Gonna reserve judgement on this one till we see which way it jumps.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
With all due respect, since we are capped at 8k refined dil per day, you can increase the dil reward as much as you want, we will still be capped at 8K/day.
BZ do not need a dil boost. Seriously. We can reach the cap really fast, even when we are not playing tag the dino.
The refinement cap is daily, but there are few days I actually can spend enough time to max out the refinement cap, especially since that is not all what I want to log in for.
So increasing the rewards will help people - just not the hardcore crowd. Which I think is good, because it avoids the gap between players increasing even worse.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Cryptic, if you do add them to Normal queues at the very least (and double them for Advanced, and triple them for Elite if you want) I will redact all my statements regarding how you don't care about casuals and undergeared, as well as not being Alt-friendly.
Yes, this is a very good idea and I posted the same thing in Mr.Grey's other thread.
Once again devs., I urge you to seriously consider this. Adding a minor chance of obtaining the unique drops like BNPs and VR R&D mats to the normal queues will be a win-win situation for everyone. This way the new players, new chars or ultra casuals will be able to slowly progress towards their goals of owning end-game equipment while they'll learining the end-game on normal. All this at their own pace. This will mean fuller queues and more prepared players in advanced, something that will make everyone happy. Do consider this, please.
On the surface this looks like a move in the correct direction.
While we're considering Quality of Reward improvements, something else to consider:
*Bulk Mark Conversion -- Time and Time again this is needed badly...hours sliding 50 marks at a time
isn't something you as developers/gamers yourselves would spend hours
doing, the average player shouldn't get taxed on their time again for a
currency conversion
Solution -- 5000 mark conversion crates available via current npc contacts (Roxy for ex)
at the same flat mark rate as the 50, not looking for an increase just not
hours of "slide bar hero".
The recent Delta Rising expansion released for Star Trek Online included a large number of updates to existing features throughout the game. The focus of many of these updates has been to add new challenges for players to experience and to update rewards to reflect these difficulty changes. Unfortunately, our first attempts at setting rewards values have not been universally successful. Accordingly, we will be working towards bringing rewards in line with where we, and players, think they should be.
An important part of playing any piece of content in Star Trek Online is that players feel appropriately rewarded for the time and effort they put forth completing that content. With all the changes made to the PvE queues (new difficulties, new mission objectives, etc.) many of them now take significantly longer than they used to before the release of Delta Rising. This means that the number of reputation marks players are getting are no longer adequate for their time investment. Accordingly, we will be increasing mark rewards on all queues that are currently under-rewarding. There are also a small number of queues that are significantly over-rewarding which will have their rewards reduced.
PvE queues are not the only pieces of content that will have their rewards adjusted. With the introduction of the Research & Development and Item Upgrading systems, there is an increased need for dilithium. To accommodate this need, we will be increasing dilithium rewards in several key locations throughout the game. PvE Queues will get a small increase to their current dilithium rewards, while Adventure and Battle Zones will see their dilithium rewards increased by 50%.
We are also examining the drop rates of Very Rare Research & Development Materials, Skill Points, Officer Skill Points, Starship Mastery Skill Points and Elite Reputation Marks (i.e. Borg Neural Processors, Voth Cybernetic Implants, etc.) among other items.
There will be many changes coming in the next several weeks that are aimed at updating the rewards throughout the game in most places increasing the rewards to meet the new demands players have from taking part in brand new systems. We will continue to communicate with the players about all these updates as they occur.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
My two questions:
1. Will Kobali Prime (and possibly Nimbus) receive attention to bring them more into line with Battle Zones? There is virtually no reward for returning to Kobali Prime, particularly as XP from level scaling has been reduced.
2. Will mission replay rewards receive attention? Currently, they are all almost identical aside from a single Kobali Prime mission. A key feature of the upgrade system is what it does to enhance mission replay's unique rewards. Also, unique rewards such as the EMH DOff and Hierarchy BOff currently cannot be reclaimed if lost.
I do enjoy battlezone content seeing as it's something I can immediately jump into without having to wait and group with other people. However, Kobali Prime lacks any major boss events that the Voth and Undine battlezones have, and it doesn't reward Ancient Power Cells. There was a missed opportunity here to add an epic upscale event battle that culminates at the top of the mountainous region. Instead that concept was used for story missions. How about trying to bring that into the open zone as well?
Rewards are only a small portion of the problem. The key thing to keep in mind Cryptic is our time as players and consumers of your product needs to be respected. A lot of queues simply are not fun to play. Some are boring and take too long to complete. There's little incentive to play them repeatedly, especially after you've completed a rep. I prefer to play shorter straightforward missions. For example, I like to play colony invasion. It's simple, quick, and straight to the point. Optional objectives are present and the random enemy factor is a nice touch to keep the run interesting. I would not say that everything needs to be a lot more like colony invasion, but the way the mission is structured to be a simple and quick run with the use of random elements should be taken into account for future queue content.
IMO, the ENTIRE queue list needs to be re-evaluated from the ground up, and the reward tables need to offer more incentive for repeated play. Simply upping numerical values won't solve the issues alone.
Whilst I will reserve full judgement until the specific details become clearer, I did want to say thank you at this stage for taking the time to communicate with the players and try to provide some reassurances.
The double whammy of huge increases in NPC HP, along with reduced rewards, and several other issues, mainly relating to the increasing grindification of STO, has demoralised many players. I know a couple of prominent players who have deleted all their chars and left the game as a result. Others have cancelled their subs.
I hope that this increasing communication (such as the explanations from Geko, Stephen D'Angelo, etc) continues, and that Cryptic keep in mind that whilst STO needs to make money, it also needs to be fun otherwise people will stop playing (and paying).
The recent Delta Rising expansion released for Star Trek Online included a large number of updates to existing features throughout the game. The focus of many of these updates has been to add new challenges for players to experience and to update rewards to reflect these difficulty changes. Unfortunately, our first attempts at setting rewards values have not been universally successful. Accordingly, we will be working towards bringing rewards in line with where we, and players, think they should be.
An important part of playing any piece of content in Star Trek Online is that players feel appropriately rewarded for the time and effort they put forth completing that content. With all the changes made to the PvE queues (new difficulties, new mission objectives, etc.) many of them now take significantly longer than they used to before the release of Delta Rising. This means that the number of reputation marks players are getting are no longer adequate for their time investment. Accordingly, we will be increasing mark rewards on all queues that are currently under-rewarding. There are also a small number of queues that are significantly over-rewarding which will have their rewards reduced.
PvE queues are not the only pieces of content that will have their rewards adjusted. With the introduction of the Research & Development and Item Upgrading systems, there is an increased need for dilithium. To accommodate this need, we will be increasing dilithium rewards in several key locations throughout the game. PvE Queues will get a small increase to their current dilithium rewards, while Adventure and Battle Zones will see their dilithium rewards increased by 50%.
We are also examining the drop rates of Very Rare Research & Development Materials, Skill Points, Officer Skill Points, Starship Mastery Skill Points and Elite Reputation Marks (i.e. Borg Neural Processors, Voth Cybernetic Implants, etc.) among other items.
There will be many changes coming in the next several weeks that are aimed at updating the rewards throughout the game in most places increasing the rewards to meet the new demands players have from taking part in brand new systems. We will continue to communicate with the players about all these updates as they occur.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
Wow. Four updates in 2 days.
To anyone who thinks that addressing things you find damaging to the game in general in this forum is a waste of time, please rethink your commentary.
Vocal customers sometimes get the responses they believe will benefit the game.
I think this would also be a good time to reevaluate having Borg Neural Processors and Ancient Power Cells only drop from queued content. The Dyson and Undine reputation trinkets can be obtained from their respective battlezones, which puts their rep gear in reach of players who can't tackle the Advanced queues yet. Omega and Delta rep don't have this option, currently.
Something I want to add is the idea of giving some sort of chance to add items like Borg Neural Processors, Ancient Power Cells to the NORMAL queues.
We all know where the average STO player sits, and I will say Advanced and Elite is a bit out of reach.
That said, those Rep Currency items like BNPs and Ancient Power Cells are critical to even get better Reputation gear to help improve their builds and play. Giving them a chance to gain them at Normal would help them out.
I have always felt, even during the Pre-DR days of me running Elite STFs all the time, that not including the Rep Currency items at Normal was a mistake.
Unfortunately, our first attempts at setting rewards values have not been universally successful.
Or to put it in realistic terms:
"We changed some things without thinking them through and the players have practically turned up at our offices with pitchforks and torches ready to burn the place to the ground and the forums have actually been in meltdown with threads and posts by people venting their anger and frustration."
Glad to see you finally have seen the light and will at least (in very politically correct terms) admit you were wrong on something.
Now hopefully these changes will draw back in the hordes of players baying for blood and get them playing again.
But seriously, don't just look at the reward vs time/effort relationship here. The whole idea of certain required reward items like BNPs being effectively locked behind content the average Joe can't ever hope to compete has done just as much damage to the game's reputation.
Never forget that STO is essentially a fairly casual game, and pushing for the more elitist (and also money grabbing) side of things will alienate a lot of the players.
Hmmm. Nov 2014 signup date, 2 posts..... new guy ? I thought Geko was the lead content designer ?
I think Geko is in charge of everything that is going with the Design of a season or Expansion, just one step below the EP, which we know is D'angelo. For example, he oversaw the design of everything from the Level cap increase to the designs of the various locations we can visit in the delta quadrant.
Charles Grey, the new face we have, I believe is in charge of overseeing stuff that we can play such as the queues, new missions and so forth.
I'll ask again, since it seems to be an on going concern with some players, so will the XP granted from missions/kills be adjusted in line with the other rewards?
I think Geko is in charge of everything that is going with the Design of a season or Expansion, just one step below the EP, which we know is D'angelo. For example, he oversaw the design of everything from the Level cap increase to the designs of the various locations we can visit in the delta quadrant.
Charles Grey, the new face we have, I believe is in charge of overseeing stuff that we can play such as the queues, new missions and so forth.
Ahhh, nice to see a new face around here. I'll reserve judgement pending results, but I hope fresh blood can un-funk the 'new and improved' STO.
Excellent news - to paraphrase patch notes from a previous patch - there was much rejoicing!
Thank you for the communication, and for letting us know what's coming!
TBH, I'll echo what some had said - give me a casual-friendly way to rep-specific items like BNPs and Ancient Power cells and that'll go a long way. I'd like a very very small chance of getting VR mats somewhere other than Advanced and Elite as well, but I can probably get by just with the BNPs.
Not sure ground zones need more dil, though. Can hit Dyson for 5-7k as things stand, already.
I think you overlook what he said:
There are also a small number of queues that are significantly over-rewarding which will have their rewards reduced.
Finally, R&D gets looked into... quite costly for player base to work on stuff, (F2P, Sub, P2W)
Can't see how 3 toons can fuel one in any reasonable manner for those who have just 3, got 12 feeding one toon and it seems to be "just reasonable" when dumping all the dil to play with R&D.
shave those Dill costs in half across the board and more people can have fun, twice as much...
I would like to see an addition to the three levels of queues where the items we earn (such as the Borg Neural Processors or the Voth Implants) are scaled according to difficulty. Say, Normal queues award 1 per success, Advanced award 2 and Elite award 3.
The reason I mention this is because I find my Rep progress dependent on how a group performs and not on my own merits. It's aggravating to discover that after 9 minutes of a 10 minute STF, the person responsible for taking care of a particular aspect has failed to maintain and the entire group fails the mission because of a failed optional objective.
Thanks for the consideration, as well as the increase in communication recently from the Dev team...
CM
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science." - Edwin Hubble
Didn't read the rest of the thread, so this has most likely been address. If so, consider this an echo:
You mentioned an increased need for dilithium, so there's going to be an increase in rewards. The only problem is that you're increasing rewarded dilithium ORE, and not the spendable, refined kind. You could make everything in the game give 10,000 dil per completion, and it would NOT matter, because most players can only refine 8k dil a day.
I offer 2 proposals, neither of which Cryptic/PWE would like, but are the only tenable solutions to the problem as presented. (Note: I intend for these solutions to be mutually exclusive. Doing both would be awesome but inanely unbalanced)
1: Increase dil refinery cap. 8k is NOT enough to get ANYthing worth having at level 50+. This is, however, by (semi-flawed) design. It's just another time sink. If you really want folks to be able to afford more things more quickly, then they need to refine at least 10-12K a day. Up the 1000 day vet reward to 15 or something to compensate.
OR
2: Lower the costs of things. In the rep system, you already have to play for days on end to get the rep marks needed to buy things. Why, in addition, do things also cost a couple day's worth of refined ore? I've already waited 2/3/4 months to unlock a tier, and played the same 3 missions straight for weeks to get the 700-odd marks. Most people would have the required dil by then but you can't always count on that (I think i'll donate to my fleet first... oh TRIBBLE, I put the slider too far!). Are you really content making people grind dil for 2 or 3 days on top of that, instead of just a few hours of grinding it out and refine as much as I need? Everything in the rep stores should be 8000 dil OR LESS.
R&D 20 hr research? 8k or less each. That's STILL 3-5 days worth to fast forward each school once (depending how many tiers you have unlocked). We shouldn't have to spend a month's worth of dil to save ourselves a week of progress (or however the math works out, it's probably worse than that)
Basically, no one thing should cost more than 1 day's worth of dil refining.
We are also examining the drop rates of Very Rare Research & Development Materials,
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
Does this mean we'll be able to get these outside of queued group content? If not then it is meaningless to some of us including myself. I, like some others, do not do that content due to verious reasons including, lack of confidence, not wanting the drama of people going off on one, etc.
Other than that good to see you looking into the whole reward thing in general.
Thats great, and i thank you for this needed changes, i stop doing too much PVE because lack of time, as a casual player, i saw no worth of doing missions that reward so low for almost twice the time.
You mentioned an increased need for dilithium, so there's going to be an increase in rewards. The only problem is that you're increasing rewarded dilithium ORE, and not the spendable, refined kind. You could make everything in the game give 10,000 dil per completion, and it would NOT matter, because most players can only refine 8k dil a day.
yup 24,000 dil gets gobbled up real fast by R&D, anyone who have not bought like a 4 toon slot increase can see that R&S will see the following.
numnumnumnumnumnumnu DONE!!! please try again tomorrow and see if you can reach that upgrade point. LOL are you kidding, because that was one big funny lol
To give any reasonable "try" at it, i need all 12 to feed this mess.
Could you also look at the drop rates/availability for Rubidium at the same time as the very rare mats?
I have all the other blue items (and green/white) in the hundreds, while that one is down at 23. I think it's a case of being more useful and therefore consumed more, but that feels like too much of an imbalance to be comfortable. Thank you.
Comments
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
So increasing the rewards will help people - just not the hardcore crowd. Which I think is good, because it avoids the gap between players increasing even worse.
Wait! "this is too good to be something the dev team intended to happen", it must be another exploit!
Yes, this is a very good idea and I posted the same thing in Mr.Grey's other thread.
Once again devs., I urge you to seriously consider this. Adding a minor chance of obtaining the unique drops like BNPs and VR R&D mats to the normal queues will be a win-win situation for everyone. This way the new players, new chars or ultra casuals will be able to slowly progress towards their goals of owning end-game equipment while they'll learining the end-game on normal. All this at their own pace. This will mean fuller queues and more prepared players in advanced, something that will make everyone happy. Do consider this, please.
While we're considering Quality of Reward improvements, something else to consider:
*Bulk Mark Conversion -- Time and Time again this is needed badly...hours sliding 50 marks at a time
isn't something you as developers/gamers yourselves would spend hours
doing, the average player shouldn't get taxed on their time again for a
currency conversion
Solution -- 5000 mark conversion crates available via current npc contacts (Roxy for ex)
at the same flat mark rate as the 50, not looking for an increase just not
hours of "slide bar hero".
Voth no, all others yes and greatly that is.
My two questions:
1. Will Kobali Prime (and possibly Nimbus) receive attention to bring them more into line with Battle Zones? There is virtually no reward for returning to Kobali Prime, particularly as XP from level scaling has been reduced.
2. Will mission replay rewards receive attention? Currently, they are all almost identical aside from a single Kobali Prime mission. A key feature of the upgrade system is what it does to enhance mission replay's unique rewards. Also, unique rewards such as the EMH DOff and Hierarchy BOff currently cannot be reclaimed if lost.
Rewards are only a small portion of the problem. The key thing to keep in mind Cryptic is our time as players and consumers of your product needs to be respected. A lot of queues simply are not fun to play. Some are boring and take too long to complete. There's little incentive to play them repeatedly, especially after you've completed a rep. I prefer to play shorter straightforward missions. For example, I like to play colony invasion. It's simple, quick, and straight to the point. Optional objectives are present and the random enemy factor is a nice touch to keep the run interesting. I would not say that everything needs to be a lot more like colony invasion, but the way the mission is structured to be a simple and quick run with the use of random elements should be taken into account for future queue content.
IMO, the ENTIRE queue list needs to be re-evaluated from the ground up, and the reward tables need to offer more incentive for repeated play. Simply upping numerical values won't solve the issues alone.
The double whammy of huge increases in NPC HP, along with reduced rewards, and several other issues, mainly relating to the increasing grindification of STO, has demoralised many players. I know a couple of prominent players who have deleted all their chars and left the game as a result. Others have cancelled their subs.
I hope that this increasing communication (such as the explanations from Geko, Stephen D'Angelo, etc) continues, and that Cryptic keep in mind that whilst STO needs to make money, it also needs to be fun otherwise people will stop playing (and paying).
Wow. Four updates in 2 days.
To anyone who thinks that addressing things you find damaging to the game in general in this forum is a waste of time, please rethink your commentary.
Vocal customers sometimes get the responses they believe will benefit the game.
My Two Bits
Admiral Thrax
Quoting to increase visibility.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
We all know where the average STO player sits, and I will say Advanced and Elite is a bit out of reach.
That said, those Rep Currency items like BNPs and Ancient Power Cells are critical to even get better Reputation gear to help improve their builds and play. Giving them a chance to gain them at Normal would help them out.
I have always felt, even during the Pre-DR days of me running Elite STFs all the time, that not including the Rep Currency items at Normal was a mistake.
Or to put it in realistic terms:
"We changed some things without thinking them through and the players have practically turned up at our offices with pitchforks and torches ready to burn the place to the ground and the forums have actually been in meltdown with threads and posts by people venting their anger and frustration."
Glad to see you finally have seen the light and will at least (in very politically correct terms) admit you were wrong on something.
Now hopefully these changes will draw back in the hordes of players baying for blood and get them playing again.
But seriously, don't just look at the reward vs time/effort relationship here. The whole idea of certain required reward items like BNPs being effectively locked behind content the average Joe can't ever hope to compete has done just as much damage to the game's reputation.
Never forget that STO is essentially a fairly casual game, and pushing for the more elitist (and also money grabbing) side of things will alienate a lot of the players.
I think Geko is in charge of everything that is going with the Design of a season or Expansion, just one step below the EP, which we know is D'angelo. For example, he oversaw the design of everything from the Level cap increase to the designs of the various locations we can visit in the delta quadrant.
Charles Grey, the new face we have, I believe is in charge of overseeing stuff that we can play such as the queues, new missions and so forth.
I just checked. Been a STO Dev already but I think the "Lead" is new.
Ahhh, nice to see a new face around here. I'll reserve judgement pending results, but I hope fresh blood can un-funk the 'new and improved' STO.
GL Mr. Grey.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Thank you for the communication, and for letting us know what's coming!
TBH, I'll echo what some had said - give me a casual-friendly way to rep-specific items like BNPs and Ancient Power cells and that'll go a long way. I'd like a very very small chance of getting VR mats somewhere other than Advanced and Elite as well, but I can probably get by just with the BNPs.
I think you overlook what he said:
There are also a small number of queues that are significantly over-rewarding which will have their rewards reduced.
Can't see how 3 toons can fuel one in any reasonable manner for those who have just 3, got 12 feeding one toon and it seems to be "just reasonable" when dumping all the dil to play with R&D.
shave those Dill costs in half across the board and more people can have fun, twice as much...
The reason I mention this is because I find my Rep progress dependent on how a group performs and not on my own merits. It's aggravating to discover that after 9 minutes of a 10 minute STF, the person responsible for taking care of a particular aspect has failed to maintain and the entire group fails the mission because of a failed optional objective.
Thanks for the consideration, as well as the increase in communication recently from the Dev team...
CM
You mentioned an increased need for dilithium, so there's going to be an increase in rewards. The only problem is that you're increasing rewarded dilithium ORE, and not the spendable, refined kind. You could make everything in the game give 10,000 dil per completion, and it would NOT matter, because most players can only refine 8k dil a day.
I offer 2 proposals, neither of which Cryptic/PWE would like, but are the only tenable solutions to the problem as presented. (Note: I intend for these solutions to be mutually exclusive. Doing both would be awesome but inanely unbalanced)
1: Increase dil refinery cap. 8k is NOT enough to get ANYthing worth having at level 50+. This is, however, by (semi-flawed) design. It's just another time sink. If you really want folks to be able to afford more things more quickly, then they need to refine at least 10-12K a day. Up the 1000 day vet reward to 15 or something to compensate.
OR
2: Lower the costs of things. In the rep system, you already have to play for days on end to get the rep marks needed to buy things. Why, in addition, do things also cost a couple day's worth of refined ore? I've already waited 2/3/4 months to unlock a tier, and played the same 3 missions straight for weeks to get the 700-odd marks. Most people would have the required dil by then but you can't always count on that (I think i'll donate to my fleet first... oh TRIBBLE, I put the slider too far!). Are you really content making people grind dil for 2 or 3 days on top of that, instead of just a few hours of grinding it out and refine as much as I need? Everything in the rep stores should be 8000 dil OR LESS.
R&D 20 hr research? 8k or less each. That's STILL 3-5 days worth to fast forward each school once (depending how many tiers you have unlocked). We shouldn't have to spend a month's worth of dil to save ourselves a week of progress (or however the math works out, it's probably worse than that)
Basically, no one thing should cost more than 1 day's worth of dil refining.
Does this mean we'll be able to get these outside of queued group content? If not then it is meaningless to some of us including myself. I, like some others, do not do that content due to verious reasons including, lack of confidence, not wanting the drama of people going off on one, etc.
Other than that good to see you looking into the whole reward thing in general.
Thanks again for this.
yup 24,000 dil gets gobbled up real fast by R&D, anyone who have not bought like a 4 toon slot increase can see that R&S will see the following.
numnumnumnumnumnumnu DONE!!! please try again tomorrow and see if you can reach that upgrade point. LOL are you kidding, because that was one big funny
To give any reasonable "try" at it, i need all 12 to feed this mess.
the quote was right though
I have all the other blue items (and green/white) in the hundreds, while that one is down at 23. I think it's a case of being more useful and therefore consumed more, but that feels like too much of an imbalance to be comfortable. Thank you.