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STO's Paradigm Shift
staq16
Member Posts: 1,181 Arc User
So, I blanched when I saw the new Specialisation plan yesterday. I'd just about got my head around the fact that it was going to take me until around May to complete the initial three and now it's up to four at least.
This probably shouldn't have bothered me but it did. I mean, back when STF Mk XII gear was the product of random mission drops, and Mk XII VR consoles were the product of extremely rare DOff mission results, I specifically avoided aiming for those on the grounds that you could get "90% of the effect for 10% of the cost". It took me most of 2011 to level 2 alts with the way the game worked at that time.
Then I went and reread the original blog about specialisations, and it clicked that STO has fundamentally changed; but not in the way (monetisation) that most players complain about.
There is still remarkably little in game that you *have* to spend money on. Dil is not money; I've upgraded 4 alts to full Mk XIV sets (albeit only at the gear's original VR / UR) using dil saved up over time. And all of that dilithium they want you to spend Zen on... has to be earned by players (unless you believe Cryptic are consciously manupulating the dil exchange, which is one of the few allegations I haven't seen lately).
Only C-store ships and lockbox/lobi gear require players to spend hard cash. (Buying Zen with dil is, of course, spending someone else's cash). The one "hard" piece of monetisation in DR is the fact that you need to have a C-store ship (either T5U or T6) for the upper reaches of endgame content - and even that dies when you factor in event ships like the Sarr Theln.
What has changed is the time/effort required to reach the "upper limit" of character potential; and this has changed by an order of magnitude (as in, 10x the effort it used to need). But as many of Cryptic's defenders point out, you don't need to be at that level to tackle advanced or even some elite content.
STO's paradigm has changed in that it's gone from a game where it was relatively straightforward to get an Alt into the "top 10%" range for power - by which I mean within 10% of the most potent level of traits/gear possible - to being a very long term process (4-6 months of daily play per alt). The game has gone from encouraging players to have multiple characters to pushing the long-term development of a main character.
This is not inherently bad; what it is, is jarring for players who were emotionally attached to multiple characters and were used to them being at "top gear" levels. The only real casualty is PVP - which was on life support anyway - as there is now no longer even a pretence at balance between characters. But as someone who used to enjoy PVP, before being driven out by the gimmick-arms race creep and increasing tempo/complexity of that element, I have some sympathy with a dev view that the remaining PVP community no longer care about balance and will just keep vaping each other come what may (rather like what I hear about PVP in more open games like EVE or Elite).
But if PVP is not a factor, the only thing making a player race to the top is self induced pressure. The game adds to this by subtly implying that if you don't have all specialisations and full Mk XIV epic gear, you're missing out on the REAL FUN. This is reinforced by the way that the game emphasises players But that's advertising for you and to be fair, it's now how the devs have actually built PVE.
So I'm back to asking myself why I'm playing STO - and the bottom line remains that it's because I like Klingons. And the Klingons, I suspect, would be the first to argue that having the best ships and weapons is *not* what it's about, since onscreen they had a philosophy of running most designs on for decades. Unfortunately the Klingon philosophy - lots of individually smaller and less capable ships - does not translate well to STO.
So what? Well, I can either quit, go insane or try and manage my own expectations. At the moment I'm trying the latter. But the game's paradigm has changed by explicit and publicly stated design - the aim now is to push towards "unlimited progression". I think in my own twisted little mind the solution may be to settle on older T5U designs rather than go mad trying to "appropriately" gear a cutting edge ship. My Fed-Klink has started this, going back to his rustbucket Hirogen Hunter instead of the shiny Phantom.
The losers? In the end, Cryptic. If I'm incentivised to make do because the top tier is unreachable, and PVP is unplayable, I will hesitate before buying another ship. Because I can maraud perfectly well in a B'rel or Negh'var
.
This probably shouldn't have bothered me but it did. I mean, back when STF Mk XII gear was the product of random mission drops, and Mk XII VR consoles were the product of extremely rare DOff mission results, I specifically avoided aiming for those on the grounds that you could get "90% of the effect for 10% of the cost". It took me most of 2011 to level 2 alts with the way the game worked at that time.
Then I went and reread the original blog about specialisations, and it clicked that STO has fundamentally changed; but not in the way (monetisation) that most players complain about.
There is still remarkably little in game that you *have* to spend money on. Dil is not money; I've upgraded 4 alts to full Mk XIV sets (albeit only at the gear's original VR / UR) using dil saved up over time. And all of that dilithium they want you to spend Zen on... has to be earned by players (unless you believe Cryptic are consciously manupulating the dil exchange, which is one of the few allegations I haven't seen lately).
Only C-store ships and lockbox/lobi gear require players to spend hard cash. (Buying Zen with dil is, of course, spending someone else's cash). The one "hard" piece of monetisation in DR is the fact that you need to have a C-store ship (either T5U or T6) for the upper reaches of endgame content - and even that dies when you factor in event ships like the Sarr Theln.
What has changed is the time/effort required to reach the "upper limit" of character potential; and this has changed by an order of magnitude (as in, 10x the effort it used to need). But as many of Cryptic's defenders point out, you don't need to be at that level to tackle advanced or even some elite content.
STO's paradigm has changed in that it's gone from a game where it was relatively straightforward to get an Alt into the "top 10%" range for power - by which I mean within 10% of the most potent level of traits/gear possible - to being a very long term process (4-6 months of daily play per alt). The game has gone from encouraging players to have multiple characters to pushing the long-term development of a main character.
This is not inherently bad; what it is, is jarring for players who were emotionally attached to multiple characters and were used to them being at "top gear" levels. The only real casualty is PVP - which was on life support anyway - as there is now no longer even a pretence at balance between characters. But as someone who used to enjoy PVP, before being driven out by the gimmick-arms race creep and increasing tempo/complexity of that element, I have some sympathy with a dev view that the remaining PVP community no longer care about balance and will just keep vaping each other come what may (rather like what I hear about PVP in more open games like EVE or Elite).
But if PVP is not a factor, the only thing making a player race to the top is self induced pressure. The game adds to this by subtly implying that if you don't have all specialisations and full Mk XIV epic gear, you're missing out on the REAL FUN. This is reinforced by the way that the game emphasises players But that's advertising for you and to be fair, it's now how the devs have actually built PVE.
So I'm back to asking myself why I'm playing STO - and the bottom line remains that it's because I like Klingons. And the Klingons, I suspect, would be the first to argue that having the best ships and weapons is *not* what it's about, since onscreen they had a philosophy of running most designs on for decades. Unfortunately the Klingon philosophy - lots of individually smaller and less capable ships - does not translate well to STO.
So what? Well, I can either quit, go insane or try and manage my own expectations. At the moment I'm trying the latter. But the game's paradigm has changed by explicit and publicly stated design - the aim now is to push towards "unlimited progression". I think in my own twisted little mind the solution may be to settle on older T5U designs rather than go mad trying to "appropriately" gear a cutting edge ship. My Fed-Klink has started this, going back to his rustbucket Hirogen Hunter instead of the shiny Phantom.
The losers? In the end, Cryptic. If I'm incentivised to make do because the top tier is unreachable, and PVP is unplayable, I will hesitate before buying another ship. Because I can maraud perfectly well in a B'rel or Negh'var
. Post edited by staq16 on
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Take most builds have specialization in multiple fields right now to survive. So most builds will be missing certain skills that might otherwise be useful and what we'd used to be able to do is buy Boffs or get another player to train them on the Boffs we had.
Now though and this is what botheres me the most is this is a Zen grab, you'll have to retrain in order to unlock all of the skills you'd need to train for any build you might be using, and then retrain again to the build that you were working with at the time. So it's possible to have to build for several specs in order to unlock the ability to train those skills, several times, with several tokens from the Zen store, and then train AGAIN to revert to the one you were using before that you prefer.
A single retrain token won't fly because you won't have the ability to train all of the skills you need from just one token so they are definitely blatantly grabbing for cash now seriously it's obvious to anyone with two eyes. smh
I hope someone sensible buys them out soon and starts the process of changing personnel because it's getting worse.
Somewhere around summer probably
But yeah, the metrics show that the whales are happy singleplayer farming for passive copy-paste text and so be it
Don't need the queues, just throw out and episode every 3 months and slap 800 patrol missions on it peace out
However now with new specializations, upgrades, and simply more to choose [see. kit mods versus old kits] from there's always a point now for continuing on with a given character. Even after the longer haul to finish a character he/she/it might be "satisfactory" now but with the next update Crtypic could add a spec type that works even better with your intended playstyle [forcing you to continue on with him/her/it in order to remain satisfactory.]
I'll argue that it represents a stronger core design of STO (because with so much more depth you're far less quick to reach a point where you'll have to play from a completely different faction and/or class to get more playtime.) But it is difficult adjusting one's habits to fit the new model (see. the decisions involved with and process of dismantling 3-4 alts) and Cryptic hasn't done a whole lot to help players along with that.
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The cost of acquiring gear is based on keeping a player "busy" (or at least have him mindful of reaching a particular goal) for a predictable amount of time.
I think that is ultimately what is making alts difficult. But the devs have made the reputation system a lot more alt-friendly with sponsorship tokens and the Event Ship discounts, so I think the time "restrictions" are aimed really at the "single character" case and they don't mind if a second or more characters could advance considerably faster - the primary objective is that daily and constant time investment in STO.
I think there is a good point to ask for ways to make the life of alts easier, and to also suggest specific ideas on how to do it or what areas need it.
You cannot respec specialization powers, only regular skill points, and you already have to respec if you want to train BO skills that you need certain skills for that you currently don't possess. So I am not sure what you're about, unless you simply didn't know this.
And unlike the old system, now your BOs don't forget powers - they learn them permanently. That means you respec once, train all your BOFFs the skills you can teach now, and then switch to whatever you want and never need to spec back. Unless you acquire a new BOFF - for that, maybe you should also make some training manuals? Of course, you could also use the exchange for that then...
One or two coders will be able to keep the event cycle churning almost indefinitely...:(
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I have not been doing that since i finished DR arc...
Cryptic was very honest about the entire thing in a dev post a while back about the specialization system: the entire point was that xp would never become useless like it did in the old system (if you max out all the specialization trees, you can convert skill points to dil). This means that they wanted to make it so that a character was never "finished," probably because people would get bored and quit the game. There are some people who just love leveling a character up and don't know what to do with themselves when there's nothing left to improve.
I like this system, and it's not that badly done. I have 1 main and 5 alts, and I'm almost done upgrading all their gear to mk 14. They're not all at level 60, but they can do advanced content just fine and 3 of them can do elite pve's without being carried even though none of them has finished a spec tree. And even after they introduce new spec trees, you can only use 1 at a time so having 1 finished means your character is technically maxed out.
In other words, there are new time sinks (spec trees, upgrading to gold if you use in-game dil, etc.) but they are *far* from necessary.
What *is* necessary is knowing how to play the game, because it doesn't matter if you have everything up to mk 14 gold with all your spec trees filled if you're just going to pew-pew a tarantula in the azure nebula for 3 minutes instead of releasing the tractor beams or if you're going to try to kill every borg and voth and undine in bde instead of letting them fight each other and free the borg ships. You can do advanced content just fine with mk xii gear from the exchange and elite content with non-gold mk xiv gear if you know what you're doing.
tl;dr version: if you don't like enormous grinds (like me), then don't do them and just learn to play the game effectively. You'll do fine. If you do like grinds (and some people do! I don't judge!), then now STO has something to offer you. The only people who'll have a problem are people who don't like grinds but like having that feeling of completion, that feeling that they finished everything they could do to get the best stuff, even though that stuff isn't needed, and I guess those people are the losers in this new system.
I agree, it is nice to not have wasted XP. I was discouraged from playing my main alt when he hit level 50. Now that we keep earning XP for specializations, I want to keep playing him. Overall I like the new system, but then again I only really like to play my main and my alts tend to sit around. I would be more open to playing Alts if the gear was account bound instead of character bound, but I have so much invested into one character I don't really want to invest time or dil in another.
I know this will never happen, but it would be interesting if they followed the path Blizzard did with Diablo 3 and Paragon levels. Basically characters level up like normal and once they hit max level, they earn experience to their Paragon levels. The experience gathered is account wide, so alts can contribute to Paragon leveling too.
If Cryptic made specialization XP account wide, it would encourage a multiple character play. Gear binding being available for the entire account vs character would seal the deal for me starting up new Alts.
If it is taking you this long to level your alt's, even under the new increased XP costs, you are probably doing something wrong. Five of my alts should be hitting lvl 60 by the end of the month and I have played them very minimally, three others are going a bit slower and will need some mission supplementation. I would recommend you get yourself some good doff rosters going on your alts.
I feel everyone's pain too, I have one main who I leveled through the content and felt I had to relegate my alts as the "farmers" to feed this toon. But it does not have to be the case if you work within the system, just by being the "farmers" my alts are leveling, yes a slower pace but I can do them all at the same time rather then just mindlessly running through Argala. That leaves me time to play on my main.
There IS a grind ... but when you consider that it takes less than two months of playing a couple of hours a day to fully equip your character in reputation purples (and maxing out all the reps), it's much less than most MMOs out there. Plus contrary to most MMOs, you can actually solo your way to the best gear, which is a great change of pace from throwing one's headset at the wall because your PUG wiped for upteenth time on this last boss.
On the other hand, it is very true that the system is designed to optimize one character rather than playing alts. My main is my federation science girl, and I barely play my rommy engi anymore due to the gear and reputation difference.
That being said, due to the incredibly variable play style of the different ships and different bridge and ground team officers, each character is essentially it's own alts. I have a bunch of ships .. so when I get bored playing a pure science ship like the Intrepids, I can jump into my cruiser. If I get bored with that, I can jump into my carrier. If I get bored with that, I can jump into an escort. Each one of those plays *completely* differently. The only thing that stays the same are your character's four or five career specific abilities. So there is MUCH less need to roll alts in this game than pretty much every other game out there, a fact I absolutely adore about STO as I tend to suffer from severe altitis in MMOs. If I'm playing a rogue in those games, I'm stuck being a rogue. He or she can never be a mage or a priest, no matter how much I wish for it. In STO, not a problem.
When I say 4-6 months, I mean to complete all the specialisations. All 4 are already at L60 and chewing through the process steadily (well, the KDF ones are thanks to their vastly more efficient DOffing).
Getting to L60 is easy. Finishing the Intel tree alone is more XP than the whole of L1-L60.
Very true, and what's really changed in STO is the specialisation trees. Where before it was possible to "finish" a character, now it's less so. Does this matter? Not outside PVP.
And that was really the point of my post. Yes, there's a lot more to spend/grind for in the DR era; but very little of it is needed for 90% of game content.