Because there are a dozen threads for complaining about rewards. We have a thread where we have (had?) a dev's attention wanting to talk about the difficulty mechanics, lets stay on topic here.
I am on topic. Read what I wrote. I'll give you a big hint since you seem to fail at reading comprehension: the content we've all been doing for years is suddenly now so difficult that we need to invest hundreds of thousands of dilithium to complete it.
Its no fun playing advanced which is supposed to be the old elite it really isn't.
I have pugged and every time the players left its not fun ( Im on here for a bit of fun that's all ) You should be able to complete even in pugs - how do you meet new players in the game if you always do it as a fleet
Ive not been able to complete one yet , I have all fleet mk13 gear that cost a hell of alot to upgrade to and yet still i cannot complete one pve mission
So my supprise of all , - i was thinking advanced a nice big juicy reward 1200 dilithium maybe 1000
No a big fat 480 ???? what on earth ?
So it takes longer , your gear cost so much , and yet even though you have upgraded your gear you still cannot compete ? ?? and when you do complete it , your getting a slap around the face with a lower reward
I'm glad you're considering making Elite even harder. Those DPS channel dweebs screamed for more and I hope you make it as painful as possible. And they deserve even better rewards if they can beat it.
But Advanced needs to be much, much closer to the previous elite. In rewards as well as in form. We were repeatedly told that Advanced would be the old elite, and those statements were never accurate.
I actually didn't get to any of the DR story content yesterday. I hear it's good. But I tried some advanced queues and was left too angry to actually play.
What REALLY concerns me is that a lot of the ire here was posted in the Tribble subforums...why was it not heeded there?
The concept of INCREASING the HP redonkulously yet simultaneously nerfing the rewards doth not maketh good design or encourage people to play.
Crystaline Advanced is just plain silly now.
What boggles and astounds me is that someone played the current advanced qeues and said "that's the sweet spot right there!"
They need to be harder than before but not so silly. Also, advanced and elites should have a shorter cooldown of replay since they are so easy to fail. Perhaps not a huge amount...but *something*.
I did UIA twice today... noticed two main changes: no more forcefield making us wait in the briefing room! and there's a small change to the objectives. the old optional is part of the mission, there's a new optional for getting the interrogations right.
The Undine themselves seemed no harder... But that brings me to two glitches: 1: at least some of the enemies were level 40. 2: the attackers trying to steal the orb never spawned. So we just stood there guarding the orb for a few minutes.
The problem with the new Advanced (old Elite) isn't that it's entirely too difficult, it's that the HP are so high now that it takes a LOT longer to do. Thus, it not only is very boring & drawn out to most, but to a lot of others, it gives the illusion of being more difficult. For example, when the Crystalline Entity takes 10 well-equipped people in upgraded ships 45 minutes to knock it down to 25%, and then it stays at 25%, there's an issue. It comes off as being impossible to kill, and therefore more difficult.
I'd be ok with bumping them up to twice as long, the 5-10 minutes they used to take would be upwards of 20. If that was the goal, it was missed by many quadrants. I've yet to play an Advanced queue that has finished through, everyone ends up quitting due to the HP stagnating at some point...
I just ran the Advanced (old Elite) Crystalline Entity for the first time since the expansion hit. Imagine my surprise when everything in there seems to have had their HP multiplied by a factor of 10.
Nearly 1 million HP's for a Tholian Recluse? The Entity itself had more than 20 million where it used to have a bit over 2 million on the old Elite? WTF?!
The optional is to defeat the Entity in 10 minutes or less. It took 6 minutes just to beat the first wave of Thoians. The next 15 minutes were wasted whittling the Entity down to 80%. 3 people on my team quit around this point, and I'd be willing to bet a couple from the other team quit as well. I logged out and came to the forums to see if what I'm seeing is unique. Or a bug. Seems it's WAI.
The way I understood the new setup for the queues to be was Normal would be unchanged, Advanced would simply be the old Elite with some optional things added where there were none, and some old optionals becoming mandatory. The new Elite was to be where the difficulty really ramped up. Guess things got changed.
Oh, and the Dilithium being cut down, what's the deal with that?
Oh well, I guess if this is what the new queues are going to be like, I guess I'm done running them on anything above Normal.
Thanks Cryptic, you really know how to make improvements. :rolleyes:
Hello. My name is iamynaught and I am an altaholic.
What boggles and astounds me is that someone played the current advanced qeues and said "that's the sweet spot right there!"
There's a flaw in your thinking here, which is the assumption that anyone on the STO dev team playtested them at all.
I bought one of their fancy T6 ships, the Guardian. It has a bugged heal mod that scales all hull heals as if it were a T3 ship, and its console ability is laughably broken. If no devs tested an item that they sell for $30, I would not be so sure they ever queued up for Advanced themselves.
There's a flaw in your thinking here, which is the assumption that anyone on the STO dev team playtested them at all.
I bought one of their fancy T6 ships, the Guardian. It has a bugged heal mod that scales all hull heals as if it were a T3 ship, and its console ability is laughably broken. If no devs tested an item that they sell for $30, I would not be so sure they ever queued up for Advanced themselves.
Why do i feel, that the current advanced is supposed to be the LVL60+ elite?
Your Plasma Torpedo - Heavy III deals 174321 (66343) Kinetic Damage(Critical) to I.R.W. Valdore.
Only Advanced and Elite missions reward processors, injections, implants, as well as VR R&D mats. So without them new 50 level characters will not be able to get better quality equipment. With out better quality equipment they will not be able to to Advanced and Elite missions.
It is kind of chicken an d the egg thing.
I did UIA twice today... noticed two main changes: no more forcefield making us wait in the briefing room! and there's a small change to the objectives. the old optional is part of the mission, there's a new optional for getting the interrogations right.
Previously the mark reward scaled with the number of correct interrogations. Now it's a binary on/off reward -- and all it takes is one idiot or misclick to TRIBBLE it up for everyone. BAD DESIGN!
Welcome to Delta Rising. A lot has changed in the game difficulty, and we are looking for your feedback.
Delta Rising was a massive addition, and we anticipate that we will need to make adjustments. So over the next few weeks expect changes in the baseline difficulty, advanced difficulty, and elite difficulty - and also expect rewards to change as we gather more metrics on play-times and success rates.
Our goal was to make basic difficulty and the story content something everyone can play - even with a standard T5 ship. Levels 1-50 are generally pretty easy at basic difficulty, so we felt 51-60 should step things up a bit. Although we expect 51-60 accessible everyone, those in T5 ships and non-upgraded gear should to start to feel a definite challenge as they approach level 60. We expect Advanced to be for more skilled players and those who have invested in the game (ships and gear). And we expect Elite to be for the best of the best. We don't expect most players to succeed on elite difficulty.
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
My opinion is simple
The HP scaling is way to high. Even a small Kazon takes as much as pre DR Undine ship. Not to talk about Advanced or Elite in the story missions. Fighting a small enemy more then 1min is not acceptable because it gets boring, even on eltie.
There you will find much higher HP, even higher shield resistence and thats it. Maybe they do some more damage but my Vesta does not care. Shield is allways up. Simply long and boring fights without any surprise or challenge. And it might be very hard if you run into this HP-wall with a lower DPS ship.
The breaking off for an attack run of the Vodwoor is a nice idea. But they never turn for an attack if you can stay at their tail. So use at last a timer. Flying away does not work? Skip running away.
And the drops are - where are the drops?
There is next to nothing in the episodes, not on Elite nore on normal. And there is nothing in the PvE queues at advanced. I played 2 advanced yesterday and i was "allowed" to gamble for 2! items. Both XI.
And there are items that are needed for repgear from advanced. But you can get them just from elite.
So, how should that work now.
There is next to no loot, so how should new players get EC. How should anybody buy stuff from the R&D system that is on exchange.
How should they effort the Repsystems when level 50?
You can get the items you need for rep gear from the hourly projects but that is very random. So no marks, next to no Di, no EC = no Repgear. Well, maybe after a long time. But didn't you introduce the Rep system because you wanted to get rid of the randomness of the old style of getting XII "Repgear"?
And then you expect the new players to play on Elite to get the Items for the repgear with just items from the missions. Totaly works.
And are there purple R&D mats you can get from advanced? If not you killed the R&D System too for most players. Next to nobody will be able to play Elite soon. I doubt that it will be even impossible for most players with XIV gold gear and T6 ships.
Next to nobody will be able to effort R&D mats of higher quality (maybe ground ones...) and next to nobody will be able to buy that stuff on exchange.
Why again the Ditraders that where selling up to XI blue for DI where removed when you planed to kill the R&D system right in the next content update.
We are back to no EC, no Di, no Items for Repgear, very few marks and a dead marked. Congrats, you have killed your economical system that was just started with the new R&D system.
You took the EC out of the calculation. It will take some time and fleets will be crippled first because people will stopp donating EC and DI and then the market will crash. Even today i get my EC nearly just from marauding KDF toons.
Beside all that i do enjoy DR. Even if you close some story arcs with a blunt club.
Only Advanced and Elite missions reward processors, injections, implants, as well as VR R&D mats. So without them new 50 level characters will not be able to get better quality equipment. With out better quality equipment they will not be able to to Advanced and Elite missions.
It is kind of chicken an d the egg thing.
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.
This game need new blood. People like us hard core Star Trek fans , already here, we will be here no meter what, till last server goes offline. We already have all of the shines and we are know better not to play lock-box games.
The new people on another hand, will come because of big neon F2P sign. They will level up and then hit the end level content wall. After few futile attempts to brake trough the will leave. It is a lot of entertainment choices around.
Previously the mark reward scaled with the number of correct interrogations. Now it's a binary on/off reward -- and all it takes is one idiot or misclick to TRIBBLE it up for everyone. BAD DESIGN!
Welcome to Delta Rising. A lot has changed in the game difficulty, and we are looking for your feedback.
Delta Rising was a massive addition, and we anticipate that we will need to make adjustments. So over the next few weeks expect changes in the baseline difficulty, advanced difficulty, and elite difficulty - and also expect rewards to change as we gather more metrics on play-times and success rates.
Our goal was to make basic difficulty and the story content something everyone can play - even with a standard T5 ship. Levels 1-50 are generally pretty easy at basic difficulty, so we felt 51-60 should step things up a bit. Although we expect 51-60 accessible everyone, those in T5 ships and non-upgraded gear should to start to feel a definite challenge as they approach level 60. We expect Advanced to be for more skilled players and those who have invested in the game (ships and gear). And we expect Elite to be for the best of the best. We don't expect most players to succeed on elite difficulty.
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
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...
The PWE/Cryptic sweatshop...not where the game is made,but where the game is played!
Take back your home,end the grind!
Volunteer moderators policing the forums is like a mall cop trying to solve a murder.
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.
Comments
I am on topic. Read what I wrote. I'll give you a big hint since you seem to fail at reading comprehension: the content we've all been doing for years is suddenly now so difficult that we need to invest hundreds of thousands of dilithium to complete it.
Its no fun playing advanced which is supposed to be the old elite it really isn't.
I have pugged and every time the players left its not fun ( Im on here for a bit of fun that's all ) You should be able to complete even in pugs - how do you meet new players in the game if you always do it as a fleet
Ive not been able to complete one yet , I have all fleet mk13 gear that cost a hell of alot to upgrade to and yet still i cannot complete one pve mission
So my supprise of all , - i was thinking advanced a nice big juicy reward 1200 dilithium maybe 1000
No a big fat 480 ???? what on earth ?
So it takes longer , your gear cost so much , and yet even though you have upgraded your gear you still cannot compete ? ?? and when you do complete it , your getting a slap around the face with a lower reward
Yeah my idea of fun
But Advanced needs to be much, much closer to the previous elite. In rewards as well as in form. We were repeatedly told that Advanced would be the old elite, and those statements were never accurate.
I actually didn't get to any of the DR story content yesterday. I hear it's good. But I tried some advanced queues and was left too angry to actually play.
The concept of INCREASING the HP redonkulously yet simultaneously nerfing the rewards doth not maketh good design or encourage people to play.
Crystaline Advanced is just plain silly now.
What boggles and astounds me is that someone played the current advanced qeues and said "that's the sweet spot right there!"
They need to be harder than before but not so silly. Also, advanced and elites should have a shorter cooldown of replay since they are so easy to fail. Perhaps not a huge amount...but *something*.
The Undine themselves seemed no harder... But that brings me to two glitches: 1: at least some of the enemies were level 40. 2: the attackers trying to steal the orb never spawned. So we just stood there guarding the orb for a few minutes.
My character Tsin'xing
I just ran the Advanced (old Elite) Crystalline Entity for the first time since the expansion hit. Imagine my surprise when everything in there seems to have had their HP multiplied by a factor of 10.
Nearly 1 million HP's for a Tholian Recluse? The Entity itself had more than 20 million where it used to have a bit over 2 million on the old Elite? WTF?!
The optional is to defeat the Entity in 10 minutes or less. It took 6 minutes just to beat the first wave of Thoians. The next 15 minutes were wasted whittling the Entity down to 80%. 3 people on my team quit around this point, and I'd be willing to bet a couple from the other team quit as well. I logged out and came to the forums to see if what I'm seeing is unique. Or a bug. Seems it's WAI.
The way I understood the new setup for the queues to be was Normal would be unchanged, Advanced would simply be the old Elite with some optional things added where there were none, and some old optionals becoming mandatory. The new Elite was to be where the difficulty really ramped up. Guess things got changed.
Oh, and the Dilithium being cut down, what's the deal with that?
Oh well, I guess if this is what the new queues are going to be like, I guess I'm done running them on anything above Normal.
Thanks Cryptic, you really know how to make improvements. :rolleyes:
Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.
There's a flaw in your thinking here, which is the assumption that anyone on the STO dev team playtested them at all.
I bought one of their fancy T6 ships, the Guardian. It has a bugged heal mod that scales all hull heals as if it were a T3 ship, and its console ability is laughably broken. If no devs tested an item that they sell for $30, I would not be so sure they ever queued up for Advanced themselves.
Balance this skill level so we can have a little something again please
Elite, havent seen it yet but from what all others have said- rewards.. WTF people, make it worth while.
Why do i feel, that the current advanced is supposed to be the LVL60+ elite?
It is kind of chicken an d the egg thing.
Previously the mark reward scaled with the number of correct interrogations. Now it's a binary on/off reward -- and all it takes is one idiot or misclick to TRIBBLE it up for everyone. BAD DESIGN!
My opinion is simple
The HP scaling is way to high. Even a small Kazon takes as much as pre DR Undine ship. Not to talk about Advanced or Elite in the story missions. Fighting a small enemy more then 1min is not acceptable because it gets boring, even on eltie.
There you will find much higher HP, even higher shield resistence and thats it. Maybe they do some more damage but my Vesta does not care. Shield is allways up. Simply long and boring fights without any surprise or challenge. And it might be very hard if you run into this HP-wall with a lower DPS ship.
The breaking off for an attack run of the Vodwoor is a nice idea. But they never turn for an attack if you can stay at their tail. So use at last a timer. Flying away does not work? Skip running away.
And the drops are - where are the drops?
There is next to nothing in the episodes, not on Elite nore on normal. And there is nothing in the PvE queues at advanced. I played 2 advanced yesterday and i was "allowed" to gamble for 2! items. Both XI.
And there are items that are needed for repgear from advanced. But you can get them just from elite.
So, how should that work now.
There is next to no loot, so how should new players get EC. How should anybody buy stuff from the R&D system that is on exchange.
How should they effort the Repsystems when level 50?
You can get the items you need for rep gear from the hourly projects but that is very random. So no marks, next to no Di, no EC = no Repgear. Well, maybe after a long time. But didn't you introduce the Rep system because you wanted to get rid of the randomness of the old style of getting XII "Repgear"?
And then you expect the new players to play on Elite to get the Items for the repgear with just items from the missions. Totaly works.
And are there purple R&D mats you can get from advanced? If not you killed the R&D System too for most players. Next to nobody will be able to play Elite soon. I doubt that it will be even impossible for most players with XIV gold gear and T6 ships.
Next to nobody will be able to effort R&D mats of higher quality (maybe ground ones...) and next to nobody will be able to buy that stuff on exchange.
Why again the Ditraders that where selling up to XI blue for DI where removed when you planed to kill the R&D system right in the next content update.
We are back to no EC, no Di, no Items for Repgear, very few marks and a dead marked. Congrats, you have killed your economical system that was just started with the new R&D system.
You took the EC out of the calculation. It will take some time and fleets will be crippled first because people will stopp donating EC and DI and then the market will crash. Even today i get my EC nearly just from marauding KDF toons.
Beside all that i do enjoy DR. Even if you close some story arcs with a blunt club.
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.
The new people on another hand, will come because of big neon F2P sign. They will level up and then hit the end level content wall. After few futile attempts to brake trough the will leave. It is a lot of entertainment choices around.
My character Tsin'xing
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...
Take back your home,end the grind!
Volunteer moderators policing the forums is like a mall cop trying to solve a murder.
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
sig
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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.