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Why content is made harder now
deaftravis05
Member Posts: 4,885 Arc User
Lately I've been seeing rage on the forums from people complaining that the content is too hard.
Honestly? no it isn't. It's hard, but quite doable if you learn how to play. There are many guides out there to show you how to properly set up a torp boat, beam boat, exotic matter boat, tank, healer, what have you.
Before, many of us others have complained that there are pugs who have no IDEA how to play. They enter the mission and ruin it for everyone else, forcing us players who know how to play the game to go into channels rather than risk pugging. Then those awful players started to follow us into those channels so the DPS channel was established with a 10k baseline. ANYONE can do 10k dps, with a proper layout. No I don't mean the kind that requires money. I have a loadout that does 27k dps without having to spend money.
The content is made harder so players are forced to learn instead of going rainbow beams with torpedo tac consoles and consoles designed to increase engine power and crew recovery rates. I'm pretty sure they're tired of the high failure rate and the ridiculously low dps of many players that makes their missions difficult to do.
If you think it's hard, ask in the public elite stf channel how to have a proper loadout or go look in sto academy or even ask here. Done politely, you'd be surprised how much help you'd get. I have fleeters armed with only green/blue items, and a decent boff setup, they do approximately 10k dps now.
Instead of complaining that the game is too hard, work on yourself, get better. They are quite doable. Advanced and Elite are difficult to do and impossible with a random loadout. A proper loadout will make advanced a breeze (if you pay attention) and elite is doable when you know HOW to play. I blast through bughunt elite, and Rhino station very easily.
Instead of yelling at the developers for encouraging you how to play and to help you stop getting ridiculed by the actual players, please, just try to learn how to play. It's so easy, and so cheap to do.
To the developers, thank you for making the content harder. It has frustrated us but it has also challenged us to play better, to learn the game and it has made them enjoyable. Before you did this, I did a mere 14k dps, then when I realised if I wanted to play advanced without fail, I need to better my ship... I did that and now my dps is doubled.
Honestly? no it isn't. It's hard, but quite doable if you learn how to play. There are many guides out there to show you how to properly set up a torp boat, beam boat, exotic matter boat, tank, healer, what have you.
Before, many of us others have complained that there are pugs who have no IDEA how to play. They enter the mission and ruin it for everyone else, forcing us players who know how to play the game to go into channels rather than risk pugging. Then those awful players started to follow us into those channels so the DPS channel was established with a 10k baseline. ANYONE can do 10k dps, with a proper layout. No I don't mean the kind that requires money. I have a loadout that does 27k dps without having to spend money.
The content is made harder so players are forced to learn instead of going rainbow beams with torpedo tac consoles and consoles designed to increase engine power and crew recovery rates. I'm pretty sure they're tired of the high failure rate and the ridiculously low dps of many players that makes their missions difficult to do.
If you think it's hard, ask in the public elite stf channel how to have a proper loadout or go look in sto academy or even ask here. Done politely, you'd be surprised how much help you'd get. I have fleeters armed with only green/blue items, and a decent boff setup, they do approximately 10k dps now.
Instead of complaining that the game is too hard, work on yourself, get better. They are quite doable. Advanced and Elite are difficult to do and impossible with a random loadout. A proper loadout will make advanced a breeze (if you pay attention) and elite is doable when you know HOW to play. I blast through bughunt elite, and Rhino station very easily.
Instead of yelling at the developers for encouraging you how to play and to help you stop getting ridiculed by the actual players, please, just try to learn how to play. It's so easy, and so cheap to do.
To the developers, thank you for making the content harder. It has frustrated us but it has also challenged us to play better, to learn the game and it has made them enjoyable. Before you did this, I did a mere 14k dps, then when I realised if I wanted to play advanced without fail, I need to better my ship... I did that and now my dps is doubled.
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"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Move into range.
Stop moving.
Press spacebar to win.
Repeat.
Then DR happened and I started having to try. I was spoiled on my laziness. I was surprised that I had to change my tactics to beat all the new missions. I didn't like it, but it was a nice change.
Quoted for truth
Bingo
However, they are still doing this the wrong way, just because the ground rewards gets bigger, the mission itself has still the same problem.
I MUST do Bug Hunt on advanced so I can get Ancient Cell for my reputation gear, and it is a pain every time, sure it depends on the group but I still find the mission very disorientated, there is no real structure and having 30 bugs spawn in a 360 circle every 10 sec doesn't help.
Borg Disconnected Advanced is another thing, its not harder, it is just slower because of the enemy buff in HP, and I don't find that fun at all, just makes me stand still and fire all my beams for 20 seconds longer the usual.
Doing everything on Normal is fun, but you are not really rewarded for it, and advanced is to hard for PUG so we just ignore it and continue on Normal.
Advanced is from 5-15 minutes waiting time with 50-70% chance of fail and no rewards.
Or Normal with 1-5 minutes waiting time with 50-70% chance of win with no rewards.
So whatever happens, my chance of getting Ancient Cells are very low.
That's pugged. Gotta find the good players. Plus Delta Rep T5 ability is extremely useful when being overrun.
And the marmot, it puts the chocolate in the alu-foil
that's a myth.
If mission can't be PUGged then it, for most part, won't be played.
That is the purpose. The design is to encourage rage purchase of upgrades. Regardless of whether such upgrades actually help so much across various missions.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Agree, but I am a casual player, my point is that they should overlook it, my fleet is mostly from the states and I am from Sweden so people are often online when the time is 00:00-03:00 GMT+1
Anyway, hopefully they will look over it till the next season update, cause as I can see it right now on queue's; nothing has changed, people are still not doing ground and the usual Space scenarios are still full and the others empty.
Like players in...
-bda who all go to the same spawn point, like all 5 would be there if I wasn't soloing a different point
-ANRA who all go to the same station together and can't free a T'Liss in 3 minutes
-KSA who can't kill 2 probes in the time it takes them to get to the transwarp gate
-CSA who all go to save kang and no one helps me do the stations so that the BOPs stop spawning sooner
-Mine Trap who don't defend the buildings
-ISA who parse below 6000 dps
Etc.
My guess is that since people were complaining for years that STO is too easy, Cryptic made the missions about more than just shooting at ships. I like the changes on most of the queues, the problem is that other players don't seem to want to make even the tiniest change in their play-style or build to play these missions correctly.
And you don't need better than mk xii gear to do advanced content so I doubt they made the optionals required to sell upgrade kits (and so what if they did? It costs money to produce a game. They can't pay devs, PR people, voice actors, etc. with EC - they need real world moneys).
So Crpytic did what people on the forums say they never do: They listened to them.
Unfortunately, it turns out that while there may have been people that wanted things to be harder, there were also plenty people that were quite happy with the difficulty level of the game.
I think it's just evidence that suggests that the forum does attract primarily the people that are unhappy with the game, but that doesn't mean they represent a majority. (Nor a minority. It just means we can't actually know how many people dislike something from forum posts.) And that gets us into problems if likes and dislikes of the community are mutually exclusive.
the difference they make, isn't that much. The stuff you can get off the exchange is good enough.
I wish they'd take the timer off "High Onslaught"... the ground is doable... and can fail easily if we get sloppy... but space is quite, quite difficult due to the timer. Take it off or increase the first timer by a few minutes, but... for the moment I'm content as I got stuff to upgrade, do and all that.
Back to my point, almost all content can be doable with the right gear, boff layout and good team communication. They don't need to be elite, ultra-high end stuff with a team that says 1 or 2 words and all is understood.
You don't need to buy the stuff with real money. That stuff gives you a few percentage edge. If you're winning/losing by a few percentage points, you got other problems.
1 million EC will get you gear for any ship that will give you a fighting chance to complete the missions, after that, any ec/dil you earn can go toward improving your ship/captain/boffs for more ease.
If the content had 5 objectives where the players were split apart and had to engage strong ships so many of these 27k Fail builds would just fail because there weak with practically no defenses at all
4 or 5 tac consoles and the rest universal consoles total DPS builds
naturally ts3 nutronic torp/ plasma dope
Its cryptics fault for designing content that allows such poor builds to dominate there content ,. Not the players fault for taking advantage of it
If players had to do a single player mission before being allowed to Q up for the STFs ,. And this solo mission was designed to challenge the players skill/build /and gear we would have much more interesting builds and much better STFs
Naturally if I item was changed on the build you would have to redo the solo mission
Right now 5 guys max pew pew team speak and content gone in 60 seconds because the team DPS overwhelms the enemy before they can fire back
Another note that 27k build in a pug with 4 team mates doing 2k each would do what for DPS ?
The content designers for STO really need to buff up there game I give them a F right now
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
27k dps is the best I can do to maintain a balance between tanking and dps.
If the devs read this, I bet they'd say: "Oh -- so it's *still* not hard enough for them." Sarcasm: Thanks for telling them. More sarcasm: That really helped improve the game.
I've played on "normal" for over 2 years ... and I want "normal" to stay that way, not get pushed up into the stratosphere. I'm one of those casual, non-hardcore players who liked how the difficulties were *before* Delta Rising. I do *not* want to have to have a ship with 10K DPS and higher to survive STFs and PVEs. No thank you. I want a game that's like Star Trek, not like Quake, not like a wargame.
Devs: Thank you for "Empress Sela". Please do more like that one.
ohhh, trust me, we can blast through missions like BHE or IGA, I've done one in 4 minutes 30 seconds (IGA for the hostages)... but that's with a team with all tacs, we were all buffing each other constantly and constantly moving. We had done the map so many times we knew exactly what to do. but take 1 or 2 of us out and replace it with a standard pug and it's a lot harder. Why? We knew exactly who must die first before we can proceed, and if they werent killed, mission failure. IF one of us got dropped by a crit hit, we had issues and we ran the risk of mission failure. I've had those teams that do it in 5 minutes and we've gotten a crit hit that nearly ruined us. But we knew what to do, failsafes and all that... resulting in the targets saved, but most of us dead with the last guy staying alive long enough for the team to respawn without all 5 dead and mission failure. How? Communications, practise and constantly bettering ourselves.
Yes there were plenty who liked the lower difficulty. For them there's normal mode. They may want that Epic gear, but then they also need to know what it's for and how to use it. A lot complain because they can't get their shiny (see complaint's about BNP's and Ancient Cells...). Good builds tend to use Nukara and Romulan, or sometimes Solonae and Delta for more specialist builds. All are easy to get and some are even free.
Too many variables to come to that conclusion. It's more that the people making complaints who are either new or stuck in the noob section of the playerbase don't always comprehend the issues in the game.
For instance balance at the moment is still horrendously broken. The overreaction on CCA has brought a 5 min timer into it for Advanced. Why? It didn't need that timer at all let alone in Advanced. If there was an Elite level then understandable, that would be a huge incentive. But at Advanced level there is no need for it (or any other Mandatory optional!). Advanced should be the learning ground for the Elite levels, which currently it pretty much is. However it also requires a minimum DPS to do efficiently, seeing as 95% of STO's playerbase are unequipped to deal with that, therein lies the problem.
During the game there isn't enough explanation on how to build a ship or character. The player is expected to learn it all for the most part independently of the game. Due to the number of variables involved it literally takes months to learn the nuances of each aspect. From why you need to have CrtH consoles and CrtD weapons, to why you need to use particular DoFF's and certain BoFF skills being useless. That hasn't even touched, skills, traits, specialisations, fleets, etc....
Scary thing is that's just for space, it's taken me 2 months to learn what's needed for Ground Gear and what should be run on what PvE Queue's as a result.
It's a hardcore game under a thinly veiled casual veneer, which in essence is the biggest problem of all. How do you teach people to play a game which has so many attributes when all they know is to click a few things and fireworks happen.
Lets not mention the cost or the economy either...
Or that a cheap competitive ship costs about 0.5M to 1M EC to setup (pretty simple to make), but a truly competitive ship costs around 400M to 1B EC and around 300,000-750,000 Dil to setup...
"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."
So true. Add that the 1 hour penality and the harsh fail conditions too. Seriously, it seems like this game is now designed by and for masochists or something. Never seen at a game something like this to an intermediate lvl of dificulty, as is supposed to be the advanced level. And same goes for fails. You get "rewarded" with a middle finger in a form of an hour time-out
You are right. But not necesary designing the content but as much as balancing the content. You cant have anymore interesting builds becouse of the HP lvls and timers along with the imbalance between skills, boff skills and such. Skills are labeled "subpar" or "not optimal" and players who may enjoy/using them are blamed, not Cryptic wich is responsable for that. So in the end only DPS builds can be used. Or even if you manage to do content in ur lil DPS fun ship, you struggle the TRIBBLE out of it and you are belittle for your DPS.
And I belive the post-DR allready hard content is made even harder with the anniv patch becouse the metrics failed. The metrics told Cryptic that players were doing too well in STFs. But it failed to tell them HOW MANY players. Since the majority dont play the queues anymore, quited or do mindless Argala runs. And only the players from the DPS channels (mostly) were doing STF runs... And again the majority got screwed.
The DPS is possible, if you don't give the enemy the ability to withstand it for while, the you have to resort to things that could end up being even worse. Invulnerability shields for example - or heals. Now suddenly a low DPS guy has to dela with the fact that his enemy can heal the pathetic damage he deals! (Either by being invulnerable for a while land passively recovering, or by healing).
Massive hit points numbers can at least be slowly reduced.
And an Invulnerability Shield that exist even once is practically as lame as saying "you need to wait 30 seconds before you can really start playing the mission).
STO's problem is that there can be such a ridicilous large discrepancy between DPS.
Poor balance of items and some broken item (like those embassy plasma consoles) is responsible in a large part for it. But no one at Cryptic probably has an idea how to reign this in (especially if you don't even know what is broken and what not). Maybe Adjudicatorhawk had an idea what to do - but he is no longer there, right?
And you are also right that part of the problem is that the game doesn't explain its mechanics very well. But to be honest, I think most games don't do that. But what some games do is - create abilities and gear that naturally work together and make sense.*
There are some things where it'S really simple - for example, Deflectors. Look at the skills your abilities need, and pick the deflector that boosts them.
But why should you not make a rainbow ship? Why can't Cannon/Beam consoles be just as good as Energy Type consoles. (Except when you use the Embassy plasma Console)? Why is Beam Fire At Will better for a Beam Cruiser than Beam Overload, they have the same ranks?!
*) I am not saying TOR is a good game, well balanced or that it has good gameplay, but: They have certain power rotations in mind when they designed the classes. I have no idea how the gear really works into this for the most part, but those rotations are something you can almost naturally learn. It may be a bit too constrained compared to STO's power system, but STO's freedom also means that the power combinations and rotations that work will be byzantine and arcane.
The Voth already have the invulnerability shield. They also have the insane damage reflect shield as well all on the Bulwark. I ran into that issue on Elite using a Aehlal Cruiser (not the highest DPS out) during the campaign before the mission was fixed. It took the better part of two hours to beat, not through difficulty, but sheer hitpoints with reflective and invulnerable shields.
Hitpoints can be increased in multiple ways, but they don't always have to be the physical hitpoints themselves. For instance having X hitpoints for Normal, with Advanced having X+33%+ 25% ResistAll and Elite having X+66%+50% ResistAll. That would give a ship that has a base 50,000 hitpoints around 66500 in Advanced and 83000 in Elite. The damage resist's allow for the difficulty to be increased without it feeling like a massive slog through 1 Million hitpoints yet still provide a quick and easy method to adjust difficulty to suit if there's a discrepancy.
DPS varies widly for a number of different reasons. First up is distance calculations, at 10Km from target ships do sod all damage. Whereas within their short range modifier they do far more damage. Hence you see video's of Ryan practically hugging his targets with DBB's going nuts.
Second is power drain, at Power 50 you are doing only 50% of the damage of Power 100. Hence the massive drive for power, not to mention the softcap of 125 power vs the hardcap at 175 or something like that. So you can get some ridiculous performance differences just from power settings.
Both of those have nothing to do with equipped gear for the most part and can increase damage by multiple factors straight away.
Thing is should it be so difficult to learn how to do damage??? The current method promotes face hugging the target rather than tactical positioning. Cannon's lose out even more due to narrow target arc's, huge power drain and poor damage ranges.
Thing is the system would need a full revamp to rebalance and manage the systems to make it usable for most players. Something that is currently not in the plan...
Though if Cryptic would like to hire me I'd be more than happy to sort it out
"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. My first "big" MMO as Anarchy Online back in the day, and I've played and still play quite a few and I am flabbergasted by the amount of bugs, features and even the little things that would take 30 seconds to fix some of it that's been with this game for years.