It involves doff assignments and I'll need to get more information, but basically, you'll need to search sectors for 2 assignments:
1) Warp coil/Singularity Coil and
2) Alien Artifact.
If you succeed in both these assignments you'll have items that total together over 1 mil ec when sold at exchange.
Neither one of those things are a daily way to make ec.
Warp/Singularity Coils take either 4-8 hours to make, then add a 24 hour cooldown once made. Not to mention it might not even be up anywhere in the galaxy as it is a dept. head mission.
By "Alien Artifact" I will assume you are referring to the Strange Alien Artifact given as loot from "Negotiate (Additional) Delivery of Rare Commodities". This is again dependent on the fact that it has to be UP, and it has a 4 hour completion time, attached with a 72 hour cooldown. It will only show up in Cardassian Space and the Exploration Sectors attached.
Not to mention if you succeed at both of these things even on a daily basis (once again impossible due to cds) there is no guarantee of "over 1 mil ec". You could get a mk x green warp core and I guarantee in today's market that won't net you the 400-500k that you would need to put you over the 1 mil mark.
Explain what is the exploit ? How was it done ?
Ppl putting 9 in Driver Coil and using the Borg Engine ? That's not an exploit .
Ppl doing only a few sectors and re-reacquiring the mission ? That's not an exploit either , as you were payed by sector , not by completing the full race , and you can drop / acquire any mission in STO .
So what was the exploit ?
'Cause I don't think there was one .
You can get over 1 mill EC per day on one account, if you do "Negotiate (Additional) Delivery of Rare Commodities" on at least three toons and keep getting it as soon as it comes off cooldown. That would be about 3 million EC if you upgrade to a powered alien artifact (4 hours science officer) and you only have one day cooldown. That should average out to 1 million per day.
Explain what is the exploit ? How was it done ?
Ppl putting 9 in Driver Coil and using the Borg Engine ? That's not an exploit .
correct
Ppl doing only a few sectors and re-reacquiring the mission ? That's not an exploit either , as you were payed by sector , not by completing the full race , and you can drop / acquire any mission in STO .
Actually, yes, that does seem to be the issue. The trick with it was to do the most sectors in the least time, and not doing the full event got people more ec than doing the whole event.
@xtern1ty and everyone who post here with another ways to earn ec...Good job:P
This thread name is "Solutions for making daily ec after Tour nerf" not " tour nerf whine 2.0" , keep your whine comments on another thread that is made for that.
Actually, yes, that does seem to be the issue. The trick with it was to do the most sectors in the least time, and not doing the full event got people more ec than doing the whole event.
Yeah, but technically its still not an "exploit" as it uses the game in the way the devs designed it.
For most people, an exploit means you are modifying something in the game that was not meant to do so, by either using an external program and modifying game code, or finding a way to circumvent in game code to make it do something it shouldn't, ala Voldemort shield bug.
Had the devs proclaimed this 2 days after the event went live, I very much doubt they would be getting the same reaction.
Waiting 2 years or more and then silently nerfing it, well they deserve everything they get to be honest.
Neither one of those things are a daily way to make ec.
Warp/Singularity Coils take either 4-8 hours to make, then add a 24 hour cooldown once made. Not to mention it might not even be up anywhere in the galaxy as it is a dept. head mission.
By "Alien Artifact" I will assume you are referring to the Strange Alien Artifact given as loot from "Negotiate (Additional) Delivery of Rare Commodities". This is again dependent on the fact that it has to be UP, and it has a 4 hour completion time, attached with a 72 hour cooldown. It will only show up in Cardassian Space and the Exploration Sectors attached.
Not to mention if you succeed at both of these things even on a daily basis (once again impossible due to cds) there is no guarantee of "over 1 mil ec". You could get a mk x green warp core and I guarantee in today's market that won't net you the 400-500k that you would need to put you over the 1 mil mark.
Thanks for adding that info, I'll post exact details, doffs needed etc, as soon I get it. 400-500k is still a good deal of ec, and therefore could be considered a supplement to dailies.
where is the logic of putting a 4 hour cool down on something that only ran 4 1hr every 12 to 13 hours, there is none because there is no logic to these idiots who cant even do weekly maintenance on game without breaking something within system.
Or better yet, 'Why does the Tour of the Universe need a 4hr cooldown when it's only a 1 hour tour AND you only hold the event once every 15 hours?"
Yeah, but technically its still not an "exploit" as it uses the game in the way the devs designed it.
For most people, an exploit means you are modifying something in the game that was not meant to do so, by either using an external program and modifying game code, or finding a way to circumvent in game code to make it do something it shouldn't, ala Voldemort shield bug.
Had the devs proclaimed this 2 days after the event went live, I very much doubt they would be getting the same reaction.
Waiting 2 years or more and then silently nerfing it, well they deserve everything they get to be honest.
I would agree to a point. The problem is that the Devs design a lot of things and then change them at will to suit their own agendas.
Just look at the damage they caused taking out the Foundry quickies. They broke it even further.
The other thing you have to remember is that the Devs create something like Foundry Rewards and Tour for people to play the way they want them to play it.
As soon as people start playing the game slightly differently from their model idea, (more efficiently or earning greater rewards) rocks fall and everybody dies. Those that are particularly unlucky might get a ban hammer as well.
There are literally dozens of examples of this throughout the game.
The problem is that everytime that they do something like this, it just puts the people that have already done all the "exploiting" way above the rest because they keep their Dil/EC while no one else has the possibility of earning enough to buy something like a JHAS on the exchange.
As always art imitating life.
As a result of this we are going to see an increase in EC farming missions on the foundry and later a ban on all types of Foundry rewards to combat that perceived problem. Tour, fast engines and driver coil are now utterly pointless as a result of this. But ho hum.
Now that I have thought about it.
Tour has been running the way it has been for 2 years.
People have been discussing ways to do runs faster for just as long.
I am sure in the archived posts someone would have talked about doing 3-5 runs to get 1m or higher.
I am sure some might even recommended the 4 sector then drop method.
All this time it was never nerfed.
People were led to believe that this gameplay would always be like this, and Tour became something like a staple EC farming method for a decent number of players.
Then here's where I get to the main point... some people even set up SPECIFIC BUILDS just for the tour. They buy the Odyssey. They get the borg or maco engines. They do whatever was necessary to get full warp speed. I won't be surprised some even created a new captain with more points on Driver Coil, or respecced their captain with more points in Driver Coil just for this. I personally was building my second and third character towards full Driver Coil in anticipation of level 50 EC farm.
In setting up builds, I am sure some people SPENT MONEY to get those builds believing it a worthwhile investment in the long run. Spend a bit of cash -> set up a reliable in-game currency farm method.
Now... with then nerf, all the efforts to specialize a build are moot.
Especially for those who spent money or ZEN on setting up a Tour build. Their MONEY that was invested is now rendered waste.
So they set up an event, let us use it as it was for 2 years, and led us to believe it would stay so. Then people spent money to work at doing that event better. And.. now the devs nerf it totally and render all the money spent wasted. And as if that weren't enough, it was a stealth nerf. Good thing I didn't wake up early that day to do the tour (it was happening at 7am Saturday morning on that first day after the nerf). So, who is exploiting whom actually. You get us to spend on the game based on some premise of how the game works and then tell us after money was spent that it shall no longer work that way. 2 years of earning cash from people who wanted to buy optimal Tour builds, then nerf it. Smart.
Other things people might have bought when they thought of tour (besides Oddy).. Captain respec tokens, Zen,
account bank, EC cap.
Thankfully I have not yet spent on the game yet. I almost did.
Then here's where I get to the main point... some people even set up SPECIFIC BUILDS just for the tour. They buy the Odyssey. They get the borg or maco engines. They do whatever was necessary to get full warp speed. I won't be surprised some even created a new captain with more points on Driver Coil, or respecced their captain with more points in Driver Coil just for this. I personally was building my second and third character towards full Driver Coil in anticipation of level 50 EC farm.
In setting up builds, I am sure some people SPENT MONEY to get those builds believing it a worthwhile investment in the long run. Spend a bit of cash -> set up a reliable in-game currency farm method.
Now... with then nerf, all the efforts to specialize a build are moot.
Especially for those who spent money or ZEN on setting up a Tour build. Their MONEY that was invested is now rendered waste.
A most poignant post. Sad state of affairs indeed, I feel for you. I did much the same. Made a specific racer alt and was leveling so I could get max speed someday, with the best ship possible, a Vesta. The Corvette was going to do meantime, and I grinded just for that because it's even designed like a race ship, complete with racing stripes and numbering. Instead the idea of the race ship is gone, now turned into some sort of yacht. As a result, according to the chat I've heard, many players are now going to let it rot in the bank or delete it entirely. All that effort gone with the wind.
A most poignant post. Sad state of affairs indeed, I feel for you. I did much the same. Made a specific racer alt and was leveling so I could get max speed someday, with the best ship possible, a Vesta. The Corvette was going to do meantime, and I grinded just for that because it's even designed like a race ship, complete with racing stripes and numbering. Instead the idea of the race ship is gone, now turned into some sort of yacht. As a result, according to the chat I've heard, many players are now going to let it rot in the bank or delete it entirely. All that effort gone with the wind.
The corvette was always going to be a terrible ship to tour in, well not terrible, but no better than any other. It had no bonuses to sector space travel - it just has an incredibly high impulse modifier. Great for PvP, pretty good for darting about all over the place in PvE.
Now that I have thought about it.
Tour has been running the way it has been for 2 years.
People have been discussing ways to do runs faster for just as long.
I am sure in the archived posts someone would have talked about doing 3-5 runs to get 1m or higher.
I am sure some might even recommended the 4 sector then drop method.
All this time it was never nerfed.
People were led to believe that this gameplay would always be like this, and Tour became something like a staple EC farming method for a decent number of players.
I understand your disappointment but there are a few things you need to keep in perspective. FTP has only been going on for 1.5 years. That seems like a long time but it's really not - especially when you consider all the things a relatively small Dev team have done in that time.
It took them over a year to adjust the Dilithium rewards, and Dilithium is far more important to the game then ECs. It's not because they didn't realize some of the Dilithium rewards could be exploited after watching people play for 6 months, it's because their manpower was focused into other areas: working on rep systems, working on LoR, etc. There were other priorities that needed to get done before they could work on the Dilithium issue. The same thing applies to the EC inflation coming from the Tour. It was a lesser problem that they got to when they had room in their schedule to decide how it should work.
The final thing you need to keep in mind is that an MMO is an ever-changing beast. When you sign up for the game you are required to check-off that you've read the terms of the game, and one of those terms is that Cryptic reserves the right to change the game at any time for any reason. That's how the game went FTP from Subscription. No one ever led you to believe things would never change. They told you things could change the moment you signed up.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
So... now I have to spend considerably more effort and time which I don't have to get enough EC for even getting stuff for the Reputation slowing the expected progress from a couple of months to... I don't know, haven't made any calculations yet as to how long it will take me... great
And no... DOffing doesn't work for me because I do not have an all Purple Crew nor do I have 10+ Chars... and I've never ever dreamed about even visiting the Exchange...
P.S.: As there were some "Oh god rich peoples problems!" Posts... I've never even had more than 1mil of EC on any Char...
A most poignant post. Sad state of affairs indeed, I feel for you. I did much the same. Made a specific racer alt and was leveling so I could get max speed someday, with the best ship possible, a Vesta. The Corvette was going to do meantime, and I grinded just for that because it's even designed like a race ship, complete with racing stripes and numbering. Instead the idea of the race ship is gone, now turned into some sort of yacht. As a result, according to the chat I've heard, many players are now going to let it rot in the bank or delete it entirely. All that effort gone with the wind.
Actually, I think I should be the one saying I feel for you... because you are the type of person that got hurt the most from the Tour nerf. The type of person I was imagining and sympathizing with.
I nearly followed your track, but I guess I started 'too late' to invest as much into the game as you have.
And regarding the Corvette. Yeah, when I heard 'racing ship', first thing that came to my mind was whether it had any sector space travel value, and Tour run value. Turns out it doesn't really have any (before and after nerf...). I have yet to open my corvette requisition pack, I'd rather keep my shipyard slots free for my other ships I have in mind.
This is a time when players need to set their differences aside and pull together, F2P players especially. Because if we don't I potentially see a large number of F2P'rs leaving STO. So what can we do? If you know a player who is struggling, don't be harsh, but understanding. Listen to them and comfort their concerns. Nobody is going to help us, so we need to help ourselves and each other if we can. To this mission, we can start by sharing effective, regular ways to make ec. If you know of any, please post in this thread. Be simple and explain in steps for players who are not die-hard gamers so they understand.
The only reliable simple way left that I know is Foundry Farm runs. On Fed, there are 2 very reliable ones that at the time of this post reward approx. 400k ec in loot when the items are sold to Lessa in ESD. To access the missions on the Fed side:
1) Open Hail Starfleet and head to the Foundry tab
2) Head to the Search Foundry tab on the left side
3) Drop down the search menu using the arrow at top and type in the search box either one of the missions below:
- blast test dummie
- Loot-o-Matic
4) Hail the desired mission(s)
Remember, when you stop receiving loot, you've reached your daily foundry loot limit.
If you know other foundry ec missions, know farming missions for KDF/Rom or know any other ways to make reliable ec, please post below. If no one else, you'll earn my appreciation for your time and helpfulness.
I will post if I find any other methods. Heads up fellow F2P'rs, together we'll get through this.
I'd like to add on to Xtern1ty's suggestion
In addition to the daily farm run ( I can't remember the loot cap reset and i may be wrong, but i think its 0000 GMT ), you should also do the Tau Dewa Sector Patrol WITH the Tau Dewa Radiation Scan mission active ( follow the white circles ). Skip the Gekli mission and collect the radiation from the satellite, because the Gekli's tend to cause massive traffic jams enroute to their destinations, prolonging the time spent considerably....
For the farm run, choose battleship royal rumble if your ship is decent enough. It does not have the stasis fields and allow the ship to move around freely...
For everyone finding themselves with a lack of income now that tour has been nerfed...
I suggest making as many klingon characters as possible. Klingons get marauding assignments, which is the same as saying klingons get free income. Make klingons, do marauding assignments, sell contraband, collect EC. It's that simple.
Contraband is of course the big-ticket item. But marauding assignments also generate commodities, (TRIBBLE) gear, and prisoners. The commodities and gear you unload to vendors, the prisoners you can put on the exchange with the contraband.
You can get plenty of good doffs for marauding assignments for free from colonization chains.
Fill up your doff assignments twice a day with mostly marauding assignments and I gaurantee you won't miss tour anymore. The special engines and warp cores you got to do tour faster will let you hunt for doff assignments faster.
This is a time when players need to set their differences aside and pull together, F2P players especially. Because if we don't I potentially see a large number of F2P'rs leaving STO. So what can we do? If you know a player who is struggling, don't be harsh, but understanding. Listen to them and comfort their concerns. Nobody is going to help us, so we need to help ourselves and each other if we can. To this mission, we can start by sharing effective, regular ways to make ec. If you know of any, please post in this thread. Be simple and explain in steps for players who are not die-hard gamers so they understand.
The only reliable simple way left that I know is Foundry Farm runs. On Fed, there are 2 very reliable ones that at the time of this post reward approx. 400k ec in loot when the items are sold to Lessa in ESD. To access the missions on the Fed side:
1) Open Hail Starfleet and head to the Foundry tab
2) Head to the Search Foundry tab on the left side
3) Drop down the search menu using the arrow at top and type in the search box either one of the missions below:
- blast test dummie
- Loot-o-Matic
4) Hail the desired mission(s)
Remember, when you stop receiving loot, you've reached your daily foundry loot limit.
If you know other foundry ec missions, know farming missions for KDF/Rom or know any other ways to make reliable ec, please post below. If no one else, you'll earn my appreciation for your time and helpfulness.
I will post if I find any other methods. Heads up fellow F2P'rs, together we'll get through this.
Watch out Dude....this could be consider an exploit and might be shut down by a DEV...These guys should just shut down the server since all they want is MONEY....
Make players grind until their eyes bleed or make them pay through the urethra. We don't care how you milk them dry, just make sure that milking them dry until their nipples petrify and fall off is your only goal. Don't deviate from this goal unless you'd rather be on the bread line." - Prime Directive from PWE
I have yet to open my corvette requisition pack, I'd rather keep my shipyard slots free for my other ships I have in mind.
Same here and thanks for the kind thought. Perhaps we may be fortunate enough to meet in game sometime. I play daily, @xtern1ty, and also lead the fleet for longterm players that I'm named after. Feel free to PM me or drop by our channel and say hi if you like, we do missions daily with fleetmates and you're welcome to come as well.
In addition to the daily farm run ( I can't remember the loot cap reset and i may be wrong, but i think its 0000 GMT ), you should also do the Tau Dewa Sector Patrol WITH the Tau Dewa Radiation Scan mission active ( follow the white circles ).
Thank you for your addition and the foundry tip. Yes, I believe you're right on Foundry reset time.
For everyone finding themselves with a lack of income now that tour has been nerfed...
I suggest making as many klingon characters as possible. Klingons get marauding assignments, which is the same as saying klingons get free income. Make klingons, do marauding assignments, sell contraband, collect EC. It's that simple.
That's a good suggestion, especially for players who are more or less independent or aren't too preoccupied with leveling a Fed fleet. I happen to be at this time so disengaging for KDF right now will take a while to organize, but still a good idea.
I suggest making as many klingon characters as possible. Klingons get marauding assignments, which is the same as saying klingons get free income. Make klingons, do marauding assignments, sell contraband, collect EC. It's that simple.
As I see... many "solutions" boil down to "spend and hour and more in Foundry and sector patrols grinding and hoping you get enough valuable stuff before you hit the cap", "Buy an all purple Crew for DOffing and hope you get friggin lucky with the missions every day" and like in the quoted part "Pay PWE a ****load of money so you can make 5+ Chars that only exist to support your Main" is this correct?
Edit: Shame on me forgot what I actually wanted to say...
Everything presented so far requires a whole lot of more time and/or Real Money... Both that some don't have or want to spend. Tour was easy... chime in, set course, tab out, do important things, tab in, change course and continue... I've never actually knew of the exploit but tried to at least make 1 1/2 runs that way...
As I see... many "solutions" boil down to "spend and hour and more in Foundry and sector patrols grinding and hoping you get enough valuable stuff before you hit the cap", "Buy an all purple Crew for DOffing and hope you get friggin lucky with the missions every day" and like in the quoted part "Pay PWE a ****load of money so you can make 5+ Chars that only exist to support your Main" is this correct?
No, not really. As I said before, you can get the doffs for free from doing colonization mission chains. You can get free blue and purple Energy Weapon, Projectile weapon, tractor beam, security officer, assault officer, and armory officer doffs (as well as others). They'll all serve you well for marauding missions, and give you a decent chance at critical successes.
You can also get blue projectile and and energy weapon doffs from the facility 4208 mission rewards, and a purple projectile weapons officer from the second to last nimbus mission.
It may take you a couple weeks to run the assignments to get the necessary doffs, but you don't need to spend any EC at all.
Every account gets a free klingon slot, you also get a free romulan slot which can be shunted into being "allied" with the klingons, which gives you marauding missions. That's two characters running marauding missions, which should be sufficient to earn yourself an income. If you need/want a greater income, and don't want to purchase additional character slots, you can always create a second account which will give you another 2 klingon characters (1 KDF, 1 Rom/KDF). There's no need to give cryptic any money or to spend any zen if you really don't want to.
The Problem is right there, it takes a couple of weeks to actually start doing all this...
And then even more time to get a Klingon and a Romulan Traitor (:P) to get them this far...
And taking "a couple" as "2-5" it takes a couple of MONTHS just to PREPARE... which have to be spend on preparing and not actually doing what you wanted to do...
So if someone doesn't want to lose months of possible progress, you have to pay...
Edit: All time figures depend on your actual gaming time per day and results may vary!
(And I don't have a lot of time per week :P So more ranting!)
Edit Edit:
Some may think I am just a ranting baby and rude but while it might be true to some extent I only want to show you the serious (at least in my opinion) flaw in your solutions. Might not be the best way but gets noticed
I am glad that there are that many people actually trying to help with this Problem and I thank you but some things just seem more like "desperately flapping your arms while falling, so that it doesn't "feel so bad and deterministic"".
I hope someone can understand my incohesive babbling...
My whole problem with the STO EC economy boils down to one simple premise that is proving entirely and increasingly true. The best and most efficient way to make EC while doing the grind is to take a little dilithium, trade it for zen, and buy a master key to sell on the exchange. Its becoming too tied to real money like some attempt at a real money auction house.
and like in the quoted part "Pay PWE a ****load of money so you can make 5+ Chars that only exist to support your Main" is this correct?
Do 1 spotlight foundry and turn in contraband on 3 characters, do your normal daily playing on 1 as well as contraband and the spotlight. Take that dilithium and go to the exchange and buy zen with it. save that zen for 2 extra character slots. Do the spotlight on the first 3 contraband on all of them, convert dilithium to zen and save for 2 more character slots. before you know it you will have 7 character slots and can make 32k dilithium and around 10 million EC everyday without much effort. Not a single penny out of your pocket to get the extra slots.
Contraband can be turned in every 4 hours so if you log in and quickly collect the dilithium and turn in more contraband then log out of the game you can easily double the amount of dilithium gathered to 28k without doing a spotlight 42 if you also do a spotlight on all those characters. Now you can take that dilithium and buy items and sell those for EC. 2 of those items sold will buy the contraband needed to do this everyday. Doff assignments can get you more contraband.
Doing 1 contraband assignment on all 7 characters takes all of 10 minutes at most to swap through each and start the assignment, another 20 to buy stuff from the Dilithium store and toss those on the exchange. 30 minutes work for millions of EC. Though around 2 weeks to get all 7 character slots and leveled high enough to get Doff's. But all completely free for you atleast.
Someone bought Zen just to get dilithium and you provided the dilithium so thats not something that PWE/Cryptic wants to nerf because it would lose money when players can no longer buy enough dilithium with zen for what they want. It is also why the exchange exists. So this is actualy something they would want to see done because it will make them more money, just not from you directly:D
Parting thoughts...
2 weeks to ramp up to get to the level where 28k is possible and 14k is a guarantee.. the dilithium you can get can be used to get EC's, turned in for fleet projects, converted to zen for buying new stuff, converted to EC, buy and sell zen like the stock market, sell bought zen and collect the dilithium on 1 character to buy it goodies, and the extra characters can grid for EC if you need a ton of it the next day or do all of that and have plenty of zen, dilithium, and EC's.. Extra characters adds more variety to the game as well, you get bored with the OP tac captain flying his top of the line equiped bug you can swap to an alt and do something differant.
Join Date: Nobody cares.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
No, not really. As I said before, you can get the doffs for free from doing colonization mission chains. You can get free blue and purple Energy Weapon, Projectile weapon, tractor beam, security officer, assault officer, and armory officer doffs (as well as others). They'll all serve you well for marauding missions, and give you a decent chance at critical successes.
You can also get blue projectile and and energy weapon doffs from the facility 4208 mission rewards, and a purple projectile weapons officer from the second to last nimbus mission.
It may take you a couple weeks to run the assignments to get the necessary doffs, but you don't need to spend any EC at all.
Every account gets a free klingon slot, you also get a free romulan slot which can be shunted into being "allied" with the klingons, which gives you marauding missions. That's two characters running marauding missions, which should be sufficient to earn yourself an income. If you need/want a greater income, and don't want to purchase additional character slots, you can always create a second account which will give you another 2 klingon characters (1 KDF, 1 Rom/KDF). There's no need to give cryptic any money or to spend any zen if you really don't want to.
I think this is an understatement when you mention "get the doffs from completing the Colonization and Fugitive 4028 Chains.
These 2 alone, take a fair bit of time to complete and are not for the faint hearted.
For those who do not have the time to DOFF around, I'd suggest they go STFing using XI weapons gotten from Episodes and amped up via normal consoles gotten off the exchange.
My El Cheapo Build
Assault Cruiser: Free or <!00,000 EC on Exchange. Seach under Reward pack for either star cruiser or assault cruiser
Equipment: Either buy off exchange or replay episodes to get some for free
Positron Deflector Array Mk XI [Inc][EM off Undine Alliance Assimilation
Paratrinic Shield Array mk Xi ) equivalent to Covariant mk xi Capx2 ) off Past Imperfect
Plasma-Disruptor Beam Array or DUal Hevy Cannons off Past Imperfect
Plasma Dual Beam Bank or Beam Array mk xi [acc]x2, off Project Nightingale
You can also get some darn decent engines or sets off the episodes.
Use this to build a ship to either STF or Elite STF to grind and wait for the next nerf.
Elitists may complain that the above does not do enough DPS in Elites but i figure, we each gotta give and take on such matters. If a buddy is down, we just gotta do a bit more work and wing it
No, not really. As I said before, you can get the doffs for free from doing colonization mission chains. You can get free blue and purple Energy Weapon, Projectile weapon, tractor beam, security officer, assault officer, and armory officer doffs (as well as others). They'll all serve you well for marauding missions, and give you a decent chance at critical successes.
You can also get blue projectile and and energy weapon doffs from the facility 4208 mission rewards, and a purple projectile weapons officer from the second to last nimbus mission.
It may take you a couple weeks to run the assignments to get the necessary doffs, but you don't need to spend any EC at all.
Every account gets a free klingon slot, you also get a free romulan slot which can be shunted into being "allied" with the klingons, which gives you marauding missions. That's two characters running marauding missions, which should be sufficient to earn yourself an income. If you need/want a greater income, and don't want to purchase additional character slots, you can always create a second account which will give you another 2 klingon characters (1 KDF, 1 Rom/KDF). There's no need to give cryptic any money or to spend any zen if you really don't want to.
The Problem is right there, it takes a couple of weeks to actually start doing all this...
And then even more time to get a Klingon and a Romulan Traitor (:P) to get them this far...
And taking "a couple" as "2-5" it takes a couple of MONTHS just to PREPARE... which have to be spend on preparing and not actually doing what you wanted to do...
So if someone doesn't want to lose months of possible progress, you have to pay...
Edit: All time figures depend on your actual gaming time per day and results may vary!
(And I don't have a lot of time per week :P So more ranting!)
Edit Edit:
Some may think I am just a ranting baby and rude but while it might be true to some extent I only want to show you the serious (at least in my opinion) flaw in your solutions. Might not be the best way but gets noticed
I am glad that there are that many people actually trying to help with this Problem and I thank you but some things just seem more like "desperately flapping your arms while falling, so that it doesn't "feel so bad and deterministic"".
I hope someone can understand my incohesive babbling...
Yes, I do understand where you are coming from. I am one of those who rely on Tour to give me a quick boost of EC. Its not enough to make me rich but enough to pay for my daily expenses. With Tour, Work Life balance is moe balanced. Without Tour, there is no balance ( beginning to sound like Ambassador Surah... )
It takes about 3h to get a rommie to level 10.
For getting to VA, it takes about 3 days of rushed playing or a week of normal playing after work.
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT IS TO GET THE "I WANT IT NAOOOOO" syndrome out of your head. STO, by itself, w/o tour is playable. You won't get top equipment by you get to enjoy the fun. Once you have learnt the ropes o begin going into DOFFing / Crafting / PVPing, thats where the expense comes in but by then, you ought to be able to know you way through the murky waters...
When going for speed levelling, i find Rommie is alot faster to hit lvl 10 than fed, though the fact that it cannot use my VA CStore fed ships is irking me....
SOme stats
You can make about 70 zen on average a day off the 8000 dil mining cap
This takes about 3h on average to hit.
My Guess for Cryptic's acceptable Rate of Return for in game currency vs time is 10-15min per 1440 dil.
My Guess for Cryptic's acceptable Rate of Return for in game currency vs time is 10-15min per 1440 dil.
You don't need to guess. Cryptic is on record saying that their target is 480 dilithium per 15 minutes of gameplay.
I know there are multiple ways of earning more than that. Anything that is substantially above that number is a target for adjustment.
"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
Oh I don't want everything now... I like to take my time...
But there's a limit... when costs increase for the reputation system (value and # of Items not any more nerfs) but avaiability shrinks there is going to be a problem...
And as I said... it would take me an estimated little less then half a year to get everything prepared and then I would have to amass ec because quite frankly in the little time I currently have, I want to do different things then grind farming missions or fly aimlessly around for the right DOff Missions to pop up while effectively doing nothing.
Let's face it... It would take far too much luck for DOff Missions NOT to appear while being in a great Story (Foundry-)Mission and I definitely cannot spend that much luck .
The Tour, even without the exploit was quick money and easily done at least 1 1/2 times when not even paying attention, as I said earlier...
If I wanted to precisely time my gaming experience to get the DOff Missions needed and grinding Foundry Missions (which will inevitably get nerfed too, the loot cap is just the beginning) I would be playing EVE...
I sometimes just want quick fun... not work... without having to play in the backyard alone with an empty bottle of plastic when everyone else is out on the street with their shiny new football...
It's not good when you need to choose between "doing fun stuff" and "Make Progress" (yes I am aware that some do think of grind as fun, this instance of the word here just describes my personal view of fun and may not be what anyone else thinks of.).
But I'm getting way to far off topic, let's get our focus back to the Thread, if you want to continue this discussion I will happily receive any PM and may you all have a good night!
Comments
It involves doff assignments and I'll need to get more information, but basically, you'll need to search sectors for 2 assignments:
1) Warp coil/Singularity Coil and
2) Alien Artifact.
If you succeed in both these assignments you'll have items that total together over 1 mil ec when sold at exchange.
Neither one of those things are a daily way to make ec.
Warp/Singularity Coils take either 4-8 hours to make, then add a 24 hour cooldown once made. Not to mention it might not even be up anywhere in the galaxy as it is a dept. head mission.
By "Alien Artifact" I will assume you are referring to the Strange Alien Artifact given as loot from "Negotiate (Additional) Delivery of Rare Commodities". This is again dependent on the fact that it has to be UP, and it has a 4 hour completion time, attached with a 72 hour cooldown. It will only show up in Cardassian Space and the Exploration Sectors attached.
Not to mention if you succeed at both of these things even on a daily basis (once again impossible due to cds) there is no guarantee of "over 1 mil ec". You could get a mk x green warp core and I guarantee in today's market that won't net you the 400-500k that you would need to put you over the 1 mil mark.
This^^^^
/10 char
Nouveau riche LTS member
My character Tsin'xing
This thread name is "Solutions for making daily ec after Tour nerf" not " tour nerf whine 2.0" , keep your whine comments on another thread that is made for that.
Yeah, but technically its still not an "exploit" as it uses the game in the way the devs designed it.
For most people, an exploit means you are modifying something in the game that was not meant to do so, by either using an external program and modifying game code, or finding a way to circumvent in game code to make it do something it shouldn't, ala Voldemort shield bug.
Had the devs proclaimed this 2 days after the event went live, I very much doubt they would be getting the same reaction.
Waiting 2 years or more and then silently nerfing it, well they deserve everything they get to be honest.
Thanks for adding that info, I'll post exact details, doffs needed etc, as soon I get it. 400-500k is still a good deal of ec, and therefore could be considered a supplement to dailies.
Or better yet, 'Why does the Tour of the Universe need a 4hr cooldown when it's only a 1 hour tour AND you only hold the event once every 15 hours?"
I would agree to a point. The problem is that the Devs design a lot of things and then change them at will to suit their own agendas.
Just look at the damage they caused taking out the Foundry quickies. They broke it even further.
The other thing you have to remember is that the Devs create something like Foundry Rewards and Tour for people to play the way they want them to play it.
As soon as people start playing the game slightly differently from their model idea, (more efficiently or earning greater rewards) rocks fall and everybody dies. Those that are particularly unlucky might get a ban hammer as well.
There are literally dozens of examples of this throughout the game.
The problem is that everytime that they do something like this, it just puts the people that have already done all the "exploiting" way above the rest because they keep their Dil/EC while no one else has the possibility of earning enough to buy something like a JHAS on the exchange.
As always art imitating life.
As a result of this we are going to see an increase in EC farming missions on the foundry and later a ban on all types of Foundry rewards to combat that perceived problem. Tour, fast engines and driver coil are now utterly pointless as a result of this. But ho hum.
Tour has been running the way it has been for 2 years.
People have been discussing ways to do runs faster for just as long.
I am sure in the archived posts someone would have talked about doing 3-5 runs to get 1m or higher.
I am sure some might even recommended the 4 sector then drop method.
All this time it was never nerfed.
People were led to believe that this gameplay would always be like this, and Tour became something like a staple EC farming method for a decent number of players.
Then here's where I get to the main point... some people even set up SPECIFIC BUILDS just for the tour. They buy the Odyssey. They get the borg or maco engines. They do whatever was necessary to get full warp speed. I won't be surprised some even created a new captain with more points on Driver Coil, or respecced their captain with more points in Driver Coil just for this. I personally was building my second and third character towards full Driver Coil in anticipation of level 50 EC farm.
In setting up builds, I am sure some people SPENT MONEY to get those builds believing it a worthwhile investment in the long run. Spend a bit of cash -> set up a reliable in-game currency farm method.
Now... with then nerf, all the efforts to specialize a build are moot.
Especially for those who spent money or ZEN on setting up a Tour build. Their MONEY that was invested is now rendered waste.
So they set up an event, let us use it as it was for 2 years, and led us to believe it would stay so. Then people spent money to work at doing that event better. And.. now the devs nerf it totally and render all the money spent wasted. And as if that weren't enough, it was a stealth nerf. Good thing I didn't wake up early that day to do the tour (it was happening at 7am Saturday morning on that first day after the nerf). So, who is exploiting whom actually. You get us to spend on the game based on some premise of how the game works and then tell us after money was spent that it shall no longer work that way. 2 years of earning cash from people who wanted to buy optimal Tour builds, then nerf it. Smart.
Other things people might have bought when they thought of tour (besides Oddy).. Captain respec tokens, Zen,
account bank, EC cap.
Thankfully I have not yet spent on the game yet. I almost did.
A most poignant post. Sad state of affairs indeed, I feel for you. I did much the same. Made a specific racer alt and was leveling so I could get max speed someday, with the best ship possible, a Vesta. The Corvette was going to do meantime, and I grinded just for that because it's even designed like a race ship, complete with racing stripes and numbering. Instead the idea of the race ship is gone, now turned into some sort of yacht. As a result, according to the chat I've heard, many players are now going to let it rot in the bank or delete it entirely. All that effort gone with the wind.
The corvette was always going to be a terrible ship to tour in, well not terrible, but no better than any other. It had no bonuses to sector space travel - it just has an incredibly high impulse modifier. Great for PvP, pretty good for darting about all over the place in PvE.
Kirk's Protege.
It took them over a year to adjust the Dilithium rewards, and Dilithium is far more important to the game then ECs. It's not because they didn't realize some of the Dilithium rewards could be exploited after watching people play for 6 months, it's because their manpower was focused into other areas: working on rep systems, working on LoR, etc. There were other priorities that needed to get done before they could work on the Dilithium issue. The same thing applies to the EC inflation coming from the Tour. It was a lesser problem that they got to when they had room in their schedule to decide how it should work.
The final thing you need to keep in mind is that an MMO is an ever-changing beast. When you sign up for the game you are required to check-off that you've read the terms of the game, and one of those terms is that Cryptic reserves the right to change the game at any time for any reason. That's how the game went FTP from Subscription. No one ever led you to believe things would never change. They told you things could change the moment you signed up.
So... now I have to spend considerably more effort and time which I don't have to get enough EC for even getting stuff for the Reputation slowing the expected progress from a couple of months to... I don't know, haven't made any calculations yet as to how long it will take me... great
And no... DOffing doesn't work for me because I do not have an all Purple Crew nor do I have 10+ Chars... and I've never ever dreamed about even visiting the Exchange...
P.S.: As there were some "Oh god rich peoples problems!" Posts... I've never even had more than 1mil of EC on any Char...
Actually, I think I should be the one saying I feel for you... because you are the type of person that got hurt the most from the Tour nerf. The type of person I was imagining and sympathizing with.
I nearly followed your track, but I guess I started 'too late' to invest as much into the game as you have.
And regarding the Corvette. Yeah, when I heard 'racing ship', first thing that came to my mind was whether it had any sector space travel value, and Tour run value. Turns out it doesn't really have any (before and after nerf...). I have yet to open my corvette requisition pack, I'd rather keep my shipyard slots free for my other ships I have in mind.
I'd like to add on to Xtern1ty's suggestion
In addition to the daily farm run ( I can't remember the loot cap reset and i may be wrong, but i think its 0000 GMT ), you should also do the Tau Dewa Sector Patrol WITH the Tau Dewa Radiation Scan mission active ( follow the white circles ). Skip the Gekli mission and collect the radiation from the satellite, because the Gekli's tend to cause massive traffic jams enroute to their destinations, prolonging the time spent considerably....
For the farm run, choose battleship royal rumble if your ship is decent enough. It does not have the stasis fields and allow the ship to move around freely...
I suggest making as many klingon characters as possible. Klingons get marauding assignments, which is the same as saying klingons get free income. Make klingons, do marauding assignments, sell contraband, collect EC. It's that simple.
Contraband is of course the big-ticket item. But marauding assignments also generate commodities, (TRIBBLE) gear, and prisoners. The commodities and gear you unload to vendors, the prisoners you can put on the exchange with the contraband.
You can get plenty of good doffs for marauding assignments for free from colonization chains.
Fill up your doff assignments twice a day with mostly marauding assignments and I gaurantee you won't miss tour anymore. The special engines and warp cores you got to do tour faster will let you hunt for doff assignments faster.
Watch out Dude....this could be consider an exploit and might be shut down by a DEV...These guys should just shut down the server since all they want is MONEY....
Make players grind until their eyes bleed or make them pay through the urethra. We don't care how you milk them dry, just make sure that milking them dry until their nipples petrify and fall off is your only goal. Don't deviate from this goal unless you'd rather be on the bread line." - Prime Directive from PWE
Same here and thanks for the kind thought. Perhaps we may be fortunate enough to meet in game sometime. I play daily, @xtern1ty, and also lead the fleet for longterm players that I'm named after. Feel free to PM me or drop by our channel and say hi if you like, we do missions daily with fleetmates and you're welcome to come as well.
Thank you for your addition and the foundry tip. Yes, I believe you're right on Foundry reset time.
That's a good suggestion, especially for players who are more or less independent or aren't too preoccupied with leveling a Fed fleet. I happen to be at this time so disengaging for KDF right now will take a while to organize, but still a good idea.
As I see... many "solutions" boil down to "spend and hour and more in Foundry and sector patrols grinding and hoping you get enough valuable stuff before you hit the cap", "Buy an all purple Crew for DOffing and hope you get friggin lucky with the missions every day" and like in the quoted part "Pay PWE a ****load of money so you can make 5+ Chars that only exist to support your Main" is this correct?
Edit: Shame on me forgot what I actually wanted to say...
Everything presented so far requires a whole lot of more time and/or Real Money... Both that some don't have or want to spend. Tour was easy... chime in, set course, tab out, do important things, tab in, change course and continue... I've never actually knew of the exploit but tried to at least make 1 1/2 runs that way...
No, not really. As I said before, you can get the doffs for free from doing colonization mission chains. You can get free blue and purple Energy Weapon, Projectile weapon, tractor beam, security officer, assault officer, and armory officer doffs (as well as others). They'll all serve you well for marauding missions, and give you a decent chance at critical successes.
You can also get blue projectile and and energy weapon doffs from the facility 4208 mission rewards, and a purple projectile weapons officer from the second to last nimbus mission.
It may take you a couple weeks to run the assignments to get the necessary doffs, but you don't need to spend any EC at all.
Every account gets a free klingon slot, you also get a free romulan slot which can be shunted into being "allied" with the klingons, which gives you marauding missions. That's two characters running marauding missions, which should be sufficient to earn yourself an income. If you need/want a greater income, and don't want to purchase additional character slots, you can always create a second account which will give you another 2 klingon characters (1 KDF, 1 Rom/KDF). There's no need to give cryptic any money or to spend any zen if you really don't want to.
The Problem is right there, it takes a couple of weeks to actually start doing all this...
And then even more time to get a Klingon and a Romulan Traitor (:P) to get them this far...
And taking "a couple" as "2-5" it takes a couple of MONTHS just to PREPARE... which have to be spend on preparing and not actually doing what you wanted to do...
So if someone doesn't want to lose months of possible progress, you have to pay...
Edit: All time figures depend on your actual gaming time per day and results may vary!
(And I don't have a lot of time per week :P So more ranting!)
Edit Edit:
Some may think I am just a ranting baby and rude but while it might be true to some extent I only want to show you the serious (at least in my opinion) flaw in your solutions. Might not be the best way but gets noticed
I am glad that there are that many people actually trying to help with this Problem and I thank you but some things just seem more like "desperately flapping your arms while falling, so that it doesn't "feel so bad and deterministic"".
I hope someone can understand my incohesive babbling...
Do 1 spotlight foundry and turn in contraband on 3 characters, do your normal daily playing on 1 as well as contraband and the spotlight. Take that dilithium and go to the exchange and buy zen with it. save that zen for 2 extra character slots. Do the spotlight on the first 3 contraband on all of them, convert dilithium to zen and save for 2 more character slots. before you know it you will have 7 character slots and can make 32k dilithium and around 10 million EC everyday without much effort. Not a single penny out of your pocket to get the extra slots.
Contraband can be turned in every 4 hours so if you log in and quickly collect the dilithium and turn in more contraband then log out of the game you can easily double the amount of dilithium gathered to 28k without doing a spotlight 42 if you also do a spotlight on all those characters. Now you can take that dilithium and buy items and sell those for EC. 2 of those items sold will buy the contraband needed to do this everyday. Doff assignments can get you more contraband.
Doing 1 contraband assignment on all 7 characters takes all of 10 minutes at most to swap through each and start the assignment, another 20 to buy stuff from the Dilithium store and toss those on the exchange. 30 minutes work for millions of EC. Though around 2 weeks to get all 7 character slots and leveled high enough to get Doff's. But all completely free for you atleast.
Someone bought Zen just to get dilithium and you provided the dilithium so thats not something that PWE/Cryptic wants to nerf because it would lose money when players can no longer buy enough dilithium with zen for what they want. It is also why the exchange exists. So this is actualy something they would want to see done because it will make them more money, just not from you directly:D
Parting thoughts...
2 weeks to ramp up to get to the level where 28k is possible and 14k is a guarantee.. the dilithium you can get can be used to get EC's, turned in for fleet projects, converted to zen for buying new stuff, converted to EC, buy and sell zen like the stock market, sell bought zen and collect the dilithium on 1 character to buy it goodies, and the extra characters can grid for EC if you need a ton of it the next day or do all of that and have plenty of zen, dilithium, and EC's.. Extra characters adds more variety to the game as well, you get bored with the OP tac captain flying his top of the line equiped bug you can swap to an alt and do something differant.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
I think this is an understatement when you mention "get the doffs from completing the Colonization and Fugitive 4028 Chains.
These 2 alone, take a fair bit of time to complete and are not for the faint hearted.
For those who do not have the time to DOFF around, I'd suggest they go STFing using XI weapons gotten from Episodes and amped up via normal consoles gotten off the exchange.
My El Cheapo Build
Assault Cruiser: Free or <!00,000 EC on Exchange. Seach under Reward pack for either star cruiser or assault cruiser
Equipment: Either buy off exchange or replay episodes to get some for free
You can choose your poison off here http://sto.gamepedia.com/Episode_replay
Some good ones to go for
Positron Deflector Array Mk XI [Inc][EM off Undine Alliance Assimilation
Paratrinic Shield Array mk Xi ) equivalent to Covariant mk xi Capx2 ) off Past Imperfect
Plasma-Disruptor Beam Array or DUal Hevy Cannons off Past Imperfect
Plasma Dual Beam Bank or Beam Array mk xi [acc]x2, off Project Nightingale
You can also get some darn decent engines or sets off the episodes.
Use this to build a ship to either STF or Elite STF to grind and wait for the next nerf.
Elitists may complain that the above does not do enough DPS in Elites but i figure, we each gotta give and take on such matters. If a buddy is down, we just gotta do a bit more work and wing it
Yes, I do understand where you are coming from. I am one of those who rely on Tour to give me a quick boost of EC. Its not enough to make me rich but enough to pay for my daily expenses. With Tour, Work Life balance is moe balanced. Without Tour, there is no balance ( beginning to sound like Ambassador Surah... )
It takes about 3h to get a rommie to level 10.
For getting to VA, it takes about 3 days of rushed playing or a week of normal playing after work.
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT IS TO GET THE "I WANT IT NAOOOOO" syndrome out of your head. STO, by itself, w/o tour is playable. You won't get top equipment by you get to enjoy the fun. Once you have learnt the ropes o begin going into DOFFing / Crafting / PVPing, thats where the expense comes in but by then, you ought to be able to know you way through the murky waters...
When going for speed levelling, i find Rommie is alot faster to hit lvl 10 than fed, though the fact that it cannot use my VA CStore fed ships is irking me....
SOme stats
You can make about 70 zen on average a day off the 8000 dil mining cap
This takes about 3h on average to hit.
My Guess for Cryptic's acceptable Rate of Return for in game currency vs time is 10-15min per 1440 dil.
You don't need to guess. Cryptic is on record saying that their target is 480 dilithium per 15 minutes of gameplay.
I know there are multiple ways of earning more than that. Anything that is substantially above that number is a target for adjustment.
Do you happen to have the link to the dev blog of them saying this? I'd like to find out more on their expectations myself.. :P
But there's a limit... when costs increase for the reputation system (value and # of Items not any more nerfs) but avaiability shrinks there is going to be a problem...
And as I said... it would take me an estimated little less then half a year to get everything prepared and then I would have to amass ec because quite frankly in the little time I currently have, I want to do different things then grind farming missions or fly aimlessly around for the right DOff Missions to pop up while effectively doing nothing.
Let's face it... It would take far too much luck for DOff Missions NOT to appear while being in a great Story (Foundry-)Mission and I definitely cannot spend that much luck
The Tour, even without the exploit was quick money and easily done at least 1 1/2 times when not even paying attention, as I said earlier...
If I wanted to precisely time my gaming experience to get the DOff Missions needed and grinding Foundry Missions (which will inevitably get nerfed too, the loot cap is just the beginning) I would be playing EVE...
I sometimes just want quick fun... not work... without having to play in the backyard alone with an empty bottle of plastic when everyone else is out on the street with their shiny new football...
It's not good when you need to choose between "doing fun stuff" and "Make Progress" (yes I am aware that some do think of grind as fun, this instance of the word here just describes my personal view of fun and may not be what anyone else thinks of.).
But I'm getting way to far off topic, let's get our focus back to the Thread, if you want to continue this discussion I will happily receive any PM and may you all have a good night!