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Quick Guide to making Season 9 Great!
captainpirko
Member Posts: 270 Arc User
Dear Cryptic.
as you may have noticed by skimming over the most recent threads, you may have noticed that ratings on season 8 isn't near as high as they have been for previous seasons. i suspect the reason for this is more because there have been so many replies from so many different types of players that you dont really know what the majority of the player base wants, and are attempting to fill in a gap that you cant tell is there or not. as a concerned member of the community, i'm going to try and help you by giving you a very simple to follow list of tips for making the current and future seasons better!
Reputations:
the original idea of the reputation was a good idea. knowing full well that the drop tables for STFs would never be perfect, and that messing with them would only cause further frustrations and not actually fix the problem short of giving players the loot they wanted on their first try, you went with this approach. the idea was simple; introduce a system that gave both casual and hardcore players access to the same gear. no matter how casual you are, it is fully possible to complete a reputation. the time necessary to complete it was fixed, which gave the advantage to those with only enough time to finish one or two dailies.
the downside to this system however, comes from the fact that it's been abused. too many reputations have been done, causing people to feel like they've had to start from scratch over and over on the same character. unique gameplay sells, which means in order for each reputation to be as successful as the last one, it has to be different from its predecessors; not only in loot mind you, but also in how you go about it. for example: having completed the romulan reputation, most players probably wont notice any difference from it, to the nukara reputation. you're still doing low rewarding missions for llarge amounts of marks so you can complete large numbers of projects so you have the option of purchasing gear you probably will never use, and isnt as good as the fleet gear released before hand.
how do you go about fixing this?
the solution isnt really that hard in all honesty. make each reputation different. for example: nukara reputation (do to the small number of missions it has) should be changed so that one only needs to get 50,000 points. 3 tiers, but the same possible rewards. this way nukara would be an easy reputation and a good place for new players to start. whereas omega rep might be 100,000 experience, but have 7-8 teirs along the way.
this way each reputation at least feels a little different. the changes you started with the voth system is a good idea, and definitely should be adjusted to fit the feel of the other 3 reps.
Space, the final frontier
its arguable that space action is what people play this game for. thats why people have spent alot of real life money in order to get their favorite starships ingame. therefore it's important that there's things to do with these ships. at engame, people expect a challenge, but not immediately. later tiers in reputations should yield harder missions. if i unlock T5 omega, a bonus STF should unlock that has only two gamemodes. "elite", and "Challenger". furthermore the "challenger" difficulty should be added to all other STFs. this difficulty will be alot higher then elite, such as elite is alot harder then normal. this will provide a much needed challenge to endgame, and give dedicated players something to do, while also making sure alot of players without any experience cant accidentally stumble into the queues and TRIBBLE it up.
starships should also have more unique rolls in the game. two escorts should be alot more different then just their console or Boff layout. for example a defiant might be more maneuverable but a Prometheus is faster in a straight line. (those nacelles have to be good for something, i have 4 after all.) admittedly i'm drawing a blank on this, but i'm sure there'll be plenty of ideas in the replies, not to mention i'm sure you guys have some ideas of your own.
make each weapon type more unique then its damage/arc. also the subsystem targeting skills should be replaced with an actual built in option for ships. the way this could be reworked, is that cannons using subsystem targeting would have a fairly low chance to actually take out the system, but might come close enough to damage the system slightly (-10 power in the system). whereas beams, being alot more accurate, would have a high chance to take out the targeted system.
optionally it'd be cool if this system could be reworked so that i could shoot the tractor beam emitter of the borg cube holding me. the enterprise did it. ... alot.
science still needs to be set apart from the other classes. since it cant tank, and it cant do damage, it really needs to be given a few perks that makes it an alternative option aside from just a healer (though turning science into a healer class isnt a completely bad idea). there's alot of ideas on how to do this, from reworking all of the science skills, to simply giving unique science abilities to each science ship based on the ship itself. intrepid might have some sort of deflector boost built into the ship that alters all nearby starships to repel objects, whereas a nebula can suppress a group of nearby targets. sorta like an AoE energy drain. each science vessel would be unique this way, and would give science officers a creative new way to help.
lastly: Level Cap!
its been talked about, and season 9 seems like a really good time for this. we really need a level cap boost. with this, the ability to command our personal fleets, the ability to authorize special R&D, etc. to go along with the revamped crafting system (no do not make it a reputation that just doesnt work).
depending on ship size/class, ships would have a certain amount of modifications available. these would be permanent changes to your ship that could only be changed through a ship respec or reclaiming the ship. each modification would have to be worked on for a while, and would take a fair bit of work to produce, so you'd have to decide which one you really want. after a while you'd come back with several modifications that'd set your ship apart from all other ships. such modifications include, but wouldnt be limited too:
+1 forward weapon slot (3 mod points)
+1 aft weapon slot (2 mod points)
+1 shield system slot (3 mod points)
+1 engine system slot (2 mod points)
+1 deflector system slot (2 mod points)
+2 device slots (2 mod points)
+1 engineering console slot (4 mod points)
+1 science console slot (4 mod points)
+1 tactical console slot (4 mod points)
+1 hanger slot (6 mod points)
+1 ensign universal (3 mod points)
turn commander Boff into Captain Boff (5 mod points)
you'll notice i left little numbers after each one saying how many mod points it'd take. this means if you're a tiny ship like a defiant, you only have 3 mod points. if your a big ship like a oddy you have maybe 7-8 points. if your a vo'quv, you'd have 10.
just some general ideas. i have alot more ideas, but unfortunately this post is already so long most people probably wont even read it. =(
as you may have noticed by skimming over the most recent threads, you may have noticed that ratings on season 8 isn't near as high as they have been for previous seasons. i suspect the reason for this is more because there have been so many replies from so many different types of players that you dont really know what the majority of the player base wants, and are attempting to fill in a gap that you cant tell is there or not. as a concerned member of the community, i'm going to try and help you by giving you a very simple to follow list of tips for making the current and future seasons better!
Reputations:
the original idea of the reputation was a good idea. knowing full well that the drop tables for STFs would never be perfect, and that messing with them would only cause further frustrations and not actually fix the problem short of giving players the loot they wanted on their first try, you went with this approach. the idea was simple; introduce a system that gave both casual and hardcore players access to the same gear. no matter how casual you are, it is fully possible to complete a reputation. the time necessary to complete it was fixed, which gave the advantage to those with only enough time to finish one or two dailies.
the downside to this system however, comes from the fact that it's been abused. too many reputations have been done, causing people to feel like they've had to start from scratch over and over on the same character. unique gameplay sells, which means in order for each reputation to be as successful as the last one, it has to be different from its predecessors; not only in loot mind you, but also in how you go about it. for example: having completed the romulan reputation, most players probably wont notice any difference from it, to the nukara reputation. you're still doing low rewarding missions for llarge amounts of marks so you can complete large numbers of projects so you have the option of purchasing gear you probably will never use, and isnt as good as the fleet gear released before hand.
how do you go about fixing this?
the solution isnt really that hard in all honesty. make each reputation different. for example: nukara reputation (do to the small number of missions it has) should be changed so that one only needs to get 50,000 points. 3 tiers, but the same possible rewards. this way nukara would be an easy reputation and a good place for new players to start. whereas omega rep might be 100,000 experience, but have 7-8 teirs along the way.
this way each reputation at least feels a little different. the changes you started with the voth system is a good idea, and definitely should be adjusted to fit the feel of the other 3 reps.
Space, the final frontier
its arguable that space action is what people play this game for. thats why people have spent alot of real life money in order to get their favorite starships ingame. therefore it's important that there's things to do with these ships. at engame, people expect a challenge, but not immediately. later tiers in reputations should yield harder missions. if i unlock T5 omega, a bonus STF should unlock that has only two gamemodes. "elite", and "Challenger". furthermore the "challenger" difficulty should be added to all other STFs. this difficulty will be alot higher then elite, such as elite is alot harder then normal. this will provide a much needed challenge to endgame, and give dedicated players something to do, while also making sure alot of players without any experience cant accidentally stumble into the queues and TRIBBLE it up.
starships should also have more unique rolls in the game. two escorts should be alot more different then just their console or Boff layout. for example a defiant might be more maneuverable but a Prometheus is faster in a straight line. (those nacelles have to be good for something, i have 4 after all.) admittedly i'm drawing a blank on this, but i'm sure there'll be plenty of ideas in the replies, not to mention i'm sure you guys have some ideas of your own.
make each weapon type more unique then its damage/arc. also the subsystem targeting skills should be replaced with an actual built in option for ships. the way this could be reworked, is that cannons using subsystem targeting would have a fairly low chance to actually take out the system, but might come close enough to damage the system slightly (-10 power in the system). whereas beams, being alot more accurate, would have a high chance to take out the targeted system.
optionally it'd be cool if this system could be reworked so that i could shoot the tractor beam emitter of the borg cube holding me. the enterprise did it. ... alot.
science still needs to be set apart from the other classes. since it cant tank, and it cant do damage, it really needs to be given a few perks that makes it an alternative option aside from just a healer (though turning science into a healer class isnt a completely bad idea). there's alot of ideas on how to do this, from reworking all of the science skills, to simply giving unique science abilities to each science ship based on the ship itself. intrepid might have some sort of deflector boost built into the ship that alters all nearby starships to repel objects, whereas a nebula can suppress a group of nearby targets. sorta like an AoE energy drain. each science vessel would be unique this way, and would give science officers a creative new way to help.
lastly: Level Cap!
its been talked about, and season 9 seems like a really good time for this. we really need a level cap boost. with this, the ability to command our personal fleets, the ability to authorize special R&D, etc. to go along with the revamped crafting system (no do not make it a reputation that just doesnt work).
depending on ship size/class, ships would have a certain amount of modifications available. these would be permanent changes to your ship that could only be changed through a ship respec or reclaiming the ship. each modification would have to be worked on for a while, and would take a fair bit of work to produce, so you'd have to decide which one you really want. after a while you'd come back with several modifications that'd set your ship apart from all other ships. such modifications include, but wouldnt be limited too:
+1 forward weapon slot (3 mod points)
+1 aft weapon slot (2 mod points)
+1 shield system slot (3 mod points)
+1 engine system slot (2 mod points)
+1 deflector system slot (2 mod points)
+2 device slots (2 mod points)
+1 engineering console slot (4 mod points)
+1 science console slot (4 mod points)
+1 tactical console slot (4 mod points)
+1 hanger slot (6 mod points)
+1 ensign universal (3 mod points)
turn commander Boff into Captain Boff (5 mod points)
you'll notice i left little numbers after each one saying how many mod points it'd take. this means if you're a tiny ship like a defiant, you only have 3 mod points. if your a big ship like a oddy you have maybe 7-8 points. if your a vo'quv, you'd have 10.
just some general ideas. i have alot more ideas, but unfortunately this post is already so long most people probably wont even read it. =(
[SIGPIC]Timelords Fleet [/SIGPIC]
Post edited by captainpirko on
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Comments
The grind doesn't cut it anymore.
Season 8 is a step in the right direction where the entire map is one big adventure-zone... lets backfit this to other sections of the game. Defera, for example. Revamp New Rom so there is more to do besides stomping rats and clicking pallets.
FEs are great, but we need to see more missions, more story content and more immersion.
And we need challenge. I can roll a T-rex solo. That ain't cool. It's to the point where I can solo cubes.
It's not a question of adding more hit-points and increasing the frequency of one-shotting... ya'll need to come up with something that'll hold our interest. That's what we pay you for!
It's been a long time coming. Address all the known issues. New maps. Fix or go over imbalanced powers/abilities. Combine that with a dyson sphere like contested zone for ground and space and cryptic would breathe new life into the game. It would give fleets a new reason to exist. Plus cryptic would rake in more money from people wanting to get the best gear.
- Story
- Make some content that already screams for it PvP playable (Battlezone & contested zone)
- Rework PvP in general
- Story
- Less bugs
- Promote teamwork (seriously you can do a lot of stuff yourself e.g. take on entire tac cubes)
- Rework bank system and pets
- Revive crafting
- Story
- Get some of the Trek philosophy and spirit back. (aka let's not just shoot everything or let us at least play a part of the failed negotiations)
- Take the time to actually do things to the end. Don't rush it out and leave a half ready version. Not just in terms of bugs but also story etc. Let's be honest here, S8 FE => Great / S8 => No time left for mission so let's just skip it/squeeze it.
Love it
#1: Don't import glitches preventing players from logging into the game from Tribble to Holodeck even after being warned about them months in advance.
#2 Story Content
#3 Level Cap increase
#4New Bridge/Ship Interior designs and/or remakes of some of the earlier ones which look truely outta whack.
#5 My own suggestion.. Have mission givers refer to our character by the title we have selected instead of our rank. Though most of my characters are VA, I play them as Captains and use the title "Captain" so having a mission giver call me Captian instead of Vice Admiral (or the ever horrid Rear-Admiral)
"No matter where you go, there you are."
"I found a bug in Beta, Cryptic squished it. STO Founder and Proud LTS member."
I hate to be the one to burst bubbles, but the "story content" you're all clamoring for is far and away the most expensive part of developing the game. That's true in almost every genre.
The resources, time, and expense associated with creating "story content" - by which we're obviously referring to the scripted, largely linear, "single-player-style" missions like the Feature Episodes is mind-boggling, when applied to the scale of any MMO.
Just think of the fantastic expense associated with making all the "story content" in The Old Republic, a game made by a company with an order of magnitude more resources (and arguably talent) than what's available at Cryptic and PWE.
And even then, players burned through it all in two weeks and were left shouting and screaming for more, more, MORE. And now, the Old Republic has also gone free-to-play (not that that's necessarily a "failure"), and has also augmented its copious-but-still-not-enough "story content" with brand new Reputation systems to grind out, lockboxes to open, and new, repeatable adventure zones to do daily questing in. Players who wanted even more "story content" got it...in the form of paid expansions that cost half the original cost of the base game.
The reason STO stopped doing Feature Episode series like the ones we used to get was due to this expense. You simply can't make "single player" content like this pay on the regular basis needed to sustain an MMO, at least not outside the subscription setting.
Cryptic knows this. It tried it, back when Champions Online sold more "story content" via the Adventure Packs. It wasn't enough.
So this is the current business model of STO:
1. All mission, zone, quest and raid content (the "story content") is FREE. Available to every player.
2. Money is made by selling new items, i.e. ships, and things that lead to new items (lockbox keys), and to a less significant extent, the RMT currency trade (Zen > Dilithium). The income from gold subscribers is a factor, but isn't nearly as profitable as some think (note that Neverwinter, which has a similar model, has no "gold" tier).
3. Engagement at the endgame (the only place it matters in a game like STO) is maintained by daily questing. Cryptic makes money when you and everyone else logs into STO as a habit, part of the daily routine. Reputation systems, Doff assignments, Dil farming, fleet holdings, adventure zones, and the major components of the STO endgame for this reason.
4. The "story content" is still there, except now the chances of people just getting it the way the FE series used to come out is virtually nil. Now it'll come out alongside new endgame engagement systems, like "Sphere of Influence" did with S8. It'll also be scattered here and there as "flavor" for the new zones like those "secret missions" in the New Romulus adventure zone in S7. Much less frequently, it'll arrive alongside new sub-factions, like the Romulan Republic, since sub-factions from here on in will likely require content for the 1-50 journey.
I'm sorry if you find this a depressing read, but that's the reality right now. This is how STO makes its money. This is the business model, and if the rumors are true, it's one that's working.
Personally, I don't find it depressing, but I guess I'm part of that lucky contingent that feels "catered to" by the way the game works at present. STO fits my lifestyle and habits as a player (and I'm not even some kind of 30-alt dilithium farmer), so I've "got mine". I sympathize with everyone who feels that STO isn't a game for them anymore.
BUT...the way to change this is - and I hate to say it, because it really sounds mean and harsh - is QUIT. If you want things to change with STO, QUIT. DROP THOSE DAILY ENGAGEMENT FIGURES. Don't just change your player title, or whine in zone chat or the forums, or make an alt with the name "PWEsuxxx". That's noise. Companies respond to action. They respond even harder to threats to the bottom line.
Stop building your starbase. Stop farming dilithium. Put your lobi in storage. Mothball those starships. Go away, and don't come back until Season 9 looks like something more to your liking. If you're truly the vast majority you claim you are on the forums, then people like me, those who "got theirs", will suddenly feel much lonelier when playing STO.
Seriously, that's the only way you can make the current business model stop working. When they see you logging in each day, if only just to refresh your Doffs or slide some sliders, Cryptic has done its job (business-wise, at least). Perfect World's world is in order.
If you consider yourself part of the war for Star Trek Online's future, and think you might be on the losing side, then the only winning move here is not to play.
They may have made a good storyline for all 8 classes, that doesn't mean on the scale of things that the game is any better then STO, nor does it mean the Talent could be any worse or better as we of just don't know for sure.
From what i understand, Cryptic has a lot of cash and making such content is time consuming but not that much more expensive. Do remember Cryptic take their directions from PWE after all they are hte ones keeping Cryptic alive and CBS for the star trek side. there could be any number of reasons why the FE's were stopped or they may not of been, just temporarily suspended.
With all due respect to CO's adventure packs which i played months before it went F2P, but playing as gold gave you access to that stuff so making it a paid thing in the Z-store and you already played them, what would be the point in paying for them? aside from Resistance until they fixed that mission where you could claim insane credits and XP, by dropping it and picking it up and playing it over, the rest of it wasn't of any real concern. Even so there is more then enough grinding on the level progression anyway that it would last long enough not to need the adventure packs. and BTW i have not played CO since it went F2P because it got 10x worse then where it was at.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
And Season 8 has been out for all of 2 days (a month on Tribble), so who says it's not forthcoming? We're entering the story essentially in medias res, so in the heat of the battle it's hard to say the whys and why nots.
There's already a number of "log entries" and minor lore items scattered about the Battlezone that give insight as to the Voth's motivations, so there's that.
Future seasons, missions, events and feature episodes could expand further. Seasons are long and this isn't the end of the new content drip. Sit tight.
I'm not saying TOR is a better game than STO. I've given STO about 800+ hours and TOR maybe 60 for a reason.
I'm just saying that the "story content", the scripted, heavily written, "feature episode" stuff, is all iover TOR, and costs a mind-blowing amount of time and resources to make, and I think it's a safe assumption to make that BioWare and EA have a little more money and resources at their disposal than whatever is in PWE's dev budget for Cryptic, not to mention that Cryptic is splitting resources between STO and Neverwinter (CO is under a different Cryptic substudio now).
True, there could be any number of reasons why Cryptic stopped making FE series at the frequency they did, but the fact remains that if they continued, it would still consume a significant amount of time and resources in ways that can't easily be turned into continuing revenue, as I explained. In fact, since they're running a lobi giveaway on the FEs right now, they're arguably taking a LOSS for that kind of content (which is obviously intended to balance out by people opening more lockboxes to supplement the lobi they pick up during the promo etc.)
Hell, when you think about it, the only way "Sphere of Influence" translates into money for Cryptic is because the 2 setpieces for the Obelisk drop off it, making the Advanced Obelisk (a lobi ship) more tempting to buy.
Adventure packs were just part of the reason CO's in such bad shape, business-wise, but I distinctly remember an interview where a Cryptic dev stated that it didn't make business sense to paywall the adventure pack content.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
If you're going to call this a season, have the content worthy of said season. Not to say the sphere isn't something new and exciting cause it is. For all of an hour then it's "play capture the flag on land and by air."
Gets a tad boring after a while, but I'll admit the rewards are damn good. Spend a few hours kicking around doing jobs, get a lot of marks and a lot of dilithium.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
If it were my job to offer tips and I felt I were qualified to do so, these would be mine:
New Rep Grind = A bajillion times less irritating than the others. Retrofit this to other reps asap but add more marks projects of 2, 4, 6 and 8 hours with scaling XP to all.
No more Riverasaurus Rexes. CaptainGeko, please refer to your own critique of JJ Trek for a very clear explanation of precisely what the problem is with the Dinos. Yes, they are fun, we like them but they are not Trek. Hand of Apollo and Spock's Brain be damned. There is a line, whether you saw it when you crossed it or not. We forgive you, just don't do it again.
Continue to develop large persistent zone tech but make less confusing ground maps and put 'travel to' clickables on the space maps. Queued stuff is precisely what makes it all feel so dang grindy.
Make crafting worthwhile and make it take as much dedication to max out as maxing out all the doff CXP tiers. It's not just the bizarre system that killed crafting it's the fact that you can regularly get drops, for free, that are better than anything you can craft with the exception of the Aegis Set. That is before we mention rep and fleet gear...
Doff tier rewards at each tier. Maybe even a permabuff like DI. If there is a thing that's worth the doff 'grind', people will do it and buy doff packs IF the chance to get purple doffs were increased slightly.
Realise that neglect is perhaps the cause of lack of popularity for certain existing content instead of taking lack of popularity as reason to neglect (or even remove - RIP Terradome) said content. The KDF will probably spring to most people's minds but I give the example of Vulcan and Andoria. Are they neglected because they are unpopular or unpopular because they are neglected?
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
Disagree entirely.
In fact, you can make a better case for those Voth battlemechs and the use of "full-auto" ground weapons to be "not-Trek" than for dinosaurs.
Okay, so there was that cave in that one episode of voyager when the Kazon left them on that one planet. An outfit is just an outfit, however borrowed it might be.
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
- PvP
- PvP
- PvP
- PvP
- PvP
- PvP
- PvP
- PvP
:rolleyes:
And then there's the gangster planet.
As for those, add them to the list.
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
My character Tsin'xing
Hmmm.mmm funny thing they are getting all sorts ofsingleplayer scripted content absolutly free ona daily basis through the foundry so why not just incorporate some of the highest rated into the game itself its already coded all theyhave to do is attach it in a likley spotor even create a new one called continuing missions and periodically wecan vote on foundry missions to be added to it minimal expense for pwe/cryptic more content in "main" story for us
Seems logical to me