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R&D Beams: Tritanium and Rubidium shortage.
wrathofachilles
Member Posts: 937 Arc User
Dear devs,
You rather recently implemented an R&D system which, at first glance, looked like a failure to learn from the past... a massive grind, not account wide, heaps of resources (even more than the original rep system) go into it, but at least this produces products that can be sold off, so... maybe not so bad, especially when I saw that, on top of a daily, I could set up several items that would take an hour or two to finish and thus wouldn't be too terribly time consuming or distracting from actually playing the game.
Unfortunately, STO has turned into "sweatshop online" for me to try and upgrade my R&D schools. I chose to focus on one school at a time, starting with beams, rather than level up several schools very slowly. To that end, I've been grinding out items to try and accelerate my progress... which went swimmingly at first. I was thinking to myself "wow, this isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, I'm really cranking these things out and getting lots of exp, yaaaay." But now my progress has been severely stalled out by the fact that resources, even just "uncommon" ones seem to drop... never. I have a severe shortage of rubidium and tritanium, I do all the queues and none seem to drop these items with any greater frequency than any other. The emitter module and EPS conduits BOTH need tritanium, and the firing sequencer and surge protector BOTH need rubidium, and with that cross over, I'm at a constant shortage, and now run a little sweat shop popping out MK II items every 5 minutes (a massive distraction from the game) that give very little exp, because these are the only items I have the resources to craft. I looked through the other R&D schools, and none of the others seem to have more than one component that requires the same resource, except projectiles have a cross over of verteron particles and science has a cross over of tetrazine gas that I imagine will prove difficult when I get to working on those schools/items.
Since these cross over requirements for components seem to be a rare fluke that beams is particularly afflicted by, I am hoping they are a mistake and that you will change the requirements for these items so that they cease to provide this bottleneck to progress. One can even check the market to see that this artificial bottleneck has generally made rubidium and tritanium the most expensive materials in their respective rareness categories.
So please fixy fixy, dev magic to the rescue!
You rather recently implemented an R&D system which, at first glance, looked like a failure to learn from the past... a massive grind, not account wide, heaps of resources (even more than the original rep system) go into it, but at least this produces products that can be sold off, so... maybe not so bad, especially when I saw that, on top of a daily, I could set up several items that would take an hour or two to finish and thus wouldn't be too terribly time consuming or distracting from actually playing the game.
Unfortunately, STO has turned into "sweatshop online" for me to try and upgrade my R&D schools. I chose to focus on one school at a time, starting with beams, rather than level up several schools very slowly. To that end, I've been grinding out items to try and accelerate my progress... which went swimmingly at first. I was thinking to myself "wow, this isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, I'm really cranking these things out and getting lots of exp, yaaaay." But now my progress has been severely stalled out by the fact that resources, even just "uncommon" ones seem to drop... never. I have a severe shortage of rubidium and tritanium, I do all the queues and none seem to drop these items with any greater frequency than any other. The emitter module and EPS conduits BOTH need tritanium, and the firing sequencer and surge protector BOTH need rubidium, and with that cross over, I'm at a constant shortage, and now run a little sweat shop popping out MK II items every 5 minutes (a massive distraction from the game) that give very little exp, because these are the only items I have the resources to craft. I looked through the other R&D schools, and none of the others seem to have more than one component that requires the same resource, except projectiles have a cross over of verteron particles and science has a cross over of tetrazine gas that I imagine will prove difficult when I get to working on those schools/items.
Since these cross over requirements for components seem to be a rare fluke that beams is particularly afflicted by, I am hoping they are a mistake and that you will change the requirements for these items so that they cease to provide this bottleneck to progress. One can even check the market to see that this artificial bottleneck has generally made rubidium and tritanium the most expensive materials in their respective rareness categories.
So please fixy fixy, dev magic to the rescue!
Post edited by wrathofachilles on
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i know they are VR and all, but when i was running CCE during the event, i didnt start getting the vr drop from the box till the last couple of days, and i ran it across 4 toons for the entire length of the event.
drop rate needs to be increased
And yeah... it would be delightful if elite queue packs had a guaranteed content of the very rare material rather than a possibility of having it. Even if it was just a guarantee of 1 of it with a possibility of a lucky drop of extra, perhaps based on if the optionals are completed. Like there used to be a chance at a bundle of neural processors dropping. Is that still a thing? I know I haven't seen it in ages.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
It isn't a matter of under priced/over priced. Some of the materials are less valuable/more common and others are more valuable/less common.
For example, Craylon Gas is both valuable and uncommon, so it is worth a fortune. Trellium-K is not valuable and in massive supply, meaning it is dirt cheap. (worth less than certain rare materials it must be said)
Right now because certain mats are tied to certain events, there is a lot of disparity in mat prices. Compare Trellium-K to Craylon Gas for example. If instead the mats were on a weekly or daily rotation, then we might see a more even distribution of reasonable prices.
Yes, I agree, but some of those less common mats, are priced well, while at the same time you find people over pricing it!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Example science (There are the # of mats required)
Common (Duranium overlap)
3/2
3/2
Uncommon (No overlap)
3/2
3/5
Rare (Tetrazine overlap needing 7 and 5 rubidium)
4/1
3/5
Very rare (No overlap, but why did it have to be Plekton?)
2/3 (500 dil)
5/3 (4000 dil) - 5 Plekton which is a pain to farm in the first place
Now back when we could farm VR mats in Exploration clusters during the bonus hour, getting the good mat drops was a chore but doable. Now you not only have to play PvE content, you don;t even get a guaranteed VR drop for them. You could run all 3 borg grounds, which take a good while, and not get anything. You could do it all day, and just get a couple.
So for mk x items you need:
2 common components
2 uncommon components
4 rare components
shouldn't that look more like:
6 common
4 uncommon
2 rare
as it stands I have a huge reserve of common, a decent amount of uncommon and few rare/very rare materials and crafting is taking my smallest stockpiles first.
Related note, if you are short on common/uncommon/rare materials try doing the scanning doff missions in sector space, they are especially good for common/uncommon materials. The archaeological ruin duty officer missions work well too.
Also the Request R&D Assistance duty officer mission at Starfleet Academy, New Romulus Command and the KDF Academy cost 1k dil but can give very rare materials and components along with the specialist duty officers (common quality).
Well don't buy the over-priced ones then.
I subscribe to this game monthly because I believe in game companies making money...they aren't charities. But every person has a strong sense of fair and completely usurious. This game is bordering on that limit for me. Less fr........ Delta box drops and more item drops please and make UNCOMMON drops actually UNCOMMON instead of PIA grind, grind, grind, drip, drip, choke, choke, oh hey look....Finally I can make ONE component. Thank you Devs, if you are actually taking note of this, if you aren't......@#$@#$!#$!#$%@#$%@#$% : )
If you need uncommon mats you have two options.
1) Kick off all 23 scan/analyze assignments (spector space + sphere) at least once a day (you could park somewhere close to several sectors and kick the sector space ones all day)
2) Wait for an R&D event and buy uncommon mats when their price crashes.
Frankly, I took the slow route to get to 15 except in 2 schools for profiteering purposes (once a day). I would never sink so many resources on something that now doesn't even give decent returns. Do the once a day. Slow and steady gets you there in 100 days.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
I have more Tritanium than I know what to do with. It's all on the market if you'd like some?
Well, there's your problem.
Really though, why would the devs "fix" something when you're deliberately acting contrary to their design?
Yeah, the relative rarity vs utility of materials is an issue, but you're also going about it in a severely inefficient way.
It's a shame sitting there with 10 seconds to go and you already hit max reward score. Allow those skilled enough to mine these rare mats.
Or even add rare and very rare mats to the rich dili claim rewards.
It needs to drop more frequently, simply because it is used more. At the moment demand outstrips supply so far that the exhange isn't an effective way of addressing the shortfall, in the way that it does with other items where people have chosen to specialise in something else.
Face it, its meant to bring in income, if you haven't seen the pattern by now, don't bother asking for increases/adjustments, not going to happen.
And I don't want to hear " oh you don't have to spend anything in STO. I KNOW that already, but you want it NOW, you pay NOW, THAT, is what they are counting on.
By doing dailies you are only using at most five common mats per day, until you become skilled enough to make useful or profitable stuff you can save up everything else. I had huge stacks of mats by the time I was able to start using them.
Only since the upgrade system was introduced have I regularly run out of rubidium and z-particles but I like that stuff marked 'rare' isn't just pouring out of every TRIBBLE, and it's a nice bonus when you do find some.