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How many Reputations?
drkfrontiers
Member Posts: 2,477 Arc User
One of the main things that killed my playtime was the reputation systems.
Before I would merrily go about having as many as 6 alts each special to me since I have had them since Beta, some a little while after.
Now its takes me 4 - 6 hours just to do the admin i.e doffing, marks, etc and by that time I'm exhausted. {There's a voice in my head most nights: ... can't play now sorry mate... have to do damn Azure Nebula again because some AFK ..."
Sure I could take a break and do something else, but what >.<. I want to PvP. But I need rep or its no point.
Development seems to be focused only on these hefty reputations systems where even the content now seems to be locked behind a grind.
I stopped playing with the mission unlocks from Romulan and Tholian because of the knowledge that it would take forever.
Personally I think that the business model is flawed. STO customers are like window shoppers. They love a great deal, but if they see something they like, and the sign says come back in December, chances are but that time they have found something down the way. Time is precious.
And in terms of the reputation how many is enough, before the reputations start to become pointless, the one negating the other. I was startled when I tried to imagine STO's lifespan in terms of Reputations. How many has it got?
The mere fact that we could end up with polarised-tetryonic-phased-holographic-antiproton-transphasic DHC makes me just want TOS all the more. When the Romulans hated everyone with a God-complex, and the Klingon women knew how to roar and bite off a Starfleet's eat all the while slapping their mother.
Thats my thoughts really.
Oh, and a K'Vort. Just a K'Vort.
Before I would merrily go about having as many as 6 alts each special to me since I have had them since Beta, some a little while after.
Now its takes me 4 - 6 hours just to do the admin i.e doffing, marks, etc and by that time I'm exhausted. {There's a voice in my head most nights: ... can't play now sorry mate... have to do damn Azure Nebula again because some AFK ..."
Sure I could take a break and do something else, but what >.<. I want to PvP. But I need rep or its no point.
Development seems to be focused only on these hefty reputations systems where even the content now seems to be locked behind a grind.
I stopped playing with the mission unlocks from Romulan and Tholian because of the knowledge that it would take forever.
Personally I think that the business model is flawed. STO customers are like window shoppers. They love a great deal, but if they see something they like, and the sign says come back in December, chances are but that time they have found something down the way. Time is precious.
And in terms of the reputation how many is enough, before the reputations start to become pointless, the one negating the other. I was startled when I tried to imagine STO's lifespan in terms of Reputations. How many has it got?
The mere fact that we could end up with polarised-tetryonic-phased-holographic-antiproton-transphasic DHC makes me just want TOS all the more. When the Romulans hated everyone with a God-complex, and the Klingon women knew how to roar and bite off a Starfleet's eat all the while slapping their mother.
Thats my thoughts really.
Oh, and a K'Vort. Just a K'Vort.
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If you're spending 4-6 hours a day on Rep, I'm thinking it's because you want to, not because you need to.
I have 9 toons all maxed rep on all reps save for my one sci rommie. I love them all equally. Leaving one out for even a cycle makes me lose sleep - G@d I'm a geek.
Actually I do like the reputations don't get me wrong. Imagine me as some orphan in a toystore for the first time told he can pick a toy.
Only real complaint I have is that one is not able to spawn all pets on the ground at once. I would love to spawn my pet parrot "Zanadu" from the islands, my trusty robot spider "Cricket", my Epoph "Poppet", and my faithful first officer and do an reenactment of the hit musical "The Hill are alive with the sound of Music" on Romulus. Truly, it will be magnificent. However I always end up here.
Help me Cryptic. Help me help you.
I as well as others are in the same boat as you. That's why I've been pleading to the Dev Team a change in the reputation system, where it doesn't punish players with multiple characters. Because like you said, the more characters, the more time you are forced to commit.
The only response we got is that they revised the Reputation system for "weekday warriors", but ignoring us who have multiple characters. Seems they want us to spend more time in-game and grinding out reputations on every single character. Which they have no idea the negative ramifications this has on us, because if we spend our entire time online grinding and less time playing the game how we enjoy it, we eventually lose interest and leave the game.
I've seen lots of people left because of the Nukara Reputation, so I have no idea why Cryptic is ignoring this issue. But instead, we get blind Pro-Cryptic supporters are telling us "hey grind later" or some other nonsense, but they have no idea what we have to go through. Lets see them turn grind constantly on characters for 6-8 hours per day and 3-4 months and see how happy they would be.
Yeah, it's been nothing but a repeat of Season 7 - New Rep and a new Fleet Holding with a few storyline missions. It's really getting tiresome and I'm tired of Fleet Starbase grinding (can't even do it on the Klingon side even if I wanted to, because the queues are dead).
I just wish they come out with something actually new than rehashing same-ol.
Yes! Tired of them making the excuse "oh it's just a big B'rel". Guess what, its a canonical ship and you have an obligation to add that in STO, Cryptic! Not like you couldn't alter it's looks so it's less of an exact copy of the B'rel, my word even Activision did a nice job of doing that with SFC3 and the Armada games.
1. I need to level all my toons through rep.
2. Rep grinding is so painfully boring and slow.
3. I don't want to rep grind them because of that.
And thus toons get left behind, and the cycle starts again, but you have even less desire to do so because now those toons are behind and thus you have to grind even MORE.
Not to mention that, once you move past the rep level grind, then you have an even worse part: Gear grind.
Sure you only should grind what you need, but that is a HUGE grind if you are wanting specific things, like an STF set or whatever. Ironically enough, you can get around the dil limit of 8k a day by using ALTS. Even so, that still needs a lot of dil per set piece (or per item you buy outta the stores) and also a lot of marks for set pieces. It can be over 100k dil for a single full Mk XII set for ONE toon!
A lot of people have also said that, 'Well, you chose to have so many alt toons, so it's your own fault.'.
To which I say, not really. A large majority of us, when we made so many alts, was long before they added in rep. Heck, even the original Omega Task Force stuff wasn't bad, because back then you could gear a toon out in a week if you worked at it long enough.
It also doesn't help how...bi-polar so many things feel. So much stuff used to be account based, and now there's TONS of character-based stuff. Like C-store ships are account, yet stuff like rep is character.
Besides, I made alts because I wanted to enjoy the game through the other captain types, and also the other factions, including their styles of ships, not leave them behind because of the giant grind walls that've been put up over time.
I want to ENJOY my characters, have different toons with different ships, foci, etc, because to me that is fun. If the content rarely changes, then I made other toons so I could try the content in other ways.
I don't want everything handed to me on a platter (so many seem to think that's what we want), but it's getting less and less fun to want to play at all if all there is, is new grinds that I don't really want to do on all my toons.
Also, Azurian, I've noticed you in a few posts mentioning how it seems to be tough on your KDF-side of your fleet. If you want to, feel free to PM me (or I can PM you) about maybe helping out with that some.
For me the solution would be to make the marks account shared (using account bank) and be able to transfer from one character to another.
I have and maintain 4 characters and it gives me a headache that I would have to harvest Voth marks. :mad:
I would like to make 2 more characters and buy of course ships specific to their class but the harvesting of marks stops me.
KDF Eng: Boreas I.K.S. Demonon Nemesis {Fleet: HoS}
Rom Sci: Crius I.R.W. Noctem Aeternus {Fleet: LoS}
Fed Tac: Kronos U.S.S. Xibalba, I.S.S. Theogonia{Fleet: HSF}
If you let yourself get overwhelmed, or feel you need to always do everything, well, there's your problem.
"This feature allows players that have maxed out a reputation on one character to have double reputation experience for all of their alts in that same rep.""
Hopefully they pass this dfeature to all the reputations! This would greatly improve the experience for alts.
There is a strong bit of irony to the rep system, it is a pve grind, but more significant for pvp in its effect. You can still complete pve without the traits, but in pvp, as they continue to add rep systems every single season it becomes necessary max out the rep on any toon that you wish to pvp.
I had 3 kdf and 3 fed toons that I kept their gear up (would like rommies, but not starting over on them). Now because of account based zen purchases I stick to only fed because the purchases are faction specific in some cases. I avoid being overwhelmed by cutting back alts, but i am tired of only being fed. For now with only a few reps I could run a kdf presently and be competitive as long as I keep other aspects current especially gear. However, I see the writing on the wall about they will need to be shelved in the next year for sure so I am saving dilithium and play time accumulating fleet credits for them.
Account base rep should not reduce player use of rep missions, I would probably run as many rep missions with account based as with character based rep. The thought being I would have 6 toons and possible 2-4 new rommies and I would still want to get gear on them which requires marks. That being said I don't believe the dev interviews stating account based rep would diminish community involvement. It is interesting that that comment indicates there is substantial alt use in the rep system. Since polls can't be run here it is hard to get information on what most people want, but polls in fleet and from others suggest people would want more toons to have rep gear.
This has made the game less interesting because of diminished diversity in what I can play. I feel 2 changes need to be made in the next year or rep will really hurt the game. First rep sponsorship is a nice gesture, but it still needs to be made account bound, if anything, for the sake of new players that are logging in for the first time. I met such a guy who is new to the game just this week and I talked to him a bit. He has been in the fleet for two weeks, has a desire to be a kdf sci and fed eng, but after leveling the fed eng and initiating the rep system he is going to wait on the kdf. I think that a non-alt friendly policy is bad for business and hurts all players that want a growing game. Typically the more diversity of characters played, the more diversity in ships created. Will the rep system impact the next faction release (is it a coincidence that rep sponsorship was released after LOR) because people don't start new toons as much anymore?
Second, and this needs to happen soon, rep traits need to be removed from pvp. There is no pvp equivalent for rep mark earning. Rep traits are going to become essential for pvp once there are 8-10 reps. Rep gear is fine for two reasons, there are alternative paths to decent gear through the fleet system, and the gear does not require constant completion of rep, just focused completion of a rep that interests a player.
The sponsorship feature is not substantial to deal with this issue because half the grind is still too much pve time in a 2 mission rotation of the same thing over and again, but more importantly the timegate is obscene. You have to wait till prime is max then you can start the alts, whose rep xp missions are timegated. At the least this will take 2-3 months of just waiting on timers. Why not let us build up resources on alts and have instant xp missions once we activate sponsorship?
In wrap up:
1. alts make more money for STO and leads to more content and investment in STO
2. new players are pigeonholed into a very daunting rep grind
3. pvp impact of rep is overly significant and improperly implemented by the pve nature of earning rep
4. account bound rep shouldn't reduce utilization of rep missions because of gear needs
5. The sponsorship system rep projects for xp should have an instant timer till account based rep is implemented.
This is not an entitlement, I have cut back zen purchases in game because of rep (no need for an Avenger for one), I have cut back playing time because of rep. I guess for those that think entitlement to desire to play pvp in a competitive manner and want to enjoy that aspect of A GAME, then I have no argument that can cut through that.
They openly stated that the number of currencies had gotten out of hand, with 28 different data samples, then the individual tokens for each of the star clusters/nebulae, dilithium, etc.. so they consolidated most of those into dilithium in order to simplify things and allow players to spend more time playing and less time grinding out currencies.
Now what do we have? Counting Season 8, we have 4 different rep grinds, plus 4 different fleet grinds, all requiring various currencies and other resources, which means people are back to the mindless grind for currencies instead of actually playing the game.
Adding salt to the wound, they took away all of the best rewards for doing the various mission chains and STFs and threw those into the Rep system, making that idiot grind mandatory if you wanted the gear.
While the Rep system has it's advantages, what they should do is simplify it by making the Rep tiers account wide, allowing all of your characters access to the perks and giving them the ability to contribute resources towards the progression of the tiers. Individual gear needs would still need to be met by that character, which would ensure that all characters have to participate to some degree in the Rep system in order to progress, but without requiring the ridiculously idiotic amount of time and resources needed in the current system to level it on each and every toon.
Then, to give people something to do besides mindlessly grinding out currencies and resources, add some meaningful content with it's own rewards that aren't tied to the Rep grind, the Fleet grind, or the C-$tore.
This is an MMORPG after all. It's time PWE/Cryptic remembered that there's more to the game than endless resource farming and fleecing people on the C-$store.
Before the rep system I liked playing all may chars. Without it I would probably have about 20 toons by now. If they had only made it account bound I would love the system *sigh*
Well the new sponsoring system is a step in the right direction. I would have hoped for more but it is a start. Nevertheless when the new rep hits I will probably focus on something like 3 chars. Getting the new rep to max lvl will likely take me something like 2 months. That means I have to ignore a large part of my chars for quite some time or split my attention, which means I can't use the sponsoring very well and have to grind a lot longer till I have someone with max rep.
My stomach is clear and my mind is full of bacon!
On Tribble, it is for all reputations. At least the claim sponsorship project is there... my current Tribble toon (while he has all rep powers, has 0 rep experience), so I cant seem to slot the project to get the Sponsorship Token to give to an alt.
It will be shared via the account bank. Very excited by this...
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....