Dil Event not affecting mark or BNP/Iso/etc turnins

rahmkota19 · February 2015

Okay.

First of all, thank you for this level of communication on such short base. Keep up with this communication, and I believe the forums will definitely improve.

That being said.

WHAT. WHY. HOW. WHERE. WHEN.

Thats not how this works.

The reason players keep saving up their marks is to earn bonus dilithium. Why would we save up as much as we do? Because we NEED it.

No, I don't want to have such a huge amount of things to spend dilithium in. All of mine goes straight to my fleet. I have been able to so far upgrade 1 torpedo launcher and 1 MACO set to Mark XIII. Let along the rest of my gear. On that one specific character. Let along the other 6 characters.

You ask us to spend so much dilithium into everything, that we simply do not have a choice but to find and use any increase in dilithium we can find.

You want people to not hord up their dilithium? Then don't force them too. Let them convert whenever, by lowering dilithium requirements across the board.

Or just permanently increase the amount those projects pay out. One of those options oughtta do it.

Ow, although I appreciate your apoligy fix, it was simply not enough. In no way am I going to be able to earn hundreds of thousands of bonus dilithium because the event got extended by 3 days. No chance for that. Not one small chance for that.

ddesjardins · February 2015

TY Sir. Well handled.

shinnok918 · February 2015

First thing out of the new cryptic commander =SCREWED

quepan · February 2015

thanks for the response , but this is the wrong thing to nerf IMO , it should have stayed plain and simple it gave another option for players to benefit from these weekends , the rewards lowered to the point that these weekends are really not worth the time or effort . trading marks was a good perk to compensate for what been done . with the drop of another sink into the dil reserves of players .
this game is becoming less and less of freedom to have players play the game they want ,more of play where you tell us and how . there should always be alternatives for players not the opposite .
youve funneled the player base into one set on content . rather than letting the diverse players find there niche of fun . so basically the only way to make di is to hunt dinos and exploit the system .
i do alot of contraband is that next on the list? why is that ok and marks isnt?

if you increased the overall reward for say turning in marks than and playing content in general you might have a happier player base in the long run .

generalmoco · February 2015

I've been through 3 diff EP through out the time of me playing STO...

This was an issue that was handled the best out of all 3...

Thank you for that Mr. Ricossa!!!

raisencain1 · February 2015

Just so nice of you guys to cut another way of making dil in the game. I'm wondering now and maybe could we get a heads up, is this gona happen to the marks too?

Thanks in Advance

comtedeloach2 · February 2015

This is a huge mistake on YOUR part. People have saved those marks to turn in on this weekend because DIL is so damn limited every other time. Have they not played that content to get the marks? Hey, I can go play Diablo III, not this. We need that dil to pay for your overpriced upgrades. We are already hamstrung by the refine limit, we don't need to be hamstrung by the accumulation limit too. It doesn't matter if we change in enough marks to get a billion in unrefined dil, we can only refine 9000 a day over 352 days a year. 3,168,000 is it for the year. doesn't matter if I have a billion unrefined or not, it would be impossible for me to refine more than that in a year. So what does it matter how I cash in?

kimony · February 2015

Someone should have kindly reminded Mr Ricossa:

"You never get a second chance at making a good first impression."

emeraldsiun · February 2015

No.

I've been grinding enough, I can't be bothered to grind some more at this point just for a pittance extra of dil. I'm burnt out. I'm not going to waste time spending a week in game to help with your metrics to gain the dil I should already have through my own patient saving of resources.

This slight deviance from the usual contempt and walls of silence still does nothing to fix the many problems of Delta Grinding and I'm not falling for it.

This game had a lot of goodwill from it's players, was recommended as a good casual fun game prior to that disgusting waste of voice acting, maps and resources commonly known as Delta Grinding. Since then it's been a foul festering mess of randomised and time-gated content, nerfs and dwindling player interest.

I am not going to log in and slowly build up my dil again to waste it on that nasty piece of TRIBBLE you call crafting. I am not going to make hundreds of failures, waste millions of ec and dil on the slim chance that maybe this time when an item goes to ultra rare, it won't be rendered vendor trash with an unwanted mod.

Extending your so-called dil weekend to a week changes nothing. It's just a scam to make your numbers look good, so you'll be able to claim players are coming back again.

crypticarmsman · February 2015

Well, we see how the 'change in Command" (aka the EP swap out) affected STO - even MORE reward nerfing. WTG Cryptic - Captain Geko wins again (and Salami Inferno either wholeheartedly approve; OR just lets Geko do as he likes) as I'm sure Mr. Rivera was the one behind this decision as on some level he feels players using the Rep Marks to Dil conversion assignments over the Dil weekend is a prime 'over-rewarding' situation - although if that's indeed the case why bother with 'Dilithium Weekends' since the point is to make Dilithium related content reward at a higher rate?

There's so much doubletalk from the STO Dev team being shoveled at STO players of late, it's getting ridiculous.

uranium23567 · February 2015

people slow your roll. read the words *this weekend*. In other words, all future dil weekends will be regular weekends, with no mark turn-ins bonus, or apologizes. So they're trying to calm you down, and hopefully next weekend you would have forgotten about this whole 'wording debacle'.

they could at least give us our bonus rep boxes back to turn in during the rep time, that would be a start, but no.

I also notice the turn in contraband dil has been nerfed too. no mention of THAT

mattaukett · February 2015

First of all thanks for the response SalamiInferno its good to see the EP directly responding to the concerns of the community (even if we don't agree or fully agree with the response - but you're never going to satisfy everyone) so please keep it up and continue your engagement with the community (and fixing the dev tracker properly would be really helpful

) also the extension to the dilithum event in order to compensate for the concerns raised does help show that you've listened to the concerns so thank you.

Now having said that, I've got to agree with the other posters that the timing of this couldn't be worse, rewards for some of the most popular queues (ok so they probably were the easiest for time invested as well which is probably why they were most popular) have just been nerfed while the queues having been made more challenging (again maybe for the right reasons in the long term direction of the game). While at the same time promises have been made for increasing the rewards across other content in the mid-term (which was a previous undefined timescale). I think its fair to say what has been upsetting the community is that most of the reward changes have been to decrease the rewards per unit time to the point with people feeling their time in game is not valued (be that in XP terms, marks or dilithium) and that its now taking too much time investment to develop a character (saying nothing for alts). While I hope that the proposed increases will go some way to correct this view, there had been no time scale previously given on when this will happen and its got to be said that past form gives little confidence that these changes would have made it live any time soon (based on track records for bringing buffs in which benefit the players) so you can understand why everyone is sceptical of these changes ever making it love while at the same time feeling like every change brought in is a constant nerfing of the rewards.

Personally I think if you can deliver on these promises and rekindly popularity in the public queues somehow (may it needs personalised rewards for each player based on overall team performance and individual contribution to the mission as well as and easy missions that actually teach tactics for the harder versions of those missions so we can't/don't end up with hopelessly under powered pugs that don't know they are doing or need the rewards to get equipped to a reasonable level) then I hope game can once again be a great trek game we all know it could and can be.

vsilverwings1 · February 2015

I see contraband and claims then being nerfed/removed from the events as well or even removing the events altogether. As players migrate more to grinding only during the events Cryptic will not like that their metrics only look good during the events so will remove the events so players can make their rewards "valid and valuable all the time, not only during the few Dilithium Weekends we run every year".

Calling it now because that's what I'm thinking of doing, farm only during the events until Cryptic removes that bonus. I'm looking at just doing contraband and mining claims this weekend (now week) so I hope this reflects poorly in their metrics.

crusader2007 · February 2015

THANKS for reaching out and at least listening to the playerbase! I hope you do well in the job and Im happy for the communication.

smokeybacon90 · February 2015

Thanks for the response and the concise and to-the-point explanation. You've made a good first impression as EP as far as communication is concerned. Sad that it had to be over this subject though.

swatop · February 2015

ok... fine
let me tell you why i think your comment is not true

You said that the rates at which players earn dilithium remained the same over all that time. How is that possible after you practically have nerfed all the rewards in this game?
How is that possible after you guys have increased the difficulty scales of the PVEs... putting fail conditions on them... and making them so incredible hard that many players can no longer win them?
The dilithium rewards did not stay stable.
If I want to earn dilithium via PVE (just like i used to do long time ago) I have to have an uber expensive ship with expensive upgraded weapons and then i need much luck in order to find a team that is able to do this PVE.
The dilithium rewards for playing regular content dropped massively for MANY players in the game. Players also need much more time to get their rewards these days due to ridiculous difficulty scales where NPCs have millions of HP.

Next to that do "stable" rewards not mean there are good rewards at all.
Fact is over the past months the dilithium costs throughout the entire game exploded.
Players required to upgrade their ships.... player required to upgrade their ship equipment... players require to upgrade their weapons... and pretty much everytime a player want to try a new weapon this weapon has to be upgraded again to be any effective in combat.
Just alone the upgrades consume millions of dilithium for just one single char (here i am not even taking into account that most players have multiple chars -> which they meanwhile abbandon because they can not cover the costs anymore).
With every new character... with every new item that a player want to "try" the upgrade costs raise.... and we are not talking about just a few thousand dil.
We are really talking about millions of dilithium that players additionally have to earn in order to be competative in this game.
And you tell us something about stable rewards?

How stable are these rewards if players can not earn them because they dont do enough dps to play adv. or elite missions any longer?`
How stable are the rewards when people which can not win adv. and elite matches are also locked out from earning the larger amounts of reputation marks and the elite reputation marks?

Players earn less than they used to and at the same time all the costs in this game increased massivle.
And now you take away one of the very few remaining ways to earn good amounts of dilithium.

You want to add dilithium to story missions?
ok go ahead... but be sure that this will absolutely not change anything on the ingame earn rates you were talking about.
Fact is that players have only a limited amount of time to play... either they earn their dilithium on PVEs or they earn the dilithium on story missions.
The amount of time the players spend in the game wont change. Questionable is if you can offer rewards high enough to allow players earning more dilithium in this limited amount of time.
(most likely not)

But to stick with the current mess... it was a very bad move to remove the dilithium rewards for the above reasons. But worse was actually the way how you did it.
You could have long ago announced such plans so players would have grinded for this event. You could have played with open cards. You could have said... "hey guys... we will do a dil bonus even in a few weeks but we will have to change the rewards a bit".
Or you could have let the players do this event just like all the dil bonus events before and after that announced the changes for future events of this kind.
But doing such a sneaking change right when the event started is so.... disgusting.
Really it is disgusting to let the players believe everything is find and make them looking forward to the event... while then you silently do such terrible changes.
The trust between players and cryptic was already damaged before this incident but now its totally broken.

Turning the dilithium weekend in to a full week now clearly does not compensate what players potentially have lost.
If you were up for compensation and showing good will you would have told your developers to do an emergency fix to restore the original content.
Maybe you have not noticed yet.... we have another event running atm. Time is limited.

sorry salamiinferno... you had no good start here and players are more angry than ever before

btw. why are you guys so overly sensitive about how much dilithium ore players earn?
There is a limit at which rate they can convert the ore.
It does not matter if a player has 100k dilithium or 20mio dilithium.... there is this damn limit which prevents the players to convert more than allowed.
There is absolutely no risk for cryptic because of this limit... but once more you guys overreact.

gulberat · February 2015

While it is disappointing that an incident like this occurred, it is promising to see that you have done two things I've been calling for, for a long time:

A) Taking personal ownership of what happens as a leader. Credit to you for not making comments that can be construed as it being the players' fault, or throwing your team under the bus by either forcing them to fend for themselves and not stepping in to take the heat off of them. Taking personal responsibility is a good thing and I hope this demonstrates the sort of commitment and ethic you will bring to your work in the future.

Making up for the promise made to players. It is good to see that at least in this instance, rather than simply nerfing for the sake of metrics or internal intentions, you realized that whatever you had internally, your battle plan did not survive contact with the real world, and your response must now be governed by the external reality of what has occurred. Mind you I don't think players should always get every single thing they want. I realize that way leads the path to madness.

That said, when a promise was made, it is good to see that at least for this event you are doing something to allow players to make up for at least some of what they expected their take to be for this weekend.

In some ways this is similar to what happened when I as a retail manager or one of my team misquoted an order for cheaper than the actual cost: sometimes, the right thing after such an error was to explain the situation to the customer so they knew what to expect going forward, but eat some or all of the loss on the current transaction. Frankly we haven't felt very often that Cryptic understood the need to do this sort of thing when it is a company error--so it's good to see it now.

In a lot of ways, this can be contrasted against what happened with STF difficulties, where what was advertised and what was delivered with DR were quite simply out of line with each other. Thank you for not doing that again.

In the end, whatever metrics, systems, or goals that are in place must support the player experience and not just profit--because ironically, over focus on profit will cost you exactly that.

I hope to see more communication like this. Even when I don't fully agree, this post was clear, responsible, avoided insults, and remembered to respect how players would feel about the matter.

mikefl · February 2015

^^^ This was definitely a better event cycle. I was one of those wanting the events to be more set in stone like the weekends but it has clearly not been a success. It has made the overall play to be terrible with queues, etc.

I played the game far more often (multiple times a day) when we had rotating hourly events. I almost feel like I'm encouraged not to play as I'm dreading logging in thinking about what I have to do.

tk79 · February 2015

Well, I disagree with that mindset, and I will try my best to explain why.

It's called tactics. People will hold onto marks to save for the Dilithium Bonus weekends, but that doesn't come for free. Players that do this will not have more dilithium available to use until the event, and that can mean a long time. This is a fair compromise as far as getting the bonus go. It should be respected.

The same goes for Mark Boxes, that were likewise nerfed. People saved those boxes to open during Reputation Weekends, at the expense of filling their inventory and bank with them. They will also hold onto their marks, as in, NOT get them and not use them, until the event comes up. It's the price they pay for the benefit they will get in the end, for having waited. It's tactics. It's STRATEGY. It's PLAYING THE GAME. Those efforts should be accounted for, and recognized.

Not everyone will do this. In my opinion, the people that do and go through the hassle of doing so should be rewarded.

captaind3 · February 2015

First thanks for the communication, that's a good start.

I understand your problem though I disagree wholly with your methodology on this.

You've effectively...how shall I say, killed Black Friday.

We save all our efforts up and then when the dilithium event hits, we maximize the profit for our hard work. That skyrocket that you saw was Christmas for us. For those of us contributing to small fleets, and trying to gear up either via rep or Fleet, that was, "you've saved up your pennies for several months, no son it's time to go to the toy store".

It was an allowance of respite. I had 100K dilithium stored up. I got a little burned out and tired of the game. I was able to take a week off, just logging in to refine and be on my way. Then I'm resumed normal regular gaming. You're interfering with my stockpiling Mr. Ricossa. Stockpiling that allows me to play how I please and have more fun.

I'm very happy about the addition of dilithium to patrols and episodes, a long overdue addition and welcomed.

On another note, I'm not really big on running events concurrently. If I'm working on Omega Particles I don't want to have to break off and worry about grinding dilithium. That may work for some people, but it's kind of irking me.

jack24bau3r · February 2015

exactly, adding the bonus for the marks back in for this run of the event, and giving notice in anticipation of the next one is the best way to handle this.

jarvisandalfred · February 2015

Thank you for communicating with us, understanding that we were upset about this, and giving us a reward. It's not ideal, for any of us, but it is consistent with the rest of the 'weekend' ideas - reward playing, not stockpiling, and I appreciate that we got something to compensate for this miscommunication. I also appreciate that you're answering this here, on the forums - it's nice to have communication back and forth via this method.

shurato2099 · February 2015

While I certainly appreciate the response and the extra time on the event is appreciated I just have to say ... Too Little, Too Late.

We've all known for some time that the Cryptic staff is not big on communication but snafus like this demonstrate that you're actually quite pathetic at it. I can accept that the earlier blog post was an error and that you didn't intentionally lie to us ... but you wound up doing it anyway. How much lead time do you need to change a single line of text in a front-facing blog entry? Follow that up with your refusal to honor, just this one final time, what you had been advertising in that blog makes you look dishonest and inept.

Say sorry as often as you like, throw us a couple of crumbs by way of apology but that will not change the fact that people took you at your word, went out of their way to prepare for this event so that they could gather enough dilithium for whatever big projects they had lined up ... and then you pulled the rug out from under them with no notice.

You guys already have a bad reputation, one that's growing beyond these forums every day. Your own community distrusts and dislikes you, every act that could be construed as even vaguely negative adds to the pile and when we vent that frustration it still seems to come as a surprise to you.

Let me be clear, then: Take something away from us, whether that's content or in-game currency, and we're going to become angry with you. You've taken a lot from us since Delta Rising launched and, while there have been some very nice things in there too, the bad things tend to stand out.

While 'community confidence' may be an awkward entry for your quarterly spreadsheets, going into the red there never turns out well.

lordhavelock · February 2015

Stephen, thank you for the honest and open explanation about STO's goals for the Dil Weekends, your decisions to change the way it worked to realign the event to meet your goals, and your apology over the miscommunication of the change. Thanks also for extending the event as a mea culpa. I hope you continue with this sort of customer service.

That being said, I have to say I will miss the bonus Dil on Marks and dislike that you're taking away yet another source of Dil from this game by effectively adding another nerf to the amount of Dil we earn from STFs. Whether it was your original intent or not, this is how we've been playing the game for years. :rolleyes:

I don't mind spending money and buying things from time to time (check my account, I'm your favorite customer), but I need to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Lately, and ever increasingly since F2P took over, I have felt this less and less. You do add content to the game, but so much of it is repeating the same stuff over and over again. I feel I'm grinding more for less results, and even the thought of spending money doesn't feel like it adds anything (like the idea of spending $8 on a 10k R&D boost when it takes 630k XP to reach useable L15 and millions more to reach L20 -- It's a drop in the bucket).

Anyway, I'll paraphrase another IP and leave with the idea to consider that the more you tighten your grip the more players will slip through your fingers.

szerontzur · February 2015

I sincerely appreciate the response and the goodwill gesture of compensation.

While I won't get into my opinions regarding the bad mojo of trying to so forcefully "control" your playerbase, I do have two counter-points I would like to bring up for consideration:

1.) People still have to log in during the event window to benefit from it. That is still trackable as an increase of activity that can be shown to management/stockholders. By removing it, that is one less activity players are actively motivated to spend their time doing during the event.

2.) Has the potential devaluing of marks as a dilithium currency been considered? Without the bonus to incentivize, are people even going to be bothered/motivated to play the content that generates them? Has there been consideration that this might very well kill queues (and other mark-generating content) even more?

I am concerned that this short-term grab for metrics is going to have bad long-term consequences. The lure of being able to hold onto something earned via play for a greater return later encourages players to stay invested in the game and revisit it/continue playing when they might otherwise move on to greener pastures. This move just seems.. counter-productive with the original goals of moving Events to a rotational weekend thing instead of an hourly system.

gerwalk0769 · February 2015

I'm disappointed that I will not be able to convert marks. However, thank you for the sincere apology, for accepting responsibility for a company mistake, for the compensation, and for the open and prompt communication. Kudos to you. I appreciate your attitude.

You set a good example.

filemona · February 2015

Now that we know we won't get any extra Dil from this and future Dil week(end)s, could you finally consider a shortcut of some kind in Rep stuff => Dilithium projects?
I imagine it this way:
You put an amount of Marks or Rep currencies (divisible by 50 or 3 if you cannot implement it in other way), the projects starts, it lasts proportionally longer than current one and gets you proportionally bigger Dilithium reward.
Instead of time players are forced to spend combating the system itself, it would grant you, the developers and your publisher, real playing time. Even though it may come out smaller because of less time spent queuing the project and moving the slider, waiting for 15s during which you can't do almost anything else, as it's a ridiculously small time frame, and repeating ad infinitum, you will get the playing time you can brag about because it's spent playing the content you created, not battling with its technicalia.

jarvisandalfred · February 2015

I think they don't intend for that to be needed, as with no bonuses to them ever, you'll just turn them in as you get them.

filemona · February 2015

Well we have it for R&D projects, and it doesn't "grant" them anything.
Sometimes improvements to the game should be made without profit as the first thing in mind, but purely to make it easier for players. It's good PR, because it shows that sometimes developers listen to player requests (and currently, the game needs loads of good PR), generates positive feedback, and in the end, maybe makes players more eager to spend money.

rtk142 · February 2015

Thanks for making it a week, that rocks. I approve. And thanks for putting out a time frame for the episode/patrol dilithium, that's great. Now, and I'm sure this might sound like crazy talk, but how about upping the dilithium for the normal and advanced queues to 480 and 960 permanently?

And if you REALLY wanted to make players happy/give people incentive to give you money, how about upping the refining cap to 12000 for gold players and 16000 for life timers?

Dil Event not affecting mark or BNP/Iso/etc turnins

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