test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
So, about this Grindfest Online.
nebulonine
Member Posts: 7 Arc User
I do not know if this is the place to post something like this, and I doubt I'm the first one to say it.
So in the light of this dil weekend "not-nerf-but-still-nerf", I have a couple of thoughts that most likely will never be considered or read by any dev, but hey, Im tired and have nothing to do, so here goes!
With every damn update we see, the game seems to take step after step towards becoming more and more grindbased, at the same time as the grinding takes longer and longer.
An example:
Most SFT's made during the past 2 years - the traveltime in the STF's themselves become unbearable after the 1'st run.
I can appreciate a long story, but the STF's don't need long stories. An attractive STF is an arcade-action based STF. Thats why you basically only see people in the borg stf's and CC.
The stories in those STF's are short and irrelevant, you get some quick, fun action with some rewards afterwords.
Any STF with too much traveltime and too little action simply becomes boring after a while,
which is why you dont see people que up in them.
Another example is with DR, with the whole "you can repeat the missions blahblahblah" - More grind! With the same damn story over and over again.
If you want to make a fun game, make it actionbased (space combat does a nice job in my iopinion, otherwise I propably wouldn't play this game, but the ground action is horribly boring) or intellectually challenging, preferably both.
And now with the anniversary dust to dust mission - "replay this mission these dates to get this space gear".
Again! Grind! Repetitive and boring grinding with a story that is way too long to be repeated (it can be fun to experience it the first time, but not the second one).
I dont know anything that is fun if you repeat the same way over and over again. Hell, not even sex is fun if it gets repetitive. So why make a _game_ repetitive? Over. And Over. Again.
(The obvious answer to that is money, its a simple formula - people grind to get good stuff. Make grinding unbearable and people will buy things with real money to save time, which I'm not critisising, the servers need workers to keep running, but if the game isnt that interesting, then how can you expect people to pay real money and be happy at the same time?)
And I want to rant a little bit more about the whole ground based gaming in this game.
Its. Awful. Its just too slow and few-dimensional.
Its like a bad mix of FPS and wizard-mmo's.
Here is how it currently works:
Mark enemy>Activate buff>Aim>Crouch>Spam "1" until the key breaks or enemy dies. And keep a lookout for when you can activate your buffs again.
The current "FPS-aim", is also horrible. The "scope" is annoying, the "feeling" of firing the weapon is non-existent (and I know I sound like gun-nut now, which Im not, but I refer to the "feeling" you get when you play other regular FPS's), the enemies running pattern is too erratic for the aim to be useful, and unless the target becomes marked, you miss. Useless.
Here is how you can make it more interesting:
Make it alot more FPS-like, keep the wizard-mmo playmode for those that prefer it (dont nerf it, but add a little damagebuff or more ways to increase damage by actual mouse-and-keyboard skill alone.
Making the groundstuff more FPS-like could make the experience much more exciting, maybe add headshot functions (when the shield is down), crouching behind walls and leaning out from it, shakycam when an explosion goes of nearby with some cool soundeffects that simulate sensory impairment of the carachter (like tinnitus when an explosion goes off nearby, maybe some visionblur etc.) and so on. Not to mention that your eyes would be more focused on the visual details of the battle instead of maiinly the skilltray.
Oh yeah, could mention this as well. Its ugly the way it is now.
4 Vaadwaur standing up straight behind a wall looking into a rock until the player gets close enough for them to notice, after which they run as close as they can with their _ranged_ weapons?
Its. Ugly. And not fun. You shoot at them because they are in the way, not because its fun to shoot.
And PVP could be way more fun as well. Unfortunately I dont have any ideas on how to improve it.
So I guess the point Im trying to make here is:
Dear devs, stop looking for easy ways to make the game so unbearable to play in order to get what you want ingame in order to make more money, try making the game more interesting instead.
I didn't intend to, but apparently this post has become TL: DR, so I dont really expect anyone to read it.
Cheers!
So in the light of this dil weekend "not-nerf-but-still-nerf", I have a couple of thoughts that most likely will never be considered or read by any dev, but hey, Im tired and have nothing to do, so here goes!
With every damn update we see, the game seems to take step after step towards becoming more and more grindbased, at the same time as the grinding takes longer and longer.
An example:
Most SFT's made during the past 2 years - the traveltime in the STF's themselves become unbearable after the 1'st run.
I can appreciate a long story, but the STF's don't need long stories. An attractive STF is an arcade-action based STF. Thats why you basically only see people in the borg stf's and CC.
The stories in those STF's are short and irrelevant, you get some quick, fun action with some rewards afterwords.
Any STF with too much traveltime and too little action simply becomes boring after a while,
which is why you dont see people que up in them.
Another example is with DR, with the whole "you can repeat the missions blahblahblah" - More grind! With the same damn story over and over again.
If you want to make a fun game, make it actionbased (space combat does a nice job in my iopinion, otherwise I propably wouldn't play this game, but the ground action is horribly boring) or intellectually challenging, preferably both.
And now with the anniversary dust to dust mission - "replay this mission these dates to get this space gear".
Again! Grind! Repetitive and boring grinding with a story that is way too long to be repeated (it can be fun to experience it the first time, but not the second one).
I dont know anything that is fun if you repeat the same way over and over again. Hell, not even sex is fun if it gets repetitive. So why make a _game_ repetitive? Over. And Over. Again.
(The obvious answer to that is money, its a simple formula - people grind to get good stuff. Make grinding unbearable and people will buy things with real money to save time, which I'm not critisising, the servers need workers to keep running, but if the game isnt that interesting, then how can you expect people to pay real money and be happy at the same time?)
And I want to rant a little bit more about the whole ground based gaming in this game.
Its. Awful. Its just too slow and few-dimensional.
Its like a bad mix of FPS and wizard-mmo's.
Here is how it currently works:
Mark enemy>Activate buff>Aim>Crouch>Spam "1" until the key breaks or enemy dies. And keep a lookout for when you can activate your buffs again.
The current "FPS-aim", is also horrible. The "scope" is annoying, the "feeling" of firing the weapon is non-existent (and I know I sound like gun-nut now, which Im not, but I refer to the "feeling" you get when you play other regular FPS's), the enemies running pattern is too erratic for the aim to be useful, and unless the target becomes marked, you miss. Useless.
Here is how you can make it more interesting:
Make it alot more FPS-like, keep the wizard-mmo playmode for those that prefer it (dont nerf it, but add a little damagebuff or more ways to increase damage by actual mouse-and-keyboard skill alone.
Making the groundstuff more FPS-like could make the experience much more exciting, maybe add headshot functions (when the shield is down), crouching behind walls and leaning out from it, shakycam when an explosion goes of nearby with some cool soundeffects that simulate sensory impairment of the carachter (like tinnitus when an explosion goes off nearby, maybe some visionblur etc.) and so on. Not to mention that your eyes would be more focused on the visual details of the battle instead of maiinly the skilltray.
Oh yeah, could mention this as well. Its ugly the way it is now.
4 Vaadwaur standing up straight behind a wall looking into a rock until the player gets close enough for them to notice, after which they run as close as they can with their _ranged_ weapons?
Its. Ugly. And not fun. You shoot at them because they are in the way, not because its fun to shoot.
And PVP could be way more fun as well. Unfortunately I dont have any ideas on how to improve it.
So I guess the point Im trying to make here is:
Dear devs, stop looking for easy ways to make the game so unbearable to play in order to get what you want ingame in order to make more money, try making the game more interesting instead.
I didn't intend to, but apparently this post has become TL: DR, so I dont really expect anyone to read it.
Cheers!
Post edited by nebulonine on
0
Comments
Actually, this push towards STFs being bite-sized action-packed runs is and has been part of the move towards being grindy-grindy. There's almost no actual "travel time" between objectives, you're almost always shooting and blowing something up in between with little dialog if any. Eventually, we'll probably just have a screen that says "press this button rapidly for the next five minutes to win the mission" and a small button we have to press with the mouse at the rate this is going.
You might have missed seeing the original STFs, but they were much longer runs that actually had a self-contained story and occasionally unique (and sometimes hair-pulling) game mechanics. The Borg STFs you know of nowadays are severely cut-up versions of those, which is why there's little-to-no story, and what little story remains is so butchered that it's basically nonsensical.
The original STFs, while having issues, were far more interesting and fun to do, and I frankly preferred personally warping to them and working out a team with personable people instead of using a queue window to instantly transport into a map with a bunch of random people who are just as likely to mess up the run in the most horrible fashion as complete it. Instead of a silly queue window, a simple team-finder would have been more useful.
I'd attribute the current STFs' problems, however, to the terrible changes made to their difficulties and objectives in the last several updates. Instead of making them better, they're only getting worse; less rewards, more enemies that are tougher, allies and objectives to protect that are weaker, longer cooldowns, shorter timers for mandatory/optional objectives, etc. Sure, a dedicated group that min-maxes all the right gear and stats might handle it fine, but not the average STO player in a group of potential randoms. I'm not even talking about Elite runs here, this is Advanced, the lowest difficulty needed to acquire necessary components, like Borg Neural Processors.
If the devs want to turn this around, I'd probably suggest doing something like undoing many of the strange design choices they've made to the STFs as of late, give us back the incentives to do them...and the ability to actually complete them without being the absolute "best of the best." They should boost rewards all around; maybe give Borg Normal STFs a single BNP as a reward alongside the usual stuff, and up it from there, so Advanced has two, Elite gives three.
I'd go even further and say go back to the way the original STFs were originally, but with the improvements they needed to make them more playable, or at least make them an optional side-thing alongside the little bite-sized runs. I miss feeling like I was part of a story as opposed to mind-numbingly grinding something that holds absolutely nothing else of interest besides a tiny amount of necessary loot.
I've seen I don't know how many times, on ISA or Azure Nebula Advanced or Borg Disconnected Advanced, failing right away because people blow mandatory objective, and then everyone acts like they don't know why. Honestly, some of them probably don't because they don't understand what the objective was that they failed in the first place. They just fly in and pew-pew everything like they are actually a top-tier DPSer, without actually being anywhere close to dealing that kind of damage.
Heck I was in a normal difficulty Borg Disconnected the other day, and there were three ships on one spawn location. I asked in the chat why, and the response was silence. After I saw how frequently they started dying however, I understood why. Fortunately for my sanity, myself and the other guy were holding our own solo, but if that had been an Advanced queue, we'd have failed right away.
So the problem now is, you have a vast majority that have ships that are underequipped to deal with any higher difficulty PvE content, coupled with either ignorance or antipathy regarding how to actually improve, fueled by an almost non-existent training by the game and perhaps a pinch of role-playing and wishing the game worked exactly like the tv shows. And how do you fix it? The developers can't really do anything without basically admitting that a large portion of equipment out there isn't worth anything but selling for credits to get the equipment you actually want to be using. Suggesting any improvements to dealing damage in-game usually gets met with some rude remark about being some kind of DPS glory boy or what have you, followed by the eponymous "muh playstyle" quip.
Basically, we've found ourselves painted into a corner. If Cryptic further nerfs content to make it easier, or introduces new content that's easier without making it engaging in a non-tactical way, people are going to hate it. If they do nothing, they're probably going to continually alienate the casual player base who right now is struggling if they do anything besides re-run single player missions and Foundry content.
Vice Admiral of - Starfleet Command -
You mean fake casuals. Hardcore players pretending to be casual players to get spoonfed with end game stuff.
If you are going to define casuals by time of playing, therefore a lot of top DPS players are casuals because they spend little on playing but the efficiency is so high. For example, a player spend hours getting 1 specialization but an efficient player spend 10 minutes getting specialization. So an efficient player is more casual than a self proclaimed fake casual.
Casual players should not be complaining about grind since they dont need it. The complain about grind is more of greed of the player rather than anything else. More of being spoiled and self entitlement that they should have the same benefit as the Top PvE performer.
The only thing I would probably complain about is the lag. Since it affects everyone. Complaints on grind only affects the spoiled, fake casual, self entitled players.