test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Dear Cryptic: A point of consideration on Mirror & Metrics.
ruinsfate
Member Posts: 58 Arc User
Dear all at Cryptic.
I know you put a lot of stock in your metrics and datamining for player participation and so on. These are valuable figures, it is true. However, I would like to point something out, and ask that you keep it in mind, now that the event is drawing to a close and you will start to pull these figures.
The Mirror Event is NOT a success.*
Yes, you will find that a lot, probably the very VAST majority of players participated in it. However, many, many of these players did so while grumbling and absolutely loathing the event. I do not speak for everyone obviously, and this is somewhat anecdotal, but every single person in my fleet either hated the event, or didn't do it all. Pretty much everyone I've talked to on my friends list or in chat channels hated the event after the first couple of days.
Between the initial bugginess, including uncompletability and the 10 minute forced time gate which caused good groups to sit around twiddling their thumbs, the event quickly gained a haze of tedium, which some players even grew to resent (myself included).
So why did we do it?
Simple.
The Carrot.
You have made Dilithium such a large near-neccessity that when a carrot of such a large value is waved before the players, they WILL go for it, even to grind out an event they absolutely despise. This, and mostly likely this alone, is why your metrics will say that so many people played it. Please, PLEASE keep this in mind when interpreting the data.
Opinioned Generalisation: We LIKE events. We like something new to do. We do NOT like excessive, tedious grinds, especially back-to-back, close together. Give us a break for a while. Tone it down a litle.
And don't just look at the numbers, the metrics. THINK about what those numbers, who are all in fact people, FEEL about the events.
Thank you.
*Exaggeration for effect
I know you put a lot of stock in your metrics and datamining for player participation and so on. These are valuable figures, it is true. However, I would like to point something out, and ask that you keep it in mind, now that the event is drawing to a close and you will start to pull these figures.
The Mirror Event is NOT a success.*
Yes, you will find that a lot, probably the very VAST majority of players participated in it. However, many, many of these players did so while grumbling and absolutely loathing the event. I do not speak for everyone obviously, and this is somewhat anecdotal, but every single person in my fleet either hated the event, or didn't do it all. Pretty much everyone I've talked to on my friends list or in chat channels hated the event after the first couple of days.
Between the initial bugginess, including uncompletability and the 10 minute forced time gate which caused good groups to sit around twiddling their thumbs, the event quickly gained a haze of tedium, which some players even grew to resent (myself included).
So why did we do it?
Simple.
The Carrot.
You have made Dilithium such a large near-neccessity that when a carrot of such a large value is waved before the players, they WILL go for it, even to grind out an event they absolutely despise. This, and mostly likely this alone, is why your metrics will say that so many people played it. Please, PLEASE keep this in mind when interpreting the data.
Opinioned Generalisation: We LIKE events. We like something new to do. We do NOT like excessive, tedious grinds, especially back-to-back, close together. Give us a break for a while. Tone it down a litle.
And don't just look at the numbers, the metrics. THINK about what those numbers, who are all in fact people, FEEL about the events.
Thank you.
*Exaggeration for effect
Post edited by ruinsfate on
0
Comments
However, Mirror Event is different. For one, I did not hate the mission until the point I had to pug, after the patch that overspammed each run with too many rifts. I liked the challenge. I liked that there was more than blunt DPS needed. I liked the teamwork required to succesfully finish each run. I liked that a player could continue all the way until Obisek saying: "We have the Dreadnought trapped." without any weapons equipped (depending on your team) and be useful throughout the run.
After tomorrow, when I finally finish my Mirror, I will have run 57 matches (4 out of 6 characters, and 1 extra run to help friends fill their team). This is a lot for in 3 weeks. 3 weeks, 1 hour of running Mirror indeed is much. However, I forgive Cryptic this one. The Dilithium reward? Nice, but in those fourteen days gaming 15 minutes per character, I could get that by fast-running STFs with the fleet and allies. The Mark amount? 2 Defera's and an hour doing content related to the Choice of Marks and you have those. The doff is unique and nice, but we don't need him. He is only nice for a build specified in healing. And guess how many out there are something different than healers.
Sure, the fact that Crytic is giving us grind after grind is becoming a dangerous tendensy. The next months we will see Undine grind, Fleet Holding grind (I guess), Summer Grind, and maybe another Crystalline grind.
However, each and every single one of these grinds is optional. In fact, most people don't even bother with the rewards. I did not see huge amounts of Breen ships after the winter event. I did not see huge amounts of Dyson ships after the Grindversary. You dont have to. The carrot is either not wanted, or can be earned via other ways.
The choice to grind is yours. Dislike it? Act like me: 6 characters, currently 4 reputations, spread over 2 characters, maxed out. And I am not outclassed in any PvE content I find. In fact, I usually outclass others before they outclass me.
Join the Deltas today!
Having more or less the same discussion in this thread
Personally, I don't enjoy these timed grind things so I just don't do them. I don't care about the carrot or the dils. My character will live on and at the end of the day I'll be fine without those things.
I play the game to have fun and don't like to be told what to do by anyone really let alone a video game. So telling me I have to do x if I want y by this date will never fly with someone like me. I skipped Risa and the winter thing, I skipped the grindaversary, and have skipped the mirror. And in my opinion, that's the best possible way to tell Cryptic that I don't like these events.
I enjoyed the event, seems a lot did too.
Depends on how one defines sucess. Getting people to logon daily to chase some "limited time only" reward might look good in some exec's meeting about how many people are "playing" the game. However, I fail to see how making people grind any of these limited time events (well after the shine and mystery of the event has worn off I might add) inspires any of us to spend more money.
In short, forcing more daily logins to not equate to more money....more time actually enjoying our toons does. Any limited time event that must be run over and over is exhausting when you maintain more toons. More toons we enjoy playing = more money spent to enhance them. Nothing in this type of event made it more fun to play alts...just the opposite.
Take a page from your very healthy changes in this regard for the reputation system. When officer sponsorship went in...I not only played more of my semi retied alts but even made more. More to the point...I spent money on them as well.
Meanwhile the forums go back and forth and there are always partisans who say any change must be good or its not 'that bad of a nerf.' to which you should remember:
some people claimed the "New Game Experience" for SWG was a good idea too. You may remember it as the patch that sunk the game.
I'm sure many people had a blast. Others, not so much.
By tomorrow i'll have run it 168 times and i'll be quite happy not to run it again for a while.
However, success is something of a moving target.
If the threshold for success is mere time playing, then it will have been a success.
If the threshold is getting lots of people playing, and then spending cash on zen, perhaps not.
If the threshold is the warm fuzzies from having designed a well received missions, somewhere in the middle probably.
Point is, its almost the end of the last grind in far too long a series of grinds.
I imagine there's a sense of grim relief in some parts...and grim relief is not an emotion usually associated with a willingness to spend money.
I feel like this issue is something of a "put your money where your mouth is" thing for players. How many people on these boards say they don't like grinding, and yet go do the grindy content anyway?
If everyone played what they wanted, when they wanted, then Cryptic wouldn't be getting false metrics. And for all I know they aren't getting false metrics at all. There's a lot of people who don't post here at all, and a lot that don't post if they don't have a problem. There could be thousands of players who have no problem grinding and wouldn't complain about it, and never post to say so.
i did it on crystaline entety and never again, i all most overburn my self on that good awful mission, and all most stopped playing STO.
and if you have more then one toon, you can have that dilitium on daily basis, not for grinding the same boring mission, over and over again.
so no, not for me. didnt even care for it.
devs. seams can't wrap there minds that this community is not hillbilly community from WoT or similar games, and that grind is not what we are looking for, as there is so much other games that offer that, and i would say that they do it in much better way. but hey it is there game.
would you like some fancy fleet console? yes. you have dillitium or fleet marks? no, bad for you. tell me what content you will play in game that is not forcing you to grind, what exactly are missions that do not force you to grind.
doff's you say? do i look like some one that wont to play soccer manager? no definitely not. missions are so repetitive that they are not giving me any pleasure to do them. and as repetitive as they are they are becoming grind per se.
so in short, if you wont to advance you have to play what it is given to you. and no there is no mission in this game that is not making you to grind. so one dose not have a choice, unless you are suggesting that we should stop playing this game untill they change it, which is very stupid proposition.
Many, but the ones that don't probably won't stick around, since they can't 'keep up' with the timed grinds. It must get infuriating after a while.
So, while the overall design isn't stellar in the first place, they way the mirror event plays now is just annoying and frustrating, EVEN SO you can not really fail. Rfits spawn far to fast and far to close together now, sometimes you essentially close the same rift three times in a row, only to have another immediately spawn at the same spot. Or you get interrupted by ships from another rift and so on.
Yeah, the reward is nice, but the event itself is basically a failure from a gamedesign point of view..
What is VERY offensive to me is that it was the "Event" (read : grind) of the month .
Last month it was the Anniversary Grind .
The month before that it was the Winter Event Grind .
Do you begin to see a pattern ?
And when I said that it was VERY offensive , I meant that it was not very offensive by itself .
This is how STO looks right now .
Grind , on top of grind , on top of grind , on top of grind .
And the 'fun' thing is , it just keeps coming .
What was the justification for the Rep Nerf ? Something about wanting the New Players to be on the same footing as the Veterans ?
I look at that pile of grind and I can't help but laugh .
On the same page ???
That is about as the same page as the players requests and Cryptic's responses .
The OP offered what I believe to be a very valid reason for why players do things they don't enjoy: the good stuff is on the other side. When the only thing you're looking forward to is behind 14 days of an event, you can bet you'll be grinding it out.
The question I want to know the answer to is: Now what? Now that we're ridden the treadmill to get the dilithium to get the gear, where do we use it? I'm already tired of the content since I had to do it ad nauseum to get the gear!
Well, this event for me has been about amassing large quantities of the things my tiny fleet find hard to gather; dilithium and fleet marks.
So, all of that is more or less spent.
This specific grind is not one i particulary mind, indeed its something I do my best to take advantage of.
My only issue is the burn out from way too many grinds like this in a row.
The grindaversary was a strategic error.
What content is not forcing me to grind? All of it! I don't need anything behind a grind wall to play any part of this game. I will grant you that you will likely be more successful at PvP or No Win Scenario with decent gear. But a good build and a smart player tend to trump good gear.
STFs, Foundry, PvE queue events, Story Missions, Battlezones, etc can all be done "grind" gear.
I'm not suggesting you stop playing the game unless you hate every part of the game. I'm suggesting you stop doing something you feel like you are forced to do and do the content you want to do. That way Cryptic will get the right metrics from you. And if everyone is giving them the right metrics for themselves, the numbers will play out and show Cryptic where they really should be focusing.
This type of event tells you you have to spend 2/3rds of every night for a 3 week period of time performing the exact same task and event on every toon you want the shiny on. Or else you miss out on said shiny for perhaps ever. This is not a carrot, it's a stick and it's unappreciated.
Only these events do that to us, everything else in the game can be grinded based on our threshold for effort, expenditure and available time.
As a person with a job and a life, I absolutely hate that.
I hope that makes sense here...no one's saying dont work for your shinies. What we are saying is let us go after our shinies on our schedule (like we usually do) not on Cryptic's reporting cycle.
I truly hope there is a conversation going on at Cryptic about logons vs dollars not being what they thought they would be. I still feel they are not directly related and not at all related regarding these events...but..that's just a logic based guess on my part.
Require that you get 1 Multidimensional thingamajig.....and have the timer on the event rep mission take 14 days......ZING
I thought WoW's forums had angry elitist snobs, but I never could have imagined the level STO forums has.
i didnt have any issue playing the MU event for 15 minutes a day. now that i got the reward, i dont need to come back to it. why would anyone want to "look gift horses squarely in the mouths" for is beyond me.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
at first the mirror event was great, sure a couple of times when you had a poorer team you didn't do so well score wise but that was ok cos other times you cleared the field before the end of the first part some times with a couple of minutes or sometimes with just seconds to spare and it was fun.
since the update it has never been as good, after the first couple of minutes you are so overwhelmed by enemy you have no chance to close rifts or anything else very much, if you try to take out an enemy ship there is usually 10 to 20 of is mates there to back him up so you are lucky if you manage to eliminate him before you are taken out yourself.
its just a matter of doing what you can which isn't very much before the timer runs out and you go to stage 2.
the overall effect of this for me is to turn what was once an enjoyable mission into I grind, I will keep going until the end but only cos I want the dilithium.
whether I would bother to play this mission again I am not sure, I was at first hoping they would keep it in like they did with the CE event but now I don't really care cos unless its for an event that has a good prize I want I shant bother, its a shame really.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Astute observations. Just because ppl do it, doesn't mean it's been a good Event.
The Dilithium reward is kinda meh (you get twice as much from an eSTF). I did it for the true 'choice of marks.'
In the simplest of terms: it was half-way decent event, until it got nerfed, and has been somewhat fubarred ever since.
Grind... I do not think this means what you think it means...
A grind is something you do hundreds of times for hours on end. Example: LOTRO, slayer deeds that total over 100k kills across every zone and species to earn "traits" for your character (it literally takes months to earn them all, and its 100% mindless).
STO example: Earn 10,000 omega marks for gear by nonstop ICE, KHIT, defara ground, etc on a rotation.
14 times of doing what is effectively a space stf over a period of 4 weeks is not a 'grind' to me. If you did it every 30 min for marks for 4+ hours each day for every day over 4 weeks, that would *make* it into a grind. If you have a dozen+ characters doing it every day, that would also make it into a grind. But a single character doing it once every other day: not really a grind.
I'd like the mission better if Cryptic had a way of auto-booting them.
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
But then when something like this is put in with a specific grind attached to it, I tend to think that making something challenging is just poor design. Make a version that is hard for the people who want to group up and do it, but also make one not challenging to do in random groups if people are not complete idiots. Yes, the metrics will show that people will take the easy one, but that's because players always take the easier route to get a reward.
Fortunately I only have one character I'm still doing this on (since I started late on that one).
This. I liked the Mirror Event. Still do, even with too many rifts. It requires a different strategy beyond pew-pew.
I don't really want to grind it, and only did it on one character, but it's a good scenario in its' own right and I hope they keep some version of it alive past the event (like they did with CE).
They could definitely tone down the respawning of rifts, though.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
It's not the 480 dilithium per run that's the carrot--it's the forty thousand that you get when you turn in the 14 tokens for the event project, and the 2000 that you get when you turn in each single token after that. Also, you get the nice 500 Fleet Marks plus 250 choice-of-marks for the 14-token project and you get 1/10 of that amount for each single token you turn in afterward, in addition to the 40-80 marks from the run itself.