Maybe your trying to tell me mk XIV stuff are loot drops when you hit lvl 60 ?
Just curious, we were talking about the upgrade system
Actually, the thread is about the H/P values of the NPC and some folks not wanting that changed at all in any of the three levels of game-play.
Now play nice children, or I'll stop this vehicle and make you both walk home...
:P
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Actually, the thread is about the H/P values of the NPC and some folks not wanting that changed at all in any of the three levels of game-play.
Now play nice children, or I'll stop this vehicle and make you both walk home...
:P
bah, I walk everywhere any way :P
as it stand I don't care if they change it. I do fine in normal gameplay in all 3. grant I'm avoiding stfs till I get around to upgrading my gear and maybe getting a T-6 ship.
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
Actually, the thread is about the H/P values of the NPC and some folks not wanting that changed at all in any of the three levels of game-play.
Now play nice children, or I'll stop this vehicle and make you both walk home...
:P
SRY, just exploring ways to play this exponentially increasing difficulty with gear the upgrade system won't let me upgrade, and a ship that'll cost more to upgrade than buying a less capable new T6.
as it stand I don't care if they change it. I do fine in normal gameplay in all 3. grant I'm avoiding stfs till I get around to upgrading my gear and maybe getting a T-6 ship.
SRY, just exploring ways to play this exponentially increasing difficulty with gear the upgrade system won't let me upgrade, and a ship that'll cost more to upgrade than buying a less capable new T6.
Farming Dilithium + Time (a LOT if it) are the obvious option...
I got the Eclipse by trading Dilithium for ZEN and even though I'm a bit below being an average player, I've managed to get to Level 54 already.
And I've played on Advanced since day one.
I've gone back to doing mostly Dyson stuff (I'm still working on that rep) with a bit of exploration of the Delta Missions.
But.., after hitting a few of the Kazon Carriers with the "Fountain of Youth" for shields and hull, I decided to put off going deeper into the Delta Quadrant till after Thursdays patch.
Hopefully, it will be a bit more pleasurable to fight them and my fingers won't ache so much from 15 minutes of keyboard smashing.
:cool:
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
I am sure Borticus will be along to clarify at some point but that's not how I read his post.
I read it as:
Normal approx. 80% of current levels (approx. 20% reduction to current levels)
Advanced approx. 70% of current levels (approx. 30% reduction to current levels)
Elite approx. 110% of current levels (approx. 10% increase to current levels)
Not saying I am right just that I interpreted his post differently.
Doesn't that equal 110% of what it used to be before D.R.??
And I think I said that Normal is getting a "slight nerf".
I also said that Advanced would probably be the one to be fiddled with the most.
I'm not really sure how we differ in what we read...
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Doesn't that equal 110% of what it used to be before D.R.??
And I think I said that Normal is getting a "slight nerf".
I also said that Advanced would probably be the one to be fiddled with the most.
I'm not really sure how we differ in what we read...
Sorry haven't had my morning coffee yet! I read your reference to Elite being buffed by 110% as 110% on top of current levels! I've also seen others referring to the nerf as a 80%/70% reduction (20%/30% of current levels)! My mistake, I apologise.
People's selfishness really knows no bounds.
The way the game was people could have fun. They could make "bad" builds, canon builds, whatever and they could still get a sense of getting somewhere and being able to play the way they wanted even if they did Elite (now advanced) in order to get exclusive gear/materials so that they could keep advancing. And they didn't have to invest much time in it. People who can't play much still could manage to get somewhere,
Now they can't. It's either do "this" or "that" build, play "this" or "that" style, use "this" or "that" ability, so you can do at least "this" damage, or no advancement for you. And play for 30 minutes? Oh no, now you're going to play for an hour, to do what you used to do in 10 minutes.
This is wrong! This isn't fun, and this should never, ever be the mindset in a game.
The introduction of Elite in the game is a good thing because it provided a few people the harder experience they wanted. However, messing the game for a whole lot of people is clearly the wrong way of doing it.
To me there are only two ways to solve this:
1-They put normal and advanced to what they were (normal and elite) and keep Elite as the "best of the best"
2-Normal should start droping very rare materials/rep gear items essential (BNP's, etc)
Normals - Playable by low geared players level 50+, reasonably easy once you know how to do it with slim chance of dying - Dil reward 480, time for ISN with an average team around 7 min.
Advanced - Playable by level 60 only, quite challenging with high level gear, high chance of dying - Dil reward 960, time for ISA with an average team around 12 min.
Elite - Playable by level 60 only, very difficult with maxed out gear and at least one intelligence ship in the team, you will die. Dil reward 1920, + bonus 500 dil per optional and bonus 2000 dil for all optionals. Time for ISE with expert team 25 min (timers all extended to 30 min for ISE only).
That's what I would like to see.
See, now here's the rub...
It's not just the STF's that were adjusted upward, THE ENTIRE GAME WAS ADJUSTED UPWARD.
The Low Level Missions and Normal STF's were drastically adjusted.
The parts of the game that people play from Level 10 to 45 became almost nightmarish to attempt.
That's not how one hangs onto paying customers, and I'm willing to wager that the first few days of D.R. data-mining, showed a drastic drop in the number of folks playing the game because of it.
They are trying to ebb the flow of players AWAY from the game.
:cool:
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Sorry haven't had my morning coffee yet! I read your reference to Elite being buffed by 110% as 110% on top of current levels! I've also seen others referring to the nerf as a 80%/70% reduction (20%/30% of current levels)! My mistake, I apologise.
Heh... no prob... yer just getting up and I haven't gone to bed yet (5am here)
We're both probably a bit loopy.
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
many of the end game items are behind rep, and many of those items require things like neural processors voth implants, so how can a toon with RAUH even get geared if they cant get them?
"It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
How do these players reach Elite status? They play a LOT.
How can they have the time to play so much? They are most likely on the dole, be it school or some other hand out that we the casual players are working to provide them with.
So it's a double face slap.
Please have a bit of humility if you don't have to work for a living.
I'm sorry but this is just idiotic.
A lot of people I know in this game are good at the game for one singular reason, we taught them how to do things right and make best use of their time. Frankly a lot of them have real world commitments.
Granted I'm not saying you're entirely wrong because some people obviously are at a point in their lives when they have a lot of time for whatever reasons, however slating us all with that brush is just totally inappropriate.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
SRY, just exploring ways to play this exponentially increasing difficulty with gear the upgrade system won't let me upgrade, and a ship that'll cost more to upgrade than buying a less capable new T6.
Um..no such ship exists, and the amount of unupgradable items is minimal.
Normals - Playable by low geared players level 50+, reasonably easy once you know how to do it with slim chance of dying - Dil reward 480, time for ISN with an average team around 7 min.
Advanced - Playable by level 60 only, quite challenging with high level gear, high chance of dying - Dil reward 960, time for ISA with an average team around 12 min.
Elite - Playable by level 60 only, very difficult with maxed out gear and at least one intelligence ship in the team, you will die. Dil reward 1920, + bonus 500 dil per optional and bonus 2000 dil for all optionals. Time for ISE with expert team 25 min (timers all extended to 30 min for ISE only).
That's what I would like to see.
Other than your times and the dil payout, that's how it is now.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind a moderate HP nerf (the one coming, basically)as long as it comes with an increase in npc damage and skill use. That would actually increase difficulty rather than just time taken to kill an unthreatening enemy. And not bloody spike damage either, there's plenty of "chance to insta kill if shields down for a second" torps. There's no real threat in Advanced to a player capable of building the 15k dps ship it (currently) requires. After the nerf then yeah, you'll be able to hit the 10k requirement with maxed level, mastery, gear and no idea how the game works so people might die occasionally, but frankly Advanced isn't for those people. Those of us who can play the damn game perfectly well, but don't drop huge amounts of effort into min-maxing to the Nth degree need a place to play, and Advanced should be it.
STF's and all other pve were much too easy before Delta Rising.
Failing a STF should not be a rare event.
Players should sometimes lose battles.
I almost quit playing STO during summer 2014 because crafting and farming is boring to me.
I want exciting battles which can be failed.
Easy farming is boring. Guaranteed victory/success is boring.
Predictable battles are boring.
free2play players will experience difficulty but that's how it ought to be.
Up until Delta Rising, there was no reason for me to craft or buy anything crafted because all pve could be beaten without crafted gear.
If you want to "level the playing field" between well-geared and under-geared players, focus attention on the powerful items available in a fully upgraded fleet. If you are not in a high level fleet, you are at a huge disadvantage. There are so many good items available in a fully upgraded fleet that rep gear and rep items are not actually needed.
Just a question.
Have you see how low the numbers of players are on PVEs lately?
When I started playing the game 2 years ago there were many PVE players. Within minutes 20 players PVEs were filled and multiple of these ran at the same time.
Today you have to way half an hour or longer to start such a match.
Its not much better on 10 player PVEs ... or 5player ones these days.
Its like nobody is playing the game anymore.
If you still consider the changes positive then i dont know.
Just a question.
Have you see how low the numbers of players are on PVEs lately?
When I started playing the game 2 years ago there were many PVE players. Within minutes 20 .
One possible explanation:
Before Deltra Rising, a huge number of characters (I would guess most characters) were at end-game and using end-game queues.
After Delta Rising, most characters are no longer at end-game.
There is a queue separation between level 50-59 and level 60 characters.
Exactly how the queues are separated, that I do not know.
Just a question.
Have you see how low the numbers of players are on PVEs lately?
When I started playing the game 2 years ago there were many PVE players. Within minutes 20 players PVEs were filled and multiple of these ran at the same time.
Today you have to way half an hour or longer to start such a match.
Its not much better on 10 player PVEs ... or 5player ones these days.
Its like nobody is playing the game anymore.
If you still consider the changes positive then i dont know.
It could be possible that many of these players are still enjoying the story and not romping through the STFs. Or perhaps they're on Kobali or in the Voth Battlezone or the Undine Battlezone...
Just a question.
Have you see how low the numbers of players are on PVEs lately?
When I started playing the game 2 years ago there were many PVE players. Within minutes 20 players PVEs were filled and multiple of these ran at the same time.
Today you have to way half an hour or longer to start such a match.
Its not much better on 10 player PVEs ... or 5player ones these days.
Its like nobody is playing the game anymore.
If you still consider the changes positive then i dont know.
go to tau dewa block, check japori system, see if you still think the game is failing.
STF's and all other pve were much too easy before Delta Rising.
Failing a STF should not be a rare event.
Players should sometimes lose battles.
I almost quit playing STO during summer 2014 because crafting and farming is boring to me.
I want exciting battles which can be failed.
Easy farming is boring. Guaranteed victory/success is boring.
Predictable battles are boring.
free2play players will experience difficulty but that's how it ought to be.
Up until Delta Rising, there was no reason for me to craft or buy anything crafted because all pve could be beaten without crafted gear.
If you want to "level the playing field" between well-geared and under-geared players, focus attention on the powerful items available in a fully upgraded fleet. If you are not in a high level fleet, you are at a huge disadvantage. There are so many good items available in a fully upgraded fleet that rep gear and rep items are not actually needed.
The normals should not have been tuned up so much, from what I am reading. The new Elite STFs were refered to at times on the lead up as "nightmare mode" which meanspeople should have expected them to be difficult to complete and to be able to fail at them. However optionals should have stayed optionals and not turned into one of the conditions for success.
Crafted gear was never the best to begin with, possible exception being the old kits. It was a stop gap at best, and good for levelling an alt. Most of the time mission gear was better and could be gotten a lot quicker.
As to the fleet thing you are not at a disadvantage being in a low levelled fleet. The one I am in isn't the high tier wise but I can still get the stuff from the fully completed ones just by getting an invite to their respective SB/embassey/spire. The only exception seems to be ships.
There are plenty of fleets out there that are more than willing to allow people free access to these things, there are even channels dedicated to this free access system you just have to ask and if someone is on and their fleet whatever is at the level you require then they send you an invite.
How do these players reach Elite status? They play a LOT.
How can they have the time to play so much? They are most likely on the dole, be it school or some other hand out that we the casual players are working to provide them with.
So it's a double face slap.
Please have a bit of humility if you don't have to work for a living.
Thanks for assuming we're all students or dole dossers. For your information I've worked full time 39 hrs plus per week since I've left school in 96 as well as raising a family. Now how do we get to be so good well simply put we play the game we learn, we teach others as we ourselves were taught. We look at each others builds pull them apart and put them back together. By taking the time to learn, myself and another person that has quoted you have managed to pull stuff off on ground such as running kage with just the two of us. Cryptic revamped the rep traits, so we went back and run it again and we proved the revamp did nothing to effect the playability or difficulty of the Stf's. What cryptic have done this time is the same as they did last time which was to tack on a load more hit points. The tactics are the same, the only time strategy comes into play in space is when someone drops the ball and the rest of the team has to pick it up. Power creep has been put back 6 months or a year at most. The only reason people aren't ramping their gear up to is the shear cost of dilithium involved. But once the new gear starts becoming more wide spread the queues will get easier. Space Stf's are radically overrun in my opinion and by spreading the crafting mats out across grounds as well was a good move on cryptics part.
And humility has nothing to do with it. It simply boils down to that we have better understandings of how the game works and why certain elements work better together than others. The biggest challenge in the game is a players ignorance.
How do these players reach Elite status? They play a LOT.
How can they have the time to play so much? They are most likely on the dole, be it school or some other hand out that we the casual players are working to provide them with.
So it's a double face slap.
Please have a bit of humility if you don't have to work for a living.
I loled hard at this, your an elite player so you obviously have no job or are at school.
Give your head a shake, then go hang it in shame for being such a judgemental douche.
I don't get where the hell people saying NPC's should do more damage are coming from, or what game they're playing. I looked away from my Defiant for a few seconds yesterday and it had gone from full everything to front shield gone and 60 hull. When a game punishes you that hard for not having your total attention at all times, it's not balanced. Having to sneeze in real life shouldn't be the line between life and death. Damage most certainly cannot be angled upwards, it's as much of a completely stupid 'just add more numbers' attempt as raising the hitpoints was.
The solution is far more wide ranging than something so simple as just raising NPC damage for more challenge because just raising NPC hitpoints didn't work and needed reverting, and would certainly include PLAYER hitpoints being increased if you want such rebalancing to work out. When the distance between the player and the NPC is so arbitrarily large, players feel cheated on top of all the other issues, which is what actually creates frustration.
Players don't want to feel the game is being unfair...it doesn't matter if it is or not, the trick is making sure they don't FEEL it...or see it. An NPC higher than a frigate can eat torpedo salvoes to the hull like they were tic tacs; when a salvo heads towards the player's open shield facing the only response is to stand up out your chair, resign yourself to death, and quote Hamlet just before impact. Things like this make the 'cheating' required for an AI to compete, completely blatant. Players thus no longer feel challenged by the game, they feel cheated. Then they get angry.
All the datamining in the world is completely irrelevant, all the numbers you put up to 'prove' the game is balanced is meaningless, if they players don't feel it's right. Stuff like this is why the Diablo III patch notes after Reaper of Souls sometimes included lines like, "This power didn't feel meaty enough or satisfying to use, so we did this and this."
I somehow doubt that people who have real world commitments who can't spend a lot of time or money on this game have ship builds that are capable of doing 60+K DPS...or what is REQUIRED to do hive elite. And that is PER SHIP. Come the update, this is going up to 66+k per ship. And hive advanced ain't currently much better at around 55+k per ship required. I'm sorry but tell me how somebody without spending a ton of real world money or spending a ton of time is hitting those marks again?
Sqwished has already said what needs to be said, but I'll re-iterate. It's about making good use of your time, and yes pre DR I had 7 characters and they all had good ships. I have a lot of real life commitments, which hasn't stopped me making a high DPS Scimitar or any number of other ships. I've even helped others build their ships.
Am I amused that they've pandered all the content to a DPS race? Absolutely not. However if you really think real life commitments have stopped us before you are sorely mistaken. Also do remember that this time round a lot of people just aren't willing to use the upgrade system because the costs are insane, not because we can't get the dil but because we consider it wasting said dil. At least that's the case for most of the group I play with.
So tell me again how you supposedly need to tar us all with that brush, or is it just an excuse for your own failings?
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
I disagree with the OP. More HP and resists do NOT make things more challenging and definitely don't make them more fun. Between the nerfed rewards and sheer boredom from spending way too long to kill ships that shouldn't be able to hold a candle to mine. It's just driving me out of the game instead of down to a lower level.
My solution is, nerf Aux2Bat so you eliminate these 50k builds so they actually have to come up with something other than a cookie cutter build to play through STO's content.
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Looking for a new fleet? Drop by the in-game chat channel, "tenforwardforum", and say hi to the members of A Fleet Called Ten Forward (Fed) and The Orion Pirates (KDF). If you already have a fleet you are happy with, please feel free to drop by our chat channel if you are looking for a friendly bunch of helpful people to socialize with.
One phrase rings well. Increasing health pools , and forcing harsher DPS requirements were making a head on dash back to Escorts Online: Doubts Rising.
Comments
Actually, the thread is about the H/P values of the NPC and some folks not wanting that changed at all in any of the three levels of game-play.
Now play nice children, or I'll stop this vehicle and make you both walk home...
:P
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
bah, I walk everywhere any way :P
as it stand I don't care if they change it. I do fine in normal gameplay in all 3. grant I'm avoiding stfs till I get around to upgrading my gear and maybe getting a T-6 ship.
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
SRY, just exploring ways to play this exponentially increasing difficulty with gear the upgrade system won't let me upgrade, and a ship that'll cost more to upgrade than buying a less capable new T6.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
no, he likes a challenge, a word that you are not familiar whit.
What's the difference? o.o
one enjoys it because of the humiliation, the other enjoy turning the tables :P
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
I read it as:
Normal approx. 80% of current levels (approx. 20% reduction to current levels)
Advanced approx. 70% of current levels (approx. 30% reduction to current levels)
Elite approx. 110% of current levels (approx. 10% increase to current levels)
Not saying I am right just that I interpreted his post differently.
Then give me yer shoes and socks...
Farming Dilithium + Time (a LOT if it) are the obvious option...
I got the Eclipse by trading Dilithium for ZEN and even though I'm a bit below being an average player, I've managed to get to Level 54 already.
And I've played on Advanced since day one.
I've gone back to doing mostly Dyson stuff (I'm still working on that rep) with a bit of exploration of the Delta Missions.
But.., after hitting a few of the Kazon Carriers with the "Fountain of Youth" for shields and hull, I decided to put off going deeper into the Delta Quadrant till after Thursdays patch.
Hopefully, it will be a bit more pleasurable to fight them and my fingers won't ache so much from 15 minutes of keyboard smashing.
:cool:
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
nope, sorry, would but need something to keep needles out of my foot
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
Doesn't that equal 110% of what it used to be before D.R.??
And I think I said that Normal is getting a "slight nerf".
I also said that Advanced would probably be the one to be fiddled with the most.
I'm not really sure how we differ in what we read...
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
The way the game was people could have fun. They could make "bad" builds, canon builds, whatever and they could still get a sense of getting somewhere and being able to play the way they wanted even if they did Elite (now advanced) in order to get exclusive gear/materials so that they could keep advancing. And they didn't have to invest much time in it. People who can't play much still could manage to get somewhere,
Now they can't. It's either do "this" or "that" build, play "this" or "that" style, use "this" or "that" ability, so you can do at least "this" damage, or no advancement for you. And play for 30 minutes? Oh no, now you're going to play for an hour, to do what you used to do in 10 minutes.
This is wrong! This isn't fun, and this should never, ever be the mindset in a game.
The introduction of Elite in the game is a good thing because it provided a few people the harder experience they wanted. However, messing the game for a whole lot of people is clearly the wrong way of doing it.
To me there are only two ways to solve this:
1-They put normal and advanced to what they were (normal and elite) and keep Elite as the "best of the best"
2-Normal should start droping very rare materials/rep gear items essential (BNP's, etc)
See, now here's the rub...
It's not just the STF's that were adjusted upward, THE ENTIRE GAME WAS ADJUSTED UPWARD.
The Low Level Missions and Normal STF's were drastically adjusted.
The parts of the game that people play from Level 10 to 45 became almost nightmarish to attempt.
That's not how one hangs onto paying customers, and I'm willing to wager that the first few days of D.R. data-mining, showed a drastic drop in the number of folks playing the game because of it.
They are trying to ebb the flow of players AWAY from the game.
:cool:
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Heh... no prob... yer just getting up and I haven't gone to bed yet (5am here)
We're both probably a bit loopy.
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
many of the end game items are behind rep, and many of those items require things like neural processors voth implants, so how can a toon with RAUH even get geared if they cant get them?
"It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
I'm sorry but this is just idiotic.
A lot of people I know in this game are good at the game for one singular reason, we taught them how to do things right and make best use of their time. Frankly a lot of them have real world commitments.
Granted I'm not saying you're entirely wrong because some people obviously are at a point in their lives when they have a lot of time for whatever reasons, however slating us all with that brush is just totally inappropriate.
Um..no such ship exists, and the amount of unupgradable items is minimal.
Other than your times and the dil payout, that's how it is now.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind a moderate HP nerf (the one coming, basically) as long as it comes with an increase in npc damage and skill use. That would actually increase difficulty rather than just time taken to kill an unthreatening enemy. And not bloody spike damage either, there's plenty of "chance to insta kill if shields down for a second" torps. There's no real threat in Advanced to a player capable of building the 15k dps ship it (currently) requires. After the nerf then yeah, you'll be able to hit the 10k requirement with maxed level, mastery, gear and no idea how the game works so people might die occasionally, but frankly Advanced isn't for those people. Those of us who can play the damn game perfectly well, but don't drop huge amounts of effort into min-maxing to the Nth degree need a place to play, and Advanced should be it.
Failing a STF should not be a rare event.
Players should sometimes lose battles.
I almost quit playing STO during summer 2014 because crafting and farming is boring to me.
I want exciting battles which can be failed.
Easy farming is boring. Guaranteed victory/success is boring.
Predictable battles are boring.
free2play players will experience difficulty but that's how it ought to be.
Up until Delta Rising, there was no reason for me to craft or buy anything crafted because all pve could be beaten without crafted gear.
If you want to "level the playing field" between well-geared and under-geared players, focus attention on the powerful items available in a fully upgraded fleet. If you are not in a high level fleet, you are at a huge disadvantage. There are so many good items available in a fully upgraded fleet that rep gear and rep items are not actually needed.
fixed it for you
Have you see how low the numbers of players are on PVEs lately?
When I started playing the game 2 years ago there were many PVE players. Within minutes 20 players PVEs were filled and multiple of these ran at the same time.
Today you have to way half an hour or longer to start such a match.
Its not much better on 10 player PVEs ... or 5player ones these days.
Its like nobody is playing the game anymore.
If you still consider the changes positive then i dont know.
One possible explanation:
Before Deltra Rising, a huge number of characters (I would guess most characters) were at end-game and using end-game queues.
After Delta Rising, most characters are no longer at end-game.
There is a queue separation between level 50-59 and level 60 characters.
Exactly how the queues are separated, that I do not know.
It could be possible that many of these players are still enjoying the story and not romping through the STFs. Or perhaps they're on Kobali or in the Voth Battlezone or the Undine Battlezone...
go to tau dewa block, check japori system, see if you still think the game is failing.
The normals should not have been tuned up so much, from what I am reading. The new Elite STFs were refered to at times on the lead up as "nightmare mode" which meanspeople should have expected them to be difficult to complete and to be able to fail at them. However optionals should have stayed optionals and not turned into one of the conditions for success.
Crafted gear was never the best to begin with, possible exception being the old kits. It was a stop gap at best, and good for levelling an alt. Most of the time mission gear was better and could be gotten a lot quicker.
As to the fleet thing you are not at a disadvantage being in a low levelled fleet. The one I am in isn't the high tier wise but I can still get the stuff from the fully completed ones just by getting an invite to their respective SB/embassey/spire. The only exception seems to be ships.
There are plenty of fleets out there that are more than willing to allow people free access to these things, there are even channels dedicated to this free access system you just have to ask and if someone is on and their fleet whatever is at the level you require then they send you an invite.
Thanks for assuming we're all students or dole dossers. For your information I've worked full time 39 hrs plus per week since I've left school in 96 as well as raising a family. Now how do we get to be so good well simply put we play the game we learn, we teach others as we ourselves were taught. We look at each others builds pull them apart and put them back together. By taking the time to learn, myself and another person that has quoted you have managed to pull stuff off on ground such as running kage with just the two of us. Cryptic revamped the rep traits, so we went back and run it again and we proved the revamp did nothing to effect the playability or difficulty of the Stf's. What cryptic have done this time is the same as they did last time which was to tack on a load more hit points. The tactics are the same, the only time strategy comes into play in space is when someone drops the ball and the rest of the team has to pick it up. Power creep has been put back 6 months or a year at most. The only reason people aren't ramping their gear up to is the shear cost of dilithium involved. But once the new gear starts becoming more wide spread the queues will get easier. Space Stf's are radically overrun in my opinion and by spreading the crafting mats out across grounds as well was a good move on cryptics part.
And humility has nothing to do with it. It simply boils down to that we have better understandings of how the game works and why certain elements work better together than others. The biggest challenge in the game is a players ignorance.
I loled hard at this, your an elite player so you obviously have no job or are at school.
Give your head a shake, then go hang it in shame for being such a judgemental douche.
The solution is far more wide ranging than something so simple as just raising NPC damage for more challenge because just raising NPC hitpoints didn't work and needed reverting, and would certainly include PLAYER hitpoints being increased if you want such rebalancing to work out. When the distance between the player and the NPC is so arbitrarily large, players feel cheated on top of all the other issues, which is what actually creates frustration.
Players don't want to feel the game is being unfair...it doesn't matter if it is or not, the trick is making sure they don't FEEL it...or see it. An NPC higher than a frigate can eat torpedo salvoes to the hull like they were tic tacs; when a salvo heads towards the player's open shield facing the only response is to stand up out your chair, resign yourself to death, and quote Hamlet just before impact. Things like this make the 'cheating' required for an AI to compete, completely blatant. Players thus no longer feel challenged by the game, they feel cheated. Then they get angry.
All the datamining in the world is completely irrelevant, all the numbers you put up to 'prove' the game is balanced is meaningless, if they players don't feel it's right. Stuff like this is why the Diablo III patch notes after Reaper of Souls sometimes included lines like, "This power didn't feel meaty enough or satisfying to use, so we did this and this."
Sqwished has already said what needs to be said, but I'll re-iterate. It's about making good use of your time, and yes pre DR I had 7 characters and they all had good ships. I have a lot of real life commitments, which hasn't stopped me making a high DPS Scimitar or any number of other ships. I've even helped others build their ships.
Am I amused that they've pandered all the content to a DPS race? Absolutely not. However if you really think real life commitments have stopped us before you are sorely mistaken. Also do remember that this time round a lot of people just aren't willing to use the upgrade system because the costs are insane, not because we can't get the dil but because we consider it wasting said dil. At least that's the case for most of the group I play with.
So tell me again how you supposedly need to tar us all with that brush, or is it just an excuse for your own failings?
My solution is, nerf Aux2Bat so you eliminate these 50k builds so they actually have to come up with something other than a cookie cutter build to play through STO's content.
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