I don't like anything about this idea at all. This entire crafting update seems like a massive waste of time and just another moneygrab in the form of Dilithium. We already have a crafting system that works fine, but just doesn't have any worthwhile gear in it... There was really no need to change if they're just mirroring that system we already have and even now planning to remove content from the game for it.
Randomly generated missions weren't the best, of course, but they weren't all that bad either. Definitely mixed things up in the game, and the fact that they're moving away from content that makes the game feel more sandbox-like in place of their own scripted missions (Which end up broken a fairly large amount of the time) disgusts me. More than enough to discourage me from participating in the 'new' crafting system at all.
I haven't lost hope. But my cynicism is bubbling to the forefront here and I'm VERY wary. The company's track record to create content is not good so seeing a dev hang their hat on a phrase like current mission standards makes me want to rant and rage. Because of their history of mission making standards. Not just in this game. Heh.
Same. When I first heard they were pulling the missions, it depressed the hell out of me. I just can't see them having secretly made a whole new exploration system after all this time of just ignoring it. Still, I can't rule out the possibility; so I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt for now (at least until the 3rd).
Mind you, if the blogs come out and we find that it's just 'something we'd like to come back to sometime in the distant future maybe', I'm going to be furious.
"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before."
That's really how I feel about this... While not caulked with great story content, this was the most Star Trek thing about the game. I really feel like the game is modeled off of DS9 waaaaay more than it should be. I wish that instead of just closing them all off, they would slowly roll out a replacement zone one at a time. (While keeping the currant ones open.) Update them with new missions and content. More traditional Star Trek Original Series type scenarios. More Humanoids with different civilizations. Not just random encounters with *insert DS9 villain here, or Romulans.
My guess is that something will come out down the road. But we have the game patched and on our hard drives... Until a replacement is ready there is no benefit to removing it. It only takes away opportunities for new players to gain exp outside the story line, blocking in a more liner gaming experience. I didn't touch the story until I was a Vice Admiral. The game will feel much less open world, and much more scripted.
... it's part of a longer term plan?
Remember what happened to the Hromi Cluster and Arcanus Arm? Both moved to gaseous clouds in their respective sectors to make room for a whole new sector - Tau Dewa. This was the introduction of the Romulans and their whole new area for play. Is the plan to do this with all of the clusters part of some larger map plan?
Remove Rolor Nebula and Delta Volantis and make them "clouds" and you have 2 potential entry points for a new sector. Is there a plan to use this sector to finally introduce those homeworlds we've been missing for so long (Ferenginar and Trill) or possibly the Delphic Expanse?. We already have pretty convincing evidence that the next lockbox is the Xindi one (aquatic carrier from lobi store and reptilian escort from the box itself) so moving some stuff around, map-wise, to make room would make sense.
It's just a pity that we'll no longer be able to actually GO into the clusters and EXPLORE.
Anyway, back to exploring, DOFFing and "crafting" before this latest half-expansion takes those away...
I am not sure why but a friend did mention getting lost in them when they first started.
I'll certainly miss the isolated and on the frontier alone feeling they give when I visit them.
They also said too many new players were getting lost in them.
So the qualification to find your way from the screen to toilet and back is no longer needed to become a star ship captain? I mean, one IQ-Point less and those guys would be vegetables!:eek:
So you're a native speaker and I'm not. So what?:P
So the qualification to find your way from the screen to toilet and back is no longer needed to become a star ship captain? I mean, one IQ-Point less and those guys would be vegetables!:eek:
But vegetables know their direction, they're always growing towards the sun :P
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
If they would just move the clusters into thier sectors, fix to where you could just go into them like you do planets. So that people can do their doff missions. I would be fine with it. But to remove them all together. Thats stuppied. IF thats what their doing. The game sure as hell doesn't need any content took from it. TBH, its been out now for 4 years plus. The Galaxy map should be at the very least 2X the size it is now. With Exploration chain missions stretching all over the galaxy. Each chain mission would have both Ground and space combat and would end with a random Mk 12 very rare item. These may take as long a 2 days to complete. Theres alot more Cryptic could do to help the exploration of the game. They could first come up with anywhere around 50 star trek storys. These storys would take about 10 missions each to complete. There could be a chain mission NPC giver at ESD. Thats where your mission could start from and it could end anywhere. Ever few months cryptic could add 10 or so.
I don't know about anyone else but I'm tired of getting a new ship and no new places to fly the thing. I mean whats the use. You have a garage full of nice rides but there all gathering dust becuase theres nowhere to take them that you haven't already been. To say its growing stale and boring would be the biggest understatement of the century. Cryptic get in that office and get to working. NOW !!!!!!!!!
But vegetables know their direction, they're always growing towards the sun :P
I started playing on the first day and simply could not fly the ship. It was my first try at a space mmo. I quite for a while and played BGO for about a year. When I came back it was easy. I can see new players having trouble with virtually anything.
That said, I just got the lifetime on the hope that more exploration is in our future. It is my favorite part of the game. And I liked the explore strange new worlds mission perhaps most of any game aspect.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
They stated it was to remove content they deemed not up to the quality of today's standards. They also said too many new players were getting lost in them.
If you right about that. Then half of the game needs to be deleted and redone. Esecially those last 2 "NEW" undine space "stfs". That is of course if your refering to Quality over Quanity.
Honestly, I wouldn't be shocked if PvP was next on the list.
I bet there would still be people acting all surprised that anyone would be angry or upset about it too.
It doesn't take up any space or effort so it might survive. It seems to me the main reason to remove the exploration was to save $ on operation costs/burden on servers. Also it may have been impossible, or at least improbable, to change the type of crafting materials found in the cluster maps.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
It doesn't take up any space or effort so it might survive. It seems to me the main reason to remove the exploration was to save $ on operation costs/burden on servers. Also it may have been impossible, or at least improbable, to change the type of crafting materials found in the cluster maps.
Oh, I'm not expecting it to be removed; there isn't any reason to. It just wouldn't shock me.
It doesn't take up any space or effort so it might survive. It seems to me the main reason to remove the exploration was to save $ on operation costs/burden on servers. Also it may have been impossible, or at least improbable, to change the type of crafting materials found in the cluster maps.
Or that it may have also been a player sink they didn't want to maintain. If you look at the exploration clusters with eyes bent on a new crafting system what you have is a completely blank map sparsely populated by interaction points. Now that's the most efficient region possible for collecting resources but its provides the least amount of gameplay that is physically possible for STO.
Instead of that null space the player could be in a featured episode with characters and plots and voice overs and terrain and missions a fair bit more involving kill/scan 5 targets. Of course its never nice to have something taken away from you, but I can see this as being in our collective best interests. The mindset with which we grind can easily lead us into parts of the game that hardly qualify as "game", and it is up to the developer in trying to maintain that game in addition to those other aspects of the MMO to at times do something that we explicitly don't want in order for us to have a space where we can be less mechanical and more human (if only because humans tend to be more liberal with their money.)
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Or that it may have also been a player sink they didn't want to maintain. If you look at the exploration clusters with eyes bent on a new crafting system what you have is a completely blank map sparsely populated by interaction points. Now that's the most efficient region possible for collecting resources but its provides the least amount of gameplay that is physically possible for STO.
Instead of that null space the player could be in a featured episode with characters and plots and voice overs and terrain and missions a fair bit more involving kill/scan 5 targets. Of course its never nice to have something taken away from you, but I can see this as being in our collective best interests. The mindset with which we grind can easily lead us into parts of the game that hardly qualify as "game", and it is up to the developer in trying to maintain that game in addition to those other aspects of the MMO to at times do something that we explicitly don't want in order for us to have a space where we can be less mechanical and more human (if only because humans tend to be more liberal with their money.)
The goal of the exploration clusters was to make things more repeatable by randomising stuff. A featured episode defeats the point. To achieve the same effect, you would need so many of them, requiring so much work, that we wouldn't see the results of such a project for years.
The goal of the exploration clusters was to make things more repeatable by randomising stuff. A featured episode defeats the point. To achieve the same effect, you would need so many of them, requiring so much work, that we wouldn't see the results of such a project for years.
Its randomization along a very small handful of themes. You might have the technical fact of a random number generator having SOME effect on gameplay but its such a trivial effect that it's not worth maintaining in its current form.
What you would need to achieve the goal of exploration is randomized combat design, a huge number more objectives, and much more meaningful differences between the structure of the small handful of maps you have access to in addition to a great number other types of missions. What you can probably say is that our present mode of exploration is the barest possible minimum for STO, which at the same time creates a far too efficient environment for resource grinding. If retained it will draw players away from better designed parts of the game and in so doing lower the collective impression of STO, which may have far greater consequences down the road for the game and its population (as it will have spent far more time with a much weaker part of the game.)
Now featured episodes are not a replacement for randomized missions. They are not perfect substitutes (though of course you can start drawing mission names out of a hat if you really need that analog.) They are however far more suitable to the crafting revamp.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Its randomization along a very small handful of themes. You might have the technical fact of a random number generator having SOME effect on gameplay but its such a trivial effect that it's not worth maintaining in its current form.
What you would need to achieve the goal of exploration is randomized combat design, a huge number more objectives, and much more meaningful differences between the structure of the small handful of maps you have access to in addition to a great number other types of missions. What you can probably say is that our present mode of exploration is the barest possible minimum for STO, which at the same time creates a far too efficient environment for resource grinding. If retained it will draw players away from better designed parts of the game and in so doing lower the collective impression of STO, which may have far greater consequences down the road for the game and its population (as it will have spent far more time with a much weaker part of the game.)
Now featured episodes are not a replacement for randomized missions. They are not perfect substitutes (though of course you can start drawing mission names out of a hat if you really need that analog.) They are however far more suitable to the crafting revamp.
All they needed to do to make it less trivial was add new types of random mission over time; there's plenty they could have done just basing them on existing missions. There was always room for improvement; they just couldn't be bothered.
They've been a terrible design flaw not because of how they were made but because of the AI being turned down so low in the mission creation under the hood. They've also been a problem for material gathering, it takes forever to get there, you're still in sector so you're maneuverability is still in Warp rather than impulse, and even if you put yourself in a shuttle you could accidently start a scenario that pulls you into a fight which doesn't help.
People who've never seen startrek or even seen a single movie are playing this game so they don't really understand it fully. Imagine being in an exploration scene and you can't get out because no one told you that you could warp out with the button on the minimap.
I for one say good riddence but I would also ask that they use some replacement that's far better. IMO Firefall's personalized missions-on-demand are a far better solution to any scifi themepark system that's out now. I would love to see that system replace the exploration missions this game had. It asks you a series of questions as a player to see what you'd like to do in game, then it builds an instance around your answers and voila, customized content.
I did the clusters when I first began STO and I must say that simply, they didn't qualify as exploration or surveying or supplying and whatever other mission category that arose. I won't miss them nor grinding for those accolades either.... but they weren't without they're uses either.
Ranking up quickly, expertise, dil farming am I missing anything?
Sandbox is too OP so it was nerfed. Enjoy the roller coaster rides ... and don't forget to tip the operator.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
All there was to do on exploration was to exchange the genesis missions
through the Spotlight Foundry Missions. Or at least some percentage (60-70?)
Then, give us a 2000 XP project for the EXPLORATION REPUTATION for completing 1 to 3 such missions a day, and create some reputation rewards to grind for (i would for once welcome costumes, bridges, emotes, crafting enhancements)
The good part of the Exploration Clusters was that some of us don't like to be lead in a specific direction a lot fo the time... and to add to the quotes that speak to the "explore strange new worlds, etc..." I would like to quote Kirk in two instances...
Helmsman: "Heading sir?"
Kirk: "Just out there."
Helmsman: "Sir...?"
Kirk, gesturing ahead with abandon: "Thataway."
or...
Helmsman: "Heading sir?"
Kirk: "Second star to the right... and straight on til morning..."
Those both seem to address what doing the Exploration Clusters felt like...
Accolades that previously tracked completing missions inside each Exploration Cluster will now track completion of duty officer assignments unique to those Exploration Clusters.
The daily missions to explore these Exploration Clusters have been removed, including the Explore Strange New Worlds and We Need Breathing Room daily missions.In order to replace these sources of Dilithium, we are looking at ways to add more Dilithium to rewards throughout the game, with a focus on adding it to rewards for single player content.
For those who will miss the opportunity to explore these particular locations, we will be adding doors to the Foundry so that player-created missions can make use of these settings. The limitless nature of the potential missions that can be created using the Foundry as well as the high quality of content that Foundry authors continue to deliver are both exactly in line with the original goals of Exploration Clusters.
While we are removing part of the game, we hope that this improves the overall quality of STO. In the end we aim to make Star Trek Online something youre excited to be playing every week.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
Here is what is worrying me, they are unclear on how and when they will be replacing the Dilithium special mission that earned players 1.5K Dilithium. Will this be in "LIMBO" for a long time? Or will it be wrapped up in some long winded doff session.
I am hoping they make it clear on when and how these missions will be back, or what "NEW" missions will take their place. If they are increasing rewards to existing ones? Which ones and when?
But you get the "dabbler" title if you maxed out old crafting. So it all balances out in the end. :rolleyes:
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
I could give a rat's rear about the accolades and the dilithium grind. I want something to DO. No exploration clusters means no random content. That means I know exactly what the mission is going to be before I even start. That means there's NO EXPLORATION.
My god, the Star Trek franchise is ABOUT exploration. Now, it has even less exploration than EvE or Galaxies.
This is a deal breaker for me.
It always had less exploration than EvE and Galaxies. Galaxies was "hard-on" exploration. Now STO has exactly NONE.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
You get the "Genius" title for maxing out old crafting. You get the "Dabbler" title for dabbling in the old crafting system.
Wow, my bad. I guess that makes it all worth it then.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Comments
Randomly generated missions weren't the best, of course, but they weren't all that bad either. Definitely mixed things up in the game, and the fact that they're moving away from content that makes the game feel more sandbox-like in place of their own scripted missions (Which end up broken a fairly large amount of the time) disgusts me. More than enough to discourage me from participating in the 'new' crafting system at all.
Same. When I first heard they were pulling the missions, it depressed the hell out of me. I just can't see them having secretly made a whole new exploration system after all this time of just ignoring it. Still, I can't rule out the possibility; so I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt for now (at least until the 3rd).
Mind you, if the blogs come out and we find that it's just 'something we'd like to come back to sometime in the distant future maybe', I'm going to be furious.
That's really how I feel about this... While not caulked with great story content, this was the most Star Trek thing about the game. I really feel like the game is modeled off of DS9 waaaaay more than it should be. I wish that instead of just closing them all off, they would slowly roll out a replacement zone one at a time. (While keeping the currant ones open.) Update them with new missions and content. More traditional Star Trek Original Series type scenarios. More Humanoids with different civilizations. Not just random encounters with *insert DS9 villain here, or Romulans.
My guess is that something will come out down the road. But we have the game patched and on our hard drives... Until a replacement is ready there is no benefit to removing it. It only takes away opportunities for new players to gain exp outside the story line, blocking in a more liner gaming experience. I didn't touch the story until I was a Vice Admiral. The game will feel much less open world, and much more scripted.
I am not sure why but a friend did mention getting lost in them when they first started.
I'll certainly miss the isolated and on the frontier alone feeling they give when I visit them.
So the qualification to find your way from the screen to toilet and back is no longer needed to become a star ship captain? I mean, one IQ-Point less and those guys would be vegetables!:eek:
But vegetables know their direction, they're always growing towards the sun :P
Yepp, but the way back is hard to manage:cool:
I don't know about anyone else but I'm tired of getting a new ship and no new places to fly the thing. I mean whats the use. You have a garage full of nice rides but there all gathering dust becuase theres nowhere to take them that you haven't already been. To say its growing stale and boring would be the biggest understatement of the century. Cryptic get in that office and get to working. NOW !!!!!!!!!
I started playing on the first day and simply could not fly the ship. It was my first try at a space mmo. I quite for a while and played BGO for about a year. When I came back it was easy. I can see new players having trouble with virtually anything.
That said, I just got the lifetime on the hope that more exploration is in our future. It is my favorite part of the game. And I liked the explore strange new worlds mission perhaps most of any game aspect.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
If you right about that. Then half of the game needs to be deleted and redone. Esecially those last 2 "NEW" undine space "stfs". That is of course if your refering to Quality over Quanity.
Are you a parrot or sth.?
Honestly, I wouldn't be shocked if PvP was next on the list.
I bet there would still be people acting all surprised that anyone would be angry or upset about it too.
It doesn't take up any space or effort so it might survive. It seems to me the main reason to remove the exploration was to save $ on operation costs/burden on servers. Also it may have been impossible, or at least improbable, to change the type of crafting materials found in the cluster maps.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Oh, I'm not expecting it to be removed; there isn't any reason to. It just wouldn't shock me.
Or that it may have also been a player sink they didn't want to maintain. If you look at the exploration clusters with eyes bent on a new crafting system what you have is a completely blank map sparsely populated by interaction points. Now that's the most efficient region possible for collecting resources but its provides the least amount of gameplay that is physically possible for STO.
Instead of that null space the player could be in a featured episode with characters and plots and voice overs and terrain and missions a fair bit more involving kill/scan 5 targets. Of course its never nice to have something taken away from you, but I can see this as being in our collective best interests. The mindset with which we grind can easily lead us into parts of the game that hardly qualify as "game", and it is up to the developer in trying to maintain that game in addition to those other aspects of the MMO to at times do something that we explicitly don't want in order for us to have a space where we can be less mechanical and more human (if only because humans tend to be more liberal with their money.)
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
The goal of the exploration clusters was to make things more repeatable by randomising stuff. A featured episode defeats the point. To achieve the same effect, you would need so many of them, requiring so much work, that we wouldn't see the results of such a project for years.
Its randomization along a very small handful of themes. You might have the technical fact of a random number generator having SOME effect on gameplay but its such a trivial effect that it's not worth maintaining in its current form.
What you would need to achieve the goal of exploration is randomized combat design, a huge number more objectives, and much more meaningful differences between the structure of the small handful of maps you have access to in addition to a great number other types of missions. What you can probably say is that our present mode of exploration is the barest possible minimum for STO, which at the same time creates a far too efficient environment for resource grinding. If retained it will draw players away from better designed parts of the game and in so doing lower the collective impression of STO, which may have far greater consequences down the road for the game and its population (as it will have spent far more time with a much weaker part of the game.)
Now featured episodes are not a replacement for randomized missions. They are not perfect substitutes (though of course you can start drawing mission names out of a hat if you really need that analog.) They are however far more suitable to the crafting revamp.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
All they needed to do to make it less trivial was add new types of random mission over time; there's plenty they could have done just basing them on existing missions. There was always room for improvement; they just couldn't be bothered.
People who've never seen startrek or even seen a single movie are playing this game so they don't really understand it fully. Imagine being in an exploration scene and you can't get out because no one told you that you could warp out with the button on the minimap.
I for one say good riddence but I would also ask that they use some replacement that's far better. IMO Firefall's personalized missions-on-demand are a far better solution to any scifi themepark system that's out now. I would love to see that system replace the exploration missions this game had. It asks you a series of questions as a player to see what you'd like to do in game, then it builds an instance around your answers and voila, customized content.
Ranking up quickly, expertise, dil farming am I missing anything?
- Judge Aaron Satie
through the Spotlight Foundry Missions. Or at least some percentage (60-70?)
Then, give us a 2000 XP project for the EXPLORATION REPUTATION for completing 1 to 3 such missions a day, and create some reputation rewards to grind for (i would for once welcome costumes, bridges, emotes, crafting enhancements)
Voila!
Helmsman: "Heading sir?"
Kirk: "Just out there."
Helmsman: "Sir...?"
Kirk, gesturing ahead with abandon: "Thataway."
or...
Helmsman: "Heading sir?"
Kirk: "Second star to the right... and straight on til morning..."
Those both seem to address what doing the Exploration Clusters felt like...
Here is what is worrying me, they are unclear on how and when they will be replacing the Dilithium special mission that earned players 1.5K Dilithium. Will this be in "LIMBO" for a long time? Or will it be wrapped up in some long winded doff session.
I am hoping they make it clear on when and how these missions will be back, or what "NEW" missions will take their place. If they are increasing rewards to existing ones? Which ones and when?
- Judge Aaron Satie
You get the "Genius" title for maxing out old crafting. You get the "Dabbler" title for dabbling in the old crafting system.
It always had less exploration than EvE and Galaxies. Galaxies was "hard-on" exploration. Now STO has exactly NONE.
- Judge Aaron Satie
Wow, my bad. I guess that makes it all worth it then.
- Judge Aaron Satie