Put the damn doff UI back the way it was pre-Season 9.5. It was fine. I have never seen any change ever made to this game that has had 99% of the forums saying it was bad.
Adjudicatorhawk, here's some feedback for you. Next time you morons decide that you're going to do something regardless of feedback, just don't bother asking for feedback beforehand. We told you not to do it when this monkey sh*t hit Tribble and why and you did it anyway.
You tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and the logical result followed.
How about Just giving us an option to Select which interface we want to use...
I would be fine with this, call the new system Beginner and the Old system "Advanced"
I must warn you, I am quite Isane! I am Grand Duchess of the Abh Empire: Beneej Letopanyu Spoor!
yes I am 1 of those once in a blue moon forum players also, but I just felt I had to say something. This a game I have liked very much for the past 3 yrs, I am a life time subscriber, an Admiral of my own fleet on klink side, and this new doffing interface is just plain bad.
SWITCH IT BACK , I SAY AGAIN !!
Or just give us an option to pick "Basic" (The New Interface) or "Advanced" (Ye Olde but Goode Inferface).
I must warn you, I am quite Isane! I am Grand Duchess of the Abh Empire: Beneej Letopanyu Spoor!
a) That looks like [redacted] , and looses the whole point of attempting to make a more "sleek" interface that works for touchscreens (especially smaller touchscreens) .
b) Now they are just scrambling to justify their work instead of putting back the old UI and perfecting the one that they made for for Gateway (with which we're saddled with) .
So , with due respect , this is not good news ... , as I still have to open 3-5 separate Doff lists for every marauder mission & the UI is still horribad looking & feeling @ use .
Good news indeed. Now would you PLEASE make the Doff UI a little more clear. You know, like the old UI was. And while you're crating a new trait search function for the Doff system would you mind creating one for the EXCHANGE too? That would be VERY helpful.
How many people already figured out that you can slot more than one of those 20h assignments from the same school?
And if some of those people are using Dilithium to finish those assignments ahead of time, they're going to rack up a lot of xp really fast.
Is that WAI?
I find myself a bit tempted to buy Dil.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
Not fair to the people who haven't figured it out yet.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
This isn't a case of not listening. It is only speculation. On my part, but it could be a lead designer too proud/stubborn to admit the UI is terrible. A system that already has too much time/cash spent to just flush down the drain or perhaps they still feel they can work out the "kinks."
God I wish I was an internal tester...
Sorry to break your fantasies, but it is ALWAYS a case of not listening.. thats one of the big problems of cryptic, since ever...
The new filter they going to add to the new doff ui is ok, but still, it will make you to waste a lot of time filtering for specialization. The whole problem (one of em) was that you lose a lot of time making assignments. Its stupid. I will say it again, why the hell not to keep the old ui, for god sake?? IT is so hard?? is there any policy in cryptic that say "things we do, we cant revert em back to their original state". Because this happens all the time, cryptic does things that nobody likes, but they NEVER revert the changes prior to the change. We know cryptic will never listen to players, but this is getting ridiculous...
ask them to send tells... No need for cryptic to figure this out.
Doesn't work that way. If that's not what they want, they will figure it out one way or the other. Meanwhile some people are benefiting and others aren't.
The haves get farther ahead and profit from it and the have-nots get farther behind.
I don't think that's right.
Meanwhile the situation exists and there's nothing anybody can do about it at the moment.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
Doesn't work that way. If that's not what they want, they will figure it out one way or the other. Meanwhile some people are benefiting and others aren't.
The haves get farther ahead and profit from it and the have-nots get farther behind.
I don't think that's right.
Meanwhile the situation exists and there's nothing anybody can do about it at the moment.
WEll theres a difference with them taking months to figure out that something is going on, and you serving it to them on a silver platter.
Also, right now, it's 100% game feature...
Don't look silly... Don't call it the "Z-Store/Zen Store"...
I'm sorry (cause no doubt a lot of work went into this new system) but it sucks.
* It takes longer
* Doffs already assigned to a mission don't disappear from the apply list
* We can no longer right click Doffs (useful if we're looking to exchange a bound one) - we have to go into the roster to check 'em first
* Hard to navigate
* Not user friendly
* I think, in some respects, too much detail
It's a mess... Sorry guys!
*it takes longer -
The speed you can use it will increase.. 3 days in and my eyes are getting used to where they need to look, so im definately getting more profficient and faster.
*doffs assigned to missions dont dissapear -
this is annoying, but im sure it is something that they will look to fixing
*we can no longer right click doffs -
true, but you can left click the box in the bottom left of the protrait, which does the same thing, from anywhere in the interface.
Also people, you do realise you can turn off 1st Officer Recommendations and never have missions auto filled?
Personally it think alot of people have just taken 1 look at it and gone nnnooooooooo, how can you give proper cronstructive feedback if you haven properly tried to use it? yes there are th obvious 'sorting' issues durig doff selection, yes people have lost some purple doffs.. me included.. but it does still function. i am still doffing, and will continue to do so, from this point forward anything they can do to improve or correct issues within it will make the going easier.
Even with dilithium in the mix, the 20h assignment is only 6000xp and the xp requirements for each crafting level goes up quite a bit.
It will take an awful lot of dilithium at 18k a pop to advance Crafting instantly. Some got it to burn. I for one don't.
But, major dilithium sink. Potentially lots of Zen transfers. Which they make money from.
Yeah, people can probably hit level 5 in one school really fast. But things are going to start to slow way down, especially if they're trying to advance more than one school.
I bet they tweak it, but I doubt they're going to take it away entirely.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
the guy/girl who came with this idea and ruined my doffing time should get demoted or fire imho...
is really hard for me nowdays to select my own officers and see my assigments sort by time left until completion
Personally it think alot of people have just taken 1 look at it and gone nnnooooooooo, how can you give proper cronstructive feedback if you haven properly tried to use it? yes there are th obvious 'sorting' issues durig doff selection, yes people have lost some purple doffs.. me included.. but it does still function. i am still doffing, and will continue to do so, from this point forward anything they can do to improve or correct issues within it will make the going easier.
"It still functions" doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
And we thought that the revamp would be an improvement, so they've lost a lot of faith with trying to fix what they broke while trying to get the new UI out the door way too early. They should have tacked on the R&D UI and left the rest alone until they could get something fully functional and usable instead of this barely tolerable UI.
In my experience the system can pick the first Doff ok , but then if other Doffs are needed , it keeps picking the first one , so I have to manually slot all the others , while taking care that I don not slot something that was already chosen .
To me this is hella frustrating , not to mention that for each Doff chosen I have to open up another Doff menu , which takes more time & more mouse movement .
To be fair, I'm ONLY finding it easier with the "Disable Freighter" or "Unauthorized Raid/Offensive/Assault on Colony" type missions. I've already got so many purples and highly advanced blues (meaning perfect traits) for those specific types of missions that it kind of doesn't matter who from my roster gets fitted to which specific mission.
In that very unique situation, auto-assigning seems to be fine and speeds up the process a bit.
A friend of mine did mention something that might be a bug, can't tell, that sort of sounds like what you're having problems with. He claims not to be getting any suggestions at all and having to manually assign everyone, despite turning the 1st officer recommendations back on. He always used to have it auto-disabled, so not sure if there might be a bug with how you were setup before the patch? He also just might not be doing what he thinks he is.
With season 9.5 a new doffing interface was created. It has failed miserably.
The UI itself is bulky and the supersized icons are fairly useless since you now have to however your mouse over them to see what they are instead of just reading, because the text took up too much disk space and people got lost in it because reading is hard.
The algorithm that is being used to recommend doffs is still focusing on redundant success chances rather than focusing on critical chance.
There is no filter to quick select doffs from your roster. What was the designer thinking when they created this? It is absolutely unacceptable to manually have to scroll through your doff list to hand pick what doff you want to run the assignment.
The system promotes sending good doffs on suicide missions. Definitely misleading.
Since we know Cryptic does not roll back things like this, please add an option to use the OLD UI as it didn't want to make me quit this game, where as the new one really is just that bad.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Lazarus Long --->Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
I'm sure it's been said elsewhere, but we really need a confirmation dialogue for the complete-with-dilithium buttons in crafting. It's far too easy to accidentally hit the button and end up wasting a huge amount of dilithium that you never intended to use. Of course, I know this is all probably part of Cryptic's plan, hoping that people waste dil accidentally in this way, so such a confirmation will probably never materialize.
a) That looks like [redacted] , and looses the whole point of attempting to make a more "sleek" interface that works for touchscreens (especially smaller touchscreens) .
b) Now they are just scrambling to justify their work instead of putting back the old UI and perfecting the one that they made for for Gateway (with which we're saddled with) .
This isn't a 100% apples-to-apples comparison, but seems pertinent.
I had a client who spent an absurd amount of money remaking their transaction/conversion webpages. Over my vehement objections, they decided to make everything targeted for mobile/touchscreen devices.
The next month, they came to me in a panic asking why they had a giant drop in revenue. When we finally did a test, everything I warned about was proven true - they had screwed over 80-90% of their audience to "make life easy" on the ~10% that wasn't contributing to the bottom line.
I don't usually post on forums, but having tried to use the new doff interface, I was so annoyed by the changes to what was one of my favourite parts of the game, that I felt I had to.
Change can be good; destruction never is. What you have here is destruction: of a perfectly good system and of hours of fun. The new interface is ugly and unpleasant, and a huge downgrade to the old system.
I just bought a lifetime sub; fortunately, there's enough else in the game that I don't feel completely cheated, but it makes me extremely unlikely to spend any additional money. I certainly no longer plan to purchase extra doff slots, or more doffs.
The main issues I have with the new interface:
1) Everything is huge. You can't see more than a few missions at once; I don't want to spend half the day scrolling.
2) Everything is now pictorial. I'm not a pictures person at the best of times, and since the pictures are identical for, for example, two different types of scientist, I have to mouse-over little pictures continually to work out what they are.
3) You used to get more than one recommended officer; the one choice you are now offered is, I grant, usually better, but still frequently not the doff I actually wanted to use. I've had to turn off recommendations to make the interface usable at all. And now, to choose any other doff, you get a giant scrolly menu, that is sorted unhelpfully to boot.
4) I no longer get the information about how many of an item I have when I don't have enough. I don't get told 3/15; now, all I know is I don't have 15. This effectively means I either have to carry everything on my person, or only doff at a bank...
5) When I select a doff to be part of a mission they aren't removed from the menu of choices. With multiples of the same doff, that's downright confusing.
6) The bar graph. If you're going to have it, let me turn it off, I'd rather just have the numbers if you won't let me have a pie chart. I can't easily tell the proportions from a bunch of lines, so they are just a waste of space.
7) It's ugly and cluttered.
I have to admit that one and two combined with seven make me feel like I'm being asked to doff with an interface designed for a three year old.
I just don't see why this seemed like a good idea to anyone...
Also as a side note to my request that you stop encouraging me to gut my current awesome doff crew for a pittance of recruitment experience, I find it ironically amusing that in all of this, you didn't bother to fix the only real issue the old doff ui had - that being that when you had insufficient resources for a doff mission selected under one of the department heads, when you opened your ship's replicator, it would take you away from the page that told you what items you needed to buy. So you ended up having to flip back and forth, opening and reopening screens until you got what you needs.
So yeah. you still have to do that. Except it's worse because with the 'red on red' color scheme now, you can barely see how many items you need to buy.
I don't know about you guys, but it is readily apparent to me that the infiltration of the highest echelons of Starfleet Command by Undine shapeshifters is much more rampant than we ever expected. A rampant infiltration by shapeshifters from the highest echelons of Starfleet Command is the only plausible explanation for our new orders to mass produce antiquated technology we already possess in the name of 'research' and to surrender the best members of of our lower decks crews and order them to become farmers in colonies for races that aren't technically even in the Federation.
I suspect a legitimate first target for investigation is that person who destroyed our prior repository of knowledge at Memory Alpha and enthusiastically told us we were 'going to start from the ground up.' She's probably an embedded Undine.
Even with dilithium in the mix, the 20h assignment is only 6000xp and the xp requirements for each crafting level goes up quite a bit.
It will take an awful lot of dilithium at 18k a pop to advance Crafting instantly. Some got it to burn. I for one don't.
But, major dilithium sink. Potentially lots of Zen transfers. Which they make money from.
Yeah, people can probably hit level 5 in one school really fast. But things are going to start to slow way down, especially if they're trying to advance more than one school.
I bet they tweak it, but I doubt they're going to take it away entirely.
The ability to slot more than one of the same assignment is intentional, and was present on Tribble; it applies to all crafting projects. I'm sure that is a major reason the Crafting School XP for that 20hr Research project was tweaked (as you put it) prior to Season 9.5 going live, as a means to balance progress.
I do have one bit of advice on your being "tempted to buy Dil": If you spend dilithium for crafting XP, do NOT do it on the 20hr project. The projects have "normalized" returns of 600 XP per hour for item creation, while this version of the 20hr project returns only 300 XP per hour (earlier versions rewarded more). As the dilithium costs are based on the amount of time you are buying out, you are getting half as much XP for that dilithium expenditure if you use the dilithium Finish Now option on the 20hr.
TL;DR: If you are using the Finish Now button, use it on making items, not on the 20hr Research project; you get more XP for your dilithium that way.
...only real issue the old doff ui had - that being that when you had insufficient resources for a doff mission selected under one of the department heads, when you opened your ship's replicator, it would take you away from the page that told you what items you needed to buy. So you ended up having to flip back and forth, opening and reopening screens until you got what you needs.
Actually, when the doff UI was smaller you could just adjust the position of your replicator and doff UI so they were side-by-side. This doesn't work as well now thanks the the size of the new doff UI.
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
I want to start off with a non critical statement just so you know I am not all hate. I think this new user interface may be more user friendly to non-doffing players as the AI autoselect assignments seems to be improved and for those who don't have many doffs, or understanding of the system, they may find it a bit more friendly.
That being said, those of us who put in time and effort to doffing, the new system is an absolute disaster and I hate it.
If you don't like exploration cluster missions, that's fine, get rid of them, but why did you change the clusters as a doffing location? By moving them to sector space you remove the DH assignments for that exploration cluster that is eliminating many mission that were DH exclusive. For example, on the KDF side, the 6 hour maurader raiding missions are gone ad the DH was the only location they could be acquired. Furthermore the missions aren't appearing in nearly the same quantities as before so it you can't find the missions you are after. This is reducing choice and options for the doffing community and does nothing to expand our content.
I agree with all critiicising the interface itself with the scrolling, illogical sorting, etc., on the missions themselves. The size and choice for many missions is reducing the information we used to have available. The in progress mission are a mess and the logical chronological order to finishes is replaced by a hodgepodge that makes it very difficult to assess when things finish to determine when you should try and get back on to reload the missions.
Expanding on this, the seeming predictable rotation of assignments does not appear to be occurring further reducing our options to acquire the most desirable missions. We were used to a 4 hour shift of assignments but most exploration clusters appear not to be shuffling assignments as they used to increasing the time spent searching instead of being able to enjoy STO other content due to limited gaming hours. When there is an increasing in workload over time enjoyed playing, eventually you have to start questioning why you should undertake a second job.
I am not opposed to change if the changes make sense. I just find the present system is grossly inferior to the previous system and only takes away the enjoyment of those who focus their play on the doffing system. It is one of the few things that keeps me going on this game and yet, now I find myself looking more and more at other entertainment options as I don't want to fight through the interface imposed on the players. I hope some changes are made quickly to improve functionality, otherwise I may take my time and money to other gaming options.
Comments
How about Just giving us an option to Select which interface we want to use...
I would be fine with this, call the new system Beginner and the Old system "Advanced"
Or just give us an option to pick "Basic" (The New Interface) or "Advanced" (Ye Olde but Goode Inferface).
a) That looks like [redacted] , and looses the whole point of attempting to make a more "sleek" interface that works for touchscreens (especially smaller touchscreens) .
b) Now they are just scrambling to justify their work instead of putting back the old UI and perfecting the one that they made for for Gateway (with which we're saddled with) .
So , with due respect , this is not good news ... , as I still have to open 3-5 separate Doff lists for every marauder mission & the UI is still horribad looking & feeling @ use .
Good news indeed. Now would you PLEASE make the Doff UI a little more clear. You know, like the old UI was. And while you're crating a new trait search function for the Doff system would you mind creating one for the EXCHANGE too? That would be VERY helpful.
I am very sorry to have lead you down that path then...
I Want Dis
RnD and upgrade needs less RNG. Less lottery. Something has to change.
How many people already figured out that you can slot more than one of those 20h assignments from the same school?
And if some of those people are using Dilithium to finish those assignments ahead of time, they're going to rack up a lot of xp really fast.
Is that WAI?
I find myself a bit tempted to buy Dil.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
SHHHHHHHHHHHH... Bloddy you...
Not fair to the people who haven't figured it out yet.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
ask them to send tells... No need for cryptic to figure this out.
Sorry to break your fantasies, but it is ALWAYS a case of not listening.. thats one of the big problems of cryptic, since ever...
Doesn't work that way. If that's not what they want, they will figure it out one way or the other. Meanwhile some people are benefiting and others aren't.
The haves get farther ahead and profit from it and the have-nots get farther behind.
I don't think that's right.
Meanwhile the situation exists and there's nothing anybody can do about it at the moment.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
WEll theres a difference with them taking months to figure out that something is going on, and you serving it to them on a silver platter.
Also, right now, it's 100% game feature...
*it takes longer -
The speed you can use it will increase.. 3 days in and my eyes are getting used to where they need to look, so im definately getting more profficient and faster.
*doffs assigned to missions dont dissapear -
this is annoying, but im sure it is something that they will look to fixing
*we can no longer right click doffs -
true, but you can left click the box in the bottom left of the protrait, which does the same thing, from anywhere in the interface.
Also people, you do realise you can turn off 1st Officer Recommendations and never have missions auto filled?
Personally it think alot of people have just taken 1 look at it and gone nnnooooooooo, how can you give proper cronstructive feedback if you haven properly tried to use it? yes there are th obvious 'sorting' issues durig doff selection, yes people have lost some purple doffs.. me included.. but it does still function. i am still doffing, and will continue to do so, from this point forward anything they can do to improve or correct issues within it will make the going easier.
Even with dilithium in the mix, the 20h assignment is only 6000xp and the xp requirements for each crafting level goes up quite a bit.
It will take an awful lot of dilithium at 18k a pop to advance Crafting instantly. Some got it to burn. I for one don't.
But, major dilithium sink. Potentially lots of Zen transfers. Which they make money from.
Yeah, people can probably hit level 5 in one school really fast. But things are going to start to slow way down, especially if they're trying to advance more than one school.
I bet they tweak it, but I doubt they're going to take it away entirely.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
is really hard for me nowdays to select my own officers and see my assigments sort by time left until completion
"It still functions" doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
And we thought that the revamp would be an improvement, so they've lost a lot of faith with trying to fix what they broke while trying to get the new UI out the door way too early. They should have tacked on the R&D UI and left the rest alone until they could get something fully functional and usable instead of this barely tolerable UI.
To be fair, I'm ONLY finding it easier with the "Disable Freighter" or "Unauthorized Raid/Offensive/Assault on Colony" type missions. I've already got so many purples and highly advanced blues (meaning perfect traits) for those specific types of missions that it kind of doesn't matter who from my roster gets fitted to which specific mission.
In that very unique situation, auto-assigning seems to be fine and speeds up the process a bit.
A friend of mine did mention something that might be a bug, can't tell, that sort of sounds like what you're having problems with. He claims not to be getting any suggestions at all and having to manually assign everyone, despite turning the 1st officer recommendations back on. He always used to have it auto-disabled, so not sure if there might be a bug with how you were setup before the patch? He also just might not be doing what he thinks he is.
The UI itself is bulky and the supersized icons are fairly useless since you now have to however your mouse over them to see what they are instead of just reading, because the text took up too much disk space and people got lost in it because reading is hard.
The algorithm that is being used to recommend doffs is still focusing on redundant success chances rather than focusing on critical chance.
There is no filter to quick select doffs from your roster. What was the designer thinking when they created this? It is absolutely unacceptable to manually have to scroll through your doff list to hand pick what doff you want to run the assignment.
The system promotes sending good doffs on suicide missions. Definitely misleading.
Since we know Cryptic does not roll back things like this, please add an option to use the OLD UI as it didn't want to make me quit this game, where as the new one really is just that bad.
I think you answered your own question there BG.
This isn't a 100% apples-to-apples comparison, but seems pertinent.
I had a client who spent an absurd amount of money remaking their transaction/conversion webpages. Over my vehement objections, they decided to make everything targeted for mobile/touchscreen devices.
The next month, they came to me in a panic asking why they had a giant drop in revenue. When we finally did a test, everything I warned about was proven true - they had screwed over 80-90% of their audience to "make life easy" on the ~10% that wasn't contributing to the bottom line.
This feels very much the same.
Change can be good; destruction never is. What you have here is destruction: of a perfectly good system and of hours of fun. The new interface is ugly and unpleasant, and a huge downgrade to the old system.
I just bought a lifetime sub; fortunately, there's enough else in the game that I don't feel completely cheated, but it makes me extremely unlikely to spend any additional money. I certainly no longer plan to purchase extra doff slots, or more doffs.
The main issues I have with the new interface:
1) Everything is huge. You can't see more than a few missions at once; I don't want to spend half the day scrolling.
2) Everything is now pictorial. I'm not a pictures person at the best of times, and since the pictures are identical for, for example, two different types of scientist, I have to mouse-over little pictures continually to work out what they are.
3) You used to get more than one recommended officer; the one choice you are now offered is, I grant, usually better, but still frequently not the doff I actually wanted to use. I've had to turn off recommendations to make the interface usable at all. And now, to choose any other doff, you get a giant scrolly menu, that is sorted unhelpfully to boot.
4) I no longer get the information about how many of an item I have when I don't have enough. I don't get told 3/15; now, all I know is I don't have 15. This effectively means I either have to carry everything on my person, or only doff at a bank...
5) When I select a doff to be part of a mission they aren't removed from the menu of choices. With multiples of the same doff, that's downright confusing.
6) The bar graph. If you're going to have it, let me turn it off, I'd rather just have the numbers if you won't let me have a pie chart. I can't easily tell the proportions from a bunch of lines, so they are just a waste of space.
7) It's ugly and cluttered.
I have to admit that one and two combined with seven make me feel like I'm being asked to doff with an interface designed for a three year old.
I just don't see why this seemed like a good idea to anyone...
Please stop trying to encourage me to send my awesome diplomats, chefs, entertainers, and bartenders to work for the Paradans digging ditches.
Thanks,
OM
Also as a side note to my request that you stop encouraging me to gut my current awesome doff crew for a pittance of recruitment experience, I find it ironically amusing that in all of this, you didn't bother to fix the only real issue the old doff ui had - that being that when you had insufficient resources for a doff mission selected under one of the department heads, when you opened your ship's replicator, it would take you away from the page that told you what items you needed to buy. So you ended up having to flip back and forth, opening and reopening screens until you got what you needs.
So yeah. you still have to do that. Except it's worse because with the 'red on red' color scheme now, you can barely see how many items you need to buy.
So thanks for that,
OM
I don't know about you guys, but it is readily apparent to me that the infiltration of the highest echelons of Starfleet Command by Undine shapeshifters is much more rampant than we ever expected. A rampant infiltration by shapeshifters from the highest echelons of Starfleet Command is the only plausible explanation for our new orders to mass produce antiquated technology we already possess in the name of 'research' and to surrender the best members of of our lower decks crews and order them to become farmers in colonies for races that aren't technically even in the Federation.
I suspect a legitimate first target for investigation is that person who destroyed our prior repository of knowledge at Memory Alpha and enthusiastically told us we were 'going to start from the ground up.' She's probably an embedded Undine.
At any rate,
OM
The ability to slot more than one of the same assignment is intentional, and was present on Tribble; it applies to all crafting projects. I'm sure that is a major reason the Crafting School XP for that 20hr Research project was tweaked (as you put it) prior to Season 9.5 going live, as a means to balance progress.
I do have one bit of advice on your being "tempted to buy Dil": If you spend dilithium for crafting XP, do NOT do it on the 20hr project. The projects have "normalized" returns of 600 XP per hour for item creation, while this version of the 20hr project returns only 300 XP per hour (earlier versions rewarded more). As the dilithium costs are based on the amount of time you are buying out, you are getting half as much XP for that dilithium expenditure if you use the dilithium Finish Now option on the 20hr.
TL;DR: If you are using the Finish Now button, use it on making items, not on the 20hr Research project; you get more XP for your dilithium that way.
Actually, when the doff UI was smaller you could just adjust the position of your replicator and doff UI so they were side-by-side. This doesn't work as well now thanks the the size of the new doff UI.
That being said, those of us who put in time and effort to doffing, the new system is an absolute disaster and I hate it.
If you don't like exploration cluster missions, that's fine, get rid of them, but why did you change the clusters as a doffing location? By moving them to sector space you remove the DH assignments for that exploration cluster that is eliminating many mission that were DH exclusive. For example, on the KDF side, the 6 hour maurader raiding missions are gone ad the DH was the only location they could be acquired. Furthermore the missions aren't appearing in nearly the same quantities as before so it you can't find the missions you are after. This is reducing choice and options for the doffing community and does nothing to expand our content.
I agree with all critiicising the interface itself with the scrolling, illogical sorting, etc., on the missions themselves. The size and choice for many missions is reducing the information we used to have available. The in progress mission are a mess and the logical chronological order to finishes is replaced by a hodgepodge that makes it very difficult to assess when things finish to determine when you should try and get back on to reload the missions.
Expanding on this, the seeming predictable rotation of assignments does not appear to be occurring further reducing our options to acquire the most desirable missions. We were used to a 4 hour shift of assignments but most exploration clusters appear not to be shuffling assignments as they used to increasing the time spent searching instead of being able to enjoy STO other content due to limited gaming hours. When there is an increasing in workload over time enjoyed playing, eventually you have to start questioning why you should undertake a second job.
I am not opposed to change if the changes make sense. I just find the present system is grossly inferior to the previous system and only takes away the enjoyment of those who focus their play on the doffing system. It is one of the few things that keeps me going on this game and yet, now I find myself looking more and more at other entertainment options as I don't want to fight through the interface imposed on the players. I hope some changes are made quickly to improve functionality, otherwise I may take my time and money to other gaming options.