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Let us pick which enemies will appear in groups!
novapolaris
Member Posts: 806 Arc User
This probably won't be read by anyone from Cryptic, but it's worth a shot at least.
Due to the fact that enemy groups are randomized, it is currently impossible to set up an encounter so that specific NPCs will have specific powers. This is especially the case with space groups, which have an ever-increasing amount of possible ships that can spawn in each time any particular group is spawned. Even if the ships are reskinned, their powers will still be randomized due to how enemy groups currently work.
What I would like to see is an additional, optional dropdown menu for each NPC in a group, which allows for their "type" to be determined.
Say a Foundry author wants a specific ship to spawn in with a group and fight, such as the Chimera in a Federation group or a Bortas in a Klingon group. They can reskin a vessel in the group of the same general type, but they won't be able to control which powers the ship will spawn with. While this can be used to create interesting encounters, without the ability to choose which NPCs will (generally) spawn as what, Foundry authors will find it impossible to get a space or ground encounter "just right" when they need specific NPC types to spawn.
Please add an option to individual combat-capable NPCs so that Foundry authors can choose which NPCs will spawn as what, from a list available to the faction and type of the group. This is especially needed for space groups, but would be invaluable for ground groups as well.
Due to the fact that enemy groups are randomized, it is currently impossible to set up an encounter so that specific NPCs will have specific powers. This is especially the case with space groups, which have an ever-increasing amount of possible ships that can spawn in each time any particular group is spawned. Even if the ships are reskinned, their powers will still be randomized due to how enemy groups currently work.
What I would like to see is an additional, optional dropdown menu for each NPC in a group, which allows for their "type" to be determined.
Say a Foundry author wants a specific ship to spawn in with a group and fight, such as the Chimera in a Federation group or a Bortas in a Klingon group. They can reskin a vessel in the group of the same general type, but they won't be able to control which powers the ship will spawn with. While this can be used to create interesting encounters, without the ability to choose which NPCs will (generally) spawn as what, Foundry authors will find it impossible to get a space or ground encounter "just right" when they need specific NPC types to spawn.
Please add an option to individual combat-capable NPCs so that Foundry authors can choose which NPCs will spawn as what, from a list available to the faction and type of the group. This is especially needed for space groups, but would be invaluable for ground groups as well.
Post edited by novapolaris#2925 on
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"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Something like the Creature/Spaceship Creators in Spore would be fun, but I don't know if Cryptic's engine would support it.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Almost every time I check the Foundry forum section, there is a new thread about either this (custom-power NPCs) or branching missions, and sometimes both!
I find it suspicious that the things repeatedly requested here are so frequently ignored.
(The City of Heroes 'Mission Archtect' allowed this very thing when it launched, and was so heavily abused that Paragon had to nerf the MA to hell, and it pretty much was abandoned by the CoH developers at Paragon after that.)
Yes, some will argue - "So, some people will make really easy setups, with little challenge. If that's how someone wants to play STO, who cares?"
Well, it's the same reason they don't have a zone/mission that's just 'hit this key 50 time - gain 1 level' -- they do want to try and enforce a minimum level of risk/reward gameplay. It really does hurt player retention in the long run if they don't (especially in an F2P game where they WANT you to buy things that make the harder content easier, etc.)
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
We're not necessarily talking about completely customizable mobs, but rather being able to choose which of each faction's ships will spawn in an encounter.
For example, as you can see here there are seven possible Federation cruiser-level mobs that can spawn, plus dozens of possible costumes for each. What the OP is asking for is the ability to choose exactly which one will spawn, so we don't end up with a Defiant costume capable of saucer-separating or a Nebula costume capable of deploying ablative armor.
Regarding custom mobs, I had an idea for that a while ago - see here. And the amount of skill points/loot/whatever is awarded would be based on the type of mob and its difficulty (ex: a weak frigate will reward less than a powerful one). So it's not really that exploitable.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
This is a legitimate concern, but there are at least two ways around that problem that I can see:
1. Only allow for the creation of captain/battleship level NPCs - These would have a high minimum HP value, high minimum shield power, high minimum number of slotted abilities/traits, etc. (to prevent one-hit-kill exploitation), but still leave room to the author for customizing.
2. Allow allegiance switching of NPCs - The lesser of my two ideas (in my opinion), this would simply augment the current reskinning system.
My request was for the ability to choose which existing types of NPCs - both in space and on ground - could be chosen to appear in a group, from an appropriate list available to each NPC in the group based on their rank. The abilities and power levels would still be the same for each type of NPC; authors would only be able to choose which NPCs (complete with appropriate powers) would spawn in with each group out of rank and faction appropriate lists.
If even that can (and if it can, it will) be exploited, Cryptic should be more than capable of balancing it so that players can't make anything that's *too* easy. However, if it's just the NPC types that are made to be choose-able and not the power levels as well, then there should hardly be as much of a problem with exploiting as there could be with the ability to set the actual power levels.
the removed costume import is a good example for this: why is cryptic so much worried about fixing its bugs, which aren't really bad and easily to avoid for an author? and why the aren't in the slightest worried about bugs, that are very bad (for instance, stuck in ground-bug) , and have no way to avoid?
but against all hope, here what i think we would need:
- choice of weapon types (both energy weapon and torpedo type independent from each other)
- choice of special ability (for instance, just to prevent a defiant from splitting into prometheus parts, or transform any ship into a nausicaan battleship etc.)
- abillity to make an npc indestructible ( for story relevant npc's, where it is important they don't die in battle)
about exploits...i don't see in which way there is a possibility to exploit that. maybe there is a way, but really, i'm sure for every possible exploit there are two ways to prevent them:
first a imprudent way which limits foundry authors, and second an intelligent way, which needs more thinking about, but also won't limit the authors. unfortunately, i think cryptic always uses the first way...
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
You never know, maybe one of them will say it tomorrow.
By that I mean I don't think its a conspiracy, it is just that they have not made Foundry development a priority. That may change, and it may not.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
1. they never think a second about what is important to add and what is unimportant
2. their intention is to prevent us from making good missions.
but if second explanation is not true, that would mean there is a very high level of incompetence :eek:
but i also can't foreclose the second explanation...cryptic won't be the first development studio that has made decisions for the reason that they want to reduce the quality of work they need to do.
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
But really I think you just need a hug. C'mere you
but just to explain, it's fairly simple. i mean, LoR was a very nice add-on for the game itself, but what happened to the foundry is really a catastrophe. maybe i should just recapitulate what happened:
- foundry missions got broken, many missions got lots of 1-star ratings because cryptic has turned off ratings far to late
- we got a new weighted rating system, which causes a very hard time for new missions to find players
- the missions list now only shows a very limited number of all missions, many of them can now only found by search. should i mention that very many players even didn't recognize there is a search function for foundry missions? so this is another issue that prevents new (and even older) missions from finding players. and why make missions, if nobody will play them??
- we lost the freecam tool...very very important for map building - without that it's very hard to see if everything is at the right place
- we lost the costume import, that was also an important feature - and we just got a plea "it's buggy". if cryptic would remove all from sto what has bugs, there won't be much left. ok, that tool had bugs...but no one of them was really disturbing, while cryptic otherwise don't cares about very much disturbing bugs - just some kind of very bad joke if you ask me. and not to mention it isn't necessary to remove something to fix bugs...
even that's not all of what makes me feel like this. also the game itself...it's still one of the buggiest games i've ever played and that after 3 years since the game was launched...
or another interesting detail about sto, what i don't know if you ever have seen it - cause i don't know what your native language is. as i am playing the german localization, which is still incomplete after 3 years, much of the game is still in english. i've played hundreds of games, but sto is just one of only two games where i have seen such a example of bad work...
and worst of this issue is, cryptic is even advertising with "complete in german". you can say what you want, but this is just a perky lie...
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
If you have no hope of any of this changing and think the Foundry will be dead soon, then why do you care?
and maybe some day the cryptic will do that things...i mean, after 1 million requests for a transporter room, we got one
so finally, i'm only 999989 posts away from getting what i want :cool:
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
Also Cryptic if you're going to change the foundry maps please don't change them in already-published missions. You fossilized several of my enemy groups in a very large tree and rock >.>
and i mean it's not only one man who is responsible for that...
maybe "conspiracy" is a bit to hard to say, but developers that aren't honest to their customers is nothing new...and not really a suprising thing.
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
But how have they not been honest? They've told us plainly that there is no team working on the Foundry. Zero adds things in her spare time. Branflakes can do spotlights and such but he's not a dev. Crypticfrost can troubleshoot bugs, but he's just QA, he's not adding features.
They've told us they'd like to do more and add in some of the features from Neverwinter, but I've never heard them say "I guarantee we will add such and such by whatever date."
Sure, they're not completely open about their schedule and how they allocate their resources, but so what, private companies rarely are.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
that may be true, but it's no explanation why whe never get important things at the foundry. all i want is that they don't waste their time to add things which are nearly useless, when they could better use the same time to add things that are very useful. at the last update, they did it again...we got elachi npcs, but no elachi maps, consoles and so on. so we have another new thing that is quite useless.
"not completely open" is a extremely huge unterstatement. they are so rarely giving us target dates for things that i really doubt they have some kind of schedule...
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972