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Mirror Invasion Event: Hits and misses
rinkster
Member Posts: 3,549 Arc User
So, now its over, lets review......
Hits:
A space based team mission that rewards Romulan marks.
The clear intention to create more valuable roles for particular types of ships.
It has to be said, very good VO work.
Misses:
While the role differentiation is an excellent idea, game mechanics were not generous enough to make those ships indispensible. Essentially, the best ship was a high DPS escort, speed at closing rifts or powering generators was a long secondary behind killing the spawned ships.
There was an initial problem with rifts, which was fixed in possibly the least clever way. Ther second phase needed to trigger either on closing a set number of rifts or when time ran out, whichever came first.
Leeching was a huge issue in this event. Seems like the AFK/kick system wasn't applied to it and the rewards were given out regardless of any participation whatsoever.
However, overall I'd give this event a B-.
I appreciate the good intentions of the devs in their design of the event and consider it a good try, albeit not wholly succesful.
It does need to come back, suitably tweaked, as the equivilant to CE for Romulan marks.
Hits:
A space based team mission that rewards Romulan marks.
The clear intention to create more valuable roles for particular types of ships.
It has to be said, very good VO work.
Misses:
While the role differentiation is an excellent idea, game mechanics were not generous enough to make those ships indispensible. Essentially, the best ship was a high DPS escort, speed at closing rifts or powering generators was a long secondary behind killing the spawned ships.
There was an initial problem with rifts, which was fixed in possibly the least clever way. Ther second phase needed to trigger either on closing a set number of rifts or when time ran out, whichever came first.
Leeching was a huge issue in this event. Seems like the AFK/kick system wasn't applied to it and the rewards were given out regardless of any participation whatsoever.
However, overall I'd give this event a B-.
I appreciate the good intentions of the devs in their design of the event and consider it a good try, albeit not wholly succesful.
It does need to come back, suitably tweaked, as the equivilant to CE for Romulan marks.
Post edited by rinkster on
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Anything an entire team can afk through 90% of the mission and win is a joke, developers should be ashamed of such trash.
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Didn't say there weren't problems, but I do give credit for the attempt to move away from pure DPS.
Didn't work perfectly, or even that well, but I appreciate the attempt.......and trying is something I don't see Cryptic do enough of.
I think they had a good idea with a team based mission that had different objectives for different ships, but the execution was lacking.
Mine Trap Supporter
That said, I liked the space mission overall. I liked the advantage given a sci ship for something. And cruisers had their own advantages in it, mostly in their ability to tank a bunch of ships near the station. Too many ships though. I had tank builds that got ran off after a dozen or more ships start shooting at me all at once.
Yet when you got a good team it worked still. I got 60 marks on normal in a science vessel today before it ended.
Was it? I love how the guy always says "Meeror Dreadnought coming through!" It's a 'Mirror,' for crying out-loud! :P
Otherwise entirely agree with your assessment.
IMHO if a player stays AFK for a set amount of time, a battleship rift should spawn on top of them.
Mmh full dps-team+1 Sci gave the most marks. I dont think one Substitute (a Scischiff instead of a more dps-ship, but well, Vesta is good enough for 16k+ in ISE on a Sci, not to mention a tac) does make it "move away from pure dps"
"station plasma lance firing in 3, 2, 1...."
Wait a damn minute, I thought you said your defences were down!
Bad writing PWE, bad writing!
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- The only mission in the game that requires team work.
- A mission that forces to "adept" means not necessarily working best with the "standard" setup taken for STFs or other pve.
- regular rom marks income
Cons:
- Implementation.
This mission n particular simply didn't work as the "time gated event" it was.
It required team work, means it would work as a mission that is generally available and where people willing to work together team up and go in.
But teasing everybody to grind that mission multiple times a day, ending up with leechers and people who have no clue.... the frustration was unavoidable.
- immersion.
This game already lacks immersion in every way, but this was a new low.
5 ships fighting a zerg like horde... ok if thats what they are aiming for, all right.
But most of those ships we fight should be, from an "in universe" POW, capable to take a playership. But with 5 ships we destroy literally hundrests of ships in minutes.
I'm not really speaking of changes stat wises, more a skin change... but the "Horde ships" themselves should be something... well it should be even REMOTLEY imaginable that 5 ships could take what comes out of there.
- repulsor warning
We get a warning for that plasma lance looking like a phaser lance but not for that f**** stations repulser thing?
I don't know how often I had a nice dozen of ship in my firing arc, buffed my Scattern and Spread, and the second I fire... gone, repulsored aways.
Just caught all of them in your gravity well and ready for kill? Nope. Repuslored out of range.
Positioned the scimitar to fire? Hahaha, try again...
That was agonizing, the thing should be removed or there should be some warning.
- station health and fail condition.
On the one hand: the mission should fail when the health drops to zero. Seriuously. we are there to protect it, and if it drops to 0 that obviously didn't work out.
On the other hand... it shouldn't die that fast.
I mean, even if I got the message "station health at 80%", I knew, in most cases, it was over. As soon as it starts to take damage it goes to 0 within a minute or so. We should have some time to react IMO.
That are my 3 cent here... But I could live very well if I never see that particular mission ever again.
Well I haven't been on tribble, but from what I hear the undine mission sounds pretty zerg rushy....
1) You couldn't really win. Too many ships kept spawning; and the relationship between rifts opening and ships appearing was somewhat lost after the patch (which made you realize you should just forget about closing those rifts, and blast everything around you).
2) You couldn't really lose. Station structural integrity down to 0%? No problemo! You win anyway. In my book, station at 0% = you lose, and go home with nothing, but your tail between your legs!
In the long run I would play it sometimes if the ship spawn was a Little slower and if they remove the long wait at the beginning - even just make it 30 seconds.
For long term rewards 480 dil and around 50 marks (including Romulan) seems ok to me. Maybe give us a bit more experience - say 10000+ for ship killing (this was Mirror after all).
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
He is a Reman, English probably wasn't his 1st language.
The way he says it, reminded me of those old Honeycombs commercials. "I'm a big Reman, and I need a BIIIIG cereal!"
Anyway, getting rid of the 25-ish cap on rifts was a mistake, I think. I felt that was a good goal to reach - before they changed it, I wasn't in many PUGs that could do it, but I always treasured the little break I got, especially since I was kind of sick of the mission after the sixth run or so. Increase the cap to 30-35, maybe? I don't know, by the end of the event I was seriously tempted to afk for it, though I never did. Saw others doing it more, though. Since there's literally no downside to afking besides some marks lost, it didn't give a compelling reason to play it out.
So while I understand the vitriol people have for the mission not dealing with leechers, I think the mission dealt with them in a way we all overlooked.
On one of my characters I saved every reward box until the end. And the amount of over 50 marks boxes I had compared to the 30 marks boxes, showed me that I got much more bang for my participation. Glad the people that toon ran with felt the same as I got ooooooodles of marks. Which I needed on that character.
I mean really. How much effort does it take to push the F key, the spacebar, and some number keys? Certainly to up your reward by 20 or more marks, it's worth doing.
I know that this has been discussed more times than I can remember but it is the only viable option, there are to many people that run more than one account at a time just to earn dil and marks and in my opinion the only way it will stop on pug groups is to allow a vote kick option.
But as for the mirror event imo it was a nice change but needed team work to have a better than average run which is what I feel PWE was going for.
Also, it must be said that Carrier Captains were really screwed over with this event. If you had frigates you could do a bit better, but all it took was for one Typhoon to spawn on top of you, and then all of your pets are dead.
I thought it promoted teamplay over DPS alone. Our best runs happened when a sci and one other teamed up to close rifts. It was the most effective route.
I ended up rediscovering my vesta selection for all of my fed toons.
The payouts were decent for the effort. The doff is of questionable value, but given pending changes he may prove to have some worth yet.
The updated Mirror U builds were challenging. And I see the same thought process for the new Undine missions on Tribble.
This. I fly a Scimitar, and 9 times out of 10, im off on the other side of the map cleaning house when I would hear this messege, so by the time I get my ship turned around and heading back to the station, it's dead. Doing this everyday and going through this made me wonder if Cryptic has something against fat ships. 'Huehuehue, you fat ships need a work out. Get those engines moving!'
Member since early 2011
Closing the rifts was the best way to earn marks. Trying to save the station? That was pointless, that's just whatever many marks it is you won't get.
And that's obviously bad design. The station should matter, it could potentially be a fail condition. It doesn't have to - maybe destroying the Dreadnought is also a way to complete the mission. But the impact must be felt stronger.
Maybe that's actually the better way to change the mission - you either save the station until it closes the rifts and gets rid of all the ships, or you destroy the dreadnought that eventually appears. If you lose the station, the dreadnought destruction is the only thing that you can do, but the damage is worse, ten thousands of hands get lost, and if the Terran Empire tries another assault, your best counter is gone (speaking purely in fiction, it doesn't have a real impact since it's a queued repeatable mission.). Make the reward for keeping the station alive special, like an STF optional objective or something.
I think people only looked for the daily event reward, and didn't care any further. That was dumb, but it's not a problem if the mission enters the regular queue - the only reward would be the marks, and you really want your 15 minutes to be worth it.
Of course, it's likely that the 15 minute fixed duration is what will make the mission fail in the regular queue, too - an STF can be over faster and likely gives you better rewards. The time gate is probably something Cryptic wants to make people not advance too quickly, but it's useless if only a few missions have the time gate.
I suppose it's also a kind of "power creep" they have to deal with...
Now as a concept this was a great, fun, challenging mission that with just a few tweaks could be an all time favorite of the community and preplace ISE and the most run PVE mission.
There needs to be a set limit as to how many rifts can be open at once and how close they can spawn on top of one another. No multiple rifts on top of each other. Now even if the team sucks and no one is closing any rifts there can be a max amount of NPC ships then they stop timing. Also I would have the mission progress based not time gated. The Dreadnought will not how up until X amount of rifts are closed or x amount of NPC ships have been defeated. Also add in mission failure. If the base dies 3 times or even at all the mission fails. Also like in Nukara ground mission where the players activate the special weapons like detonate explosives or release warp plasma. We control the bases Lance and mines and fighters. The Dreadnought needs to be buffed and his escorts need to be capital ships as well.
The "Fix" of never ending rifts and over 100 NPC ships attacking the base at once and you have 30 tractor beams on you at the same time something is wrong.
I give this mission an A+ in concept
a B- when first released
a D+ after the "Fix"
After the patch, guarding the station was the only way I could keep the station "alive" in the majority of pugs I encountered, many of the other team members simply didn't have the DPS to close the 3+ rifts spawns that were in range of the rift they were trying to close, even when supporting one another, and as you can imagine the number of runaway rifts in low DPS teams just sky-rocketed, 100+ npc ships was not uncommon on what ever side I wasn't working.
A fail state with the way the mission is currently designed would kill its pugability completely.
maybe it looked nice on paper - and with hand picked, pre made teams it was kind of fun to play.
but in reality, with random pug:
- different roles based on ship type: nice idea, but no real effect, also in pug: random ships, not teamed by class
- afk/leechers (mission concept prefered this type of "gameplay" )
- as in every pug: "unskilled" players in silly builds doing elite mode, so even if you try you will get low rewards; no balanced teams
pro:
it would have been much more frustrating to play this, when the mission could actually fail ...
So this mission was all about:
spent a certain (fixed) amount of time to get your reward. if you want you can fly around, press space / f-key - or you could also go away, make a coffee or watch tv. doesnt really matter.
The misses were legion:
Forced teamwork in a game where only a small fraction of the playerbase understands such a concept. You will invariably be abandoned to fend for yourself. Nice idea on paper, unworkable in practice.
No AFK penalty to speak of meant you were virtually guaranteed to have at least one person AFK in any given run.
Target interaction mechanics made closing rifts without an invulnerability shield of some kind all but impossible, even if you were lucky enough to have someone taking aggro. Every NPC in that mission had AOE attacks they would spam on cooldown, resetting interactions again and again.
Spawn rates, both of the rifts themselves and the ships coming from the rifts, were utterly obscene after the patch. At least one side of the map would quickly become untouchable to all but the most godlike players.
The bane of any escort/defend mission: rice-paper defenses on the target to be protected. No healing or defensive abilities at all save that provided by the players, and not nearly enough firepower to pose any real threat to the mirror fleet, even at tier 5.
Released broken. There is no way this mission was playtested prior to going live, with an easily-triggered mission-hosing bug.
Reward not proportional to effort. Not even close. 2 weeks+ of gnashing my teeth to get a pack that doesn't add up to even one console? Granted, this is as much the fault of the gruesomely grindy reputation system as the mission, but that doesn't excuse the event design team.
On that note, requiring 2 weeks' worth of inputs for an event reward that's not even going to be around for a month must be a required outcome of Jerk Moves 101.
That is the problem of most MMOs. The reward should be the fun you have, playing the game, everything else should just be bonus.
The way he delivered the "Station disabled..." line whenever it got to 0% health made it sound like he was dropping a deuce at the time.
After the fix, I found it to be pure punishment. Rifts would respawn so much that it was difficult to keep them down, and as you were closing one after defeating the ships that spawned out of it, the ones from the rift next door would start shooting at you.
I loved the concepts of giving cruisers and science ships preferred roles. Needs a little more polish - perhaps buff them even more for their preferred thing? Escorts should...well, escort.
Few problems that could use some work - AFK out the wazoo on this. One of the pugs I ran (and I only ran this on one character) had an AFK at the start of the mission, someone left and was not replaced, finished it with only 3 of us - super painful. It made me realize just HOW much I hate AFK, when the AFK player was still rolling "Need" on all the loot.
I agree that requiring 14 runs to get the rewards in under a month is a little tight. Bad enough with 14 runs of the mini-Qs which took 2 minutes each, but this was 15 minutes, most evenings, or you can't complete it. Perhaps it should have been a 4 week event.
I did like that I could finish it off and continue to run it to get extra marks and dilithium once a day. Gave me an incentive to keep playing.
Overall though, I guess the mission was pretty good. I would like to see more in the science and cruisers having an important supporting role in the future.
The best ship was a properly-run Vesta, although I did see a handful of solo escort drivers who did reasonably well. Closing rifts was a piece of cake as long as you didn't outrun the Danubes. The shuttles' job was to harass the bandits as the Vesta closed the rifts. Then, while the Vesta is setting up the run to close the next rift, the Danubes should disengage and catch up to start the process again (need to use the "Protect Friendly" option).
I could easily close 25 to 35 rifts solo as long as the bandits didn't overwhelm the shuttles. As an added bonus, it helped having the Graviton Shield which allows a Vesta to close a rift even if under heavily concentrated fire. I often didn't fire a shot until my sights were aimed at the dreadnought... my mission was to close the rifts.
Unfortunately, many failed to keep an eye on the primary objective of closing rifts. This was especially evident when the dreadnought arrives. Most folks, even those working in pairs, focused on destroying the bandits before closing the rift. A better strategy would be for one of the pair to engage the bandits while the other closed the rift. Then both disengage and head to the next rift. Only after all rifts are closed and the dreadnought destroyed should the team mop up the area by re-engaging the remaining bandits.
It was more interesting than the typical PVE match, which generally are nothing more than spamming the fire button until the smoke clears. I miss the days of Air Warrior, sigh...
Next best ship was my main's S'Golth loaded with Elachi DHC, a KCB, Omega torp forward and elachi torp aft, etc etc. About 10-12k dps. The sick thing is when I would end up closing more rifts in a run then the science ships cause the science ships were off trying to fight...
Normally I could have just wrecked s**t, but after the "fix" nothing could keep up with the rifts spawning flood if you did not close rifts. The "fix" was horribly done.
As far as ways to improve it. Maybe the could lower the "base" mark rewrd, and add something like this:
Science Ships: Bonus marks for closing rifts.
Cruisers: Bonus marks for activating secondar power satellites.
Escorts: Wrecking enemy ships
Not sure what the specific numbers should be, but I think the concept could work.
Keeping the station alive. Now this needs a real fix. Rather then having you gain marks for keeping it intact, have a BIG penalty if it gets wrecked. And don't have it repair. If it's gone it's GONE for the duration of the mission. Also, base the status at end of mission on the station hull including repairs. This would give a nice incentive for people who heal/repair the station. For that matter you could give individual bonuses to people who heal Vauthil.
The leecher problem is something that need to be dealt with as well. One way is to have some sort of timer. If you sit around and do nothing, you forfeit all or most of the mark reward. Doing anything to take part in that time (Closing rifts, activating sats, shooting at ships) would reset the timer. Not a perfect solution perhaps, but a start.
Initially, it seemed like an interesting concept, though it really should have been different from the mirror hourly event. The changes they made were entirely unnecessary to make it a reman station with Obisek. Why would the Terrans want a reman anything? How does Obisek know so much about the attacks and the ships? This mission raises more questions than it answers, and not in the good way. The VO wasn't great, but then again, i've never been much of a fan of Obisek beyond his first mission. After that, he just gets whiney and annoying.
Mission wise, i do like that they've added objective differences for the different classes, but this really could have been done better. It would have been nice to know it was ships rather than captains, or if captains effected the ship bonus'. I.E. It would be nice if a Sci captain gets a bonus to the rifts, and a sci ship gets a bonus, but a Sci Captain in a Sci ship, would get the best bonus for closing them. It would have also been nice to get a tac based objective, like interacting with the station at each phase to enhance it's defenses. I like that they tried to do class based things in this mission, but like everything else Cryptic does, it seemed very half assed and could have been done a lot better.
Fixing things should not have made them worse... I understand that premade teams rolling in the 50k DPS ships were probably Roflstomping this mission, but regular pugs were being overwhelmed way too easily, especially when rifts were opening right where you just closed one, spawning ships faster than you could interact with the rift, or opening 3-5 rifts in an area at once. To be fair, bad captains were also overwhelming in this mission, doing nothing to help the actual objectives, running this like it was the hourly event, running in to pew pew then running off because they couldn't cut it.
TL;DR:
It was an interesting idea for a mission, but it was poorly implemented in too many ways to make it good. You can't just take a mission, half-TRIBBLE it into a weak "Event" and call it a day. They really should have just left the hourly missions as they were.