite - that they are being ripped off.
So most sales actually begin at the 15% mark - like the Zen sales - more at the 20% mark like the ship sales.
I would strongly encourage Cryptic to get the discount above the single digit "it's worthless" threshold.
Bare minimum it should be 4% per tier for 12% total
However for maximum effect it shout be 5% per tier or 15% as people percieve 15% much higher - closer to 20 that 12% which is percieved as just barely above 10%
From the on-going outrage over the dilithium mine "discount" I would say it's more of a perception problem.
12% minumium would take some of this away- 15% would take almost all of it away.
In my opinion, the fleet engineering consoles are much stronger than the fleet science consoles. Stacking two fleet engineering consoles gives you the bonus of an extra regular console.
1. You can get +80 all damage resistance rating and +80% turn rate from
[Enhanced Neutronium Alloy Mk XI [+Turn]]x4
To get the same bonus from regular engineering consoles, you would need
Four fleet engineering consoles give the same bonus as six regular engineering consoles.
The only consoles sold at the dilithium mine are neutronium, monotanium, and RCS accelerators; this seems like a tacit acknowledgment by the devs that few players use any other engineering console. I'm surprised that the dilithium mine has neutronium consoles, considering that the embassy does not have field generators. Recall that Geko said he did not want to raise the survivability of every ship in the game:
I dunno...we haven't seen the actual 'dilithium dailies' and how much those give yet, along with if there is another DOFF mission(s) (there's supposed to be more than just those 2 I think).
There could be several DOFF missions we could be looking at doing and a couple dil dailies on top of that.
Add in the pretty good amounts of Trade and Development xp you can get over time, and eventually you can do DOFF turn ins for even more guaranteed FMs.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
I think the new fleet holding looks good. Here are the pros/cons I saw.
Pros:
1. +Turn EVERYTHING!!!! My cruiser shall now turn like a ballerina.
2. Really like the new consoles. They'll make it a lot easier for people to pick up some good end game consoles if they join fleets which I think is the purpose of fleet gear.
3. The small things - like the pictures/diagrams of Scimitars on the 2nd floor central column.
4. Lots of cool new ways to get dil (any word on how much dil the Rich Dilithium mining daily will turn back; wasn't live yet when I was on on Friday and Saturday).
5. The map looks awesome (thanks, Taco/other people who helped); one bug: when I get close to the mine in the space map, the map shows up as a targetable object called "Object 1".
6. Dil reduction cost in dil store is nice, especially for carrier captains
Cons:
1. This doesn't help smaller fleets as much as billed; to make the dil reduction worth it (aka to break even given the dil cost of making the mine) you would need a 30% dil discount - you get a 9% one. The addition of new Dil missions help to offset that, but it still isn't going to be as helpful as it could be for small fleets.
2. The crits on the doff missions don't seem to really be in line with other crits. Settle colonists gives more on crit than the "rich" dil doff mission and it returns the same amount on normal success.
3. Why are these ground maps not on Foundry yet??????? They would be so awesome!!! (Taco, go talk to crypticfrost; I want lots of crystals and rock formations like these)
4. No [Trans] proc on any singularity core and very limited selection on warp cores. I want a transwarp reduction, not a .01% boost to my slipstream speed.
5. The map is still called "Player_Dilithium_Mine_Base_01" or something like that
The discounts given by this holding are beyond hideous Salami. With the current numbers, a fleet is going to have to build an entire T5 starbase, an full Embassy and another 3-4 holdings priced identically to an Embassy just to recoup the investment they made on the dilithium mine.
This sums it up perfectly for me. While I absolutely adore all the new shineys with this new holding, I think you've done a superb job on the cores, consoles and doff missions. Kudos to that.
It's just not what was advertised or promised to us. This holding will in no way at all help smaller fleets, it will barely make a dent in the dilithium costs for fleet holdings and overall it's not a discount until we've completed a few more holdings. We're talking minimum 1-2 years before the discount starts being even remotely worthwhile. Frankly that's just not good enough.
It feels like another embassy, with a different skin, and different toys. I'm completely fine with that, personally, but expect a fair amount of backlash if this goes live - because you promised to help smaller fleets and all you've done is shaft them again.
EDIT: Also, and I can't believe I forgot this. STOP KILLING THE DOFFING SYSTEM. Since Heretic left, you've done your best to ruin it. Charging stupid amounts of dilithium for upgrades angered a lot of people (myself included) and basically killed alt-doffing. Now you're charging 125,000 fleet credits for a purple doff (to put that into context, that's at least 100k dilithium PER doff. That's horrendous, nobody buys the fleet/embassy doffs because they're insanely overpriced and useless. Please reconsider...
A lot of small fleets don't WANT to be large fleets. My fleet is a friends and family fleet. I don't want to recruit strangers. My fleet will never be big, and I don't want it to be big. There are A LOT of fleets like mine, and the current system basically says, "Sorry, starbase advancement isn't for you."
Yes. And that makes complete sense to me. You want to run with only a small tight-nit group of people who are all working together and know each other personally. Then you say you also want the same stuff that bigger groups have managed to get by having 500 people working together to get it done as quickly as possible. You SHOULDN'T have access to the same things, in the same time frame, at a drastically reduced cost.
You've made your decision, you don't want to "play with strangers" and you don't want to be part of a large group - that's fine, but you can't expect to get the same rewards as the people who are willing.
*raises hand* I'm one of those people where fleetmarks are the main issue. I don't know how to get them efficiently and it's all I can do to get ONE of my fleet mates to play once every two weeks.
Learn to no-win-scenario.
Getting to wave 9 and leaving = around 2,000 marks split between the team (400 each) It's actually a little more than that, but I can't remember the exact numbers.
If you leave after wave 9, there's no cool down so you can just run it over and over again.
Or alternatively you could do the easier route and do Defari easy/medium/hards with a team of 5. Same outcome, slightly fewer marks and takes a bit longer but it's much easier to learn. Fleet marks really shouldn't be an issue now they've pumped them into pretty much all content.
Projects costing loads of dili to build up.
Projects costing doffz , well at least they are going to be class requirements, instead of profession requirements ...
Projects costing commodities ... right, fair enough of a EC sink for this ..
Projects costing fleetmarks ... right .. supposed currency for the projects ...
As for the big projects/upgrades costing dili ... right .. somewhat understandable, all projects costing dili ... really does not make sense, only works for the big fleets, really shafting the small ones ..
Upgrades using purple doffz, and only using the fleet stuff ... rename the embassy provisions to fleet provisions, and it starts making sense, and anybody can donate for those ... (still weird to have a fleet-credit sink in here tho... kinda counter productive)
As for the discount projects ... all discounts make sense in a way, except the fleet mark discount. Not really sure where it is going ...
Alot of the fleet holdings stuff does not really make all that much sense ...
The dilithium is what is really holding the small fleets back, as well as the earlier stuffy doff requirements .....
Cant we get a fleet trade project somewhere, just for fleetmarks & other marks ... so ALL fleets can contribute to their hearts content on that, give all their members fleet credits access , and help out the smaller fleets with requirements ...
Bottom lines .... LOOSE THE DILITHIUM from all the "normal" projects , keep that for the upgrades, items, provisions & item-stores ..... but do not limit fleets buildings with the dilithium wall, it's even worse than the doff-wall.
"Cant we get a fleet trade project somewhere, just for fleetmarks & other marks ... so ALL fleets can contribute to their hearts content on that, give all their members fleet credits access , and help out the smaller fleets with requirements ..."
Now there's a good idea. A fleet commodites exchange. That would help large fleet's with Fleet credit issues and help small fleets turn projects over. If I could "rent" day labor to ease out my Fleet Mark issue, then all is good. But that idea would take time to implement. A trade off in the short term is on each tiered completion, have a buyable for FC's extra discount bonus applied to all active SB projects. With each tier getting larger in both cost and discounts. Large fleets wouldn't have to buy that so as to keep FC production up. But they might so only have the discount applied to the SB projects and not the holdings.
As an Excelsior Captain, I would really like to see Fleet Warp Cores offer the [Trans] trans tag. Really, all my toons prefer [trans].
All the QSS tags are less desirable, especially since the LoR Nerf (Bug?) where QSS ends prematurely whenever you make a sector block jump. That's really annoying and I tend to lose so much QSS.
QSS buffs are further devalued since they don't seem to stack (Warp Core, Vesta set, and STF Engine buffs don't seem to help each other, or there's a hard floor on the CD).
You can find/contact me in game as @PatricianVetinari. Playing STO since Feb 2010.
As a small fleet leader on both sides (T4 Fed, T3 KDF; on a good day we have maybe half a dozen on Fed-side, can't remember when that happened last time on KDF-side) I feel that the Dilithium Mine gives us very little relief.
The changes to Doff contributions will be the bigger help for us. The reduction in dilithium costs is just too small (and considering that on Fed side the next sinks are the T5 projects and the still ongoing Embassy T2 upgrade).
The consoles... wow! Talk about power creep!
Armor with turn modifiers. RCS consoles with armor modifiers. Just about kills the market for corresponding normal consoles.
In my opinion, the fleet engineering consoles are much stronger than the fleet science consoles. Stacking two fleet engineering consoles gives you the bonus of an extra regular console.
1. You can get +80 all damage resistance rating and +80% turn rate from
[Enhanced Neutronium Alloy Mk XI [+Turn]]x4
To get the same bonus from regular engineering consoles, you would need
Four fleet engineering consoles give the same bonus as six regular engineering consoles.
The only consoles sold at the dilithium mine are neutronium, monotanium, and RCS accelerators; this seems like a tacit acknowledgment by the devs that few players use any other engineering console. I'm surprised that the dilithium mine has neutronium consoles, considering that the embassy does not have field generators. Recall that Geko said he did not want to raise the survivability of every ship in the game:
Many people don't even use any engineering consoles, but they do use the science ones. This may being at least some of the eng consoles back into rotation.
The consoles... wow! Talk about power creep!
Armor with turn modifiers. RCS consoles with armor modifiers. Just about kills the market for corresponding normal consoles.
Its not called power creep, its called advancement. You need to earn these so they should be better. I don't see too many complaints about the ruined market for Impulse Engines or Shields.
I like the consoles where they are. It would be nice to see one or two more buffs or different console types so there were a few more than the current (what is it, 6?) combinations.
Yes. And that makes complete sense to me. You want to run with only a small tight-nit group of people who are all working together and know each other personally. Then you say you also want the same stuff that bigger groups have managed to get by having 500 people working together to get it done as quickly as possible. You SHOULDN'T have access to the same things, in the same time frame, at a drastically reduced cost.
You've made your decision, you don't want to "play with strangers" and you don't want to be part of a large group - that's fine, but you can't expect to get the same rewards as the people who are willing.
Except you're missing the point. The members of my fleet ARE willing to work just as hard. Each single member of my fleet is willing to work just as hard as each single member of a 500 person fleet, yet it will take us far, far longer to get the same rewards they get for the same effort. The people in the 500 person fleet are actually getting more for less, and that's not fair.
It's a well crafted......SMOKESCREEN. It has it's own insane grinding, so it does not fulfill the purpose that we were told it would do. In order for it to have any benefit towards discounts, all of its projects need to be HALF OF THE STARBASE'S PROJECTS.
I dunno...we haven't seen the actual 'dilithium dailies' and how much those give yet, along with if there is another DOFF mission(s) (there's supposed to be more than just those 2 I think).
There could be several DOFF missions we could be looking at doing and a couple dil dailies on top of that.
Add in the pretty good amounts of Trade and Development xp you can get over time, and eventually you can do DOFF turn ins for even more guaranteed FMs.
Don't think anyone answered this. Just ran the actual mining dailies on Tribble. In their current state, there are three. One which unlocks at tier 2 of the mine, and has 5 sites you mine for a max of 200 each. Another unlucks at tier 3 and is the same thing, 5 sites, max of 200 each. Then there is the "rich" mining mission that is its own separate unlock. This is one mining mission down a really pretty cave. I scored about 730 or so, and got 198 dilithium. Not sure if that is a bug in the game or not. But grand total 2198. Add in the 750 from the doff mission, and we have a grand daily total of 2948. Given that's about 20 minutes of actual work, its not that bad, but putting in a whole separate unlock for a mission that gives 198 dilithium is not a good idea to me.
Also, you have to hunt for the mining sites, there were rough areas on the mini map, but you had to find the right crystal patch to mine.
The increase in discounts is still not enough. Furthermore, the way the discount scales up again penalizes the small fleets. Many small fleets will not have the resources to spend on getting up to the last tier of everything, so in order to benefit the small fleets, the discount should be front-loaded.
E.g.
Tier I - 10% discount
Tier II - 16% discount
Tier III - 20% discount
I know some out there will complain about tier III taking the most resources and giving the least incremental discount. But here's the thing. If you have the resources to do tier III, then you didn't need the discount anyway. The large fleets would do tier III even if it offered no incremental discount, they'd do it for the gear. And if I didn't think it wouldn't attract even more outrage from the large fleets, I'd propose even more front-loading of the discounts.
Saying you're helping the small fleets and then biasing that help towards the large fleets is just bad design.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Don't think anyone answered this. Just ran the actual mining dailies on Tribble. In their current state, there are three. One which unlocks at tier 2 of the mine, and has 5 sites you mine for a max of 200 each. Another unlucks at tier 3 and is the same thing, 5 sites, max of 200 each. Then there is the "rich" mining mission that is its own separate unlock. This is one mining mission down a really pretty cave. I scored about 730 or so, and got 198 dilithium. Not sure if that is a bug in the game or not. But grand total 2198. Add in the 750 from the doff mission, and we have a grand daily total of 2948. Given that's about 20 minutes of actual work, its not that bad, but putting in a whole separate unlock for a mission that gives 198 dilithium is not a good idea to me.
Also, you have to hunt for the mining sites, there were rough areas on the mini map, but you had to find the right crystal patch to mine.
Thank you for that to start with.
But while it's good the dailies are in now, most likely I would guess it's some bugs and errors in regards to the missions. Like only 198 dil from the 'rich' daily? That has to be an error considering it doesn't even equal 1/5 of the other dailies. I would guess that like a decimal point is off or something somewhere. (might be good to make a bug report on that). I would guess that something more reasonable would be like 1,980 should be the real number for the score you got.
Which about 2k by itself would be an excellent amount to get, but without totally destroying any actual usage of the really big daily you can get out of the tal shiar and dominion lockboxes.
Question, aside from the bugs, were you able to use your tricorder to search for them? That might make it easier.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
But while it's good the dailies are in now, most likely I would guess it's some bugs and errors in regards to the missions. Like only 198 dil from the 'rich' daily? That has to be an error considering it doesn't even equal 1/5 of the other dailies. I would guess that like a decimal point is off or something somewhere. (might be good to make a bug report on that). I would guess that something more reasonable would be like 1,980 should be the real number for the score you got.
Which about 2k by itself would be an excellent amount to get, but without totally destroying any actual usage of the really big daily you can get out of the tal shiar and dominion lockboxes.
Question, aside from the bugs, were you able to use your tricorder to search for them? That might make it easier.
Personally I've given up on bug reports, I posted in here that I thought it might be a bug, but the real issue is that they put it out there and didn't tell us what it should do. Sure, we can say that we think this should put out more dilithium, but since they never said, we can't tell. Since this wasn't in the patch notes, I'm sure that the only response we would get is the usual, we put this in the build,. but we're not ready with it, etc etc. Sorry, mini-rant over.
As for the tricorder, I actually didn't test that. When I next get the chance, I'll give it a shot, if I remember.
Don't think anyone answered this. Just ran the actual mining dailies on Tribble. In their current state, there are three. One which unlocks at tier 2 of the mine, and has 5 sites you mine for a max of 200 each. Another unlucks at tier 3 and is the same thing, 5 sites, max of 200 each. Then there is the "rich" mining mission that is its own separate unlock. This is one mining mission down a really pretty cave. I scored about 730 or so, and got 198 dilithium. Not sure if that is a bug in the game or not. But grand total 2198. Add in the 750 from the doff mission, and we have a grand daily total of 2948. Given that's about 20 minutes of actual work, its not that bad, but putting in a whole separate unlock for a mission that gives 198 dilithium is not a good idea to me.
Also, you have to hunt for the mining sites, there were rough areas on the mini map, but you had to find the right crystal patch to mine.
I ran them earlier today too, however you made a minor mistake. The doff assignment yields 750 ore on a 'crit' only, else it is 500. And while I haven't exactly tinkered with it to find out where exactly the best possible result ends up it most likely won't be above 50%. And keep in mind you can actually FAIL that assignment, too.
Another minor mistake mimey2 made. You assume higher tiers unlock more doff assignments. That is not entirely correct, I ran those assignments on a fully upgraded t3 mine. As far as I can tell the earlier assignments just get replaced. If that is intentional to prevent players from running too many of them, tough luck Cryptic. This is what is going to happen if they were actually worth running. People simply will ask for invites to the specific tier mines, slightly more complicated but players will do it just because they can.
That doesn't change that I don't perceive them as worth running, especially not worth trying to crit if I need a bunch of purple miners for them. Assume you purchase three purple miners for 375k fleet credits. A crit yields you 35 fleet marks = 1750 fleet credits & 6 dilithium mine provisions = 2400-4500 fleet credits. To break even on the spent fleet credits you would need to crit 60 to 90 times. If you use 5 miners to 'max out' your crit chance (because they are your only 3 crit doffs) that increases to 100-150 needed crits. Basicly a year worth running those assignment every day before you even start coming out of the red. And before any nitpickers chime in that there are two doff assignments that could crit, yes there are, but if you run them both at the same time you need more miners. Not to mention that at some point the dilithium mine provisions hit dimishing returns on their personal use value since a fully upgraded t3 mine doesn't need thousands of personal provision stocked.
Enough of the assignments, back to the daily missions.
As pointed out some (two) of the mission markers are misleading. And the mining on the normal dailies is even more boring than the ferengi mining. If I recall correctly the ferengi mining had the chance for particle traces to turn up as an additional reward, though I don't know for sure because it has been ages since I last run that mission - boooring.
And the rich mission HAS to be a bug. 198 ore for a special unlockable mission? I don't think so.
Last but not least, the exterior is dark. Dark as in starbase incursion without flashlight dark. Makes for very unsafe miner working conditions. I can make out details fine as long as I black-out my room but as soon as the evil evil sun (that is that barely contained nuclear reaction in our star system you NERDS!) dares to show at my window (yes... windows... I have them!) 'tis not so easy anymore.
This is what the Dilithium mine building should be like:
It's been long established that Dilithium is a key component to power systems, so in constructing the mine there should be a "build and Install Power Systems" project that requires some Dilithium, but only that 1 project and once.
Unfortunately one thing Cryptic seems completely unwilling to do is to design projects are real life. Yes Star Trek and STO are science fiction, but Star Trek has always had that "yup this could be real in xxxx years" Have the projects have a linear progression to them, for example:
Tier 1 requires 4 projects to complete before reaching Tier 2:
1) Survey surrounding areas for optimal dilithium concentration
2) Survey possible construction sites
3) Break ground on new Dilithium mine and refining installation
4) Construction of installation superstructure
Tier 1/Tier 2 Upgrade project
1) Complete Superstructure construction
Tier 2 would require 6 projects to be completed:
1) Prepare for subsystem assembly and installation
2) Install power systems
3) Install life support systems
4) Install Engineering subsystems
5) Install Medical/Science subsystems
6) Run diagnostics on Facility habitat and systems
Tier 2/3 Upgrade project
1) Transfer all operations to Facility
Tier 3 would require 12 projects to complete:
1) Complete interior crew quarters
2) Complete Medical bay and other facilities
3) Complete Science labs and other Facilities
4) Complete Mess hall and Recreation facilities
5) Complete Engineering Labs
6) Complete Mining facilities
7) Complete refining facilities
8) Complete transfer of Provisions to Facility
9) Complete transfer of Mining equipment
10) Complete transfer of refining Equipment
11) Complete transfer of facility command personnel
12) Complete transfer of mining personnel
Tier 3/4 upgrade project
1) Begin full scale mining and refining operations
Tier 4 The majority of gear and equipment should be unlocked at tier 4 which would be the highest tier
1) Begin construction on Advanced R&D facilities
2) Complete construction of R&D facilities
3) begin full scale R&D
4) Test run of R&D prototypes
5) this would be the various equipment and gear unlock projects.
Tier 4 upgrade project
1) Collaborate with Fleet shipyard to design armored dilithium cargo transport vessel
The Completion of the dilithium mine would unlock the Armored Dilithium Cargo transport in the tier 4 shipyard for construction.
Unlike the many options that come with the Tuffli, this cargo transport would only have a console for a commodities broker contact which would have reduced costs for commodities, bank, and mail access. It would only have standard transwarp destinations, there would be faction specific designs (Fed,KDF,ROM) more weapons and hull. 3 weapons fore and 3 aft with either an active or passive damage bonus when either all turrets are equipped or turret, torp, turret fore weapons, 3x turrets aft slotted.
Project cooldowns would also be scaled with tier for example:
Tier 1: 5 hours
Upgrade: 8 hours
Tier 2: 10 hours
Upgrade 13 hours
Tier 3: 15 hours
upgrade 18 hours
Tier 4: 20 hours
upgrade 24 hours
Remember this is all based off a linear project approach so only 1 project would be slottable at a time. The variety of resources needed and lack of Dilithium required to build the mine is where the real help to smaller fleets would come in because it wouldn't cost dilithium to build and would still provide the discounts to other fleet holdings and the base, although those discounts still need to be adjusted to be higher than they currently are. Based off this 4 tier system the resources discounts would be: 5%, 10%, 25%, 40% for Fleet projects and 0, 0, 5%, 10% for equipment,etc.
This does absolutely nothing other than give players a miniscule amount of dilithium that they don't have to refine.
The issue is that Dan Stahl said this Dilithium Mine holding would be the solution to helping smaller fleets progress in the fleet system. As many others have pointed out, this isn't the case at all and it just furthers the divide between small fleets and larger ones, increases incentive to join larger fleets over smaller fleets, requires more Dilithium which is already one of the largest hurdles to smaller fleets, and doesn't provide any type of meaningful discount.
The benefits to larger fleets is the gear and more projects to contribute to and gain more fleet credits, the benefit to smaller/new fleets should be a large reduction in resource costs for fleet projects. This would also give players more incentive to join a smaller fleet because of increased fleet progression. Not everyone wants fleet gear/ship right this second, but they also don't want to get involved with a smaller fleet just to find out they've stalled because of resource costs.
Don't know if it's a bug or what. I saw that the rich dil mining mission is getting fixed with today's patch, but the pure and impure dil mining missions both spit out the same amount of dil (i.e. max 1000 dil each). As one is at a higher tier, it should reward more dil.
Since it is a dilithium mine let it mine something. The mine could fill fleet construction projects with dilithium over time.
I would say let it only affect construction projects (not xp or special projects). It could simply add something like 2k dilithium to any active construction project every 24h. That would not help big fleets that much, since they can fill their projects quickly, but a small fleet would get some help. This would be in addition to the discount of course.
Since it is a dilithium mine let it mine something. The mine could fill fleet construction projects with dilithium over time.
I would say let it only affect construction projects (not xp or special projects). It could simply add something like 2k dilithium to any active construction project every 24h. That would not help big fleets that much, since they can fill their projects quickly, but a small fleet would get some help. This would be in addition to the discount of course.
This right here would be a HUGE help to smaller fleets, but it should count towards all active projects in the fleet and embassy holdings. I can honestly say this is by far the best solution/suggestion I've seen on this so far. Hopefully one of the devs will see it.
Personally I would prefer the Dilithium Mine to be in the Fleet Starbase System so that Klingons won't have to traverse two sectors to get there, in addition it would make Fleet Starbases more active, give them an actual reason in a tactical sense to belong other than to guard empty space and it would make the area more interesting. Additionally Beta Ursae is already busy as it is, with ships literally crowding around DS9 and the Vlugta Mining Asteroid, not to mention that it seems silly to place it within the territory of an ally to the Federation which also borders on Federation space, where it is susceptible to attacks from both Terran Federation and True Way vessels, in short the Klingons wouldn't establish a Dilithium Mine in Cardassian Space (especially seeing as they were bitter enemies even before the Dominion War and know how to hold a grudge).
I'm not saying that the Dilithium Mine is a completely bad idea but the location could do with a rethink.
"I will make the Orion Syndicate face the light of justice or burn them with it." - Captainl Kyle Nathaniel Locke, U.S.S. Excalibur NCC-98105-C
I love the warp cores. I'm seriously excited for both. Adding +turn to other engineering console types is a very sneaky way to admit that the turn rates on the big ships are awful. It's also rather telling that there's no fleet +power level consoles. It's almost like they're uniformly complete trash...
That's the nice stuff I have to say.
As a member of a small fleet, I'm hugely disappointed in the implementation of the dilithium mine. Specifically, it's complete nonsense at every level. Why would a dilithium mine take oceans of dilithium to develop ('earn experience' for)? I mean, surely it's a net producer of dilithium in the game universe, or otherwise why does it even exist? Mines don't work by providing discounts on existing services. Mines work by producing large quantities of raw materials.
Maybe we could rename it the Dilithium Bank, as that is a bit more like how it actually works: you invest huge amounts of dilithium, and you get small dividends over time depending on the number of transactions. Not only does the way the mine works suck, it also works completely unlike a mine.
Here's a free bit of deep, complex insight into the fundamental mechanics of the game. Prepare yourselves: SMALL FLEETS DO NOT ALWAYS HAVE ENOUGH RESOURCES TO KEEP ALL THEIR PROJECTS RUNNING AS IT IS.Adding more projects they can't keep running because they don't have the resources is peeing on a starving man: not only are you completely failing to understand the problem, you are completely failing to address it. The converse is also true, that big fleets even with all their projects running have excess resources. I'd suggest finding a way to address that for them, but maybe they can staunch their tears with elite fleet shields and mk 12 embassy consoles or some other unlock they can quickly and easily obtain for a minimum of individual contribution.
Since the only abundant resource available to small fleets is fleet credits and time, maybe the new holding should take mostly those things? Maybe it should be extremely cheap so that fleets that need it the most can get it? Well, I mean... if it was actually being designed for small fleets, of course.
In practice, small fleets have exactly one niche in the greater starbase economy: They're poor. That means they are where people with finished starbases can go to make it rain and get some FC to spend at their stores. Maybe we could add some sort of system to incentivize and facilitate this cooperative behavior?
My advice: As a stopgap, drop the new stuff on the industrial fabricator. Elite fleet phasers are awful anyway so it'd put a tangible reward back on high-end Engineering progression. Then take the entire Mine concept, junk it, and start from scratch.
Hey, small fleets got the significant (negative) impact that they promised, why all the complaining?
*sigh*
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Comments
1. You can get +80 all damage resistance rating and +80% turn rate from
[Enhanced Neutronium Alloy Mk XI [+Turn]]x4
To get the same bonus from regular engineering consoles, you would need
[Very Rare Neutronium Alloy Mk XII]x4
[Very Rare RCS Accelerator Mk XII]x2
2. You can get +40 all damage resistance rating and +160% turn rate from
[Enhanced RCS Accelerator Mk XI [+Turn]]x4
To get the same bonus from regular engineering consoles, you would need
[Very Rare Neutronium Alloy Mk XII]x2
[Very Rare RCS Accelerator Mk XII]x4
Four fleet engineering consoles give the same bonus as six regular engineering consoles.
The only consoles sold at the dilithium mine are neutronium, monotanium, and RCS accelerators; this seems like a tacit acknowledgment by the devs that few players use any other engineering console. I'm surprised that the dilithium mine has neutronium consoles, considering that the embassy does not have field generators. Recall that Geko said he did not want to raise the survivability of every ship in the game:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=8645511&postcount=61
The EC variant rewards ~175k EC instead of 17k, the ore crits for 750 ore instead of the ususal 500 ore.
In addition you gain 35 fleetmarks and 6 mining provisions each.
Decide for yourself if the crit rewards are worth it.
That seems low for a crit...
Rather see:
50k regular reward, crit = 500k EC
500 ore regular reward, crit = 2000 ore
100 fleet marks regular too.
sig
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/5451/om71.jpg
It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
I dunno...we haven't seen the actual 'dilithium dailies' and how much those give yet, along with if there is another DOFF mission(s) (there's supposed to be more than just those 2 I think).
There could be several DOFF missions we could be looking at doing and a couple dil dailies on top of that.
Add in the pretty good amounts of Trade and Development xp you can get over time, and eventually you can do DOFF turn ins for even more guaranteed FMs.
Pros:
1. +Turn EVERYTHING!!!! My cruiser shall now turn like a ballerina.
2. Really like the new consoles. They'll make it a lot easier for people to pick up some good end game consoles if they join fleets which I think is the purpose of fleet gear.
3. The small things - like the pictures/diagrams of Scimitars on the 2nd floor central column.
4. Lots of cool new ways to get dil (any word on how much dil the Rich Dilithium mining daily will turn back; wasn't live yet when I was on on Friday and Saturday).
5. The map looks awesome (thanks, Taco/other people who helped); one bug: when I get close to the mine in the space map, the map shows up as a targetable object called "Object 1".
6. Dil reduction cost in dil store is nice, especially for carrier captains
Cons:
1. This doesn't help smaller fleets as much as billed; to make the dil reduction worth it (aka to break even given the dil cost of making the mine) you would need a 30% dil discount - you get a 9% one. The addition of new Dil missions help to offset that, but it still isn't going to be as helpful as it could be for small fleets.
2. The crits on the doff missions don't seem to really be in line with other crits. Settle colonists gives more on crit than the "rich" dil doff mission and it returns the same amount on normal success.
3. Why are these ground maps not on Foundry yet??????? They would be so awesome!!! (Taco, go talk to crypticfrost; I want lots of crystals and rock formations like these)
4. No [Trans] proc on any singularity core and very limited selection on warp cores. I want a transwarp reduction, not a .01% boost to my slipstream speed.
5. The map is still called "Player_Dilithium_Mine_Base_01" or something like that
This sums it up perfectly for me. While I absolutely adore all the new shineys with this new holding, I think you've done a superb job on the cores, consoles and doff missions. Kudos to that.
It's just not what was advertised or promised to us. This holding will in no way at all help smaller fleets, it will barely make a dent in the dilithium costs for fleet holdings and overall it's not a discount until we've completed a few more holdings. We're talking minimum 1-2 years before the discount starts being even remotely worthwhile. Frankly that's just not good enough.
It feels like another embassy, with a different skin, and different toys. I'm completely fine with that, personally, but expect a fair amount of backlash if this goes live - because you promised to help smaller fleets and all you've done is shaft them again.
EDIT: Also, and I can't believe I forgot this. STOP KILLING THE DOFFING SYSTEM. Since Heretic left, you've done your best to ruin it. Charging stupid amounts of dilithium for upgrades angered a lot of people (myself included) and basically killed alt-doffing. Now you're charging 125,000 fleet credits for a purple doff (to put that into context, that's at least 100k dilithium PER doff. That's horrendous, nobody buys the fleet/embassy doffs because they're insanely overpriced and useless. Please reconsider...
This is to other posts:
Yes. And that makes complete sense to me. You want to run with only a small tight-nit group of people who are all working together and know each other personally. Then you say you also want the same stuff that bigger groups have managed to get by having 500 people working together to get it done as quickly as possible. You SHOULDN'T have access to the same things, in the same time frame, at a drastically reduced cost.
You've made your decision, you don't want to "play with strangers" and you don't want to be part of a large group - that's fine, but you can't expect to get the same rewards as the people who are willing.
Learn to no-win-scenario.
Getting to wave 9 and leaving = around 2,000 marks split between the team (400 each) It's actually a little more than that, but I can't remember the exact numbers.
If you leave after wave 9, there's no cool down so you can just run it over and over again.
Or alternatively you could do the easier route and do Defari easy/medium/hards with a team of 5. Same outcome, slightly fewer marks and takes a bit longer but it's much easier to learn. Fleet marks really shouldn't be an issue now they've pumped them into pretty much all content.
Kirk's Protege.
Projects costing loads of dili to build up.
Projects costing doffz , well at least they are going to be class requirements, instead of profession requirements ...
Projects costing commodities ... right, fair enough of a EC sink for this ..
Projects costing fleetmarks ... right .. supposed currency for the projects ...
As for the big projects/upgrades costing dili ... right .. somewhat understandable, all projects costing dili ... really does not make sense, only works for the big fleets, really shafting the small ones ..
Upgrades using purple doffz, and only using the fleet stuff ... rename the embassy provisions to fleet provisions, and it starts making sense, and anybody can donate for those ... (still weird to have a fleet-credit sink in here tho... kinda counter productive)
As for the discount projects ... all discounts make sense in a way, except the fleet mark discount. Not really sure where it is going ...
Alot of the fleet holdings stuff does not really make all that much sense ...
The dilithium is what is really holding the small fleets back, as well as the earlier stuffy doff requirements .....
Cant we get a fleet trade project somewhere, just for fleetmarks & other marks ... so ALL fleets can contribute to their hearts content on that, give all their members fleet credits access , and help out the smaller fleets with requirements ...
Bottom lines .... LOOSE THE DILITHIUM from all the "normal" projects , keep that for the upgrades, items, provisions & item-stores ..... but do not limit fleets buildings with the dilithium wall, it's even worse than the doff-wall.
"Cant we get a fleet trade project somewhere, just for fleetmarks & other marks ... so ALL fleets can contribute to their hearts content on that, give all their members fleet credits access , and help out the smaller fleets with requirements ..."
Now there's a good idea. A fleet commodites exchange. That would help large fleet's with Fleet credit issues and help small fleets turn projects over. If I could "rent" day labor to ease out my Fleet Mark issue, then all is good. But that idea would take time to implement. A trade off in the short term is on each tiered completion, have a buyable for FC's extra discount bonus applied to all active SB projects. With each tier getting larger in both cost and discounts. Large fleets wouldn't have to buy that so as to keep FC production up. But they might so only have the discount applied to the SB projects and not the holdings.
All the QSS tags are less desirable, especially since the LoR Nerf (Bug?) where QSS ends prematurely whenever you make a sector block jump. That's really annoying and I tend to lose so much QSS.
QSS buffs are further devalued since they don't seem to stack (Warp Core, Vesta set, and STF Engine buffs don't seem to help each other, or there's a hard floor on the CD).
You can find/contact me in game as @PatricianVetinari. Playing STO since Feb 2010.
The changes to Doff contributions will be the bigger help for us. The reduction in dilithium costs is just too small (and considering that on Fed side the next sinks are the T5 projects and the still ongoing Embassy T2 upgrade).
The consoles... wow! Talk about power creep!
Armor with turn modifiers. RCS consoles with armor modifiers. Just about kills the market for corresponding normal consoles.
Many people don't even use any engineering consoles, but they do use the science ones. This may being at least some of the eng consoles back into rotation.
Its not called power creep, its called advancement. You need to earn these so they should be better. I don't see too many complaints about the ruined market for Impulse Engines or Shields.
I like the consoles where they are. It would be nice to see one or two more buffs or different console types so there were a few more than the current (what is it, 6?) combinations.
Except you're missing the point. The members of my fleet ARE willing to work just as hard. Each single member of my fleet is willing to work just as hard as each single member of a 500 person fleet, yet it will take us far, far longer to get the same rewards they get for the same effort. The people in the 500 person fleet are actually getting more for less, and that's not fair.
It's a well crafted......SMOKESCREEN. It has it's own insane grinding, so it does not fulfill the purpose that we were told it would do. In order for it to have any benefit towards discounts, all of its projects need to be HALF OF THE STARBASE'S PROJECTS.
Don't think anyone answered this. Just ran the actual mining dailies on Tribble. In their current state, there are three. One which unlocks at tier 2 of the mine, and has 5 sites you mine for a max of 200 each. Another unlucks at tier 3 and is the same thing, 5 sites, max of 200 each. Then there is the "rich" mining mission that is its own separate unlock. This is one mining mission down a really pretty cave. I scored about 730 or so, and got 198 dilithium. Not sure if that is a bug in the game or not. But grand total 2198. Add in the 750 from the doff mission, and we have a grand daily total of 2948. Given that's about 20 minutes of actual work, its not that bad, but putting in a whole separate unlock for a mission that gives 198 dilithium is not a good idea to me.
Also, you have to hunt for the mining sites, there were rough areas on the mini map, but you had to find the right crystal patch to mine.
Nouveau riche LTS member
The increase in discounts is still not enough. Furthermore, the way the discount scales up again penalizes the small fleets. Many small fleets will not have the resources to spend on getting up to the last tier of everything, so in order to benefit the small fleets, the discount should be front-loaded.
E.g.
Tier I - 10% discount
Tier II - 16% discount
Tier III - 20% discount
I know some out there will complain about tier III taking the most resources and giving the least incremental discount. But here's the thing. If you have the resources to do tier III, then you didn't need the discount anyway. The large fleets would do tier III even if it offered no incremental discount, they'd do it for the gear. And if I didn't think it wouldn't attract even more outrage from the large fleets, I'd propose even more front-loading of the discounts.
Saying you're helping the small fleets and then biasing that help towards the large fleets is just bad design.
Thank you for that to start with.
But while it's good the dailies are in now, most likely I would guess it's some bugs and errors in regards to the missions. Like only 198 dil from the 'rich' daily? That has to be an error considering it doesn't even equal 1/5 of the other dailies. I would guess that like a decimal point is off or something somewhere. (might be good to make a bug report on that). I would guess that something more reasonable would be like 1,980 should be the real number for the score you got.
Which about 2k by itself would be an excellent amount to get, but without totally destroying any actual usage of the really big daily you can get out of the tal shiar and dominion lockboxes.
Question, aside from the bugs, were you able to use your tricorder to search for them? That might make it easier.
Personally I've given up on bug reports, I posted in here that I thought it might be a bug, but the real issue is that they put it out there and didn't tell us what it should do. Sure, we can say that we think this should put out more dilithium, but since they never said, we can't tell. Since this wasn't in the patch notes, I'm sure that the only response we would get is the usual, we put this in the build,. but we're not ready with it, etc etc. Sorry, mini-rant over.
As for the tricorder, I actually didn't test that. When I next get the chance, I'll give it a shot, if I remember.
Nouveau riche LTS member
I ran them earlier today too, however you made a minor mistake. The doff assignment yields 750 ore on a 'crit' only, else it is 500. And while I haven't exactly tinkered with it to find out where exactly the best possible result ends up it most likely won't be above 50%. And keep in mind you can actually FAIL that assignment, too.
Another minor mistake mimey2 made. You assume higher tiers unlock more doff assignments. That is not entirely correct, I ran those assignments on a fully upgraded t3 mine. As far as I can tell the earlier assignments just get replaced. If that is intentional to prevent players from running too many of them, tough luck Cryptic. This is what is going to happen if they were actually worth running. People simply will ask for invites to the specific tier mines, slightly more complicated but players will do it just because they can.
That doesn't change that I don't perceive them as worth running, especially not worth trying to crit if I need a bunch of purple miners for them. Assume you purchase three purple miners for 375k fleet credits. A crit yields you 35 fleet marks = 1750 fleet credits & 6 dilithium mine provisions = 2400-4500 fleet credits. To break even on the spent fleet credits you would need to crit 60 to 90 times. If you use 5 miners to 'max out' your crit chance (because they are your only 3 crit doffs) that increases to 100-150 needed crits. Basicly a year worth running those assignment every day before you even start coming out of the red. And before any nitpickers chime in that there are two doff assignments that could crit, yes there are, but if you run them both at the same time you need more miners. Not to mention that at some point the dilithium mine provisions hit dimishing returns on their personal use value since a fully upgraded t3 mine doesn't need thousands of personal provision stocked.
Enough of the assignments, back to the daily missions.
As pointed out some (two) of the mission markers are misleading. And the mining on the normal dailies is even more boring than the ferengi mining. If I recall correctly the ferengi mining had the chance for particle traces to turn up as an additional reward, though I don't know for sure because it has been ages since I last run that mission - boooring.
And the rich mission HAS to be a bug. 198 ore for a special unlockable mission? I don't think so.
Last but not least, the exterior is dark. Dark as in starbase incursion without flashlight dark. Makes for very unsafe miner working conditions. I can make out details fine as long as I black-out my room but as soon as the evil evil sun (that is that barely contained nuclear reaction in our star system you NERDS!) dares to show at my window (yes... windows... I have them!) 'tis not so easy anymore.
It's been long established that Dilithium is a key component to power systems, so in constructing the mine there should be a "build and Install Power Systems" project that requires some Dilithium, but only that 1 project and once.
Unfortunately one thing Cryptic seems completely unwilling to do is to design projects are real life. Yes Star Trek and STO are science fiction, but Star Trek has always had that "yup this could be real in xxxx years" Have the projects have a linear progression to them, for example:
Tier 1 requires 4 projects to complete before reaching Tier 2:
1) Survey surrounding areas for optimal dilithium concentration
2) Survey possible construction sites
3) Break ground on new Dilithium mine and refining installation
4) Construction of installation superstructure
Tier 1/Tier 2 Upgrade project
1) Complete Superstructure construction
Tier 2 would require 6 projects to be completed:
1) Prepare for subsystem assembly and installation
2) Install power systems
3) Install life support systems
4) Install Engineering subsystems
5) Install Medical/Science subsystems
6) Run diagnostics on Facility habitat and systems
Tier 2/3 Upgrade project
1) Transfer all operations to Facility
Tier 3 would require 12 projects to complete:
1) Complete interior crew quarters
2) Complete Medical bay and other facilities
3) Complete Science labs and other Facilities
4) Complete Mess hall and Recreation facilities
5) Complete Engineering Labs
6) Complete Mining facilities
7) Complete refining facilities
8) Complete transfer of Provisions to Facility
9) Complete transfer of Mining equipment
10) Complete transfer of refining Equipment
11) Complete transfer of facility command personnel
12) Complete transfer of mining personnel
Tier 3/4 upgrade project
1) Begin full scale mining and refining operations
Tier 4 The majority of gear and equipment should be unlocked at tier 4 which would be the highest tier
1) Begin construction on Advanced R&D facilities
2) Complete construction of R&D facilities
3) begin full scale R&D
4) Test run of R&D prototypes
5) this would be the various equipment and gear unlock projects.
Tier 4 upgrade project
1) Collaborate with Fleet shipyard to design armored dilithium cargo transport vessel
The Completion of the dilithium mine would unlock the Armored Dilithium Cargo transport in the tier 4 shipyard for construction.
Unlike the many options that come with the Tuffli, this cargo transport would only have a console for a commodities broker contact which would have reduced costs for commodities, bank, and mail access. It would only have standard transwarp destinations, there would be faction specific designs (Fed,KDF,ROM) more weapons and hull. 3 weapons fore and 3 aft with either an active or passive damage bonus when either all turrets are equipped or turret, torp, turret fore weapons, 3x turrets aft slotted.
Project cooldowns would also be scaled with tier for example:
Tier 1: 5 hours
Upgrade: 8 hours
Tier 2: 10 hours
Upgrade 13 hours
Tier 3: 15 hours
upgrade 18 hours
Tier 4: 20 hours
upgrade 24 hours
Remember this is all based off a linear project approach so only 1 project would be slottable at a time. The variety of resources needed and lack of Dilithium required to build the mine is where the real help to smaller fleets would come in because it wouldn't cost dilithium to build and would still provide the discounts to other fleet holdings and the base, although those discounts still need to be adjusted to be higher than they currently are. Based off this 4 tier system the resources discounts would be: 5%, 10%, 25%, 40% for Fleet projects and 0, 0, 5%, 10% for equipment,etc.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=10895671&postcount=51
Thank you for listening .
This does absolutely nothing other than give players a miniscule amount of dilithium that they don't have to refine.
The issue is that Dan Stahl said this Dilithium Mine holding would be the solution to helping smaller fleets progress in the fleet system. As many others have pointed out, this isn't the case at all and it just furthers the divide between small fleets and larger ones, increases incentive to join larger fleets over smaller fleets, requires more Dilithium which is already one of the largest hurdles to smaller fleets, and doesn't provide any type of meaningful discount.
The benefits to larger fleets is the gear and more projects to contribute to and gain more fleet credits, the benefit to smaller/new fleets should be a large reduction in resource costs for fleet projects. This would also give players more incentive to join a smaller fleet because of increased fleet progression. Not everyone wants fleet gear/ship right this second, but they also don't want to get involved with a smaller fleet just to find out they've stalled because of resource costs.
I would say let it only affect construction projects (not xp or special projects). It could simply add something like 2k dilithium to any active construction project every 24h. That would not help big fleets that much, since they can fill their projects quickly, but a small fleet would get some help. This would be in addition to the discount of course.
My stomach is clear and my mind is full of bacon!
This right here would be a HUGE help to smaller fleets, but it should count towards all active projects in the fleet and embassy holdings. I can honestly say this is by far the best solution/suggestion I've seen on this so far. Hopefully one of the devs will see it.
I'm not saying that the Dilithium Mine is a completely bad idea but the location could do with a rethink.
I love the consoles.
I love the warp cores. I'm seriously excited for both. Adding +turn to other engineering console types is a very sneaky way to admit that the turn rates on the big ships are awful. It's also rather telling that there's no fleet +power level consoles. It's almost like they're uniformly complete trash...
That's the nice stuff I have to say.
As a member of a small fleet, I'm hugely disappointed in the implementation of the dilithium mine. Specifically, it's complete nonsense at every level. Why would a dilithium mine take oceans of dilithium to develop ('earn experience' for)? I mean, surely it's a net producer of dilithium in the game universe, or otherwise why does it even exist? Mines don't work by providing discounts on existing services. Mines work by producing large quantities of raw materials.
Maybe we could rename it the Dilithium Bank, as that is a bit more like how it actually works: you invest huge amounts of dilithium, and you get small dividends over time depending on the number of transactions. Not only does the way the mine works suck, it also works completely unlike a mine.
Here's a free bit of deep, complex insight into the fundamental mechanics of the game. Prepare yourselves: SMALL FLEETS DO NOT ALWAYS HAVE ENOUGH RESOURCES TO KEEP ALL THEIR PROJECTS RUNNING AS IT IS. Adding more projects they can't keep running because they don't have the resources is peeing on a starving man: not only are you completely failing to understand the problem, you are completely failing to address it. The converse is also true, that big fleets even with all their projects running have excess resources. I'd suggest finding a way to address that for them, but maybe they can staunch their tears with elite fleet shields and mk 12 embassy consoles or some other unlock they can quickly and easily obtain for a minimum of individual contribution.
Since the only abundant resource available to small fleets is fleet credits and time, maybe the new holding should take mostly those things? Maybe it should be extremely cheap so that fleets that need it the most can get it? Well, I mean... if it was actually being designed for small fleets, of course.
In practice, small fleets have exactly one niche in the greater starbase economy: They're poor. That means they are where people with finished starbases can go to make it rain and get some FC to spend at their stores. Maybe we could add some sort of system to incentivize and facilitate this cooperative behavior?
My advice: As a stopgap, drop the new stuff on the industrial fabricator. Elite fleet phasers are awful anyway so it'd put a tangible reward back on high-end Engineering progression. Then take the entire Mine concept, junk it, and start from scratch.
Well done cryptic.
My stomach is clear and my mind is full of bacon!
*sigh*