"Appropriately geared" means actually being able to do more than 5K DPS. It means not running 3 torps, a beam, a cannon, a turret and all of them different energy types. It means actually playing to the strengths and weaknesses of the game and not following some self imposed set of rules just because you think a tactic is "cheap". There are numerous people that are not having any problem completing the Advanced and Elite missions when teamed up with similarly outfitted players. What is the problem is when you have so many people who for years have been getting along with mismatched weapons, sub-standard gear, and poorly laid out ships.
The advanced and elite made torps even more useless with 80+% Kinetic resistance. Not everyone wants to play a beam FAW boat or a cannon boat, but that's what has to be done. At least gravity well is still useful. If I wanted DPS extreme racing, I would be playing something else besides STO.
This will be an ongoing process one that we hope we can resolve quickly but we think it is much more important to have our changes be the right ones.
So if it's important to have your changes be the right ones why did you push the current wrong changes with the launch of DR when everyone was telling you they were wrong?
The advanced and elite made torps even more useless with 80+% Kinetic resistance. Not everyone wants to play a beam FAW boat or a cannon boat, but that's what has to be done. At least gravity well is still useful. If I wanted DPS extreme racing, I would be playing something else besides STO.
It isn't about what you want really, though. You're stuck working within the confines of the game. The mechanics dictate that certain things work better than others. It would be wonderful if torpedoes were as awesome in the game as they are in the shows, but then people would be complaining about that being broken too. If you're not playing to be successful, you're fighting against the game and ultimately that's self defeating. I personally love torpedoes, how the look, etc but if there is something better out there (spoiler: there is), I'm going to use that instead because I want to do well and contribute in team play. And if you're not playing to win the game where team play is concerned, you're not playing to help your team. Somebody may really love Aceton Beam and Tyken's Rift, but pretty much anyone who has more than a basic understanding of the game will tell you those abilities are not of much use when it comes to playing on a team.
Now, there are non-tactical abilities that are helpful, Gravity Well and Tractor Beam Repulsors for example. Good crowd control abilities are more useful now than they have ever been. But, that doesn't mean you can just slack off and not put any thought into how you deal the rest of your damage. Even 10K DPS is not unattainable for anyone. Heck I'm a Tac Captain and I just started working on a Mirror Nova for the Mirror Invasion event (because for once the type of ship you have actually makes a bit of difference), and I'm probably at about 6 or 7K with it at the moment. Once it's all done it will easily be double that.
It isn't hard, it just requires actually learning the rules within which you have to operate. Once you start getting that down and trying, you'll wonder why you didn't ever do that in the first place and why you had such a slavish devotion to a self-imposed set of rules that doesn't matter.
The queues (primarily the STFs) are the STO equivalent to what is known as 'Dungeons' in most MMOs. In a Dungeon, the potential exists for a party to "wipe" on a boss encounter, and in doing so, resets the encounter, allowing players to try again. Why this mechanic hasn't been implemented into the STFs in STO, is beyond me, but as a start, I'd recommend the COMPLETE removal of any "Failure" mechanics. "Optional" mechanics are fine, so long as they remain OPTIONAL, and provide additional rewards over the basic rewards of the mission.
Furthermore, a new pass at the rewards MUST be part of this retuning objective, as it's both more difficult, and less rewarding to complete an STF post-Delta Rising. Elite difficulty should always award the best rewards, and those rewards must be greater than the previous "Elite" which has now been relabeled as "Advanced".
Lastly: More challenging encounters, is not solely a huge increase to mob health and shields. I think most player are in it, for challenging MECHANICS, such as giving Boss-type mobs additional abilities on higher difficulties. This might require some additional AI work in the game, and I dare say, it would be well worth it. For the most part, every encounter is virtually the same, within a given "critter species". Throwing more health on a Borg Cube, doesn't make it more challenging. It makes it more tedious, and less fun.
The last thing STO needs is the option for sub-standard players to keep retrying a queue that is too hard for them ad infinitum forever and ever. What I would be in favor of, is eliminating the cool down when you do fail a mission, or at least reducing it.
I don't think people really know what they're asking when they say they want more advanced AI in PvE. If NPC's were even half as good at using abilities and could stack abilities like human players do, you would be begging and crying for dumbed down AI and just more hitpoints to make it more difficult. It would be a nightmare fuel PvP-esque spin on PvE and people would leave the game in droves. It wouldn't make crappy ships and crappy abilities and crappy captains any more viable, it would just serve to make builds for PvP and PvE more similar.
People have to get this idea out of their heads that all ships and abilities and equipment and weapons are created equal. There is absolutely no reason why a ship with 8 turrets all different energy types should be anywhere near as good as a FAW beam boat using all the same weapons. You just want your ship to work your way because that's how you've had it forever and by god why should you have to change anything to be better at the game?
Everytime people whine and they try to fix it to accommodate them, invariably it breaks the game in some new way. People complain about "DPS'ers" and power creep but the fact of the matter is, every time people whine and want the game to be easier, that's what allows people to do so much better. This expansion hasn't even been out a month and already people have whined enough to get Cryptic to cave. And it isn't because they think it's too hard, it's because not enough of you have been willing to rise to the challenge and they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
I'd love to see something done with mine trap. When the materials drops started it sprung back into life then it was killed again with the introduction of a cool down with it starting maybe twice a month if you are lucky.
The introduction of the elite/advanced mode is kinda pointless because hardly any one plays it tbh because the rewards aren't great for the amount of effort you put in.
Would it be possible to get the rewards increased on this one to give an incentive to play it again?
The twenty person missions can be really fun but desperately need some sort of boost to get people playing them.
i dont think the required or fail parts were the problem in advanced it was the hp issues with mobs and what appears to be the majority of the players who pug.
now don't get me wrong im not playing elitist cause i suck for the most part. but adding hp didn't make them hard just longer to kill. and with 5 people taking them out before the objective was failed was pretty hard in a pug. i believe you should wait a week after hp is reduced more before you pull the plug on the pass or fail options . those area true difficulty modifier. rather than just a boat load of HP and shield piled on.
and if you added the BNP and other such rewards to the daily rep reward pack allot of these issues would even not be such a issue because people doing the missions would be guaranteed at least one a day rather than none. as one of the biggest complaints was people needed those type of rep rewards items to get better gear just to be able to do the missions required to get the items to get the better gear . it was implemented Bass Ackwards.
Trophies for killing FEDS ahh those were the days.
So glad to see devs on the forums. Also can we get this stickied? (And unsticky that "recent" value changes to consoles sticky thread from August/September?)
I would just like to point out that I'm not against failure conditions, but if my team wipes and we fail, can we at least not have a 30 to 60 minute wait timer before we can try again? It's really irrational for the timer to be the same for both success and failure. At most there should be a 10 minute wait for retrying after a failure.
You know what else would be awesome? If you removed the queue limitation of 3.
You keep producing more PvE queue missions, but you still restrict us to 3 missions we can queue for at a time. This clashes with the popularity of certain missions, and the time wasted waiting on a queue for a mission you really want to do, but can't stand around for an hour or more waiting for it to fill up.
Therefore, only the most popular missions will get people queued up for them, since they have a better chance of launching it quickly.
This particularly is noticable (and I'm sure your data would agree) on days for the Klingon Scout Force Daily, and that is just one example. If it isn't Klingon Scout Force Daily day, you can expect to wait a very long time for that mission to fill up with ~20 players who remember to hit the Launch button.
The addition of Advanced and Elite modes only exacerbates the problem we have had with the queues since their implementation.
Agreed entirely. It is only once in a very rare moon that I see a Mine Trap or Breaking the Planet run hit the required numbers to kick off. Even Starbase Fleet Defense doesn't happen relatively often when compared to the Borg STFs.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
i just hate how the forums have to go full blaze just to trigger responses.....
it really should not have to work this way. glad they are communicating more but it never should have gotten to the point of rage for it to happen. hopping they keep this up
Tbh, while solo advanced enemies seem a tad bit powerful in the health department.. they don't seem bad at all in STF's. Get a group where everyone is doing the 15 to 20k that we SHOULD be doing with halfway decent gear (and a "correct" setup) and advanced is pretty easy. Get a 30k group with good gear and a "correct" setup, and it becomes comically easy. The problem isn't the queue itself, the problem is that they're not a one man deal and if you're the only decent player on the team.. it's going to fail miserably.
The korfez (elite) doesn't seem any harder than the advanced queues we've got now, so if that's what we can expect from the other elite queues (if we ever get them).. then nothing in the game will be remotely challenging to a decent group. All enemies will simply melt as soon as they're clicked on.
Also - I've a hard time believing normals aren't easy enough as is. I was under the impression they could stand to be a little harder. I mean, a Cure run takes what.. a minute and a half? Two at most? If I hit surgical strikes I can literally destroy a cube without touching the things healing it.. solo. That's.. easy. If I hit FAW instead, the healers die in about two volleys and the cube dies before FAW even ends. I get that normal isn't meant for me.. but there's a point where it just gets ridiculous. Players running normals are never going to progress, because they're not even playing the same game as the rest of us. What really needs to be fixed - the stupidly high difference between what the bad players are doing and what the good players are doing. Find a way to get the bad players up to par (IE, stop hiding the only things that make most ships viable on rare and hard to acquire doffs) - and tbh, nerf some of the things us good players are using to get absolutely insane damage. I can't think of any other game out there that allows its players to have such a ludicrously high difference in ability. As it stands, I can go into a PvP match solo against five other max level players (with mk xiv VR/UR gear) and be in no danger at all. None. And I've next to no experience in PvP, and am using a PvE oriented setup. The whole system needs a revamp before any balance can be made on difficulty levels, because as it stands you're trying to create content for what amounts to two entirely different games.
I don't want to have to choose between mind numbingly easy content and intentionally playing like an idiot. I mean sure, I can go into a run without my shields equipped, I can go in with only half my weapons, or using a low level ship.. been there, done that.. it didn't change anything.
I don't want to make life miserable for those that aren't able to perform at a level able to get them to advanced. I want to see those people with the resources (information, materials, and everything else) to perform at a decent level. As it stands the system is incredibly complex, and extremely unforgiving. If you don't have just the right everything, including 60+ million EC doffs.. you can't perform at our level. It doesn't seem right to me that it should be that way. It's not necessarily pay to win.. but you really have to know the system inside and out to put together something that works. Most simply don't.
I am happy they replied, but I'm sorry.. this response just isn't good enough.
They're going to 'continue to evaluate' meanwhile the game continues to die.
You have a month worth of Data, how much more could you possibly need? There was a successful system in place prior to DR, what is there to research? Put the ques back like they were, and leave the addition of the Elite Mode for people that weren't happy with the Advanced.
Is the problem that it's just too simple? Why over complicate it?
I'm sorry if this sounds overly demanding, it's not intended that way I'm just tired of watching this game die a rapid and painful death. When things are broken against us, they are 'evaluated' and plenty of time is taken, but when something "needs" a nerf like Carrier Pets they're on that like stink on a monkey. When the player is getting hammered, it can wait, but if they think we're getting any advantage at all, they will take the servers offline just to change it.
Improvements take forever, and nerfs flow like rain. Something has to change or there simply won't be a game left to 'evaluate.'
Just don't take too long to make these needed changes, cause until we get a while to feel the new adjustments, hopefully this Thursday, the jury is still out. Nonetheless I am glad to finally hear some acknowledgement of the problem here, truly, you do need to make advanced equal to the old elite, but the new elite however still shouldn't be as frustrating as advanced currently is. It's still not practical, please realize that and much will be forgiven.
And for goodness' sake, don't even THINK about nerfing the carrier pets until ALL of the other scaling has been lined up first and the interactions between all changes is clearly visible AND tested and reported back on by the playerbase.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I am happy they replied, but I'm sorry.. this response just isn't good enough.
They're going to 'continue to evaluate' meanwhile the game continues to die.
You have a month worth of Data, how much more could you possibly need? There was a successful system in place prior to DR, what is there to research? Put the ques back like they were, and leave the addition of the Elite Mode for people that weren't happy with the Advanced.
Is the problem that it's just too simple? Why over complicate it?
I'm sorry if this sounds overly demanding, it's not intended that way I'm just tired of watching this game die a rapid and painful death. When things are broken against us, they are 'evaluated' and plenty of time is taken, but when something "needs" a nerf like Carrier Pets they're on that like stink on a monkey. When the player is getting hammered, it can wait, but if they think we're getting any advantage at all, they will take the servers offline just to change it.
Improvements take forever, and nerfs flow like rain. Something has to change or there simply won't be a game left to 'evaluate.'
I agree with you there. Im glad for the open communication from cryptic now, nevertheless so far there is only a We are aware of a problem and we look into it.
We had a running system 3 weeks ago and you have patched it out. Would have been easy to implement old elite as new normal and would never have lead to any problems cuz neither old normal nor new normal seems to be appreciated by anybody. Any changes towards higher difficulties as a working progress is acceptable yet gives the feeling of being a beta tester for which I havent signed up nor paid for.
For the moment I highly advise bringing in the hull hit point & shield values to a more reasonable level. With reasonable I mean make em the way they were in old elite or bring in the gear upgrade strength gain in correlation of those if you have to. If your upgrades from k12 to 14 give you some 25% more damage then dont enhance enemy values to more than 25%. Cant be that hard.
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This is indeed good to hear. Advice though, please take player feed back seriously. It helps if you guys pops in every now and then as say something to the effect of "Thanks for the feedback guys, we will look into it." It just shows the players that this is truly two way communications.
This expansion hasn't even been out a month and already people have whined enough to get Cryptic to cave. And it isn't because they think it's too hard, it's because not enough of you have been willing to rise to the challenge and they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
I strongly disagree with this statement.
Before DR, I was among some of the highest DPS'rs in the game FED side. Since the release, I have been playing catch up with all of my peers who have continued to sink money into the game to upgrade all of thier equipment to MK14. I spent about $50 just to get upgrade tokens on all of my ships and to buy a T6 Phantom. The reason why most "whined" as you say is because in order to do these Elite and Advanced ques successfully, you had to spend way more than our weekly budgets allowed. There has been no middle ground to gradually build up with. Rewards were killed and XP nerfed. To me, Cryptic had no choice but to "cave" because alot of people couldnt continue to spend money to be competitive. Right now with my Phantom im averaging 16k-20K in Advanced ISE due to my MK12 weapons and consoles. Dont sit there and say people are not willing to rise to the challenge, its more like some people are not willing to spend an arm and a leg to meet that challenge head on especially so soon after a new release.
I don't think difficulty needs changing if you change the reward scheme to reflect the time invested. I would caution on too much tweaking on both difficulty and rewards simultaneously as your benchmark is going to keep moving.
I also think most folks haven't upgraded their ships and gear from my experience in playing the mirror queue. I'm seeing a lot of level 45 ships and many T5 ships that haven't been upgraded and if this is the case, when people do finally get T5-U and T6 ships as well as Mk XIII and XIV gear the missions will be way too easy. Not to mention more spec points and ship mastery skills. I'm sure this wont be the last tweak to rewards and difficulty.
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Three posts in two days. I'm starting to think they got the message about communication.
Thank you Charles - much appreciated.
I am looking forward to any steps that would make the game more engaging, less grinding, and ultimately something that will bring players back.
In the Podcast it was mentioned that one of the driving factors for the changes to the queues was the extreme dps a small percentage of players were able to generate.
He also mentioned that powers adjustments didn't make it into DR becomes of time.
Small changes to pets as mentioned today by Gecko is one change the anticipated, and have had the time to apply (or, if I have misread this change was more to unintended consequences).
Can you provide insight into upcoming powers 'adjustment' and how it might pertain to high dps players?
My Two Bits
Admiral Thrax
I concur. I'm also very happy to see the plethora of posts by the devs about things they are working on and plans for near future patches. I hope it continues and a real dialog is established.
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
Sorry to disagree but "Gear" is actually of little consequence when compared to Boffs/ skill tree / doffs / positioning and boff situational rotation.
This is the problem with more difficult Queues for the general population.
The game doesn't help people understand the game mechanics when selecting all of the above.
Many will equip abilities / skill tree spec / doffs / gear that overlap / don't have synergy and actually reduce the effectiveness of their build despite having Mk XII to Mk XIV gear all around.
That's how they fail more difficult content.
Barring an actual "gatekeeper" (ie, testing players performance in the role they've decided they want to play), it's going to be hard to train them. Secret World, for example, has a literal gatekeeper that you have to beat, but you can choose the metric you want to aim for (dps, tanking or healing, in that game's meta - I guess it'd be dps, survivability or crowd control in STO's?). If people had to clear a Starfleet, KDF or RRW "training scenario" before they were even allowed to queue for Advanced or Elite, perhaps you'd see people actually facing the decisions necessary to fight beyond Normal and not turn up for Advanced in a skittle frigate.
If you can leap right in simply by reaching a certain level in game, there's never going to be much motivation to improve, or understanding that improvement is a thing - or, for that matter, ability to impart the information necessary to improve. I've received the This Is Why You Fail speech once, and it was... informative, but a lot of people wouldn't sit still to listen to that sort of lesson. Make learning it an obstacle that must be cleared, and they will.
Or at least they'll stop being able to jump in over their heads to drown.
Why would I que for something that can be "failed" in 5 minutes or worse in 15- 20 minutes. Its a complete waste of my time.
Really if you noticed that once you removed the need to do all the STFs to get the various Borg gear, people stopped doing most of the maps. Why? Because they were either tedious and boring or had ZERO margin of error or could fall apart at the end making the rest of the map a waste.
What I see a lot of now is - FAIL!!!!!! and them people asking WTF, How did we fail?
Adding failure conditions to queues was meant to add a challenge to them and so no advanced or elite queues should have a 100% success rate. At the same time, however, we dont expect any queue to have a success rate that is so low that players who are appropriately geared will never experience a successful run.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
No commente' on this flawed logic.
I have so many swear words to say, but I would be banned for saying them all.
If the idea is to obtain gear so you can fail, why would anyone want to play stf, reputation systems, fleet systems, etc...Obtaining MK XII+ gear is to increase our chances of success. Why are whole missions 'auto-failing' when optional is missed?
Please fix the 'auto-fail' feature on advanced ground stf missions. Since this was added to the queues, 100% of the PUG teams I have joined have all failed. My time is wasted.
Everything is thrown at the players to figure out for themselves.
Some just casually pew pew and others do hard in depth testing of everything and figure out the best combinations.
like I was saying in game.... so many people have been carried thru this game for sooooo long. A lot of people aren't really as bad TRIBBLE as they think they are.
For instance I just had to explain that the reason the Base was at 20% health was because NO ONE was closing rifts. We - rather I - closed 3 rifts before the dread showed up. Eveidently no one on my team had ever done anything aside from shoot a couple mobs near the station. They had no real clue how the map even worked. Just get a Scimitar and FAW
I have so many swear words to say, but I would be banned for saying them all.
If the idea is to obtain gear so you can fail, why would anyone want to play stf, reputation systems, fleet systems, etc...Obtaining MK XII+ gear is to increase our chances of success. Why are whole missions 'auto-failing' when optional is missed?
Please fix the 'auto-fail' feature on advanced ground stf missions. Since this was added to the queues, 100% of the PUG teams I have joined have all failed. My time is wasted.
Dumb.
The main issue you are probably seeing then is that the optional objectives no longer become optional at higher difficulty. This, I think, is one of the major issues facing PUGs. We got away for too long being able to clear ISE and still let the nanite probes heal the transformers. On Advanced we can't get away with that anymore, which in my opinion is a good thing. That said, the other queues are either dead or very difficult, if not impossible, to complete with a PUG.
My gripe is with the way that they increased the numbers of enemies that have to be killed in a shorter amount of time now, in addition to the ridiculous buffs in shields, hp, and damage that they received in the process. My frigates can finally combat that because of the unintentional buffs they are receiving, and Cryptic is telling me they want to take that away. I honestly would rather that the AI have the same amount of health as the old Elite, but make better use of boff abilities and actually heal themselves, their shields, and their allies. This would make for a more robust gaming experience, and despite the inevitable whining that the AI is too smart, players could easily overcome it by using strategy, or what we've been trained to do- ridiculous DPS and power creep. Imagine having an actual use for sensor analysis or subsystem targeting in PVE, that could be pretty fun.
Perhaps the new Elite could incorporate elements of this and the current state of the game.
My gripe is with the way that they increased the numbers of enemies that have to be killed in a shorter amount of time now, in addition to the ridiculous buffs in shields, hp, and damage that they received in the process.
I'm just happy to hear improvements are on the way. Some folks seem to be upset that it's going to take more time. I can understand that, but I'd rather they take the time and do it right, rather than rush into a half-finished patch.
Regardless, it's good to have communication from the team.
I have a question, if I may. Specifically on this point here:
Since DR launched, and shortly before, there was some debate among the playerbase about what an "appropriately geared player" would mean after the expansion went live. However, I think we need to know what you at Cryptic consider this to be. Do you consider someone who is in all MK XIV purples to be appropriately geared? Or just in all MK XIV gear of any color to meet that? Rep gear? Fleet gear? What are you looking at here?
Without knowing your own criteria for being an appropriately geared player, I don't think we can accurately give feedback on any further difficulty adjustments.
You know, that is a very good question. I have been playing since Day 1 and have several characters. My 2 mains are Lvl 60 Klingon and Lvl 55 KDF-aligned Romulan, Thave both have some MkXIII gear and no MkXIV yet. Most of my gear is MkXII. I used up most of my dil on Starbase Projects and now and I can't afford to update my gear. In the past I got most of my gear from Elite STF's but now having a hard time finding an Advanced STF. One that gets actually completed is even worse. Well that's not true. KSA is actually quite doable. It's getting those bloody Ancient Power Cells that is proving difficult. I'vea actually stopped trying to complete any of the DR STF's on anything but Normal. So I need to be properly geared to run an STF to get the component required to get the proper gear...
Other then that they are fine as they are ISA can be completed with a 50k dps team with about 4 minutes to spare i even once did it with a group doing 40k dps combined but we missed the time optional by 4 minutes but did't fail the mission.
Getting 8 or 10k dps is not that hard at level 50 using mk x green weapons (on a brand new klingon in a Vor'cha Battle Cruiser Retrofit using mk xi beam arrays that i purchased for under 5k a piece i was able to get 8k dps right away this was with no rep gear/traits or fleet items)
Three posts in two days. I'm starting to think they got the message about communication.
Thank you Charles - much appreciated.
I am looking forward to any steps that would make the game more engaging, less grinding, and ultimately something that will bring players back.
In the Podcast it was mentioned that one of the driving factors for the changes to the queues was the extreme dps a small percentage of players were able to generate.
He also mentioned that powers adjustments didn't make it into DR becomes of time.
Small changes to pets as mentioned today by Gecko is one change the anticipated, and have had the time to apply (or, if I have misread this change was more to unintended consequences).
Can you provide insight into upcoming powers 'adjustment' and how it might pertain to high dps players?
Then my response is that the community needs better content.
Not harder content.
But either a "Gatekeeper" or other instructional missions.
So far all of these educational sessions have been player driven. Whether PvP bootcamp, DPS channels, TeamSpeak , Fleet coordination, etc...
Everything is thrown at the players to figure out for themselves.
Some just casually pew pew and others do hard in depth testing of everything and figure out the best combinations.
No doubt. Ive trained at least 400 people since day one (1) and most, once they learn, vanish sadly. It really irks me to no end at times when I think about the time I invested in people for nothing. Shoot, I've done so many STF runs that I have eight (8) ships with full Borg gear from when it was a random one person drop per group days!
My mind reels at the number of people that simply dont get it or understand the program so to speak.
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
Comments
The advanced and elite made torps even more useless with 80+% Kinetic resistance. Not everyone wants to play a beam FAW boat or a cannon boat, but that's what has to be done. At least gravity well is still useful. If I wanted DPS extreme racing, I would be playing something else besides STO.
So if it's important to have your changes be the right ones why did you push the current wrong changes with the launch of DR when everyone was telling you they were wrong?
It isn't about what you want really, though. You're stuck working within the confines of the game. The mechanics dictate that certain things work better than others. It would be wonderful if torpedoes were as awesome in the game as they are in the shows, but then people would be complaining about that being broken too. If you're not playing to be successful, you're fighting against the game and ultimately that's self defeating. I personally love torpedoes, how the look, etc but if there is something better out there (spoiler: there is), I'm going to use that instead because I want to do well and contribute in team play. And if you're not playing to win the game where team play is concerned, you're not playing to help your team. Somebody may really love Aceton Beam and Tyken's Rift, but pretty much anyone who has more than a basic understanding of the game will tell you those abilities are not of much use when it comes to playing on a team.
Now, there are non-tactical abilities that are helpful, Gravity Well and Tractor Beam Repulsors for example. Good crowd control abilities are more useful now than they have ever been. But, that doesn't mean you can just slack off and not put any thought into how you deal the rest of your damage. Even 10K DPS is not unattainable for anyone. Heck I'm a Tac Captain and I just started working on a Mirror Nova for the Mirror Invasion event (because for once the type of ship you have actually makes a bit of difference), and I'm probably at about 6 or 7K with it at the moment. Once it's all done it will easily be double that.
It isn't hard, it just requires actually learning the rules within which you have to operate. Once you start getting that down and trying, you'll wonder why you didn't ever do that in the first place and why you had such a slavish devotion to a self-imposed set of rules that doesn't matter.
Vice Admiral of - Starfleet Command -
The queues (primarily the STFs) are the STO equivalent to what is known as 'Dungeons' in most MMOs. In a Dungeon, the potential exists for a party to "wipe" on a boss encounter, and in doing so, resets the encounter, allowing players to try again. Why this mechanic hasn't been implemented into the STFs in STO, is beyond me, but as a start, I'd recommend the COMPLETE removal of any "Failure" mechanics. "Optional" mechanics are fine, so long as they remain OPTIONAL, and provide additional rewards over the basic rewards of the mission.
Furthermore, a new pass at the rewards MUST be part of this retuning objective, as it's both more difficult, and less rewarding to complete an STF post-Delta Rising. Elite difficulty should always award the best rewards, and those rewards must be greater than the previous "Elite" which has now been relabeled as "Advanced".
Lastly: More challenging encounters, is not solely a huge increase to mob health and shields. I think most player are in it, for challenging MECHANICS, such as giving Boss-type mobs additional abilities on higher difficulties. This might require some additional AI work in the game, and I dare say, it would be well worth it. For the most part, every encounter is virtually the same, within a given "critter species". Throwing more health on a Borg Cube, doesn't make it more challenging. It makes it more tedious, and less fun.
I don't think people really know what they're asking when they say they want more advanced AI in PvE. If NPC's were even half as good at using abilities and could stack abilities like human players do, you would be begging and crying for dumbed down AI and just more hitpoints to make it more difficult. It would be a nightmare fuel PvP-esque spin on PvE and people would leave the game in droves. It wouldn't make crappy ships and crappy abilities and crappy captains any more viable, it would just serve to make builds for PvP and PvE more similar.
People have to get this idea out of their heads that all ships and abilities and equipment and weapons are created equal. There is absolutely no reason why a ship with 8 turrets all different energy types should be anywhere near as good as a FAW beam boat using all the same weapons. You just want your ship to work your way because that's how you've had it forever and by god why should you have to change anything to be better at the game?
Everytime people whine and they try to fix it to accommodate them, invariably it breaks the game in some new way. People complain about "DPS'ers" and power creep but the fact of the matter is, every time people whine and want the game to be easier, that's what allows people to do so much better. This expansion hasn't even been out a month and already people have whined enough to get Cryptic to cave. And it isn't because they think it's too hard, it's because not enough of you have been willing to rise to the challenge and they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
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I'd love to see something done with mine trap. When the materials drops started it sprung back into life then it was killed again with the introduction of a cool down with it starting maybe twice a month if you are lucky.
The introduction of the elite/advanced mode is kinda pointless because hardly any one plays it tbh because the rewards aren't great for the amount of effort you put in.
Would it be possible to get the rewards increased on this one to give an incentive to play it again?
The twenty person missions can be really fun but desperately need some sort of boost to get people playing them.
now don't get me wrong im not playing elitist cause i suck for the most part. but adding hp didn't make them hard just longer to kill. and with 5 people taking them out before the objective was failed was pretty hard in a pug. i believe you should wait a week after hp is reduced more before you pull the plug on the pass or fail options . those area true difficulty modifier. rather than just a boat load of HP and shield piled on.
and if you added the BNP and other such rewards to the daily rep reward pack allot of these issues would even not be such a issue because people doing the missions would be guaranteed at least one a day rather than none. as one of the biggest complaints was people needed those type of rep rewards items to get better gear just to be able to do the missions required to get the items to get the better gear . it was implemented Bass Ackwards.
I would just like to point out that I'm not against failure conditions, but if my team wipes and we fail, can we at least not have a 30 to 60 minute wait timer before we can try again? It's really irrational for the timer to be the same for both success and failure. At most there should be a 10 minute wait for retrying after a failure.
Agreed entirely. It is only once in a very rare moon that I see a Mine Trap or Breaking the Planet run hit the required numbers to kick off. Even Starbase Fleet Defense doesn't happen relatively often when compared to the Borg STFs.
Joined January 2009
i just hate how the forums have to go full blaze just to trigger responses.....
it really should not have to work this way. glad they are communicating more but it never should have gotten to the point of rage for it to happen. hopping they keep this up
Tbh, while solo advanced enemies seem a tad bit powerful in the health department.. they don't seem bad at all in STF's. Get a group where everyone is doing the 15 to 20k that we SHOULD be doing with halfway decent gear (and a "correct" setup) and advanced is pretty easy. Get a 30k group with good gear and a "correct" setup, and it becomes comically easy. The problem isn't the queue itself, the problem is that they're not a one man deal and if you're the only decent player on the team.. it's going to fail miserably.
The korfez (elite) doesn't seem any harder than the advanced queues we've got now, so if that's what we can expect from the other elite queues (if we ever get them).. then nothing in the game will be remotely challenging to a decent group. All enemies will simply melt as soon as they're clicked on.
Also - I've a hard time believing normals aren't easy enough as is. I was under the impression they could stand to be a little harder. I mean, a Cure run takes what.. a minute and a half? Two at most? If I hit surgical strikes I can literally destroy a cube without touching the things healing it.. solo. That's.. easy. If I hit FAW instead, the healers die in about two volleys and the cube dies before FAW even ends. I get that normal isn't meant for me.. but there's a point where it just gets ridiculous. Players running normals are never going to progress, because they're not even playing the same game as the rest of us. What really needs to be fixed - the stupidly high difference between what the bad players are doing and what the good players are doing. Find a way to get the bad players up to par (IE, stop hiding the only things that make most ships viable on rare and hard to acquire doffs) - and tbh, nerf some of the things us good players are using to get absolutely insane damage. I can't think of any other game out there that allows its players to have such a ludicrously high difference in ability. As it stands, I can go into a PvP match solo against five other max level players (with mk xiv VR/UR gear) and be in no danger at all. None. And I've next to no experience in PvP, and am using a PvE oriented setup. The whole system needs a revamp before any balance can be made on difficulty levels, because as it stands you're trying to create content for what amounts to two entirely different games.
I don't want to have to choose between mind numbingly easy content and intentionally playing like an idiot. I mean sure, I can go into a run without my shields equipped, I can go in with only half my weapons, or using a low level ship.. been there, done that.. it didn't change anything.
I don't want to make life miserable for those that aren't able to perform at a level able to get them to advanced. I want to see those people with the resources (information, materials, and everything else) to perform at a decent level. As it stands the system is incredibly complex, and extremely unforgiving. If you don't have just the right everything, including 60+ million EC doffs.. you can't perform at our level. It doesn't seem right to me that it should be that way. It's not necessarily pay to win.. but you really have to know the system inside and out to put together something that works. Most simply don't.
They're going to 'continue to evaluate' meanwhile the game continues to die.
You have a month worth of Data, how much more could you possibly need? There was a successful system in place prior to DR, what is there to research? Put the ques back like they were, and leave the addition of the Elite Mode for people that weren't happy with the Advanced.
Is the problem that it's just too simple? Why over complicate it?
I'm sorry if this sounds overly demanding, it's not intended that way I'm just tired of watching this game die a rapid and painful death. When things are broken against us, they are 'evaluated' and plenty of time is taken, but when something "needs" a nerf like Carrier Pets they're on that like stink on a monkey. When the player is getting hammered, it can wait, but if they think we're getting any advantage at all, they will take the servers offline just to change it.
Improvements take forever, and nerfs flow like rain. Something has to change or there simply won't be a game left to 'evaluate.'
And for goodness' sake, don't even THINK about nerfing the carrier pets until ALL of the other scaling has been lined up first and the interactions between all changes is clearly visible AND tested and reported back on by the playerbase.
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I agree with you there. Im glad for the open communication from cryptic now, nevertheless so far there is only a We are aware of a problem and we look into it.
We had a running system 3 weeks ago and you have patched it out. Would have been easy to implement old elite as new normal and would never have lead to any problems cuz neither old normal nor new normal seems to be appreciated by anybody. Any changes towards higher difficulties as a working progress is acceptable yet gives the feeling of being a beta tester for which I havent signed up nor paid for.
For the moment I highly advise bringing in the hull hit point & shield values to a more reasonable level. With reasonable I mean make em the way they were in old elite or bring in the gear upgrade strength gain in correlation of those if you have to. If your upgrades from k12 to 14 give you some 25% more damage then dont enhance enemy values to more than 25%. Cant be that hard.
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I strongly disagree with this statement.
Before DR, I was among some of the highest DPS'rs in the game FED side. Since the release, I have been playing catch up with all of my peers who have continued to sink money into the game to upgrade all of thier equipment to MK14. I spent about $50 just to get upgrade tokens on all of my ships and to buy a T6 Phantom. The reason why most "whined" as you say is because in order to do these Elite and Advanced ques successfully, you had to spend way more than our weekly budgets allowed. There has been no middle ground to gradually build up with. Rewards were killed and XP nerfed. To me, Cryptic had no choice but to "cave" because alot of people couldnt continue to spend money to be competitive. Right now with my Phantom im averaging 16k-20K in Advanced ISE due to my MK12 weapons and consoles. Dont sit there and say people are not willing to rise to the challenge, its more like some people are not willing to spend an arm and a leg to meet that challenge head on especially so soon after a new release.
I also think most folks haven't upgraded their ships and gear from my experience in playing the mirror queue. I'm seeing a lot of level 45 ships and many T5 ships that haven't been upgraded and if this is the case, when people do finally get T5-U and T6 ships as well as Mk XIII and XIV gear the missions will be way too easy. Not to mention more spec points and ship mastery skills. I'm sure this wont be the last tweak to rewards and difficulty.
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ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
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Barring an actual "gatekeeper" (ie, testing players performance in the role they've decided they want to play), it's going to be hard to train them. Secret World, for example, has a literal gatekeeper that you have to beat, but you can choose the metric you want to aim for (dps, tanking or healing, in that game's meta - I guess it'd be dps, survivability or crowd control in STO's?). If people had to clear a Starfleet, KDF or RRW "training scenario" before they were even allowed to queue for Advanced or Elite, perhaps you'd see people actually facing the decisions necessary to fight beyond Normal and not turn up for Advanced in a skittle frigate.
If you can leap right in simply by reaching a certain level in game, there's never going to be much motivation to improve, or understanding that improvement is a thing - or, for that matter, ability to impart the information necessary to improve. I've received the This Is Why You Fail speech once, and it was... informative, but a lot of people wouldn't sit still to listen to that sort of lesson. Make learning it an obstacle that must be cleared, and they will.
Or at least they'll stop being able to jump in over their heads to drown.
Really if you noticed that once you removed the need to do all the STFs to get the various Borg gear, people stopped doing most of the maps. Why? Because they were either tedious and boring or had ZERO margin of error or could fall apart at the end making the rest of the map a waste.
What I see a lot of now is - FAIL!!!!!! and them people asking WTF, How did we fail?
I have so many swear words to say, but I would be banned for saying them all.
If the idea is to obtain gear so you can fail, why would anyone want to play stf, reputation systems, fleet systems, etc... Obtaining MK XII+ gear is to increase our chances of success. Why are whole missions 'auto-failing' when optional is missed?
Please fix the 'auto-fail' feature on advanced ground stf missions. Since this was added to the queues, 100% of the PUG teams I have joined have all failed. My time is wasted.
Dumb.
like I was saying in game.... so many people have been carried thru this game for sooooo long. A lot of people aren't really as bad TRIBBLE as they think they are.
For instance I just had to explain that the reason the Base was at 20% health was because NO ONE was closing rifts. We - rather I - closed 3 rifts before the dread showed up. Eveidently no one on my team had ever done anything aside from shoot a couple mobs near the station. They had no real clue how the map even worked. Just get a Scimitar and FAW
The main issue you are probably seeing then is that the optional objectives no longer become optional at higher difficulty. This, I think, is one of the major issues facing PUGs. We got away for too long being able to clear ISE and still let the nanite probes heal the transformers. On Advanced we can't get away with that anymore, which in my opinion is a good thing. That said, the other queues are either dead or very difficult, if not impossible, to complete with a PUG.
My gripe is with the way that they increased the numbers of enemies that have to be killed in a shorter amount of time now, in addition to the ridiculous buffs in shields, hp, and damage that they received in the process. My frigates can finally combat that because of the unintentional buffs they are receiving, and Cryptic is telling me they want to take that away. I honestly would rather that the AI have the same amount of health as the old Elite, but make better use of boff abilities and actually heal themselves, their shields, and their allies. This would make for a more robust gaming experience, and despite the inevitable whining that the AI is too smart, players could easily overcome it by using strategy, or what we've been trained to do- ridiculous DPS and power creep. Imagine having an actual use for sensor analysis or subsystem targeting in PVE, that could be pretty fun.
Perhaps the new Elite could incorporate elements of this and the current state of the game.
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Regardless, it's good to have communication from the team.
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You know, that is a very good question. I have been playing since Day 1 and have several characters. My 2 mains are Lvl 60 Klingon and Lvl 55 KDF-aligned Romulan, Thave both have some MkXIII gear and no MkXIV yet. Most of my gear is MkXII. I used up most of my dil on Starbase Projects and now and I can't afford to update my gear. In the past I got most of my gear from Elite STF's but now having a hard time finding an Advanced STF. One that gets actually completed is even worse. Well that's not true. KSA is actually quite doable. It's getting those bloody Ancient Power Cells that is proving difficult. I'vea actually stopped trying to complete any of the DR STF's on anything but Normal. So I need to be properly geared to run an STF to get the component required to get the proper gear...
Other then that they are fine as they are ISA can be completed with a 50k dps team with about 4 minutes to spare i even once did it with a group doing 40k dps combined but we missed the time optional by 4 minutes but did't fail the mission.
Getting 8 or 10k dps is not that hard at level 50 using mk x green weapons (on a brand new klingon in a Vor'cha Battle Cruiser Retrofit using mk xi beam arrays that i purchased for under 5k a piece i was able to get 8k dps right away this was with no rep gear/traits or fleet items)
No doubt. Ive trained at least 400 people since day one (1) and most, once they learn, vanish sadly. It really irks me to no end at times when I think about the time I invested in people for nothing. Shoot, I've done so many STF runs that I have eight (8) ships with full Borg gear from when it was a random one person drop per group days!
My mind reels at the number of people that simply dont get it or understand the program so to speak.
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
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