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Reputation in STO (my own opinion and some suggestions for the devs)
battykoda0
Member Posts: 959 Arc User
The "Flame me" disclaimer
This is my opinion. I am not asking anyone to endorse it or even agree with it. You have yours and I have mine. I am fairly certain that a lot of people feel the same way I do and I am certain that a lot of people love the current system. Constructive discussion is always welcome but I don't do trolls and I don't do flames - however, I will do quips but people always take them as flames even if I :P. Besides, no one at Cryptic/PWE is going to engage in or give credence to a discussion that is nothing but throwing grenades back and forth. Add your opinions and maybe someone will look at this and get ideas from it.
Wall of Text
Ditch reputation marks. Make reputation work like XP. You do the mission, you get XP. You kill the boss, you get XP. When your reputation XP reaches a certain point, you gain a level. If you really must issue a level unlock, unlock it with an EDC type item (more on those next).
Use an EDC type drop (like the BNP etc) to fund gear. Keep the dilithium sink if you like but get rid of the commodities and if you need an EC sink, do it like the system on Tribble and just require X EC without sending people looking for the cheapest freighter in space to buy from. The worst part about that is you need commodities for one mission and devices for the other and neither is sold in the same place. So you either start out at a vendor on the ground and then patrol space for freighters or start in space and end up on a base.
Put a very rare drop in there somewhere. By very rare, I mean give it like a 0.25% chance of dropping a token for an item that you can use in the reputation store in place of the grind. Hey, awesome! John Doe just got the drop for an engine! We used to have those, remember? They were nice. They were something to hope for. Now, it's "I can get 10 marks if I kill 100 Tholians in a Red Alert or I can get 400 for little effort over a week's time if I give the Romulans a purple bunny." Which leads me to the next part and a huge wall of text.
My thoughts on the mark grind as it is
Seriously, the bunnies are the most cost effective item on New Romulus. It takes 5 minutes of running in circles over 5 days of time and the missions to get the tags and raise the bunnies are right there next to you. Once you get the cycle started, you get 400 marks every 5 days for literally a minute a day of grinding. The Romulans are going to go extinct if they value a bunny so much more than they do killing their enemies. This yields slightly less than doing the sector patrol over the same 5 days time but a sector patrol takes a bit longer than 1 minute per day. Even worse, a single sector patrol yields more than doing the Red Alert every day in those 5 days. Not figured into this is radiation scanning. If you have the will to look for them on New Romulus and to scan them in space in the mission (again, just once a day), you can get 300 radiation reports fairly easily to turn in for 30 marks. This, however, involves a lot of running in circles on New Romulus hunting down the radiation clouds. In short, the Romulan Reputation is a rat race (or bunny race if you will) that has too many cooldowns for not enough rewards. Azure Nebula and Vault Ensnared give pathetically low marks for the time spent when compared to normal STF and Omega marks (they are about as hard as each other). Make the Tau Dewa Red Alert and event like the Crystalline Entity and this will really help.
Omega rewards seem to be ok although I still preferred the old way. I never seem to run out of STFs to do, only the time to do them. I get my stuff from that fairly quickly once you ignore the fact it takes a month to get to Tier 5 regardless of how many marks you can get in a day. Defera is good for marks as well but I would really love to see the hard missions in the queue. The upcoming transwarp to Defera (if it makes it to live) is very welcome. Oh, and fix the bugs there. They are years old.
Tholian marks are not bad to grind IF you do the easy and medium missions on Nukara. Again, the queued events are pathetic (sans the Crystalline Entity) sources of Nukara marks. You can get more marks in 30 minutes on easy ground missions than you can in twice the time in the queue. And the underground mission in the queue? It's a complete waste of time. The failure rate makes that one not even worth doing simply because no one seems willing to stand at a console and push a button plus the spawn rate was at least tripled from the time before it became and event.
The upcoming reputation was looking good to me until the patch on Tribble today. Now it is the same nonsense grind for low marks as everything else but you did ditch the commodities which is a start. Just don't add them back in the next patch.
Final words
With the reputation system in STO the way it is, I have made my last alt. My desire to do this whole song and dance yet another time cannot even be won back if you gave me multiple new playable factions to experience. I would do their storyline then delete them.
I don't mind the endgame once I finish my reputations and get the items I like. I rather enjoy punishing the Borg with my friends and the many other things we do as level 50 characters once the grind has ended. After all, that is what a game is supposed to be, not a second job. There are bugs, sure. They annoy me. However, I still have a load of fun with my friends and I enjoy being a General (For the Empire!) and even enjoy being an Admiral but being a General is more fun for me.
This is my opinion. I am not asking anyone to endorse it or even agree with it. You have yours and I have mine. I am fairly certain that a lot of people feel the same way I do and I am certain that a lot of people love the current system. Constructive discussion is always welcome but I don't do trolls and I don't do flames - however, I will do quips but people always take them as flames even if I :P. Besides, no one at Cryptic/PWE is going to engage in or give credence to a discussion that is nothing but throwing grenades back and forth. Add your opinions and maybe someone will look at this and get ideas from it.
Wall of Text
Ditch reputation marks. Make reputation work like XP. You do the mission, you get XP. You kill the boss, you get XP. When your reputation XP reaches a certain point, you gain a level. If you really must issue a level unlock, unlock it with an EDC type item (more on those next).
Use an EDC type drop (like the BNP etc) to fund gear. Keep the dilithium sink if you like but get rid of the commodities and if you need an EC sink, do it like the system on Tribble and just require X EC without sending people looking for the cheapest freighter in space to buy from. The worst part about that is you need commodities for one mission and devices for the other and neither is sold in the same place. So you either start out at a vendor on the ground and then patrol space for freighters or start in space and end up on a base.
Put a very rare drop in there somewhere. By very rare, I mean give it like a 0.25% chance of dropping a token for an item that you can use in the reputation store in place of the grind. Hey, awesome! John Doe just got the drop for an engine! We used to have those, remember? They were nice. They were something to hope for. Now, it's "I can get 10 marks if I kill 100 Tholians in a Red Alert or I can get 400 for little effort over a week's time if I give the Romulans a purple bunny." Which leads me to the next part and a huge wall of text.
My thoughts on the mark grind as it is
Seriously, the bunnies are the most cost effective item on New Romulus. It takes 5 minutes of running in circles over 5 days of time and the missions to get the tags and raise the bunnies are right there next to you. Once you get the cycle started, you get 400 marks every 5 days for literally a minute a day of grinding. The Romulans are going to go extinct if they value a bunny so much more than they do killing their enemies. This yields slightly less than doing the sector patrol over the same 5 days time but a sector patrol takes a bit longer than 1 minute per day. Even worse, a single sector patrol yields more than doing the Red Alert every day in those 5 days. Not figured into this is radiation scanning. If you have the will to look for them on New Romulus and to scan them in space in the mission (again, just once a day), you can get 300 radiation reports fairly easily to turn in for 30 marks. This, however, involves a lot of running in circles on New Romulus hunting down the radiation clouds. In short, the Romulan Reputation is a rat race (or bunny race if you will) that has too many cooldowns for not enough rewards. Azure Nebula and Vault Ensnared give pathetically low marks for the time spent when compared to normal STF and Omega marks (they are about as hard as each other). Make the Tau Dewa Red Alert and event like the Crystalline Entity and this will really help.
Omega rewards seem to be ok although I still preferred the old way. I never seem to run out of STFs to do, only the time to do them. I get my stuff from that fairly quickly once you ignore the fact it takes a month to get to Tier 5 regardless of how many marks you can get in a day. Defera is good for marks as well but I would really love to see the hard missions in the queue. The upcoming transwarp to Defera (if it makes it to live) is very welcome. Oh, and fix the bugs there. They are years old.
Tholian marks are not bad to grind IF you do the easy and medium missions on Nukara. Again, the queued events are pathetic (sans the Crystalline Entity) sources of Nukara marks. You can get more marks in 30 minutes on easy ground missions than you can in twice the time in the queue. And the underground mission in the queue? It's a complete waste of time. The failure rate makes that one not even worth doing simply because no one seems willing to stand at a console and push a button plus the spawn rate was at least tripled from the time before it became and event.
The upcoming reputation was looking good to me until the patch on Tribble today. Now it is the same nonsense grind for low marks as everything else but you did ditch the commodities which is a start. Just don't add them back in the next patch.
Final words
With the reputation system in STO the way it is, I have made my last alt. My desire to do this whole song and dance yet another time cannot even be won back if you gave me multiple new playable factions to experience. I would do their storyline then delete them.
I don't mind the endgame once I finish my reputations and get the items I like. I rather enjoy punishing the Borg with my friends and the many other things we do as level 50 characters once the grind has ended. After all, that is what a game is supposed to be, not a second job. There are bugs, sure. They annoy me. However, I still have a load of fun with my friends and I enjoy being a General (For the Empire!) and even enjoy being an Admiral but being a General is more fun for me.
Wow. There is a new KDF Science ship. I'll be!
Post edited by battykoda0 on
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Comments
And really things arnt sold in the same place? I have only played two mmo's sto and pwi, but I have never seen items that weren't of the same type found in the same npc. And besides I know that certain npcs are coded to have certain type of items and only those items. They would have to rewrite the code to change that. Are people really that lazy that they cant go to different locations to get the items needed?
Hard missions in the queue? Why? Its really easy to get a team for them, and I think it was stupid they put the ones on nukara in queues. Not to mention the fact that nukara is now glitched to where the hard missions come up as an active mission when you are on nukara.
New rom is really not that hard. Its actually really easy and I can get all of the missions including the instances done in 2 hours. For a reward of 10 marks or 12 if marks event is going per mission that's actually really good. I think if they were to raise the amount of marks they should raise the difficulty as well.
This whole post sounds like to me that you are just lazy and want everything just given to you with minimal work. Well that's not how the game or real life works. If you want to be the best and have the best you have to work your butt off it get it.
To say nothing of the "Submit Commendation Report" project that gives 2500 Rep XP and requires a single Dyson Commendation item that you can get from doing one Dyson Sphere event per day. Or the introduction of Rep Sponsorship.
The throwing out of store unlock projects and projects for anything below Mk XII, adding free random gear for completing each Rep XP project and dumping the need for commodities are a great step in the right direction. They should go back and re-do all the Reps using the same model as the Voth one.
My only issue is that since the Voth XP projects require less marks, then you get less marks in payout for PvE queues and events in the Sphere. Coupled to the fact that items - such as the ground set - probably aren't going to see a reduction in Marks' cost, leads me to believe that some of it is still going to be an absurdly difficult grind to get enough marks for things.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Rep Projects =/= Playing The Game.
I have no problem working for the items needed to complete the rep projects. That is playing the game. My issue with the Rep system comes from the time and resources that are required to complete one. Projects take 20 hours to complete - even the new rep that gives 2500xp takes 20hrs. It's just not neccessary for it to take as long as it does to complete something. With that, you're basically stuck for a day with nothing to do until it finishes, if you're solely focusing on a Rep System.
And so far, with the exception of maybe a few items, only the Omega one is actually decent. So i'm struggling to see the point of the others.
Much as I prefer the Rep System to the system of random drops that we had before, the system is designed to pad out gameplay - sometimes unneccessarily. Top that off with the issue of having four different Rep systems that are character-bound. So toons have to do them again.
The grenade throwing... people just can't resist. Since we can't be constructive, here's my lob of grenades back.
There is a big difference in getting the items you need by playing and getting the items you need by playing errand boy with a shopping list flying all over the known universe to simply buy them. Time spent flying around to freighters and bases buying commodities is not playing a game. It's time spent on autopilot waiting to play a game.
Do you use your replicator for everything you need? If so, then yes, most of it is in the same place - for twice the cost. Otherwise, how could you fail to notice that the commodities needed are sold in different places? Did you notice by chance that freighters don't sell stims, shield batteries, regenerators, and weapon batteries? Did you notice that ESD sells different commodities than DS9 and K-7?
I didn't say I don't like playing the game. I said I don't like running in circles wasting time when I could be playing the game. Like I said above, in case you missed it, I'm sure some people agree with me and some people don't. What if I said "WTF? If you use the replicator for almost twice the cost, you are an idiot." It's basically the same thing as saying "You people are too lazy to fly around in circles chasing freighters." Maybe it's a time management issue that makes the rat race disliked. Maybe it's that some people would rather do missions than grocery shop for the Romulans, Tholians, and OMEGA.
Your limited experience with MMOs by a single company means you only know how a single company does it. There are much better ways that are not instantaneous and rely on an XP type system combined with drops where everything you need for the reputation comes out of the missions you are doing. I can't think of many others that the grind does not supply the items because the items needed for the reputation are part of the grind. It's not extra. It's not grocery shopping.
You would still have the same amount of mission work to do. It's not isntaboom you have your reputation level. You need items to drop. You need reputation gains with the faction for completing the missions. You already get 1 BNP for every STF you do - the elite ones anyway. What is so needy about suggesting those be the currency for the stores without the marks? And what is wrong with a rare drop that gives you a boost toward your items?
From what I read, you offered nothing substantial in why it is good except you feel you worked for it. Not to mention the name of the game, but doing a mission once a week for nearly a year for reputation in the form of XP to gain favor with a faction to buy items for currency wasn't instant gratification and sure felt like doing some work to get the benefits to me. It's not about doing the missions at all. You missed the point. It's about doing the missions and then going shopping for junk that you hold in your hand for seconds before putting it into a different box. Why not just skip the tour of the universe and set an EC cost equal to the cost of the commodities. They aren't drops. They aren't rare. They aren't in short supply. The only difference between a commodity and EC is a slider - two sliders. It's the same thing with the marks. If you finish it, you get them. The only difference between a mark and XP is a slider. The only difference between hitting your level and being able to buy the gear with drop tokens (the Borg Neural Processor) and buying it with marks, commodities, and the drop tokens is sliders. That and a bunch of flying in circles as an errand boy.
My point is why do we need a new Rep System EVERY time STO decides to introduce a new area or enemy? Sure you have new gear and weapons. But why can't they be earned some other way? This lack of imagination and creativilty is why people are complaining about the grind, grind, grind.
Leave the Rep System alone, but for heavens sake give it a rest. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
The new rep, even though they increased nearly everything, is not so bad as the others. Everything you need drops right there - marks, items worth EC, and skill points. Or it does for the small amount of it I have tested. There is a vendor in the center area to sell the junk drops to so you get your EC. The zone is resetting anyway so there's no better time to do a vendor dump. You don't have to leave the Sphere for anything. You might have to fly in space to the Command Center and beam down but it is still entirely within the zone and self-contained. If you want to recycle the junk, then you don't even have to do that. Other than the doubling of a lot of the stuff in the new rep, it is still many times over better than Romulan Reputation simply because you are not limited to doing the missions once every 20 hours to get marks even if you are limited to cycling the marks for 1 or 20 hours depending on which way you do it.
Another good thing in it is for 350 marks, you can buy 5 days worth of mission tokens for the 20 hour turn-in. It was fairly easy to get 350 marks in the time I had to play. But even better was while the long mission was running, you still had a short mission to cycle every hour you are on. Everything you need for the reputation drops inside the zone you earn the reputation for. And they have the "EDC" for those who remember them - basically a Borg Neural Processor - for currency.
Sorry about the hand grenades above. "Too lazy" irked me. :P
Just give me the damned XP at the end of every mission! If I need 60,000 xp to get to Tier 4 Omega Rep, why the frelling hezmanah do I need to spend days, weeks, running "projects" to then run "projects" to unlock stores which still allow me the honor of running "projects" to rip me off from all my in-game savings for something that should have been a 1-to-1 trade. I have BNPs. Give me gear. It's that simple.
The ONLY reason for the entire grind system, as seen in doffs, rising dil costs everywhere, the starbase projects, and ALL of the reps to date - the ONLY REASON - is to force people to pay real world money for zen, and turn that zen into dilithium or ECs. That's the only way to get along in this game nowadays. There's a reason they did this, and there's a reason the exchange gives you REFINED dil instead of unrefined. They are milking the playerbase for all they can, and killing the game in the process. It's getting worse and worse.
This.
I don't care about the bonus xp they are giving ...
I don't care if they gave us more marks ...
What I do care about is the time for these projects to take to complete. I have already done 3 reps to t5 on one character .. That should remove the timegate on all other toons.
I don't mind grinding for the marks or much anything else but the 20 hour wait is the killer here.
Basically all this new rep system does is give you more exp but still the 20 hours between projects and will still stop me from doing any rep projects on my other 6 toons.
So in summary ,
Get rid of the timegate after you've done it once and we all win.