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New Difficulty risks losing both F2P and paying members?
theotherpicard
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Since this last patch, Oct. 23rd, the new difficulty has down right enraged quite a few true STO veterans. I spent all last night, as well as another veteran friend of mine, talking and listening in zone chats throughout the game. As far as we are all concerned, making a game more challenging is a wonderful idea, however, hit points and shield values are NOT the way to go. I went to my old test bed, the infamous Japori. (Thanks to all those who exploited the game, way to go.) What I found was this. Here I am, in a T6 cruiser, decked out with MK14 gear, and I had a dog fight with a frieghter that lasted more than 25 mins. My question is this, what did these pirates get ahold of to make even their weakest ships super tanks? I mean, seriously, this entire fleet of pirates can take over the entire galaxy, and no PLAYER could stop them, before they wiped out all critical structures and points. Making a game more challenging should be giving the enemies the same abilities all ships have access to of all factions. Grav Wells, Shield heals, sensor jammers, and so on. Turning all the enimies to GOD ships is nothing more than making a grind game.
With the release of Delta Rising, (Which, by the way, i bought the delta pack, to support a great game) we have been introduced to a new rank, new and higher lvl, (Capping at a technical 120) and the introduction of TU5 and T6 star ships, which open a wonderful ship mastery system. However, along with this pack, we are introduced to a new idea of "making the game more challenging". Awsome, I thought, till you get in game. Turns out, all these upgrades, from gear to ships, means practically nothing at all. No sense of advancement, no sense of superiority after weeks of hard work fine tuneing your ship, (MK14 anything, Epic included). Only to turn around and find you are a lvl 1 character flying a Miranda Class ship with a bunch more gear and weapons. Even a simple shuttle or fighter has close to the same hit points my CRUISERS have. Seriously? What did they build them out of, Gundanium? I am waiting for Wing Zero to come out of left field and hyper blast the entire fleet. One flaw i saw in pre Delta for ages was the fact the enemies lacked the abilites all factions have access to, and that was slightly bothering. I was hoping that would have changed. How many NPCs use grav wells? How many drop plasma, or jam sensors? How many NPC Romulans USE thier plasma abilities? (NONE) There are many player ships of all classes that can do some high range sci abilities, Tactical, and so on, so why not the NPC's?
PVE's have taken a serious hit in this, most are forced to play the normal dif, just to get a few rep points. Which brings me quickly to the standard good ol Fleet Alert PVE. Once a great training ground for fleets who love to bring in new players to STO. My fleet LOVES new players. I enjoy showing them the ropes, and getting them hooked on one of the greatest MMO's in my oppinion. Even non trekkies have gotten hooked. However, since DR, I have succesfully completed the match 2 times out of 50+ attempts. This is set on normal difficulty, and yet feels like super elite. Either give the players a time bonus for each time they wipe out a wave, or lower the baddies to "LOGICAL, REALISTIC" hitpoint and shield values.
Dieing is NOT the issue here. We, all those who have been talking about the new difficulty, have gone quite a few rounds with your typical inbread trolls, claiming we are dieing to many times. Death was not the issue. On average, these are players whom have been on since launch, or have lvl 50 to lvl 60 toons. Meaning, they have quite a bit of experiance on how to stay alive. in fact, I have died LESS since this new patch, than I did in the old STO before Delta. The issue is, as I have said a few times now, the NPC's are insanely unbalanced and ALL TANKS. Every single bad guy is a tank, no matter what ship they fly. Tell you what, DEVs, how about hooking US players up with ships like the NPC's. See how that flies. You know, a shuttle with over 200K hit points, and Shields that put the shows Borgs to shame. I mean if you are going to blow a game up, go all the way.
Had I known this is what I paid for, I would have switched to Champions Online, and gone gold there. Many of these players are threatening to quit untill either you guys get a hint, and bring us back the game we loved, or to pop in to do Role Playing sessions, since that is the only thing this new version is good for. i love how tough the new borg are, feels more like a real TNG conflict. But probes, borg probes, the lowest of borg ships, can take a 10 min beating from 2 ships? Now we are getting silly.
Now, i know, new patch, new ideas, new everything. This means a lot of fine tuning. I completely get that. I have no issue on waiting the issues and bug fixes out, and I know, you guys are very busy, and honestly have done a GREAT if not AMAZING job in the past. Hats off to you. But this is our only issue. We want to feel like we have made it to fleet admirals, and our ships have some serious bite, since these are our homes away from home. Make the baddies use more skills, sure, raise thier HP and SP a bit higher (from the OLD values), or add more npcs to each conflict, SOMETHING, but the way you left this game So FAR, feels like NO advancing has happened at all.
This post has been opened to bring in all those I have talked to, and I will be directing them to this post to also share their feelings on this issue.
*ATTENTION TROLLS* and you know who you are. You normally have eyes too close, caveman like brows, and a serious underbite, let me tell you this. We do not care to hear you talk about cry babies, how you are the greatest at everything, or how you fictionally claim to have no problems at all. I will not respond to you, and I tell you up front, I don't care what you're oppinion is. It will not effect anyone from here down in the slightest, so save the cave man grunts and puffs for the next guy. We are all sold out here.
With the release of Delta Rising, (Which, by the way, i bought the delta pack, to support a great game) we have been introduced to a new rank, new and higher lvl, (Capping at a technical 120) and the introduction of TU5 and T6 star ships, which open a wonderful ship mastery system. However, along with this pack, we are introduced to a new idea of "making the game more challenging". Awsome, I thought, till you get in game. Turns out, all these upgrades, from gear to ships, means practically nothing at all. No sense of advancement, no sense of superiority after weeks of hard work fine tuneing your ship, (MK14 anything, Epic included). Only to turn around and find you are a lvl 1 character flying a Miranda Class ship with a bunch more gear and weapons. Even a simple shuttle or fighter has close to the same hit points my CRUISERS have. Seriously? What did they build them out of, Gundanium? I am waiting for Wing Zero to come out of left field and hyper blast the entire fleet. One flaw i saw in pre Delta for ages was the fact the enemies lacked the abilites all factions have access to, and that was slightly bothering. I was hoping that would have changed. How many NPCs use grav wells? How many drop plasma, or jam sensors? How many NPC Romulans USE thier plasma abilities? (NONE) There are many player ships of all classes that can do some high range sci abilities, Tactical, and so on, so why not the NPC's?
PVE's have taken a serious hit in this, most are forced to play the normal dif, just to get a few rep points. Which brings me quickly to the standard good ol Fleet Alert PVE. Once a great training ground for fleets who love to bring in new players to STO. My fleet LOVES new players. I enjoy showing them the ropes, and getting them hooked on one of the greatest MMO's in my oppinion. Even non trekkies have gotten hooked. However, since DR, I have succesfully completed the match 2 times out of 50+ attempts. This is set on normal difficulty, and yet feels like super elite. Either give the players a time bonus for each time they wipe out a wave, or lower the baddies to "LOGICAL, REALISTIC" hitpoint and shield values.
Dieing is NOT the issue here. We, all those who have been talking about the new difficulty, have gone quite a few rounds with your typical inbread trolls, claiming we are dieing to many times. Death was not the issue. On average, these are players whom have been on since launch, or have lvl 50 to lvl 60 toons. Meaning, they have quite a bit of experiance on how to stay alive. in fact, I have died LESS since this new patch, than I did in the old STO before Delta. The issue is, as I have said a few times now, the NPC's are insanely unbalanced and ALL TANKS. Every single bad guy is a tank, no matter what ship they fly. Tell you what, DEVs, how about hooking US players up with ships like the NPC's. See how that flies. You know, a shuttle with over 200K hit points, and Shields that put the shows Borgs to shame. I mean if you are going to blow a game up, go all the way.
Had I known this is what I paid for, I would have switched to Champions Online, and gone gold there. Many of these players are threatening to quit untill either you guys get a hint, and bring us back the game we loved, or to pop in to do Role Playing sessions, since that is the only thing this new version is good for. i love how tough the new borg are, feels more like a real TNG conflict. But probes, borg probes, the lowest of borg ships, can take a 10 min beating from 2 ships? Now we are getting silly.
Now, i know, new patch, new ideas, new everything. This means a lot of fine tuning. I completely get that. I have no issue on waiting the issues and bug fixes out, and I know, you guys are very busy, and honestly have done a GREAT if not AMAZING job in the past. Hats off to you. But this is our only issue. We want to feel like we have made it to fleet admirals, and our ships have some serious bite, since these are our homes away from home. Make the baddies use more skills, sure, raise thier HP and SP a bit higher (from the OLD values), or add more npcs to each conflict, SOMETHING, but the way you left this game So FAR, feels like NO advancing has happened at all.
This post has been opened to bring in all those I have talked to, and I will be directing them to this post to also share their feelings on this issue.
*ATTENTION TROLLS* and you know who you are. You normally have eyes too close, caveman like brows, and a serious underbite, let me tell you this. We do not care to hear you talk about cry babies, how you are the greatest at everything, or how you fictionally claim to have no problems at all. I will not respond to you, and I tell you up front, I don't care what you're oppinion is. It will not effect anyone from here down in the slightest, so save the cave man grunts and puffs for the next guy. We are all sold out here.
Post edited by theotherpicard on
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Casual player, F2P...occasionally farm dilithium for zen when I want something (character slots, Guardian cruiser, ec cap lifted).
I play for fun; hp sponges are not fun. Soooo, I avoid the pve queues now, when before I'd do them several times a day across 5 characters.
I also play for the story. Exp grinding to get to the next part of the story, is not fun. That is not how things were in the past, and should not be how things are now. <<shrugs>>
There are many aspects of the game that I still enjoy, thus, I still play it.
Sarah Knightly - Co-leader; Frontier Explorers - U.S.S. Witchblade
Rias Gremory - Leader; Frontier Marauders - I.K.S. B'ullwinkle
Its the fact my cooldowns no longer keep pace. I don't have 2 minutes or a minute to wait. Usually when I die its because Ive just reached a point that I have nothing left to pop and the enemy is still at 60%.
Another issue is that as Romulan I have a lot of Defense options. I can have Quantum Absorbtion and a butt load of other stuff going and still go from 100% to boom in a sec or two.
...But wait- there's more !
New skills grinding
New 'traits' that need to be ground from T6 ships that'll get parked when the grind is over
New zen needed for those ships.
More dilith to pay for the material that I ground to be applied to my upgrade attempts
I forget why I play, I just know I MUST, just to 'tread water'.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Mine is. It's ridiculous, and it doesn't get me anywhere near as far as it used to.
Uhhh... I can understand the cooldown half of the matter (though this is because I don't have two of anything on my current ships), but... you get KILLED over that? What the heck are you doing?
Again, what are you doing that's getting you killed? Quantum Absorption or Warp Shadows should give you plenty of time to cloak for another run. Speaking of which, it is usually a good idea to use the Impulse Capacitance Cell, Barrier Field Generator or Photonic Displacer from the various ship giveaways prior to cloaking. The first gets you way out of weapon range (kinda beats the point of cloaking for a purely defensive purpose, but whatever), the second blocks any weapons fire coming from a certain direction, and the last usually buys you more than enough time to turn your cloaking device on.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
It took around 2hrs to beat. Not because I didn't do enough DPS, not because I couldn't survive, but because it had 1.25M HP, two invulnerable shields, it's Grav Well, and an insta-kill DBB Beam Overload. After dieing about 6 times I managed to work out a way to win. It's not really hard, you just stay behind it in a faster turning ship, which the Aehlal is easily faster, plus with 72.5K HP it's a pretty good tank if you forget the NPC health. Thing is I used the Rom support fleet 3 times in a row across a finally 50 minute continuous, no death, fight to kill it. It wasn't fun, it wasn't really that challenging other than trying to keep awake long enough that you didn't accidentally get into the Grav Well then get Beam Overloaded...
I did like that it used abilities, but lets be honest here, the enemies just need the same gear the players have, with a selection of traits that match their style. If you are going to have a team go up against an enemy a few heavy Carriers or Dreadnoughts with lots of guns would suit better than the current BS of hull sponges.
Hell I'll make you an offer. I'll balance and help provide better direction for your game, if you pay me to do so.
BTW that offer is serious.
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Thanks for the post. Hope to see you in game.
And then DR came along.......
I have hoped on at night, do one patrol mission fight for 2 hours, and not get the mission done. So I try to stick it out and lose a little sleep to get farther along and eventually I beat it, or fall asleep.
I have noticed that if I take my fed intel escort ship with my Fed Tact Captain and fly in and out at my targets I can whittle them down. But that works only as long as I don't pull them too far from thier start point. There is some magical distance they reach in which they turn arouns and fly straight back. And INSTA-HEAL to 100% from anypoint (lowest I have seen is 26%) and now I have to start all over again. THey don't go back if they are being damaged. But I can't go toe to toe with them in my escort. It's not a tank. SO I dive in and out of range to try and whittle the suckers down. My single Typhon Class that I can summon when I am nearly dead helps to keep them from running back and reset. But he doesn't have the staying power I have in the fight. Hi dies faster than I do. Unless I do everything I can to buff my pet. But if the Typhon gets the buffs then I die because I have no cooldowns left to rescue me. And this frustrates me.
I used to run a couple missions a night on couple of characters. Now I am working hard just to complete one mission on character. The balancing they have created is not balanced as advertised. I wouldn't even dream of taking a Tier 5 ship with all Mk 12 purple gear into one of these fights. It would take hours to win.
I used to be able to run elite crystal catastrophe in my Tier 5 Patrol Escort and pick one of the top three spots regularly. Now that Same gear on a T5-U CHimera or T6 Intel ship can barely get me through Normal Crystal Catastrophe.
They need to rethink this "balance" of thiers and redesign the normal battles for the intended target, which should be T5 Ships in Tier 12 gear. Advanced can be the T6 ships in T12 Gear and Eliete can be the T6 ships in T14 gear.
And stop with making everything costing Dil. DIl should not be in Crafting. Or Upgrading.
KDF: Dahar Master Kan (Borg Klingon Tactical)::Dahar Master Torc (Alien Science)::Dahar Master Sisteric (Gorn Engineer)
RR-Fed: Citizen Sirroc (Romulan Science)::Fleet Admiral Grell (Alien Engineer)
RR-KDF: Fleet Admiral Zemo (Reman Tactical)::Fleet Admiral Xinatek (Reman Science)::Fleet Admiral Bel (Alien Engineer)
TOS-Fed: Fleet Admiral Katem (Andorian Tactical)::Lieutenant Commander Straad (Vulcan Engineer)
Dom-Fed: Dan'Tar (Jem'Hadar Science)
Dom-KDF: Kamtana'Solan (Jem'Hadar Science)
CoHost of Tribbles in Ecstasy (Zombee)
I don't think that was the intention at all. They could have left normal, advanced, and elite the way they were, and created a new Epic/Legendary difficulty for players who wanted it. Nobody would have complained about that. More choices are never bad.
I believe the insane shields, hulls, and damage resistance are a way to "encourage" players to upgrade their gear, nothing more.
I don't this change is going to 'encourage' anything but frustration and eventually leaving the game to find something more fun to do.
KDF: Dahar Master Kan (Borg Klingon Tactical)::Dahar Master Torc (Alien Science)::Dahar Master Sisteric (Gorn Engineer)
RR-Fed: Citizen Sirroc (Romulan Science)::Fleet Admiral Grell (Alien Engineer)
RR-KDF: Fleet Admiral Zemo (Reman Tactical)::Fleet Admiral Xinatek (Reman Science)::Fleet Admiral Bel (Alien Engineer)
TOS-Fed: Fleet Admiral Katem (Andorian Tactical)::Lieutenant Commander Straad (Vulcan Engineer)
Dom-Fed: Dan'Tar (Jem'Hadar Science)
Dom-KDF: Kamtana'Solan (Jem'Hadar Science)
CoHost of Tribbles in Ecstasy (Zombee)
Thank you so much for the reply though, and hope to see you in game.
If they mess up bug hunt advanced and colony invasion I will have absolutely nothing left to do.
They don't test anything, so its natural they'd go overboard with the difficulty. Its easier to lower it later, than it would be to increase it if the initial difficulty wasn't having the desired effect($$$).
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1238261
The sad thing is that for some players they had to increase the HP of elite enemies. That means the long slow fights are the symptom not the problem. The core problem is the gap between the best and average damage dealing. It is too high.
I was just fine with the old difficulty.
LOL, thanks and hope to see you in game.
Oh I guarantee you can nuke guys very fast. The trick is ignoring shields. The easiest way on a budget is with a science ship particle generator build and tactical captain. If I can ignore half the damage needed to kill them (shields + hull reduced to just hull) that's the equivalent of doubling my DPs.
Notice a recent patch reduced shields and increased HP of many enemies on elite and advanced difficulty.
Have invested enough for mark 12 to mark 14 gear, has made some difference. But not enough!!!!
Advanced and Elites are toooooooo difficult even at Player lvl 60 no affect...
We have already had 2 people with life time subs leave the game from our fleet because the grind ain't worth the time any more. I my self am getting to the point that logging on to play 1 story line patrol (which is freaking stupid to put so many in and call it story) is pretty much all the time I have to spend playing. Its getting to the point that people have to weigh the amount of time vs what they can do and get out of this game now. I have seen alot of people pretty much say I can't do any thing now days my times woth more then fighting a NPC that takes an hour to kill for 5 rep marks. Any Dev on any other game would have at lest buffed the rewards with making the NPC a super tank. But the Nerf bat at Cryptic is that of a Q any change that lets a player have it just a wee bit easy and snap all gone.
Thank you and hope to see you in game.
I hope they change this. Bless you and your vet friends. Hope to see you guys in game, for sure.