Ahh but there's r&d packs and lockboxes for better quality equipment, and of course purchasing zen to buy dilithium on the exhange.
Doesn't take a genius to see what's really going on. That's not a jab at you by the way, I'm just saying. Looking at the big picture here it's obvious what's going on.
I do know where are you going with this, i just hope Cryptic is smarter then this. This is a free enterprise, people choose to be play games, because they like it and it id fun and they are willing to pay money for this fun. You need a fair balance between the carrot and the stick.
If they will hit pay-wall hidden behind time-wall, hidden behind another pay-wall.
They will fill trapped, disappointed, cheated and leave, taking all entertainment spending money with them.
We have been waiting for years for a challenging content that doesn't take 3 min to do.
I like the new STF advanced difficulty and that gives players something to work on.
Must of us don't have the gear and we are all just started leveling again.
I Think it's great. So why nerfing it? Just because people complain it'is to hard?
Sorry, wasn't Delta Rising on tribble for weeks to test?
This is why we should have some silver members and f2p players to have access to tribble.
More feedback, less changing afterwards when it goes live!
Do you even understand what you are saying?! You are talking as if the advanced ques are the HARDEST tier in the game. THEY ARENT.
What is logical and what the vast majority of the playerbase wants is a system where the hardest tier is just that SUPER HARD and where the middle tier is just that, middle of the road hard. What we have now is the 2nd tier set to super hard mode. It makes zero sense and will cause R&D mat prices to SKYROCKET just when we need them the most (new upgrades etc)
My observation in general is that most people don't play for challenge. They play for the flow experience of playing. However, while surveys place this group as a large percentage of gamers, they're an incredibly non-vocal group. The challenge oriented player is generally louder and more vocal. And people in general often have trouble grasping why other people play.
Unless you can actually make NPCs smarter and counter based rather than tougher, I think difficulty modes directed at a small fraction of players won't even successfully satisfy that fraction, which generally craves a different and more active playstyle, not tougher enemies.
If enemies and encounters have to be made tougher rather than more reactive to be more challenging, you'd get more bang for your buck keeping elite accessible to average grinders and instead encouraging more skilled players to fly lower tier ships.
Just make Elite identical to Advanced but with no minimum ship level, allowing in Tier 1-4 and shuttles. Then offer scaling rewards to the team proportional to how weak the team's ships are. This would also sell more low tier ships.
Bloated enemy health numbers is not increased difficulty Cryptic.
As it stands right now, it's boring as ****. I'm just staring at my screen waiting for their massive health shields and hull to go down. Npc's barely do more dmg, so I'm forced to sit half afk waiting for them to die And this coming from a fully decked out fleet assault cruiser with 17-19k dps.
PLEASE make advanced less hard and KEEP elite very hard.
If you keep advanced this ridiculous you are KILLING players ability to farm R&D mats.
Correct... 'Advanced' should have stayed like the old elite. The new 'elite' can stay like the 'new elite' (aka insane mode).
Advanced didn't need any buffs to anything. The 900K+ HP for an NPC recluse? Not sure if serious, or high.
The dress is gold and white. Over 70% people says so. When viewed from a certain screen angle it appears blue and black. The dress displayed on amazon is a blue and black dress, but it's not the same dress in the picture. If you're seeing blue & black you're slightly colored blind. A normal upright screen = white and gold.
Bloated enemy health numbers is not increased difficulty Cryptic.
As it stands right now, it's boring as ****. I'm just staring at my screen waiting for their massive health shields and hull to go down. Npc's barely do more dmg, so I'm forced to sit half afk waiting for them to die And this coming from a fully decked out fleet assault cruiser with 17-19k dps.
Yes, this is generally the problem in the current adv queues, well other than novice players causing optional (and thus mission) fails. The enemies are not more of a challenge. They actually can't even kill me as effectively as before where they could (which I attribute as the additional stuff from leveling above 51 with the additional specialization and ship passives being applied. They just are harder to scratch due to their bloated hulls.
This is likely something the devs will tweak down a bit.
Come on Geko,you were planning on lowering the dilithium rewards for some time now,and you knew it would cause a crapstorm.Overshooting it now,and tweaking it later will make it seem 'not as bad' and 'something players could live with'....but it doesn't change the fact rewards are getting nerfed!
On top of that,the aim of the difficulty adjustments and the (much) lower rewards at normal and advanced difficulty,is to force players to spend money.Cryptic's F2P arguments are getting really thin...
If I were to guess, I would expect basic to get some minor tuning, Advanced to get a little easier and Elite to get a lot harder - and rewards, like dilithium rewards, could potentially go up across queues once we are sure we are hitting the right mark. But this is just my guess at this time.
Until then, let us know your thoughts here, and we will take your feedback into consideration.
Thanks, and we hope you enjoy Delta Rising.
LLAP
Gecko, thanks for this thread, and thanks for explaining the thought behind the changes. Here's my experience and impressions:
Rewards, should be equal over time. If you increase enemy HP, thus time to complete then we should get more per run. I appreciate the reduced cool down timer, but wouldn't a more effective mechanic be the tool you already use to scale dil rewards based on average time to complete foundry missions?
Could you replace the binary win/fail timer with bonus marks(actually list the marks we don't need seconds/minutes) counting down from max to zero? Then let us finish even if we get no bonus?
As others have mentioned, voth and undine special rep items are easy to get via the battle zones. Defera is not even remotely on par with those two, and I don't even know if it gives neural processors at all because I find it utterly confusing and unplayable. Thus the only source of BNP's are the advanced and elite queues, plus random luck from the daily/hourly boxes. Either add a conversion project from marks to BNP's, or increase the drop rate from daily/hourly boxes or add them to the reward for normal, or give defera a complete overhaul. New 50s need a source of BNP's and they really don't have one today.
Difficulty, I add my voice to those saying more HP is not harder. It is only slower and less fun.
Talk to borticus, I am on a phone so search and copy/paste are limited. Dontdrunkimshoot and borticus had a great exchange of posts about the ai. Please, for the love of Roddenberry, have borticus get you his suggestions. Little things like using rotate shield frequency when shields are low, not at the start of a fight, etc. I know borticus said the ai actually is smart but ships died too fast, however evidence suggests that's not the core issue. it does use powers poorly, and rarely has anything important. They are mostly bricks with HP. This straight up isn't fun. It is tedious.
Advanced is balanced for 60, I've seen it on tribble, we needed about two weeks to adapt to the difficulty and start farming the queues in t5u ships. So please don't do anything drastic right away. But, especially in the patrols and solo missions, enemy HP are way, way too high on normal. No one should ever face an enemy on normal solo with 200k hit points, and some have vastly more than that. Look at the difficulty mods for solo missions and let normal stay easy even in a patrol. The thread on the tribble forum about hp is aggressive, but has great advice and feedback.
The poster who suggested locking advanced until 55 had a good idea, I think that would help a lot.
Story missions, beautiful, well written, loved the way the guest stars didn't steal the show but made it better. The art team in particular did a fantastic job. Even the small changes like the arrows for zoning in sector space are more elegant. Mindscape is my new favorite mission in all of sto.
Please stop locking us out of team play. I have friends I LAN party with. My fleet has parents who play with their kids, and disabled vets who sometimes need help with the hard bits. This forced solo wall real!y sucks the life out of an evening. Please let us team up for EVERYTHING. And please go to the champions online developers at cryptic north and get the/code for two c-store items: "teleport all team mates to you" & "Warp to team mate". I've spent over 2,000 zen buying these for my alts in co, and I've sold dozens more by demonstrating them to people who didn't know what they were. Easy money. You won't regret it.
Leveling, about right. Some people are having trouble leveling in time to the story. Some repeatable filler would be nice. Pre delta you can always do the next story mission, you never fall behind. Here there are points where you always will. No one hits 53 without grinding out of story. That's an issue and I had to help a lot of people with it.
Communication, sorry hut very poor. The operations pack went live and we didn't know what boff races we were getting. Your comments on difficulty were ambiguous. Too much gets said where players can't find it, there's no central repository of Dev talk. You like twitter, others use the Facebook, there's a few forum posts, and a tiny fraction ends up in game. Can't you add a twitter feed and Facebook wall to the website? I think that would be a real help.
Also, please be more specific. I know things change and some people love to trot out statements that got changes as " lies". But at the same time, the whole fiasco over difficulty could have been so much less if you let people know ahead of time about being scaled to 60 not being the same as having all the captain and ship abilities, etc. People literally went into advanced thinking your statements about similar difficulty meant it would be exactly the same.
This was one of those "ounce of prevention vs pound of cure" moments. More detail in the queue revamp blog would have been both appreciated and effective.
All total I am enjoying delta rises, but only because I saw on tribble how big a difference the new powers etc are. I'd be begging for a Nerf too if I didn't have those two weeks. Good luck with the balancing act, and thanks again.
My observation in general is that most people don't play for challenge. They play for the flow experience of playing. However, while surveys place this group as a large percentage of gamers, they're an incredibly non-vocal group. The challenge oriented player is generally louder and more vocal. And people in general often have trouble grasping why other people play.
Unless you can actually make NPCs smarter and counter based rather than tougher, I think difficulty modes directed at a small fraction of players won't even successfully satisfy that fraction, which generally craves a different and more active playstyle, not tougher enemies.
If enemies and encounters have to be made tougher rather than more reactive to be more challenging, you'd get more bang for your buck keeping elite accessible to average grinders and instead encouraging more skilled players to fly lower tier ships.
Just make Elite identical to Advanced but with no minimum ship level, allowing in Tier 1-4 and shuttles. Then offer scaling rewards to the team proportional to how weak the team's ships are. This would also sell more low tier ships.
Bloated enemy health numbers is not increased difficulty Cryptic.
As it stands right now, it's boring as ****. I'm just staring at my screen waiting for their massive health shields and hull to go down. Npc's barely do more dmg, so I'm forced to sit half afk waiting for them to die And this coming from a fully decked out fleet assault cruiser with 17-19k dps.
Precisely.
Like, I can't even do a regular Fleet Alert on Normal setting anymore. Time just runs out. The enemies have too much health; it's not even that they're dealing massive amounts of damage, either.
cubes are great like they are after all, remember Wolf 359, but please change the insane spheres/nanites spheres HP.
Story missions, beautiful, well written, loved the way the guest stars didn't steal the show but made it better. The art team in particular did a fantastic job
i agree, characters are well written, i like Neelix and the doctor together. The voyager bridge is a little bit meh, the ambient occlusion could be better and the metallic tectures; they look like plastic; but this is just a detail. i like also the new ennemies and theirs skills (the vaadwaur soldiers remind me of the WW1 soldiers:P)
Honestly I think the casuals like myself need to band together and put in a refund demands if this is not fixed by this weekend. I feel NOTHING should have changed in STFs. We should get the satisfaction of burning old STFs in our new ships and the new ELITE STFs should be for 60. This is the laziest way to create new content and now I went from pretty awesome to being beaten down by the borg in an unreasonable dificulty increase. So we can unite or leave, thats the only way this game will change for the better.
while i understand the need to change from normal, Elite to Normal ,advanced, elite with the elite being the new 60lvl end game content .
my issue is with the scalability , in 24 hours before the patch i could take my old end game gear and complete the borg STFs elites in a pug environment though it could be very challenging at times ,
to being completely over matched in the new advanced in a pug situation . its like our gear we worked for in rep and in fleet is pointless .
instead of making the enemies smarter and having new strategies its become a FOCUS ALL fire event. For infected if you let one nanite sphere get to hazard range game over ? really ? you increase the HP and add this ? this is a big change not only do you need to keep trying to push those nan spheres back you have to keep up a level of DPS thats on the level way above what was needed to pug this event .this isnt team work its fire everything at OP Amount of HP NPC , AGAIN did you ever hear of gradual changes to these missions . while i dont mind a minor change done to what makes a mission fail but to add that and too increase to a abusive amount of npc HP , that takes even our gear that should be for this level of content struggles with at a PUG LEVEL is just doent make any sense .
im so glad you listened to the feed back from the 2% tribble testers ,
i understand you want us to BUY new gear and ships for the NEW ELITE content , i get it that this gives us something to shoot for , but to make so the older content needs the same sort of gear setup is the wrong move you basically ruined most players builds that dont have any new gold shinys on there ships yet , to get the resources to make the shineys in the R&D which for some are still working on there levels
Advanced level needs to be on par with the 45-50 mark gear and rep where the Elite is 51-60 the way it is now advanced is no where near that .
We have to invest an awful lot into the game - hundreds of thousands of dilithium per character not to mention acquiring the ships and consoles themselves - to be able to do the same exact content we were able to do for years up till Monday...for half the reward.
How are there people not offended by that?
Exactly this. I'm amazed the forums aren't in flames, to be honest.
I'm actually glad to see the game difficulty raised. It made no sense to upgrade stuff for the content as it was previously. I didn't even bother to upgrade from my original gear since the [borg] modified weapons came out in exchange for emblems. I didn't need to. There was nothing hard even on Elite. It was a snooze fest. The STFs were no different than the clickie consoles in the foundry giving out dilithium for 5 minutes of work.
Now... The content is awesome. The difficulty requires teamwork and yes it takes longer but it should take longer. It reminds me of the old STFs where you wanted to carry a balanced team with people providing support roles to each other. No they aren't 2 hours long anymore, but they do demand your attention and require a good build with good gear and balanced team to be the most efficient.
You've given people 3 levels to play at and if its too difficult or takes too long to play elite then play advanced or regular. I'm still playing story missions on elite setting with my old mk xi borg gear with no problem. As for the STFs/PvEs, well I'll wait until I have my upgraded gear for Elite queues.
I think the rewards should be held to the same standard as other missions with the goal of earning the 8k dilithium in a couple of hours of play. People have been playing the same handful of queues because the time/reward ratio was off and it was the biggest bang for the buck. I'm glad to see things getting balanced.
Gold Sub since March 2010
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
Advanced can be done. For reference, I'm an 11K or 12K tac Ody working my way towards top gear slowly. Even with me, a similar ship and a 30K carrier we still barely beat the timer on ISA.
That kind of skin-of-your-teeth gameplay is what I would expect from Elite. For Advanced, you'll have plenty of intermediate players trying to do it just to get the gear they need to do well. I think a difficulty jump is certainly warranted - ESTFs were getting to be five-minute meals - but the abundance of spheres that do nothing but slow you down really bogs down Infected space in particular.
The artist formerly known as PlanetofHats.
Actual join date: Open beta, 2009ish.
I also know AI can be tricky so I'll throw out another idea that could make gameplay more reactive:
Challenge ships. 15 ensign slots. My quick math says this is similar power wise to a normal ship aside from shared cool downs but maybe with some severity/accuracy nerfing baked in. And I'd suggest making the ship immune to the global cool down.
A skilled player flying this would find much more reactive gameplay.
Call it a Nova Squadron Retrofit Cruiser/Escort/Science Vessel.
If someone wants more challenge, one of these ships would provide it without penalizing other players. It's just the ship itself that demands reactive play.
15 ensign powers, chance to miss applied to all, no global cool down. There's your challenge mode.
I also know AI can be tricky so I'll throw out another idea that could make gameplay more reactive:
Challenge ships. 15 ensign slots. My quick math says this is similar power wise to a normal ship aside from shared cool downs but maybe with some severity/accuracy nerfing baked in. And I'd suggest making the ship immune to the global cool down.
A skilled player flying this would find much more reactive gameplay.
Call it a Nova Squadron Retrofit Cruiser/Escort/Science Vessel.
If someone wants more challenge, one of these ships would provide it without penalizing other players. It's just the ship itself that demands reactive play.
15 ensign powers, chance to miss applied to all, no global cool down. There's your challenge mode.
It would need mechanics to have only 4 or 5 boffs giving those powers. Otherwise, think of the SRO, pirate, infiltrator, etc stacking.
C.F. Good team upgraded ships & kit 3-4 min, C.F.Adv same team only lasted 6 min fail. In fact we have yet to complete an Advance game or K.F.A.
I no as you grade up your skills improve so we will see what its like when we hit 60 but its not very balanced at the mo & as other people have said i would hate to be just starting out as everything is so nerf now just where would they get the materials they need from unless they have a fat wallet.
My biggest concern besides the difficulty changes is that it will be more difficult to get the reputation set items to have the firepower to handle the better difficulty for up-and-coming players.
Fate - protects fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise Will Riker
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
well first off, I think we need a clear definition (from a dev, not the wanna be devs) on what they were going for..
ie, is normal and advanced (old stf's) geared towards level 50's or 60's.. now before you answer, the correct answer would be for level 50's.. its like anygame when you make an expansion, the old content, stays there for people progressing through.. (ie, getting gear and building up for the next hurtle). or else, how does one advance their gear? stepping stones are needed, and there doesn't seem to be any helpful ways to make the propers steps..
this is why I assume that the advanced and normal difficulties should, and are for level 50 play.. the elite, should be for 60... we don't need 3 different difficulties for the same content for level 60...
moving on, I agree with most of the posters.. for some reason, the dev team in this game thinks that simply making a zerg fest and higher hp/ offensive power is an increase in difficulty. while it is, it is not a fun increase in difficulty.. the player base has been asking for harder content, and more importantly, they have voiced leading up to dr that they didn't want a simple increase in just offensive and defensive npc numbers. this is not anything new being said to yall. this has also been one of the games biggest failures.. there is a reason people call it space bar online. it requires very little thought, and just point and shoot.
the new content is ok, I like it, but I wish I were challeneged more, and I mean more in the thinking.. id rather sit there and need to figure out how to get from a to b without agroing all the mobs, and still get mission objectives, than sit there and think of how to hit max dps and drop all the npc's as quickly as possible.
everyonce in a while, the devs show a small sign of learning this, well get a class specific duty in a mission, or well get something that requires the team to work together and execute everything at once.. but then it goes away..
fix the mundane style of play that has been present since beta, and the game will be 100 times better. don't take the lazy way out, take the fun and interesting way out... please..
ps, I want the devs to take this as constructive feedback, im not just slamming anyone or what not, these are real thoughts people are having, ideas I have taken from discussion with pugs, or my fleet, or my friends.. the game is an ok game, it needs to jump that hurtle to be great. it can happen, but the business as usual filosophy needs to be changed at cryptic to do it.
good luck, and hopefully we see some great changes in the near future.
Reposting this from the other thread, sorry if it gets double-posted, but I'm unsure which one is the "official" feedback thread:
So, I just finished an Advanced Cure Space. Thoughts.
1. It is obvious this was in no sense balanced at all. Probably they simply increased the HP/Shields of enemies according to a formula. The reason is namely that the IKS Kang is all but immune to the enemies that spawn due to it's high Shield/HP, enemies whose damage in no way scales proportionate to the HP of the Kang.
2. The nodes (although not, seemingly, the cubes) have pre-DR HP.
3. Killing the cubes no longer completes the mission, you have to kill the BOP's as well. (or at least some of them, it seemed incredibly weird when the mission actually completed, which was often long after we've killed the cubes)
4. Apart from the DPS check (the need to kill all the cubes+some of the BOP's within 15 min.) it's not that much harder: I did not die noticeably more than pre-DR. Elites.
5. It does however, take a significantly longer time. (I'd guess it took us around 25 min? slightly less than 15 to clear out the cubes, and an equal amount of time to kill the remaining Bops/raptors/Negh'vars and the carrier)
6. The carrier is absolutely pointless: It's a huge bag of HP, but since there's no timer on it, there's no particular reason to rush DPS, and it does completely anemic damage. (no one died on the carrier whatsoever)
7. All this means that what "should" be the focus of the mission (protecting the Kang, and the final showdown with the carrier) ignoreable while the tough part becomes evading (no use taking them out) the huge HP-sponge Bops while killing the cubes. Very counter to the actual tone of the mission. (which is more of a "desperate defence" thing)
8. Rewards are absolutely anemic. Neither XP, dilithium or omega marks were anywhere near worth the time spent. I earned maybe 3000 XP on the entire thing, and 480 dilithium.
9. The real problem comes with the fact that the "rare reputation mats" (Borg Neural Processors etc.) are locked behind advanced Queues now. Now, we were a pretty damn well-equipped bunch, but that means *we already had that kind of stuff* The new people coming are going to have to do these advanced STF's in order to earn end-level gear... That is required to run Advanced STF's in the first place. (even the upgrade system works that way!) It's slightly easier for voth/undine since they have their respective battlezones, but this makes the borg reputation all but impossible to finish for new players.
10. I don't really have a problem with the difficult of the mission per se: It was fairly tense when the timer was counting down. The problem is that the difficulty is all in the wrong places. (DPS race rather than a "keep the kang alive" race) the rewards are in no way commensurate with the tipe spent. And it is just plain *boring* you spend most of the time plonking away at high-HP enemies who plonk away at you, neither of you who do very much actual damage to each other.
11. You *really* need to take a look over the STF and figure out the balance of HP, damage, the Kang, etc. Right now it was obviously just "scaled up" from the old Elites, with no consideration for how that changes the dynamics of the mission.
A child drawing the Enterprise with crayons had more thought go into that than the devs put into the new difficulty.
Smarter AI and more boff powers to NPC would of been better. No, you just cranked up the HP by 1000% and the resists by a **** ton thinking that was a smart idea.
No. It wasn't smart. Learn how to balance, go play some other mmo's and get an idea. Or maybe hire competent programmers?
Tanking is useful again.
Support healing is useful again.
Borg are a threat.
Battles are longer.
No more one person dominating the stf.
Its challenging.
Tactics are needed again. (10% rule ftw)
Utility powers are more useful than ever.
Things I don't like :
Rewards are weak.
Takes forever to kill anything especially on timed maps.
Just my two cents but i think it has already been stated by many here, that the new advanced is not that bad, i dont have my ship all tricked out and i did rather well. It might perhaps need a little tweaking or allow for an additional ship to come in, a little more balancing and perhaps a very small adjustment on the advanced or the buffs, other than that i think what Cryptic has done is going in a good direction. Things need to be tweaked a little, but not in a major way like some are suggesting. As someone else stated, it is challenging and it is nice for a change which i would like to see implemented across the entire game.
Ok, this is NOT a complaint thread, but I believe it is a solution thread. As Cryptic stated before, they want more groups to shift to heal/tank/DPS setups, but the most recent changes are actually encouraging more DPS setups. The problem with the recent changes is that Cryptic buffed the WRONG things. The Borg should hit harder than anyone in the game due to adaptation skills and they should have special plasma weapons like Borg Degradative Plasma which should have procs similar to Tholian weapons with a 5% chance to nullify shield and hull resistances for 10 seconds.
This makes people want to have healers, and tanks, instead of buffing the Borg to 10X hull boredom. Also, if Cryptic is going to change Advanced AND Elite, which was NOT mentioned in the blogs, then PLEASE give Advanced back the 960 diltihium as the rewards no longer match the difficulty.
Lastly, please add the shield drain pulse to Cubes and Tactical Cubes. Also, if possible could you add Tactical Spheres with 2 new Borg Abilities(this I don't expect anytime soon but again it is only a suggestion).
The one area I don't mind hit poiints added is Cubes and Tactical Cubes, HOWEVER; adding more specialized Borg Weapons and harder hitting skills like FAW III, Multi-Target Borg Tractor beam/Cutting beam(blue) would greatly increase the fun, INSTEAD of just increasing the hit points.
I agree, all they become now are the same HP meatbags with the same tired old tricks with 2x more wpn damage and 5x more HP. It's just kind of tedious/impossible for most everyone trying to get rep gear.
okay my feedback since this link was posted in another thread
the way it was explained it was supposed to be that we get gear from the normal to use in advanced etc etc plus they would still be "short" at certain levels my experience
I am a returning player who returned a couple of weeks before you announced delta rising. I had 2 klingons with carriers and I started working on my federation but he has a wimpy ship t4 I guess it is. I started a romulan (he is new)
my 2 klingons completed all the reputation and have full gear from the dyson and undine rep line. According to my stats my hull is over 70k and my dps is high not insanely high but I was getting first place regularly in things like the crystaline entity etc.
My federation guy is unplayable he can't even do normals i wanted him to be a science he drives a science vessel and i was going to get him a dauntless. as soon as possible however for the moment I can only play with my 2 klingons in tanks who have full gear from the rep. I can't gear up my federation guy because he cannot do any of the pve rep missions so I have to enjoy the ground adventure zones a whole lot I guess.
my romulan is in a warbird he seems to be able to limp through some of the normals (not all of them he can handle the borg ones but not the undine ones) and he can do all the adventure zones.
I pay cryptic 15/month and wont be opening up my wallet to pay hundreds so no matter how hard you push me to shell out for upgrades since I am not a fan of "pay 2 win" i will grind dilithium. However now its a true grind. The pve q's (which are only playable on normal and advanced on completely decked out klingons in carriers) take ages to complete even on normal and the rewards are terrible.
My federation character having played all the the episodes and who enjoyed at least doing the borge pve q's for fun is now sitting with nothing he can do except ground missions.
My romulan well he does okay but he can't really contribute even to the normal level difficulty because he is a brand new leveled up 50 with the free ship and only some of his reputation completed. So I thank my lucky stars i have 2 klingons in carriers otherwise I would be very borred right now.
The pve q's for dilithium so i dont have to spend several hundred dollars on ships are going to mean that its going to be a very very long time before 2 of my little dudes even touch the new delta stuff because my 15/month subscription is not enough. It should be enough this game is fun but its not worth 100's of dollars. I also dont like having to buy zen not because i am cheap but because i like to earn my gear that is half the fun. Unfortunately the way its set up it looks like I am given not much choice because even the dilithium is going to be next to impossible to come by especially since I can't even do any of the new content on two of my guys because they are outfitted as new level 50's and not twinked fully geared with the best of the best. (should I just delete them and accept that making a new character is impossible now ? unless i want to pay cryptic hundreds of dollars in a short timespan per character?) They are not made of gold and I dont even own them.
freemium is supposed to be about enjoying the game and then paying the company what you can afford for the entertainment at a reasonable level and retaining of these customers to keep them paying you a fee. If the customer enjoys the product you give them they will compensate you financially. If they do not then they wont.
I do enjoy the game although at the moment the button mashing half hour + shootouts to get practially no reward is not feeling very fun.
If you want me to work that hard then at least give me a reward to match it. There are only 24 hours in a day.
Comments
If you keep advanced this ridiculous you are KILLING players ability to farm R&D mats.
I do know where are you going with this, i just hope Cryptic is smarter then this. This is a free enterprise, people choose to be play games, because they like it and it id fun and they are willing to pay money for this fun. You need a fair balance between the carrot and the stick.
If they will hit pay-wall hidden behind time-wall, hidden behind another pay-wall.
They will fill trapped, disappointed, cheated and leave, taking all entertainment spending money with them.
Do you even understand what you are saying?! You are talking as if the advanced ques are the HARDEST tier in the game. THEY ARENT.
What is logical and what the vast majority of the playerbase wants is a system where the hardest tier is just that SUPER HARD and where the middle tier is just that, middle of the road hard. What we have now is the 2nd tier set to super hard mode. It makes zero sense and will cause R&D mat prices to SKYROCKET just when we need them the most (new upgrades etc)
Yes This Exactly
Unless you can actually make NPCs smarter and counter based rather than tougher, I think difficulty modes directed at a small fraction of players won't even successfully satisfy that fraction, which generally craves a different and more active playstyle, not tougher enemies.
If enemies and encounters have to be made tougher rather than more reactive to be more challenging, you'd get more bang for your buck keeping elite accessible to average grinders and instead encouraging more skilled players to fly lower tier ships.
Just make Elite identical to Advanced but with no minimum ship level, allowing in Tier 1-4 and shuttles. Then offer scaling rewards to the team proportional to how weak the team's ships are. This would also sell more low tier ships.
As it stands right now, it's boring as ****. I'm just staring at my screen waiting for their massive health shields and hull to go down. Npc's barely do more dmg, so I'm forced to sit half afk waiting for them to die
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It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
Correct... 'Advanced' should have stayed like the old elite. The new 'elite' can stay like the 'new elite' (aka insane mode).
Advanced didn't need any buffs to anything. The 900K+ HP for an NPC recluse? Not sure if serious, or high.
Yes, this is generally the problem in the current adv queues, well other than novice players causing optional (and thus mission) fails. The enemies are not more of a challenge. They actually can't even kill me as effectively as before where they could (which I attribute as the additional stuff from leveling above 51 with the additional specialization and ship passives being applied. They just are harder to scratch due to their bloated hulls.
This is likely something the devs will tweak down a bit.
This sounds about right.
Rewards, should be equal over time. If you increase enemy HP, thus time to complete then we should get more per run. I appreciate the reduced cool down timer, but wouldn't a more effective mechanic be the tool you already use to scale dil rewards based on average time to complete foundry missions?
Could you replace the binary win/fail timer with bonus marks(actually list the marks we don't need seconds/minutes) counting down from max to zero? Then let us finish even if we get no bonus?
As others have mentioned, voth and undine special rep items are easy to get via the battle zones. Defera is not even remotely on par with those two, and I don't even know if it gives neural processors at all because I find it utterly confusing and unplayable. Thus the only source of BNP's are the advanced and elite queues, plus random luck from the daily/hourly boxes. Either add a conversion project from marks to BNP's, or increase the drop rate from daily/hourly boxes or add them to the reward for normal, or give defera a complete overhaul. New 50s need a source of BNP's and they really don't have one today.
Difficulty, I add my voice to those saying more HP is not harder. It is only slower and less fun.
Talk to borticus, I am on a phone so search and copy/paste are limited. Dontdrunkimshoot and borticus had a great exchange of posts about the ai. Please, for the love of Roddenberry, have borticus get you his suggestions. Little things like using rotate shield frequency when shields are low, not at the start of a fight, etc. I know borticus said the ai actually is smart but ships died too fast, however evidence suggests that's not the core issue. it does use powers poorly, and rarely has anything important. They are mostly bricks with HP. This straight up isn't fun. It is tedious.
Advanced is balanced for 60, I've seen it on tribble, we needed about two weeks to adapt to the difficulty and start farming the queues in t5u ships. So please don't do anything drastic right away. But, especially in the patrols and solo missions, enemy HP are way, way too high on normal. No one should ever face an enemy on normal solo with 200k hit points, and some have vastly more than that. Look at the difficulty mods for solo missions and let normal stay easy even in a patrol. The thread on the tribble forum about hp is aggressive, but has great advice and feedback.
The poster who suggested locking advanced until 55 had a good idea, I think that would help a lot.
Story missions, beautiful, well written, loved the way the guest stars didn't steal the show but made it better. The art team in particular did a fantastic job. Even the small changes like the arrows for zoning in sector space are more elegant. Mindscape is my new favorite mission in all of sto.
Please stop locking us out of team play. I have friends I LAN party with. My fleet has parents who play with their kids, and disabled vets who sometimes need help with the hard bits. This forced solo wall real!y sucks the life out of an evening. Please let us team up for EVERYTHING. And please go to the champions online developers at cryptic north and get the/code for two c-store items: "teleport all team mates to you" & "Warp to team mate". I've spent over 2,000 zen buying these for my alts in co, and I've sold dozens more by demonstrating them to people who didn't know what they were. Easy money. You won't regret it.
Leveling, about right. Some people are having trouble leveling in time to the story. Some repeatable filler would be nice. Pre delta you can always do the next story mission, you never fall behind. Here there are points where you always will. No one hits 53 without grinding out of story. That's an issue and I had to help a lot of people with it.
Communication, sorry hut very poor. The operations pack went live and we didn't know what boff races we were getting. Your comments on difficulty were ambiguous. Too much gets said where players can't find it, there's no central repository of Dev talk. You like twitter, others use the Facebook, there's a few forum posts, and a tiny fraction ends up in game. Can't you add a twitter feed and Facebook wall to the website? I think that would be a real help.
Also, please be more specific. I know things change and some people love to trot out statements that got changes as " lies". But at the same time, the whole fiasco over difficulty could have been so much less if you let people know ahead of time about being scaled to 60 not being the same as having all the captain and ship abilities, etc. People literally went into advanced thinking your statements about similar difficulty meant it would be exactly the same.
This was one of those "ounce of prevention vs pound of cure" moments. More detail in the queue revamp blog would have been both appreciated and effective.
All total I am enjoying delta rises, but only because I saw on tribble how big a difference the new powers etc are. I'd be begging for a Nerf too if I didn't have those two weeks. Good luck with the balancing act, and thanks again.
Totally agree.
Precisely.
Like, I can't even do a regular Fleet Alert on Normal setting anymore. Time just runs out. The enemies have too much health; it's not even that they're dealing massive amounts of damage, either.
i agree, characters are well written, i like Neelix and the doctor together. The voyager bridge is a little bit meh, the ambient occlusion could be better and the metallic tectures; they look like plastic; but this is just a detail. i like also the new ennemies and theirs skills (the vaadwaur soldiers remind me of the WW1 soldiers:P)
my issue is with the scalability , in 24 hours before the patch i could take my old end game gear and complete the borg STFs elites in a pug environment though it could be very challenging at times ,
to being completely over matched in the new advanced in a pug situation . its like our gear we worked for in rep and in fleet is pointless .
instead of making the enemies smarter and having new strategies its become a FOCUS ALL fire event. For infected if you let one nanite sphere get to hazard range game over ? really ? you increase the HP and add this ? this is a big change not only do you need to keep trying to push those nan spheres back you have to keep up a level of DPS thats on the level way above what was needed to pug this event .this isnt team work its fire everything at OP Amount of HP NPC , AGAIN did you ever hear of gradual changes to these missions . while i dont mind a minor change done to what makes a mission fail but to add that and too increase to a abusive amount of npc HP , that takes even our gear that should be for this level of content struggles with at a PUG LEVEL is just doent make any sense .
im so glad you listened to the feed back from the 2% tribble testers ,
i understand you want us to BUY new gear and ships for the NEW ELITE content , i get it that this gives us something to shoot for , but to make so the older content needs the same sort of gear setup is the wrong move you basically ruined most players builds that dont have any new gold shinys on there ships yet , to get the resources to make the shineys in the R&D which for some are still working on there levels
Advanced level needs to be on par with the 45-50 mark gear and rep where the Elite is 51-60 the way it is now advanced is no where near that .
Exactly this. I'm amazed the forums aren't in flames, to be honest.
Now... The content is awesome. The difficulty requires teamwork and yes it takes longer but it should take longer. It reminds me of the old STFs where you wanted to carry a balanced team with people providing support roles to each other. No they aren't 2 hours long anymore, but they do demand your attention and require a good build with good gear and balanced team to be the most efficient.
You've given people 3 levels to play at and if its too difficult or takes too long to play elite then play advanced or regular. I'm still playing story missions on elite setting with my old mk xi borg gear with no problem. As for the STFs/PvEs, well I'll wait until I have my upgraded gear for Elite queues.
I think the rewards should be held to the same standard as other missions with the goal of earning the 8k dilithium in a couple of hours of play. People have been playing the same handful of queues because the time/reward ratio was off and it was the biggest bang for the buck. I'm glad to see things getting balanced.
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
That kind of skin-of-your-teeth gameplay is what I would expect from Elite. For Advanced, you'll have plenty of intermediate players trying to do it just to get the gear they need to do well. I think a difficulty jump is certainly warranted - ESTFs were getting to be five-minute meals - but the abundance of spheres that do nothing but slow you down really bogs down Infected space in particular.
Actual join date: Open beta, 2009ish.
Challenge ships. 15 ensign slots. My quick math says this is similar power wise to a normal ship aside from shared cool downs but maybe with some severity/accuracy nerfing baked in. And I'd suggest making the ship immune to the global cool down.
A skilled player flying this would find much more reactive gameplay.
Call it a Nova Squadron Retrofit Cruiser/Escort/Science Vessel.
If someone wants more challenge, one of these ships would provide it without penalizing other players. It's just the ship itself that demands reactive play.
15 ensign powers, chance to miss applied to all, no global cool down. There's your challenge mode.
It would need mechanics to have only 4 or 5 boffs giving those powers. Otherwise, think of the SRO, pirate, infiltrator, etc stacking.
I no as you grade up your skills improve so we will see what its like when we hit 60 but its not very balanced at the mo & as other people have said i would hate to be just starting out as everything is so nerf now just where would they get the materials they need from unless they have a fat wallet.
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My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
ie, is normal and advanced (old stf's) geared towards level 50's or 60's.. now before you answer, the correct answer would be for level 50's.. its like anygame when you make an expansion, the old content, stays there for people progressing through.. (ie, getting gear and building up for the next hurtle). or else, how does one advance their gear? stepping stones are needed, and there doesn't seem to be any helpful ways to make the propers steps..
this is why I assume that the advanced and normal difficulties should, and are for level 50 play.. the elite, should be for 60... we don't need 3 different difficulties for the same content for level 60...
moving on, I agree with most of the posters.. for some reason, the dev team in this game thinks that simply making a zerg fest and higher hp/ offensive power is an increase in difficulty. while it is, it is not a fun increase in difficulty.. the player base has been asking for harder content, and more importantly, they have voiced leading up to dr that they didn't want a simple increase in just offensive and defensive npc numbers. this is not anything new being said to yall. this has also been one of the games biggest failures.. there is a reason people call it space bar online. it requires very little thought, and just point and shoot.
the new content is ok, I like it, but I wish I were challeneged more, and I mean more in the thinking.. id rather sit there and need to figure out how to get from a to b without agroing all the mobs, and still get mission objectives, than sit there and think of how to hit max dps and drop all the npc's as quickly as possible.
everyonce in a while, the devs show a small sign of learning this, well get a class specific duty in a mission, or well get something that requires the team to work together and execute everything at once.. but then it goes away..
fix the mundane style of play that has been present since beta, and the game will be 100 times better. don't take the lazy way out, take the fun and interesting way out... please..
ps, I want the devs to take this as constructive feedback, im not just slamming anyone or what not, these are real thoughts people are having, ideas I have taken from discussion with pugs, or my fleet, or my friends.. the game is an ok game, it needs to jump that hurtle to be great. it can happen, but the business as usual filosophy needs to be changed at cryptic to do it.
good luck, and hopefully we see some great changes in the near future.
The jump from Normal to Advanced, compared to the jump from Advanced to Elite, is just ridiculous.
So, I just finished an Advanced Cure Space. Thoughts.
1. It is obvious this was in no sense balanced at all. Probably they simply increased the HP/Shields of enemies according to a formula. The reason is namely that the IKS Kang is all but immune to the enemies that spawn due to it's high Shield/HP, enemies whose damage in no way scales proportionate to the HP of the Kang.
2. The nodes (although not, seemingly, the cubes) have pre-DR HP.
3. Killing the cubes no longer completes the mission, you have to kill the BOP's as well. (or at least some of them, it seemed incredibly weird when the mission actually completed, which was often long after we've killed the cubes)
4. Apart from the DPS check (the need to kill all the cubes+some of the BOP's within 15 min.) it's not that much harder: I did not die noticeably more than pre-DR. Elites.
5. It does however, take a significantly longer time. (I'd guess it took us around 25 min? slightly less than 15 to clear out the cubes, and an equal amount of time to kill the remaining Bops/raptors/Negh'vars and the carrier)
6. The carrier is absolutely pointless: It's a huge bag of HP, but since there's no timer on it, there's no particular reason to rush DPS, and it does completely anemic damage. (no one died on the carrier whatsoever)
7. All this means that what "should" be the focus of the mission (protecting the Kang, and the final showdown with the carrier) ignoreable while the tough part becomes evading (no use taking them out) the huge HP-sponge Bops while killing the cubes. Very counter to the actual tone of the mission. (which is more of a "desperate defence" thing)
8. Rewards are absolutely anemic. Neither XP, dilithium or omega marks were anywhere near worth the time spent. I earned maybe 3000 XP on the entire thing, and 480 dilithium.
9. The real problem comes with the fact that the "rare reputation mats" (Borg Neural Processors etc.) are locked behind advanced Queues now. Now, we were a pretty damn well-equipped bunch, but that means *we already had that kind of stuff* The new people coming are going to have to do these advanced STF's in order to earn end-level gear... That is required to run Advanced STF's in the first place. (even the upgrade system works that way!) It's slightly easier for voth/undine since they have their respective battlezones, but this makes the borg reputation all but impossible to finish for new players.
10. I don't really have a problem with the difficult of the mission per se: It was fairly tense when the timer was counting down. The problem is that the difficulty is all in the wrong places. (DPS race rather than a "keep the kang alive" race) the rewards are in no way commensurate with the tipe spent. And it is just plain *boring* you spend most of the time plonking away at high-HP enemies who plonk away at you, neither of you who do very much actual damage to each other.
11. You *really* need to take a look over the STF and figure out the balance of HP, damage, the Kang, etc. Right now it was obviously just "scaled up" from the old Elites, with no consideration for how that changes the dynamics of the mission.
Smarter AI and more boff powers to NPC would of been better. No, you just cranked up the HP by 1000% and the resists by a **** ton thinking that was a smart idea.
No. It wasn't smart. Learn how to balance, go play some other mmo's and get an idea. Or maybe hire competent programmers?
Things I like :
Tanking is useful again.
Support healing is useful again.
Borg are a threat.
Battles are longer.
No more one person dominating the stf.
Its challenging.
Tactics are needed again. (10% rule ftw)
Utility powers are more useful than ever.
Things I don't like :
Rewards are weak.
Takes forever to kill anything especially on timed maps.
I agree, all they become now are the same HP meatbags with the same tired old tricks with 2x more wpn damage and 5x more HP. It's just kind of tedious/impossible for most everyone trying to get rep gear.
the way it was explained it was supposed to be that we get gear from the normal to use in advanced etc etc plus they would still be "short" at certain levels my experience
I am a returning player who returned a couple of weeks before you announced delta rising. I had 2 klingons with carriers and I started working on my federation but he has a wimpy ship t4 I guess it is. I started a romulan (he is new)
my 2 klingons completed all the reputation and have full gear from the dyson and undine rep line. According to my stats my hull is over 70k and my dps is high not insanely high but I was getting first place regularly in things like the crystaline entity etc.
My federation guy is unplayable he can't even do normals i wanted him to be a science he drives a science vessel and i was going to get him a dauntless. as soon as possible however for the moment I can only play with my 2 klingons in tanks who have full gear from the rep. I can't gear up my federation guy because he cannot do any of the pve rep missions so I have to enjoy the ground adventure zones a whole lot I guess.
my romulan is in a warbird he seems to be able to limp through some of the normals (not all of them he can handle the borg ones but not the undine ones) and he can do all the adventure zones.
I pay cryptic 15/month and wont be opening up my wallet to pay hundreds so no matter how hard you push me to shell out for upgrades since I am not a fan of "pay 2 win" i will grind dilithium. However now its a true grind. The pve q's (which are only playable on normal and advanced on completely decked out klingons in carriers) take ages to complete even on normal and the rewards are terrible.
My federation character having played all the the episodes and who enjoyed at least doing the borge pve q's for fun is now sitting with nothing he can do except ground missions.
My romulan well he does okay but he can't really contribute even to the normal level difficulty because he is a brand new leveled up 50 with the free ship and only some of his reputation completed. So I thank my lucky stars i have 2 klingons in carriers otherwise I would be very borred right now.
The pve q's for dilithium so i dont have to spend several hundred dollars on ships are going to mean that its going to be a very very long time before 2 of my little dudes even touch the new delta stuff because my 15/month subscription is not enough. It should be enough this game is fun but its not worth 100's of dollars. I also dont like having to buy zen not because i am cheap but because i like to earn my gear that is half the fun. Unfortunately the way its set up it looks like I am given not much choice because even the dilithium is going to be next to impossible to come by especially since I can't even do any of the new content on two of my guys because they are outfitted as new level 50's and not twinked fully geared with the best of the best. (should I just delete them and accept that making a new character is impossible now ? unless i want to pay cryptic hundreds of dollars in a short timespan per character?) They are not made of gold and I dont even own them.
freemium is supposed to be about enjoying the game and then paying the company what you can afford for the entertainment at a reasonable level and retaining of these customers to keep them paying you a fee. If the customer enjoys the product you give them they will compensate you financially. If they do not then they wont.
I do enjoy the game although at the moment the button mashing half hour + shootouts to get practially no reward is not feeling very fun.
If you want me to work that hard then at least give me a reward to match it. There are only 24 hours in a day.