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meimeitoo
Member Posts: 12,594 Arc User
Dear Cryptic,
The queues are still empty. Regardless of any alleged numerical oddities in the U.I., they really be empty.
I can currently play only The Cure Advanced, or the other 2 Advanced STF's, and Federation Fleet Alert. The rest is pretty much a not-happening thing. I used to play Starbase Fleet Defense, and many others.
I wonder what you're planning on doing about this situation. Or whether we can even get full disclosure on what is going on, really, as I find the lack of participants rather alarming, tbh. I'm pretty sure your metrics will tell you the same.
Maybe it's time you did something I know you don't want to do; namely, un-nerf the rewards for these queues. Let NPC's pay out a similar amount of XP as in Argala, for instance. Because, whatever huge loss you're fearing from making that happen, it can't possibly be as bad as no one playing (or hardly anyone, for those accustomed to taking things literal). Or maybe have regular STF's drop Ancient Power Cells too. Yes, I know, that goes linea recta against your wish for everyone to just do DR content. But, as an old saying goes, You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
At any rate, you *do* realize that empty queues are 'dangerous', right? People can forego on the insane upgrade cost; they can still grind Argala; but they cannot ignore empty queues, as you can't play what's not available.
Thank you.
The queues are still empty. Regardless of any alleged numerical oddities in the U.I., they really be empty.
I can currently play only The Cure Advanced, or the other 2 Advanced STF's, and Federation Fleet Alert. The rest is pretty much a not-happening thing. I used to play Starbase Fleet Defense, and many others.
I wonder what you're planning on doing about this situation. Or whether we can even get full disclosure on what is going on, really, as I find the lack of participants rather alarming, tbh. I'm pretty sure your metrics will tell you the same.
Maybe it's time you did something I know you don't want to do; namely, un-nerf the rewards for these queues. Let NPC's pay out a similar amount of XP as in Argala, for instance. Because, whatever huge loss you're fearing from making that happen, it can't possibly be as bad as no one playing (or hardly anyone, for those accustomed to taking things literal). Or maybe have regular STF's drop Ancient Power Cells too. Yes, I know, that goes linea recta against your wish for everyone to just do DR content. But, as an old saying goes, You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
At any rate, you *do* realize that empty queues are 'dangerous', right? People can forego on the insane upgrade cost; they can still grind Argala; but they cannot ignore empty queues, as you can't play what's not available.
Thank you.
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I just had to queue up & wait 5 minutes to play the STF I wanted.
Guess which one it was.
Breaking the planet? Gorn minefield fleet action? Hive Onslaught (Elite)?
No.
Infected Conduit Advanced. The most popular STF of the lot.
Nice work Cryptic.
Free Tibet!
I put The Old Republic on my Christmas list this year.
This character is why I don't play my Romulan any more. Tovan Khev is NOT my BFF! Get him off my bridge!
Why? I personally believe it's to sell R&D packs and to make people believe that upgrading will help defeat the fail conditions. Obviously this is not going to work, but they are still trying to bluff it out.
Even ISA is beginning to show fatigue on this with more very weak players lining up for it to try and get processors. Its problem is not the fail conditions but rather the low dps players combating the massive hp wall. When you have 15 spheres to kill by yourself this will take a while and is pretty tedious.
The only one that suffers no problems is CCA which is healthy. It could even go back to pre recent nerf conditions to the entity and be fine.
I don't expect any fix to this. There seems to be no concern whatsoever in the empty queues. I expect at some point half of them to be removed.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
All I want for X-mas this year is for the game to go back to feeling remotely rewarding in more than just a few places but Im begnning to see that just isn't going to happen. The last year has felt like one piece of coal after another in my STO stocking.
Low DPS in ISA just doesn't help. BNP's should drop on normals albeit perhaps at a lower rate so new or low DPS players have the chance to get BNP's to collect gear.
a new lock box, or an other special event with an other OP ship :P
I would disagree about the Wonderland. I think there's many more instances than last year. Then in the morning eastern time these have cleared out leaving many 2 and 3 person instances that would not have existed at all last year.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
When Im in an advanced group I can grind elite contend with traumatic income now via toonjumps. I can do so much faster even than B4 DR. (~2,3k dil + tech + mats in ~6mins)
On a pug on the other hand those missions who pop after countless minutes fail most likely and are a waist of time.
At this point I have no clue anymore what cryptic ever tried to achieve here in the first place.
Whats sure to say is that especially the classic Borg STF have been made as unattractive as possible (longer CD times than other missions, no elite mode so no elite reward, general low effort/reward ratio)
What an embarrassing move to navigate players to other, newer contend in such a way.
My alternative would simply have been to design new contend based on the players preferences.
Respective metrics were present the past 3 years for Cryptic so see.
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We're sorry about your concerns, but you're flat out wrong. The queues are not empty, it's just a reporting bug.
Everything is awesome!
Warmest regards,
Cryptic Ministry of Truth.
^ This is the reason why they probably aren't going to do anything about the ques or any of the other DR-related issues until after Winter Wonderland is over, if they address said issues at all. So long as it's still going, they can insist to everyone that STO has a healthy population, and any que issues, right now at least, are because more people are doing the Wonderland content than STFs, currently (which is partially true).
I'm taking a wait and see approach right now. What Cryptic does after Wonderland is no longer there to distract people will likely determine the fate of STO for the foreseeable future.
There's a double skill points weekend already in the Calendar starting the day the winter event ends.
Expect more of these smoke-and-mirrors attempts to keep players playing. Oh wow, double skill points, now I only have to grind Argala 400 times instead of 800! Thanks Cryptic, keep up the good work! Woohoo, wow! Oh my god! Yay!
Free Tibet!
No. Going private is the logical consequence of harder missions. It has always been. If the fail chance is high enough, at some point, the best way to increase chances is to play with good players. And only with them. There is no point in playing hard missions with characters not equiped for it. There is no fix for it. Either there is hard content (everybody wants to play, especially 12year old kids, because they are the greatest) that needs well prepared players or there is not.
It's a reporting bug!
ARGALAARGLEBARGLE!
Once DR went live the rewards got nerfed and the difficulty (for casual players - those out of fleets, no teamspeak, who don't use the forums for advice on builds) was increased, I think a lot probably just gave up and moved on.
Face it, the casual players are never going to be the elite in the game, there are plenty who are good but the vast majority probably don't use the forums or even the zone/team chat to communicate during PVE missions. So these people are never going to be all that effective in missions where team communications are vital.
Pre-DR these guys could probably do pretty well in elites because all you really needed was an understanding of the mission objectives and enough DPS or HP's to make it through. Now you need a metric tonne more DPS and some objectives are so finely tuned even using teamspeak in pre-made teams doesn't help much (looking at you Borg Disconnected Advanced).
The biggest reason for the lack of players are the stupid fail conditions on many though. I know they require more tactics and skilled flying now, fair enough by combine that with stupid high HP's on the NPCs and you'll just scare off a lot of people. I don't particularly want to play ISA for 2 minutes only for it to fail because one sphere got through, despite us all having perfectly competent builds. What does it matter if the transformer gets healed if 2 seconds later it gets nuked by everyone doing 20K+ DPS against it!
Add in the crazy fail conditions for the elite level, that's there to separate men from boys.
Normal - basic objectives, easy NPCs, long timers, lowest rewards.
Advanced - as old elite, higher rewards, tougher NPCs, optional objective for more rewards.
Elite - no optional, everything mandatory, toughest NPCs, highest rewards.
Another factor is that the rewards for many PVE's are just pitiful, so people are only ever going to play the most time effective ones to get the resources they require.
You stick a huge dilithium sink in the game, nerf half the rewards and then wonder why people only use the best paying stuff?
I would however agree that WW is probably taking a lot of players out of other areas of the game. There's what, 100+ instances with 30 players in each. That's a lot of people not doing PVE missions.
Perhaps once the event is over the queues will return to normal but I really doubt it.
not the PVE queues... not the bugged and missing xp... not anything else game breaking
At this stage, this is the only reason I can conclude why Cryptic have totally dug their feet in and ignored the terrible state of the queues for weeks on end now. I honestly expected a fix or comment on this and the exp issues but its the subject the just won't touch.
I'd say they are ignorantly going to forget about it as an issue (along with the numerous other ones drafted in since DR) and just focus purely on proving to their shareholders how successful the game is with warped metrics of constant Argala runs.
A total lie but they can twist the numbers to say otherwise.
However they should move the STFs back to prior DR, names , difficulty and rewards.
Because 75% of all people don't like change, chnage the game loose 75% of your players.
What should happen for DR was not to change anything just add harder content/ queues.
Because people are more motivated to purchase stuff and upgrade if they have a choice.
141dps plasma dual beam xiv, wow.
In the last 30 min iv managed 2 space runs on normal but then again they say its a BUG & i say the sky is green the grass is blue & the moon is make of cheese.
Oh, please.
Change is not always a good thing.
The queues are mostly empty because they simply aren't worth doing anymore. You have a complete unbalance of time invested to reward ratio.
The same holds true for the Borg Disconnected: peeps unable to play it queue for it nonetheless, as they need the Ancient Power Cells.
Going 'private' is still indicative of a problem with the queues. This is a casual PvE game: if it can't be done (reasonably) within the PUG system, then something is wrong.
Cryptic, please address the empty queues issue. The best way, IMHO, is still to un-nerf the rewards. Other means are welcome too, of course.
I believe it is not just the rewards but the level changes to borg stf also. Think about it they changed normal to level 50 ( the old endgame level )it should still be level 45. The advance ( the old elite ) is level 60 and elite oh wait we don't have any for borg stf. As you level a toon gueues unlock when you reach a certain level. Well the advance unlocks at level 50 but scales player to 60. They did not need to change the levels of stf but add a new elte that was level 60 which unlocks at level 60.
I agree the optional fail is a joke now but that would not be so bad if they didn't put in so many high hp npcs and not figure in lower dps ships. I have seen normal fail now and never saw that before DR lol. If you think about it normal is the old elite now lol.
So I don't think it is just players not knowing what they are doing but the change in level. I bet if they put the levels back to where they should be and add a elite the queues will improve.
But the real issue here was that very tiny minority of the players were pushing the game to the limits. I'm talking the Wizards of STO type of players, those who have such powerful builds that even now they are still throwing out 125K DPS runs despite the increases in HPs and nerfs all over the place.
What was going on pre-DR was not indicative of the overwhelming majority of the players.
I'm not saying the STFs weren't too easy i'm just saying that how most of us played was not at the level that required the huge difficulty buff they threw at us.
So if the minority who were cake-walking the content was the part of the community the devs were watching to see how the game worked out then that is bad news for the rest of us.
They are still pushing the DPS limits past 125K so where does that leave the rest of us if they are who the devs listen to most?
Maybe they're just holding off on this to make people spend on upgrades etc. But all the DPS in the world won't help an advanced queue if 1 person in the pug can fail it for all (sometimes purposefully).
I am baffled as to why they stubbornly keep to the mandatory objectives in advanced. The only explanation I have is that their metrics told them that if the player population upgraded and go to a certain level of specialization then the current advanced content should be doable by the average player.
I think they over estimated the amount of players that would upgrade. I think they overestimated the average dps of the player base, and underestimated how quickly players would give up on the new content. I am sure from a metric standpoint it all makes sense, but humans have pesky emotions that make us a bit unpredictable.
For one, the elite queues shouldn't even exist, you can list elite matches but not allow queues, those should be for pre-mades only. No random queue is going to beat an elite, so why even let people get frustrated?
Every queue mission needs to be rejigged for rewards. The missions themselves are generally very low quality, but even with that there should be an easy way to calculate the average player you expect in the match, and the expected time for those players to beat it, and then calculate that reward. Give rewards normal 1x, adv x2, elite x4, discourage elite players from sitting in normals.. right now its all wrong.
Ideally, with a company that gave a TRIBBLE, someone would also go through the queue missions and make them not suck as bad either, but that ain't happening.
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I used to do a lot of queued events. In fact it was just about the only thing I did. Now I don't do any at all. I was basically chased away by the pitiful rewards and found myself doing the Voth Battlezone. Then they decided to nerf that as well so now I'm doing the winter event and doffing. Once the winter event is over I'm not really sure what I'm going to do.
This has always been one of the major failings in their thinking since they started DR. Looking at a 5% minority and stupidly thinking it applied to the rest of the games 95%. The truly Elite players aren't at all phased by any of these changes. They were DPS Gods then and they are still DPS Gods now.
The others who weren't and still aren't, are doomed to struggle. Why they care about, what, a few thousands players who can trash the content easily compared to the fast majority is beyond me.