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.
Problem with this is that Cryptic wants you to BUY ZEN to convert to the Refined Dililithum you need for your various projects.
Increasing the refine limit is potentially money out of their pocketsees.
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
You guys are spoiling us, four dev posts communicating about upcoming changes based on player feedback in less than an hour. We might get used to this :P
These should indeed be very welcome changes. I look forward to seeing more information in the coming weeks.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
dont know who this guy is but thanks for the heads up. i i hate to say that allot of the fires we had after the release could have been avoided with communication like this. if we like what your saying or not atleast we know whats going on and are not left to let our imaginations run wild, and this could have prevented allott of the rage quits we have seen as of late.. in short thanks for realizing we are actually here and not the spam bots selling gold at 1st city.
Trophies for killing FEDS ahh those were the days.
My only wish is that you had thought to do these things before you angered so many people. I also wish you would have taken a more conservative approach to what you are trying to do. You did not have to release all of these changes all at once. It felt like getting hit by a Mack truck. For real.
The recent Delta Rising expansion released for Star Trek Online included a large number of Money grabs to ensure existing features throughout the game are monetized. (to the extent we can get away with).
I appreciate the new chance at gaining dil-which has been in somewhat short supply lately, and given that devs are now communicating with us and taking back at least a bit of the crazy changes they made lately I'm going to cut Cryptic some slack.
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.
In regards to special reputation marks.. I think normal queues need to drop these. Advanced is considerably tougher than it used to be.. and oftentimes, having the gear you get from reputation projects can make or break a queue run. This is particularly evident in queues like the borg ground queues. If you are stuck using a normal remodulator instead of an integrated one, you are wasting a lot of your team's time. This has a major impact on missions which have a hard time limit on objectives (which is pretty much all of them).
It creates a strange situation where I have to get what I'm getting so I can get what I'm getting. It's backwards.
Either nerf advanced or add these special reputation items to normal queues. What's especially grating is that you can get these in abundance for some reputations (like the Undine Battle Zone) while others (like Omega) punish the TRIBBLE out of you for not already having what the reps reward.
Then again nerfing advanced (or more specifically, changing it) is a good idea period.
Just adding more HP is an incredibly lazy and terrible way to increase difficulty. Instead of doing only that (some HP increase is okay, 10x is just.. dumb), why not give advanced and elite mobs more interesting powers and tactics that require thinking and teamwork instead of just more DPS?
♪ I'm going around not in circles but in spirographs.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
how about increasing the dilithium cap? I have 600,000 ore that I will never refine because I always earn more each day than the measely 8.5k I can refine.
Honestly, the battlezones are far more interesting to me than the queued content at this point. The space ones are all lacking in my eyes right now, but that doesn't mean they couldn't do a very fun one. I think battlezones are the way to go, but they need to work on the balance/spamminess in space. What works on ground just doesn't translate well, as seen in the Undine zone (and the Contested Zone was never fun, and has been nigh unplayable for me since 9.5 due to framerate drops).
The Contested Zone was fun until Cryptic hit the panic button and removed the dilithium reward from doing the Daily there. After that the zone dried up and there are barely any players there compared to the first few weeks after the sphere went live. With fewer players around, the zone isn't as fun because you really do need a sizable group of people to keep the entire zone under control due to the travel distances involved and the number of hardy mobs there.
If Cryptic wants to increase the dilithium payout for 'adventure zones' then they should seriously consider reimplementing a dilithium reward for the Contested Zone daily.
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.
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.
Uh, the latter would be a mistake - I point you to the fact that you must now level up 110 (as opposed to 50 from pre-specialization) times to hit the current (and predicted to rise) specialization cap. Specialization really needs to be account-wide.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
This is likely the most important dev thread since the SNAFU with the leveling. It should be pinned methinks.
It is good to know things are being looked at to say the least. STO has turned into a job and is really no fun anymore sadly.
Along with the dilith increase will the daily cap be increased as well? Lots of "unrefined" stuff in the bank is useless; unless we can use it for upgrading - only - food for thought....
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...
So it takes weeks of forum rage for you guys to take a hint.
Thing is if you had listened to your tribble testers, you would not had the forum users up in arms yet again.
Do i think craptic have learned from the latest fiasco do i hell.
All you guys have to do is think why does the players like this, if it is a reward leave alone if its speed of a mission LEAVE IT ALONE.
I doubt that "forum rage" played that big a part in it (though I am NOT saying that it played no part in it.
More likely that they put two + two together and realised that this was one of the reasons that the queues were less busy.
As in:
Wait!!! All queues are suddenly empty. Why is that? Hmmm, shall we take a look into forums? Ahhhhhh, I see oh boy ok! Come on, lets get back to metrics.
Yea, I think thats the way it worked.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
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%.
first of all, thx to take the time to write in the forum;; it is really appreciated.
Pve queues should have a little bit more than a small increase: 950 for an advanced stf would be great. because don't forget that most of the players do the stfs and never go (or rarely) in the battlezone. a casual gamer will choose a "quick" stf, rather than the voth battlezone for example. because battlezones take too much time.
btw: please fix these 2 stfs:
- defend rhi'ho station advanced: timer is too short or elachi personal shields should be lowered
- viscous cycle advanced: 2 optionals are bugged (scan anomaly, and heal the gekli), so each time that we have these optionals, we failed the mission. Also dromias and nikor ships have too much hp.
Thing is how meny new players have seen the adds for DR thought ill take a look at the forums and walked off metrics wont tell them anything about that.
New people to mmo dont look at there forums but the wiser older mmo players do.
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
I think this is well said and well done. I hope this is a sign of growing pains
How about some rewards for players who play support roles instead of pandering to the DPS-centric playstyle you've fostered and encouraged over the last few years?
Because really, when you increase the length of time a mission takes to complete, you simply put more emphasis on tactical-focused ship set-ups and captains. With the obvious focus on simply getting through the mission faster to queue up for another, or reset the battlezone.
There's still people who would love to feel they contribute to a mission without dragging them down because they don't have enough damage output -- particularly in PvE queues where lower-level players are scaled up to everyone else.
And those players should be appropriately rewarded in a way people that provide damage output do not.
as it stands i have not had the time to properly test out the queues and such, heck dont really have the time to grind up to level 57 on my main first. however from what i have seen, used to get a few k dilithium a day and that would be enough to work with, now i cant even get past 1k dilithium mark yet. used to do the usual dailies, the 3 dailies in the eta eridani sector and an stf, in the same time with the upgrade its not worth a fraction in comparison, those same dailies plus an stf barely makes 1k dilthium.
i dont know who designed the content like that, or why they thought it was a good idea, but you should of known what to expect and so im having to make do with this chump change as a result.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
But, ARE THEY? No. There is such a massive disconnect with the players (what little remain). They aren't listening. They're inside a sound-proof booth with no windows, and are only "aware" of the outrage because they have their noses pressed into this "metrics machine" they concocted which pores over the raw server logs to mine certain bits of totally subjective and biased info. They make further totally subjective and biased (and often wrong) conclussions based on this datamining, and pretend they are "listening" to the players.
This is not new.
Exactly .
This is just V.2.0 of the Dill fiasco in Season 7 .
Back then the plan was to remove the Dil awards from the Borg STF's and spread them around to other (not played) queues .
Sounding familiar ?
... back then a wise player called you not to mess with the STF's , because they were the ONE THING you got right , and they were the "pulse" of your game . Clearly that message was not heard very well ... and some still think that "player herding" via awards is a good idea ...
sry but anybody that actually had a look at the numbers with the intention of improving the dil/time nerf of the queues with DR cannot possibly come to the conclusion that battlezones need a definite boost to dil
It is always good to know that the development team is at the least listening. Hopefully they will act intelligently on the information they are receiving (including, as I understand, actually acting on your testers' reports before pushing something out the door).
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?
Suggestion: make the boss battle an open mission that spawns once all other open missions in the instance have been completed? Additionally, I would point to this thread about 'wrapper' missions and the suggestions it has elicited.
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.
So, pwe/cryptic does have more employees than Smirk and Tendy. I honestly was beginning to wonder. Took you long enough to surface. :P
Kidding aside, I do appreciate the communication. Just wish the forums didn't have to go all flamey to make this happen. Nor should the metrics have to drive off the cliff for someone to notice something was wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to explain some of the reasoning behind upcoming changes to a game I used to enjoy a lot. I look forward to being able to enjoy it again in the future. Provided the Dev Team actually does implement these changes instead of just talking about them.
I'd also like to suggest this type of communication continue. It is a good sign. It gives the playerbase a reason to begin rebuilding the trust which pwe/cryptic damaged by appearing to not listen to thier customers. Further it may just prevent such an occurrence from happening in the future.
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
Good to see this level of communication. Dilithium rewards really need the increase along with ways to get EC rewards. Currently the best way to get those was solo running SB24 over and over. That's a broken mechanic if ever I saw one.
Increasing EC rewards for items that are uncommon, rare and very rare would go a ways to increase EC gain, unless the plan is to make people run SB24 solo continuously...
Dil from Queues really should be 480/960/1440 at minimum. Advanced needs the Optional lockout dropped and maybe a dil penalty for not completing the optional (so 720 or 480???).
Chris Robert's on SC:
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
This is good news. While some might find the increases in marks a bit odd I think it is good that you have the choice between having marks or converting them into dilithium, so it is a win-win as I see it.
My advice with the Neural Processors, Cybernetic Implants and such is that you need to think how available they are to the new level 50, because if they cannot participate in the Advanced level they won't be able to get them in order to get gear, which can leave people in limbo between difficulties. This shouldn't be the case.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
I 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.
Adding BNP to the Hard-level missions on Defera should be a very easy thing to implement, and the Hards are already time gated if Cryptic is worried about 'sploits or something.
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 would be thankful if you would consider making the starship leveling faster or at least making the trait available instantly when buying a T6 ship.
Because like it is now you get a captain in the wrong ship (for example a sci in a phantom) just levelling it for the trait for ages which takes the fun away.
Wasn't there sumthing mentioned at the beginning that starship traits are account wide unlocks? That would also help this problem.
Comments
Problem with this is that Cryptic wants you to BUY ZEN to convert to the Refined Dililithum you need for your various projects.
Increasing the refine limit is potentially money out of their pocketsees.
You guys are spoiling us, four dev posts communicating about upcoming changes based on player feedback in less than an hour. We might get used to this :P
These should indeed be very welcome changes. I look forward to seeing more information in the coming weeks.
Also reports of previously Mk 13 mission rewards items being swapped down to Mk 12s.
My only wish is that you had thought to do these things before you angered so many people. I also wish you would have taken a more conservative approach to what you are trying to do. You did not have to release all of these changes all at once. It felt like getting hit by a Mack truck. For real.
/44secs
/28secs
//11secs
Firesworn Nation (@rswfire) - https://www.firesworn.com
This made me lol.
Then it made me sad.
In regards to special reputation marks.. I think normal queues need to drop these. Advanced is considerably tougher than it used to be.. and oftentimes, having the gear you get from reputation projects can make or break a queue run. This is particularly evident in queues like the borg ground queues. If you are stuck using a normal remodulator instead of an integrated one, you are wasting a lot of your team's time. This has a major impact on missions which have a hard time limit on objectives (which is pretty much all of them).
It creates a strange situation where I have to get what I'm getting so I can get what I'm getting. It's backwards.
Either nerf advanced or add these special reputation items to normal queues. What's especially grating is that you can get these in abundance for some reputations (like the Undine Battle Zone) while others (like Omega) punish the TRIBBLE out of you for not already having what the reps reward.
Then again nerfing advanced (or more specifically, changing it) is a good idea period.
Just adding more HP is an incredibly lazy and terrible way to increase difficulty. Instead of doing only that (some HP increase is okay, 10x is just.. dumb), why not give advanced and elite mobs more interesting powers and tactics that require thinking and teamwork instead of just more DPS?
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
In an arduously slow and physically painful fashion...
The Contested Zone was fun until Cryptic hit the panic button and removed the dilithium reward from doing the Daily there. After that the zone dried up and there are barely any players there compared to the first few weeks after the sphere went live. With fewer players around, the zone isn't as fun because you really do need a sizable group of people to keep the entire zone under control due to the travel distances involved and the number of hardy mobs there.
If Cryptic wants to increase the dilithium payout for 'adventure zones' then they should seriously consider reimplementing a dilithium reward for the Contested Zone daily.
Joined January 2009
Uh, the latter would be a mistake - I point you to the fact that you must now level up 110 (as opposed to 50 from pre-specialization) times to hit the current (and predicted to rise) specialization cap. Specialization really needs to be account-wide.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
It is good to know things are being looked at to say the least. STO has turned into a job and is really no fun anymore sadly.
Along with the dilith increase will the daily cap be increased as well? Lots of "unrefined" stuff in the bank is useless; unless we can use it for upgrading - only - food for thought....
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè
Thing is if you had listened to your tribble testers, you would not had the forum users up in arms yet again.
Do i think craptic have learned from the latest fiasco do i hell.
All you guys have to do is think why does the players like this, if it is a reward leave alone if its speed of a mission LEAVE IT ALONE.
As in:
Wait!!! All queues are suddenly empty. Why is that? Hmmm, shall we take a look into forums? Ahhhhhh, I see oh boy ok! Come on, lets get back to metrics.
Yea, I think thats the way it worked.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
first of all, thx to take the time to write in the forum;; it is really appreciated.
Pve queues should have a little bit more than a small increase: 950 for an advanced stf would be great. because don't forget that most of the players do the stfs and never go (or rarely) in the battlezone. a casual gamer will choose a "quick" stf, rather than the voth battlezone for example. because battlezones take too much time.
btw: please fix these 2 stfs:
- defend rhi'ho station advanced: timer is too short or elachi personal shields should be lowered
- viscous cycle advanced: 2 optionals are bugged (scan anomaly, and heal the gekli), so each time that we have these optionals, we failed the mission. Also dromias and nikor ships have too much hp.
New people to mmo dont look at there forums but the wiser older mmo players do.
I think this is well said and well done. I hope this is a sign of growing pains
Now that's just crazy talk !!!
i dont know who designed the content like that, or why they thought it was a good idea, but you should of known what to expect and so im having to make do with this chump change as a result.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Exactly .
This is just V.2.0 of the Dill fiasco in Season 7 .
Back then the plan was to remove the Dil awards from the Borg STF's and spread them around to other (not played) queues .
Sounding familiar ?
... back then a wise player called you not to mess with the STF's , because they were the ONE THING you got right , and they were the "pulse" of your game . Clearly that message was not heard very well ... and some still think that "player herding" via awards is a good idea ...
Geko could ... .
Suggestion: make the boss battle an open mission that spawns once all other open missions in the instance have been completed? Additionally, I would point to this thread about 'wrapper' missions and the suggestions it has elicited.
Yes, it is; indeed, I think that concept could be built upon further...
Kidding aside, I do appreciate the communication. Just wish the forums didn't have to go all flamey to make this happen. Nor should the metrics have to drive off the cliff for someone to notice something was wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to explain some of the reasoning behind upcoming changes to a game I used to enjoy a lot. I look forward to being able to enjoy it again in the future. Provided the Dev Team actually does implement these changes instead of just talking about them.
I'd also like to suggest this type of communication continue. It is a good sign. It gives the playerbase a reason to begin rebuilding the trust which pwe/cryptic damaged by appearing to not listen to thier customers. Further it may just prevent such an occurrence from happening in the future.
Increasing EC rewards for items that are uncommon, rare and very rare would go a ways to increase EC gain, unless the plan is to make people run SB24 solo continuously...
Dil from Queues really should be 480/960/1440 at minimum. Advanced needs the Optional lockout dropped and maybe a dil penalty for not completing the optional (so 720 or 480???).
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
My advice with the Neural Processors, Cybernetic Implants and such is that you need to think how available they are to the new level 50, because if they cannot participate in the Advanced level they won't be able to get them in order to get gear, which can leave people in limbo between difficulties. This shouldn't be the case.
Adding BNP to the Hard-level missions on Defera should be a very easy thing to implement, and the Hards are already time gated if Cryptic is worried about 'sploits or something.
Joined January 2009
Because like it is now you get a captain in the wrong ship (for example a sci in a phantom) just levelling it for the trait for ages which takes the fun away.
Wasn't there sumthing mentioned at the beginning that starship traits are account wide unlocks? That would also help this problem.
I do agree with the sentiment that ground zones don't really need that heavy a boost, but I'm willing to wait and see how it goes.