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Upgrade system - not broken...??
captmanic
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
having used the upgrade system now to upgrade many items (including several to epic) - I can confirm that the current upgrade system is sh*t and faaaar too expensive and thirsty on dilithium.
As a quick example -
note ALL OF THE BELOW ASSUMES YOU HAVE A TIER 14 ITEM ALREADY AT UR:
(if you dont.. which you wont... then you can expect to approximately double the below cost)..
A typical tier 14 item need around 250k of tech points to upgrade, so this is 20 superior tech upgrade, at 300k a piece.
This totals 6 million in tech upgrade (for one run at the upgrade) - I havent even factored in the dilithium cost yet..
HOWEVER - this 1 level of upgrade will give you around 4% rarity chance. Ive upgrade enough items to know that they usually 'ding' to epic.. somewhere around 20-30% on average.. so this is a MINIMUM of 5 runs, so thats currently 30million in tech upgrades (or around $15 of real life cash).
Now for the dilithium... 1075 dilithium per tech upgrade, and so far we have used 100 tech upgrades.. so thats 107k of dilithium (remember this is one item..). At a dillithium refining rate of 8k per day.. thats around 2 weeks of dilithium refining for this one item upgrade... (remember all of this assumes your item STARTS at tier 14 UR.
Now - there are 22 items slot approx on an average ship.. so 2 weeks and 30 million multiplied by 22, gives around 650million cost, and 44 weeks of refining to upgrade your whole ship (assuming you do not change any modules in that time - or, god forbid consider flying another starship...)...
I have just 3 words...
WHAT
A
JOKE
I mean Cryptic.... are you frickin serious or what..????
Anyway - the good news is I have a simple fix - and this is REALLY simple and is at the heart of the problem in my opinion for why the current system is a joke... Simply add a new tech upgrade to the current crafting system that gives not 12,400 tech points (which is WAAAAAY to low), but say around 25-30k tech points. This would be a REALLY simple fix that would effectively solve all of the current issues around this broken upgrade system..
Cryptic - I've said it many times before and ill say it again - SORT IT OUT...!
As a quick example -
note ALL OF THE BELOW ASSUMES YOU HAVE A TIER 14 ITEM ALREADY AT UR:
(if you dont.. which you wont... then you can expect to approximately double the below cost)..
A typical tier 14 item need around 250k of tech points to upgrade, so this is 20 superior tech upgrade, at 300k a piece.
This totals 6 million in tech upgrade (for one run at the upgrade) - I havent even factored in the dilithium cost yet..
HOWEVER - this 1 level of upgrade will give you around 4% rarity chance. Ive upgrade enough items to know that they usually 'ding' to epic.. somewhere around 20-30% on average.. so this is a MINIMUM of 5 runs, so thats currently 30million in tech upgrades (or around $15 of real life cash).
Now for the dilithium... 1075 dilithium per tech upgrade, and so far we have used 100 tech upgrades.. so thats 107k of dilithium (remember this is one item..). At a dillithium refining rate of 8k per day.. thats around 2 weeks of dilithium refining for this one item upgrade... (remember all of this assumes your item STARTS at tier 14 UR.
Now - there are 22 items slot approx on an average ship.. so 2 weeks and 30 million multiplied by 22, gives around 650million cost, and 44 weeks of refining to upgrade your whole ship (assuming you do not change any modules in that time - or, god forbid consider flying another starship...)...
I have just 3 words...
WHAT
A
JOKE
I mean Cryptic.... are you frickin serious or what..????
Anyway - the good news is I have a simple fix - and this is REALLY simple and is at the heart of the problem in my opinion for why the current system is a joke... Simply add a new tech upgrade to the current crafting system that gives not 12,400 tech points (which is WAAAAAY to low), but say around 25-30k tech points. This would be a REALLY simple fix that would effectively solve all of the current issues around this broken upgrade system..
Cryptic - I've said it many times before and ill say it again - SORT IT OUT...!
Post edited by captmanic on
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Comments
I dont really need to answer this because you clearly aren't an end-game player.. but I will..
I, for one do it because I PvP in this game, and to PvP in this game (as anyone who has pvp'd in this game will undoubtedly confirm) you need to have the gold standard of gear to even stand half a chance of doing wel..
But even if you do not like to PvP, in order to do well in PvE (and by do well - I mean being able to run most the elite stf's, or produce in excess of 20k dps), you also need superior gear..
Ladies and gentlemen I give you the stereotypical PvP player.
It's not your rarity of gears that matter, but how you fly and how your ship is set up.
the top player in the game, if I recall correctly, in terms of dps, flys a tetryon build.
Ladies and gentlemen I give you the sterotypical guy who thinks he knows about PvP because he has played 10-15 games before but actually has never done well at PvP and so does not play it anymore, so does not really understand what it takes to be good in PvP.
Now stop trolling, and please keep this thread on topic. Thanks in advance..
Sure - you have really got to grips with the whole intent of my original post, and responded in a helpful way that relates to discussing whether or not the upgrade system is broken.
Thank you so much for your efforts, but please dont troll, and keep this post on topic. Thanks in advance.
(and I actually said you need superior gear.. not epic)..
Just so I'm clear - you don't think the upgrade system is broken,.. or needs fixing..?
(just interested, as I know for a fact there is a significant number of StO players who feel that it is)...
me? trolling?
I point out that it's skills that matter more than gear and you call me a troll? wow...
Dude, it's skills. I've fought someone using white XI gear and I have purple XII gear. He could do amazing spike damage.
My gear was a lot better, yet he could kill me if I got sloppy. However when we went into PVE matches, I'd stay alive a lot longer than him because my skills are on survival, tanking and aggroing while his was spike and alpha strikes.
is the system broken? Well, it asks for quite a lot of dilithium, a lot more than what's even remotely reasonable.
but is it necessary to have the best gear? no it isn't. I get around the upgrading to the next rarity by crafting a mk II version of the weapons I need. When I get what I want, then I proceed to upgrade and really, upgrading to mk XI from mk II is really cheap.
looking at dps, just have a MK XIII or XIV item, rarity doesn't matter really, and they'll put a hell of a lot more out than a mk XII.
No, the upgrade system is not broken. You are upgrading gear to EPIC. Do you think Cryptic is just going to let you get the best gear for peanuts? No. As the poster you are questioning said, it is for you dragon chasers who have nothing better to spend resources on or need something to brag about. Do you really expect to get a Lamborgini for the price of a Prius or a Lexus or even a BMW or Benz? No. If you want that half a million dollar or more weiner extension, you will pay out the butt for it. Same principal applies to EPIC gear. You won't get the EPIC at the VR or UR price or even in that general ballpark. You are going to pay out the nose for it. Which you apparently are.
As for PVP I was tinkering around with that last week. As an experiment I went into about 20 or so PVP games with a bug ship loaded with MK X common gear. I Ended up in the top 4 for DPS in at least 12 of those games and was in the winning team for all but 5 of them. Take from that what you will.
The upgrade costs to not even get to epic quality is asinine on many items, particularly when you net a whole 1.8 points in gains on some items from XII to XIV and that the difference from VR to UR seems very anemic to begin with.
You can't describe "red" to the blind.
I think you are focussing on the 'epic' element too much.. when I first tried to upgrade gear.. my honest first thoughts were how ridiculously expensive and consuming of diliithium the process was.. The only way I can put it is - to me it should not take 10-20 tech upgrades to up one level or 1 run at a quality upgrade (rare --> UR, mk 12 to mk 14, upgrading lobi-store items, omni-directional beams, wide arc turrets, reputation gear.. etc). For an upgrade amount of 200,000 tech points I just feel that there should be a large capacity tech upgrade available.
I think that 12,200 tech upgrade points is far too low and in my opinion is a flaw in their system.
Im glad you did well and had a successful run ;-)
However - I take from it that you probably PvP'd during the daytime when the more hardcore PvPers are not on. There is simply no way that in current STO PvP you can regularly be successful using mark 10 gear.. let alone common.
It's sick. Not necessarily just on Cryptic's end. :P I know. Seriously, though, 358k Upgrade XP for any single item is just too much. It breeds resentment. Got a nice Xmas bonus, is why i did it; but I would appreciate if Geko toned it down a bit.
Sorry it's the other way around, if you don't have anything else to do why upgrade ... for what, doing nothing with it ?
I agree with you, though ... Upgrading shouldn't be done, it's just pointless ...
My first 3 upgrade items in game were 3 Ultra-Rare Antiproton DHC's (one was at Mk VII, the other two were IV or V I believe). I bought these for a considerably modest price on the exchange, and with the mods and rarity I wanted on them, all I had to do was grind the game, buy tech upgrades and get them to Mk XIV (hoping, oddly enough, that none of them procced to Epic on a 1% chance, lest my loadout look assymetrical). Got it done in less than a month, and I'm taking a similar strat for everything I can (except Rep gear, of course).
Anyways, yeah, I can safely say that Epic quality is an enormous waste of resources for a pathetic improvement in quality - definitely the epitome of "diminishing returns," so I won't be wasting my time on upgrading my perfectly adequate UR gear.
At the current cost of upgrading from UR Mk Anything to Epic Mk XIV quality, the jump would probably have to be bigger than the difference between a common Mk X piece of gear and an UR Mk XII piece of gear, like a modifier that converts 10% of all damage to shield/hull hit points for weapons, or a modifier that doubles exotic damage and drain potency on a deflector array. Otherwise, forget it.
And while we're on the subject, cryptic is doing a pretty lousy job of convincing me to level up R&D for my own personal gain. As it is, simply buying the service on the exchange is better in basically every way.
This is why I am sticking with MK XII UR at best. I am not upgrading anything more than the one TR-116B rifle. I got it to Epic quality, which happened while upgrading it to MK XIV. However, even on it, epic quality was not worth trying for.
They should bring the cost for upgrading down to about 1/4 of what it is to make it worth anything. If they did that, I am sure that a lot more players would consider it. I know it would make me at least consider it.
However, they are still trying to milk the whales. Sadly, they are trying to get every last drop out of them before bringing the cost to a reasonable price. I have seen a lot of friends only log in for the races during the winter event, then log out. And it is because they don't want to work in a game, but play it.
I hope that the developers stop milking soon, and start focusing on the things that will improve the quality of the game. When I started playing last year, I would have given it a 8.5 out of 10. However, now it ranks about a 4 out of 10 for me.
I am trying to find a game that I can play while playing this one. Before, I was only interested in STO.
Sadly, greed has overtaken them. In the previous podcast, I recall Geko justifying the insane upgrade cost, in order 'to keep the lights on.' Lotsa people are buying into that, saying Cryptic is not a charity and all. But they're forgetting that... the lights were already on prior to DR! So, everything since DR has just been surplus profit, and quite unreasonable.
Unreasonable, however, is not an argument you can use on a company. Companies, in that regard, have no conscience: they're doing what they're getting away with. Simple as that. When asked what their core values are, in an EvE Online youtube pardody I once saw, they had the brass answer "We're a company; our core value is to have no values."
That is where we're at, at the moment.
Wow - he really had the tenacity to state that..? So he is exactly saying that it is fine to rip off our players because we need it to keep our company alive...?
I think that is disgraceful sentiment and I actually find it infuriating.
Cryptic clearly have some very simple but very key business lessons to learn:
Number 1) Dont rip off your customers blatantly, and expect them to be happy about it, or stay customers for very long.
Number 2) Dont ignore or alienate your entire customer base, but instead respond to their comments, especially when they have disputes over their satisfaction.
Number 3) Dont make a game that is 'play to win' if you want it last for more than 5-10 years, and be a successful MMO.
Im sorry guys, but i really am losing my patience with this joke of a company now...