Martin Brody, U.S.S. ORCA of the ToS Veterans. I had three outstanding years with that Fleet as a gold subscriber. I was a very tanky engineer that loved to pug on the side. I cannot count the compliments I received, and friendly advice both offered and taken in pugs.
It's all gone now. A Tank with nothing to tank and a Fleet mostly playing other games. We socialize only in voice chat. Oct 14th will be a day that lives in infamy for me. I am surprised I lasted as long as I did. By trying to create more challenge, Cryptic instead made only frustration.
1) In what way did you reduce or end your participation in queued content?
I only play Crystalline Catastrophe (occasionally) and Bug Hunt at advanced and above now. Used to be I wouldn't even touch ground STFs because I had no luck with them.
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
I used to only run elite space STFs. ISE, CSE, and KASE in particular. Then Delta Rising hit and Advanced came in, and it was SUPPOSED to be the same as the old Elite. Put simply: It wasn't. I was having great difficulty dealing with teams that before the update would have just ignored the optionals, as well as the buffed enemies that seemed more numerous and more powerful (i.e.: damage sponge) than before. This combined with the drop in rewards means I haven't touched a Borg STF on higher than normal since a week after DR dropped.
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
Make Advanced queues what they're supposed to be, or at the very least drop the auto-fail optionals from most of them (CC is okay).
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I have 7 chars I used to play with, doing every days CC, Stf's, fleet pve, etc ...
I do nothing anymore, no pve (Ok from times to times a crystalline advanced).
I sometimes do some ground on Nukara or Defera. I just farm foundry and doing the event.
like you said, cryptic nerfed so much the game recently, reducing the amount of dil, of marks, increasing the difficulty and those optionnal for advanced that they said it would be the old Elite. They just lied to us.
I would have tried the new elite for real challenges if they hadn't changed everything in the new advanced mission (former elite)
We have lost about 200 members after Delta, due to the fails in random Qs and the lack of rewards.
I know people should have ran with fleet or gone with groups in channels.
Sorry to hear you lost a large number of peeps to Delta Rising
My Question to Cryptic would be
Why should people be forced into stf channels and pre-mades. isn't the point of public queues to allow access to anyone to queue up and play that match.
Cryptic basically butchered the PvE queues and have the cheek to say everything is fine with the queue numbers its a reporting issue.
BULL****
Harder content i do go with pre-mades such as ground when i was running them before Delta, But it was nice to drop into a Elite Borg stf and pug just to skip the hassle of trying to get 4 other guys together.
1) In what way did you reduce or end your participation in queued content?
Well I have been answering these questions from the bottom to the top, so I guess the simple answer is that I play a lot less but I still answer the "Wotan" call sign from PESTF when I'm in a mood for a good ground run on the Borg STF's , and I still pug or PSTF the space ones as well, but a lot less then I used to .
As someone who always found a way to keep himself "busy" , now I turned to focusing on making EC as that has stopped raining a while back and slowly my reserves went dry .
So for me it was a balance between not having so much fun in the Borg space STF's along with the not so small desire to stay away from the DQ to avoid the padding of the almighty metrics .
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
I enjoy playing with all kinds of players .
DR visibly and aggressively removed the ... weaker players chances of participating and forced them into a "Normal" kiddie pool filled with no awards and no hope .
I was offended by that kind of arrogance ... even when I was not the target , as they removed the ability of players I played with to participate (and or their joy in participating) .
And when you as a gaming company remov joy from a game ... , well that says something about you ... .
Cryptic didn't create a new kind of content for the Elite players, they just reshuffled the deck and decided that the rules have changed, while at the same time saying that the old Elite was going to be the new Advanced .
As others have said, the game has changed but not in the way Cryptic said it would .
It has changed by herding the players to the DQ through every underheanded means possible ... -- while racking in the cash through selling power via crafting upgrading, T5U, T6 and T6 ship traits .
Thus on one hand things were going great for Cryptic , while on the other hand more and more players began to see their Scorched Earth policy toward anything not DR ... , which Iead to the "greatest expansion ever" campaign ... much to the hurt feelings of a few Devs .
Like the Foundry folk and the PVP-ers, I too am loyal to a fault to my content of choice , and I have played long enough to see my beloved Borg STF's be butchered at least 2 times (3 if you count the beginning of S7) ... , which has lead me to the unhappy conclusion that Cryptic's hatred of all things Year 1 includes not only PVP but their most played PVE content as well -- the Borg STF's .
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
Remove the timer non-optional optionals and let players play at their own pace .
Then up the awards and add a reasonable XP to ground STF's as well .
... it would also be nice to have the old Borg STF's back as additional game play along with a slightly improved Terradome (just remove the coin flipping and you're golden) ...
1. Only queue if I need fleet marks all else can be gotten elsewhere easier and with less waiting for a group.
If cryptic wants to fix it
1. Challenge can only be achieved by the need to adapt to a changing battle. If there is a script we will beat it. Give them more hit points it will just take longer. The battle must be unpredictable to be difficult.
2. Let the players play how they want what they want! Provide the players with a variety of engaging content and don't try to herd them to pad numbers or force new content to be used.
3. Nothing should be too easily attained or take too long to attain. People need attainable goals if getting 90 spec points will take over 3 months argali grind per character few will be willing to do it. On the other hand if they get it by the first weekend then its meaningless.
4. Always stay true to what made you a success. You were on a roll with LOR etc what made you think the game needed to be entirely rewritten into something else.
5. NO fail timers on instances EVER! Nothing separates the weak from the strong like an if you don't complete it in 5 minutes you fail timer. Problem is if you exclude part of your game community from content they won't play it and they likely will play something else.
6. You shouldn't make the people you are helping seem more morally reprehensible then the villain's of your content.(ie I prefer to help the vaadwar then the kobali as I believe the vaadwar have a right to fight the kobali to get their people back).
As a friend I made playing lotro said "the games a ,play it till you no longer amuses you."
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
I want to say DR made me reduce my play time in the queued missions, but In actuality, my participation probably went up after DR. Got the shot gun on 4 chars, (+ a bit extra, maybe 60 runs?) and, after the initial mob health reduction, had a lot of fun playing Bug Hunt Elite. I hear that's hard now. I haven't tried it.
Apart from the Mirror Invasion event though, my play time in 'Space' stfs has gone down significantly. Maybe I remember playing the Borg stfs more before DR than I actually did, but these days I hardly ever try them.
At first I was afraid of them, since everyone was complaining about them, so I stuck with the odd normal run for fun. I've pugged ISA twice since DR, mostly to try parsing my ship, (never tried that before). Those would probably be the only two Advanced/Elite non ground stfs I've successfully completed since DR.
The one exact experience that's probably made me reduce my playtime was playing The Cure Space Advanced with some fleet mates, after a string of failures, trying to help them get some BNPs and getting wrecked shortly after the first cube, (I didn't check, but do those BoPs have more hp than the cubes?). Pretty disappointing to be unable to do content that we could have done handily before.
Maybe we failed to adapt or had terrible builds or didn't know what we were doing, (though everyone seemed to know what they were doing...). Maybe CSA is a bad example since the Kang's survival isn't a timed optional, but I know we could have done it before.
Cure Advanced, don't bother with a point-damage build, the lowest NPC's there will absorb hts that wiill kill a tanking Oddy in one go. It's BFAW or nothing. Ditto for Infected.
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
The risk vs reward on the Queued missions is way out of whack. Rewards aren't just the tangible Dil or Exp or marks but the less tangible "FUN" aspect too. Not something easy to measure for sure, but if there is a risk of failing and ending the mission 2 minutes in... well, even if you were having a blast for 2 minutes, you're not having a blast for the next hour and have little or nothing tangible to show for it either. People won't tolerate a high risk of failure IF it means less fun. They don't want to gamble with time they've set aside for having fun. IMO that's why the queues are empty. Maybe I'm off base, it's just how I feel about it.
The battlezones are far more accessible for players, there are not risks of getting kicked out for an hour if you miss a V-Rex or PK, and they generally give out better tangible rewards too.
The battlezones are more fun. More people and bigger fights with some mayhem. Easier and probably better method of earning marks and special drops you need for reputation gear or simply more Dil. You can drop in and out when you want, fly what you want and go with what build you want and no-one moans about it.
Pretty much this.
I think they have to do something to make the queued missions as attractive or more attractive to players than the Battlezones. It's less about the tangible rewards, (which I still think are not inline with the difficulty or time expended or risk of failure). It's more about the fun. If getting rid of the mandatory optionals would let more teams succeed - even if it was a 40 minute slog - I think it would still be more fun to overcome than a 2 minute burst with an hour lockout and next to nil as a reward.
And frankly, from a business perspective, if players are in the mission for 40 minutes being exposed too your advertising, maybe thinking about what they could buy to make it faster next time... isn't that better than having them join once, fail in 2 minutes and decide that totally wasn't worth their time and never do it again?
I know people should have ran with fleet or gone with groups in channels.
I think a lot of people enjoyed the freedom of Qing up whenever they wanted without grouping.
Yep very much this here. In my case I find myself with mix where I team up with 1-3 peeps I know and who want to run a certain map. I dont want to chat through half a dozen channels to fill the team, and dont even can if I try in a lot of cases. I just want to queue up and play.
People found the game fun when you can earn rewards and buy new ships and items.
Precisely, earning a reward makes the reward worth while. The problem is just there are so few around compared to the risk of wasting your time.
One can always buy ones reward of course so big hug Cryptic. Unfortunately they are of no use for me as long as the problem remains the same: Empty Queues!
I really thought that the DR release was the low point in queue participation in STOs history but I was wrong. It was the 5th anniversary event, tendency dropping.
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And frankly, from a business perspective, if players are in the mission for 40 minutes being exposed too your advertising, maybe thinking about what they could buy to make it faster next time... isn't that better than having them join once, fail in 2 minutes and decide that totally wasn't worth their time and never do it again?
This is a VERY good point here and it seems Cryptic has really accomplished the very opposite of what would make rational business sense to do. The long slog is more likely to keep the customer hooked than kicking them out after 2 minutes and ripping away any sense of being invested in the match--even in an "I stuck it out to the bitter end" way.
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1) In what way did you reduce or end your participation in queued content?
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
1) I actually quit the Advanced & Elite queues altogether. I still use Normal queues for daily rep grinds on alts, or the occasional lark. Daily reputation bonus marks & reward boxes make this pseudo-tolerable.
2) I made the mistake of trying to contribute to team efforts in Advanced post-DR as I had pre-DR; without spacebar.txt or fleet consoles or unique exchange doffs or plasmonic leech or mk xiv weapons and even committing the deadly sins of torpedo and 4-forward escort use. Naturally, nothing could be killed in any timely fashion. What had been more than adequate previously was now abysmally useless. I did not want to "leech" my way back to competence, and essentially all lost interest in the queues I had previously enjoyed.
3) Cryptic removed the forgiving, gradual progression that existed prior to the Queue Revamp. They need to reintroduce the missing steps in difficulty progression somehow and allow sub-optimally equipped casual players (or alternate characters) to attain endgame competency without having to be dragged along by the higher echelon players.
And now a bit of personal digression.
Among the things that new/casual/alt. characters/etc. need better forms of access to:
- ancient power cells, borg neural processors, isomorphic injections, voth cybernetic implants
- fleet consoles & equipment (small fleets & independents often only learn about the value of these through informal means such as player chatter, forum discussions or websites)
- useful doffs, traits, consoles that do not require tens of millions of EC on the exchange or supernatural lockbox luck (also an awareness issue)
- Very Rare R&D materials and faster, less time-gated options for R&D progression / perks
- casual options to remain competitive with fleet-T5U, T5U & T6 mastery ships (tricky issue)
- less obtuse specialization grind, or less glaringly top-heavy specialization rewards
- methods to remain competitive with intel officer abilities (balancing would help)
This is not about invalidating the commitment of the higher echelons of players and their maxxed-out characters and optimized loadouts. It isn't about turning STO into the "easymode" of yesteryear. It's about providing a means to reopen the game to people who aren't quite there yet; the ones who steer clear of group play because they're constantly being yelled at for inferior numeric performance ratings, the ones who give up characters between 50 and 60 because they're being told to repeat content or jump into the queues they're having poor experiences with, the ones who want to run multiple competent characters instead of one all-powerful investment character requiring months of time and countless sums of time-gated resources.
I would personally participate in STO's endgame queues and group content far more often if I was able to feel more immediately useful. The current situation, where you need to play Advanced to earn the resources to gear up and be ready to play Advanced, is a closed-loop frustration machine generating disgruntled players on both ends of the competency spectrum. The dilithium, specialization and R&D grinds are bad enough without needing to be difficulty-locked out of other forms of progression as well.
I'm not going to comment on Elite difficulty, as I lack any experience with the new Elite level, and personally feel that it fully belongs to the people who are willing to commit to it.
Among the things that new/casual/alt. characters/etc. need better forms of access to:
- ancient power cells, borg neural processors, isomorphic injections, voth cybernetic implants
- fleet consoles & equipment (small fleets & independents often only learn about the value of these through informal means such as player chatter, forum discussions or websites)
Totally a nitpick but the Isomorphics and Implants can be gained through battlegrounds. BNPs and APC can only* be gained through queues.
On the other issue, slightly lesser version of the IWIN fleet two-in-one consoles should be available through non-fleet means. RCS with ResAll has no downside.
*as seen by a normal person
This is my Risian Corvette. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Totally a nitpick but the Isomorphics and Implants can be gained through battlegrounds. BNPs and APC can only* be gained through queues.
On the other issue, slightly lesser version of the IWIN fleet two-in-one consoles should be available through non-fleet means. RCS with ResAll has no downside.
thats not a good point. its blinkered and short sighted.
in killing pvp and the accessibility of balanced end game content, they removed all value from teh items they could sell.
not to mention buffing the content puts up a barrier to entry to anyone who doesnt have access to the stupid sold power gizmo's.
you make grinding the goal of the grind and you miss the point and you replace "game played for fun" with "habituation system that sucks time".
I think you missed the point of what I was saying: I was responding to the other poster you quoted and I was NOT speaking about the grind when I referred to the "long slog," but rather to what we used to be able to do if for whatever reason we blew an optional, which was to continue fighting for however long it took to win. Even a sloppy win that didn't give as many marks, but more than the insultingly minimal "rewards" from being failed out of the match, you could at least have the pride of knowing that you were not a quitter and you took the time it took to finally get the job done.
That satisfaction is nonexistent with the failoptionals--you just get kicked out after 2 minutes and a huge cooldown before you can try again that...why would you risk it? And of course Normal does not help you progress to Advanced--only Advanced helps you progress to Advanced, yet you are stuck making no progress and just failing again and again (or getting abuse from other players) because of that.
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While I have no patience for trolls, this is not about somehow thinking you have a "right to be carried" or a "right" to not do well. Most of my experience has actually been on premades with friends rather than PUGs (or at least not with complete PUG teams) anyway, and quite frankly one of the fleet rules is respect, which means that we DO help each other, teach each other, and we WILL carry someone especially when they are learning or trying to advance an undergeared toon, but a structure where even total premades are harshly penalized for trying to teach and advance their teammates (and even outright prevented from doing so often by the failoptionals) is absurd. All we ask of our fleetmates is that they listen to directions, communicate, and respect each other whether they are top players or newbies.
IMO it is not too much to ask of Cryptic that the jumps in difficulty be set in a way that makes sense and actually allows for proper at-level "on-the-job training." As it is it's barely even possible to help each other without being heavily penalized for it.
I can see ELITES potentially having fails because by then you should be geared and highly skilled. But IMO that has no place in Advanced whatsoever. NOR was it advertised that way pre-DR, and frankly I think the false advertising has people equally mad if not madder than they are about the actual end result.
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The current situation, where you need to play Advanced to earn the resources to gear up and be ready to play Advanced, is a closed-loop frustration machine generating disgruntled players on both ends of the competency spectrum.
IMO it is not too much to ask of Cryptic that the jumps in difficulty be set in a way that makes sense and actually allows for proper at-level "on-the-job training." As it is it's barely even possible to help each other without being heavily penalized for it.
You can practice optional objectives in normals.
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
And get very little to help you advance your gear so you are ready for Advanced, so it is not really a productive option--with the end result of being forced into the failoptionals to actually get anything that will help you.
The one example now that I think about it, where we largely GOT what was advertised, is Undine Infiltration. Get your first exposure to the questions on UIN, step up to a tougher fight and lose marks if you miss a question (but still have the opportunity to complete the fight) on UIA and get the isomorphic injections you need to be ready for the next level, and then step up to UIE where you must answer the questions perfectly and keep one person alive. About the only tweak I would make to UIE is make it so that only the person who screws up a question gets severely penalized, since there is less logic in claiming it's a team fail if one person cannot read and nobody else had the opportunity to change or compensate for that person's actions. But at least with the failoptionals we do have, they are on Elite only, so the situation is more livable than it is with most of the other STF's and allows for *proper* training and gearing progression.
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And get very little to help you advance your gear so you are ready for Advanced, so it is not really a productive option--with the end result of being forced into the failoptionals to actually get anything that will help you.
The only advanced queue I had to run in any quantity to gear up was Bug Hunt, and you can gear up for BHA with marks alone.
You can put together reasonable gear builds without touching another advanced queue. Sure, much of what I use is fleet gear, but there are far more sources of fleet credits than advanced rep rewards.
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
The only advanced queue I had to run in any quantity to gear up was Bug Hunt, and you can gear up for BHA with marks alone.
You can put together reasonable gear builds without touching another advanced queue. Sure, much of what I use is fleet gear, but there are far more sources of fleet credits than advanced rep rewards.
You dont need to upgrade any of your items from mk 12 from any of the content. I was hitting 500-600 DPS with mk 12 items at Bug Hunt Elite which is sufficient to carry the whole PuG team.
Advance/elite queues can be done using pre DR gear Space or ground. You just need the player to be NOT spoiled, self entitled nor have a bad performance.
Also choosing the right toon at Bug Hunt. Bug Hunt is an Eng Toons play ground. Although the Tac can compete, the Tac needs a high performance team just to be at par with an Eng toon doing it in a PuG.
Although gear Helps. I upgrade my stuff to mk 14 although still at VR quality. Took my dps to 871 presently at BHE.
I think it's fairly ridiculous for them to be called "optionals" when they are critical fails... and not all of them are. It's not like all optionals suddenly became insta-fail triggers, some of them have, and there doesn't seem to be any particular rhyme or reason as to why some are big red buttons of "just wasted an hour of my time."
Optionals should be turned back into optionals with enhanced rewards. These new random critical fail optionals have killed the public queues because heaps of pugs just can't cut it anymore. I dunno if devs expect the player's long established habits to miraculously change... cause that's a foolish assumption to make. People who never spoke a word in old cure even as their team shouted at them in all caps "DON'T YOU F*KING DARE KILL THAT CUBE!" as they proceeded to do so anyway, are still not going to respond to a "how's kang doing?" query in new cure.
I mean, before if you were a super star in a TRIBBLE pug, at least the team could grab your coat tails so you could drag them along and finish the match if only to avoid a leaver penalty, but now if you have to carry the team, you best be able to hoist them all onto your shoulders and sprint a mile in 30 seconds while singing the national anthem backwards.
The new difficulty of stfs is just "artificial" difficulty of bloated HP and critical fail not-so-optionals. One doesn't require some new level of skill, just heaps of dps and maybe a splash of CC on occasion... for when DPS hasn't been applied liberally enough the first time. Though I imagine if the devs made the AI more challenging there'd probably be a bunch of complaints on that too... those mirror event ships healing each other and themselves instead of just being floating meat bags sure is inconvenient after all... oh god... have the devs taken the smart npcs into consideration when bloating everything? If not, those mirror ships are going to be unkillable, lol.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
I guess I'm having trouble figuring out how playing 1 ISA, and failing, is killing the fun. For me, that would only fire me up to try to beat it.
EDIT: I think one thing that might help is some voice over in the STFs. Maybe have some "commander" warn the team about the spheres once a generator is killed or something. I think this thread is missing the point and there should be some mechanism of teaching players how to not fail rather than complaining (cant think of a better word but I don't mean it in the negative) about the new failing mechanic.
If you've done ISA over and over and over(like I have), and have combat parses and personal performance meters, you know how the fight is done, you do all the things right, and you STILL LOSE the not-optional, what do you do? Do you get fired up? I'll tell you what I do. I get mad. At the other players. And I don't want to be mad at the other players.
If you've done ISA over and over and over(like I have), and have combat parses and personal performance meters, you know how the fight is done, you do all the things right, and you STILL LOSE the not-optional, what do you do? Do you get fired up? I'll tell you what I do. I get mad. At the other players. And I don't want to be mad at the other players.
Hehe, know the feeling there.
Considering how often ISA has been mentioned now this map seems to have a harder fail than most of the elite runs I do (with pugs or premades alike by the way).
I doubt we ever see a change. Like pointed out I strongly think cryptic wants players off those old Borg maps to enjoy newer contend. I bet the popularity of former ISE was their biggest problem to deal with.
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1) In what way did you reduce or end your participation in queued content?
I PUGged exclusively on the old Elite STFs, usually 3-4 per day. About 1 in 10 we'd fail an optional and get a reduced reward. 1 in 50 we'd hose it so badly we'd fail the entire mission.
I don't think I've played more than 10 STFs since the new system. Only had one success due to two of us doing dedicated crowd control.
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
When I realised that in Infected Space Advanced if the naninte spheres heal the transformer at all, it's a fail. Then I swear I saw nanite spheres spawning as soon as the generators started taking damage (possibly AOE damage hitting the Generator?)
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
Easy.
Do what they said they were going to do in the first place, and make the Advanced exactly the same as the old Elite. No fail optionals.
Comments
It's all gone now. A Tank with nothing to tank and a Fleet mostly playing other games. We socialize only in voice chat. Oct 14th will be a day that lives in infamy for me. I am surprised I lasted as long as I did. By trying to create more challenge, Cryptic instead made only frustration.
I had it, I have walked away.
Cryptic's loss.
I only play Crystalline Catastrophe (occasionally) and Bug Hunt at advanced and above now. Used to be I wouldn't even touch ground STFs because I had no luck with them.
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
I used to only run elite space STFs. ISE, CSE, and KASE in particular. Then Delta Rising hit and Advanced came in, and it was SUPPOSED to be the same as the old Elite. Put simply: It wasn't. I was having great difficulty dealing with teams that before the update would have just ignored the optionals, as well as the buffed enemies that seemed more numerous and more powerful (i.e.: damage sponge) than before. This combined with the drop in rewards means I haven't touched a Borg STF on higher than normal since a week after DR dropped.
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
Make Advanced queues what they're supposed to be, or at the very least drop the auto-fail optionals from most of them (CC is okay).
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I do nothing anymore, no pve (Ok from times to times a crystalline advanced).
I sometimes do some ground on Nukara or Defera. I just farm foundry and doing the event.
like you said, cryptic nerfed so much the game recently, reducing the amount of dil, of marks, increasing the difficulty and those optionnal for advanced that they said it would be the old Elite. They just lied to us.
I would have tried the new elite for real challenges if they hadn't changed everything in the new advanced mission (former elite)
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I know people should have ran with fleet or gone with groups in channels.
I think a lot of people enjoyed the freedom of Qing up whenever they wanted without grouping.
People found the game fun when you can earn rewards and buy new ships and items.
That game play model is not so easy now.
With that said two new members in our fleet have each made a hundred million EC last week.
Sorry to hear you lost a large number of peeps to Delta Rising
My Question to Cryptic would be
Why should people be forced into stf channels and pre-mades. isn't the point of public queues to allow access to anyone to queue up and play that match.
Cryptic basically butchered the PvE queues and have the cheek to say everything is fine with the queue numbers its a reporting issue.
BULL****
Harder content i do go with pre-mades such as ground when i was running them before Delta, But it was nice to drop into a Elite Borg stf and pug just to skip the hassle of trying to get 4 other guys together.
Well I have been answering these questions from the bottom to the top, so I guess the simple answer is that I play a lot less but I still answer the "Wotan" call sign from PESTF when I'm in a mood for a good ground run on the Borg STF's , and I still pug or PSTF the space ones as well, but a lot less then I used to .
As someone who always found a way to keep himself "busy" , now I turned to focusing on making EC as that has stopped raining a while back and slowly my reserves went dry .
So for me it was a balance between not having so much fun in the Borg space STF's along with the not so small desire to stay away from the DQ to avoid the padding of the almighty metrics .
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
I enjoy playing with all kinds of players .
DR visibly and aggressively removed the ... weaker players chances of participating and forced them into a "Normal" kiddie pool filled with no awards and no hope .
I was offended by that kind of arrogance ... even when I was not the target , as they removed the ability of players I played with to participate (and or their joy in participating) .
And when you as a gaming company remov joy from a game ... , well that says something about you ... .
Cryptic didn't create a new kind of content for the Elite players, they just reshuffled the deck and decided that the rules have changed, while at the same time saying that the old Elite was going to be the new Advanced .
As others have said, the game has changed but not in the way Cryptic said it would .
It has changed by herding the players to the DQ through every underheanded means possible ... -- while racking in the cash through selling power via crafting upgrading, T5U, T6 and T6 ship traits .
Thus on one hand things were going great for Cryptic , while on the other hand more and more players began to see their Scorched Earth policy toward anything not DR ... , which Iead to the "greatest expansion ever" campaign ... much to the hurt feelings of a few Devs .
Like the Foundry folk and the PVP-ers, I too am loyal to a fault to my content of choice , and I have played long enough to see my beloved Borg STF's be butchered at least 2 times (3 if you count the beginning of S7) ... , which has lead me to the unhappy conclusion that Cryptic's hatred of all things Year 1 includes not only PVP but their most played PVE content as well -- the Borg STF's .
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
Remove the timer non-optional optionals and let players play at their own pace .
Then up the awards and add a reasonable XP to ground STF's as well .
... it would also be nice to have the old Borg STF's back as additional game play along with a slightly improved Terradome (just remove the coin flipping and you're golden) ...
If cryptic wants to fix it
1. Challenge can only be achieved by the need to adapt to a changing battle. If there is a script we will beat it. Give them more hit points it will just take longer. The battle must be unpredictable to be difficult.
2. Let the players play how they want what they want! Provide the players with a variety of engaging content and don't try to herd them to pad numbers or force new content to be used.
3. Nothing should be too easily attained or take too long to attain. People need attainable goals if getting 90 spec points will take over 3 months argali grind per character few will be willing to do it. On the other hand if they get it by the first weekend then its meaningless.
4. Always stay true to what made you a success. You were on a roll with LOR etc what made you think the game needed to be entirely rewritten into something else.
5. NO fail timers on instances EVER! Nothing separates the weak from the strong like an if you don't complete it in 5 minutes you fail timer. Problem is if you exclude part of your game community from content they won't play it and they likely will play something else.
6. You shouldn't make the people you are helping seem more morally reprehensible then the villain's of your content.(ie I prefer to help the vaadwar then the kobali as I believe the vaadwar have a right to fight the kobali to get their people back).
As a friend I made playing lotro said "the games a ,play it till you no longer amuses you."
Barring the special event normals, or if someone invites me, I'm probably going to avoid the queues until something changes.
I want to say DR made me reduce my play time in the queued missions, but In actuality, my participation probably went up after DR. Got the shot gun on 4 chars, (+ a bit extra, maybe 60 runs?) and, after the initial mob health reduction, had a lot of fun playing Bug Hunt Elite. I hear that's hard now. I haven't tried it.
Apart from the Mirror Invasion event though, my play time in 'Space' stfs has gone down significantly. Maybe I remember playing the Borg stfs more before DR than I actually did, but these days I hardly ever try them.
At first I was afraid of them, since everyone was complaining about them, so I stuck with the odd normal run for fun. I've pugged ISA twice since DR, mostly to try parsing my ship, (never tried that before). Those would probably be the only two Advanced/Elite non ground stfs I've successfully completed since DR.
The one exact experience that's probably made me reduce my playtime was playing The Cure Space Advanced with some fleet mates, after a string of failures, trying to help them get some BNPs and getting wrecked shortly after the first cube, (I didn't check, but do those BoPs have more hp than the cubes?). Pretty disappointing to be unable to do content that we could have done handily before.
Maybe we failed to adapt or had terrible builds or didn't know what we were doing, (though everyone seemed to know what they were doing...). Maybe CSA is a bad example since the Kang's survival isn't a timed optional, but I know we could have done it before. Yeah, I wasn't BFAW-ing, that must be it.
The risk vs reward on the Queued missions is way out of whack. Rewards aren't just the tangible Dil or Exp or marks but the less tangible "FUN" aspect too. Not something easy to measure for sure, but if there is a risk of failing and ending the mission 2 minutes in... well, even if you were having a blast for 2 minutes, you're not having a blast for the next hour and have little or nothing tangible to show for it either. People won't tolerate a high risk of failure IF it means less fun. They don't want to gamble with time they've set aside for having fun. IMO that's why the queues are empty. Maybe I'm off base, it's just how I feel about it.
The battlezones are far more accessible for players, there are not risks of getting kicked out for an hour if you miss a V-Rex or PK, and they generally give out better tangible rewards too. Pretty much this.
I think they have to do something to make the queued missions as attractive or more attractive to players than the Battlezones. It's less about the tangible rewards, (which I still think are not inline with the difficulty or time expended or risk of failure). It's more about the fun. If getting rid of the mandatory optionals would let more teams succeed - even if it was a 40 minute slog - I think it would still be more fun to overcome than a 2 minute burst with an hour lockout and next to nil as a reward.
And frankly, from a business perspective, if players are in the mission for 40 minutes being exposed too your advertising, maybe thinking about what they could buy to make it faster next time... isn't that better than having them join once, fail in 2 minutes and decide that totally wasn't worth their time and never do it again?
Yep very much this here. In my case I find myself with mix where I team up with 1-3 peeps I know and who want to run a certain map. I dont want to chat through half a dozen channels to fill the team, and dont even can if I try in a lot of cases. I just want to queue up and play.
Precisely, earning a reward makes the reward worth while. The problem is just there are so few around compared to the risk of wasting your time.
One can always buy ones reward of course so big hug Cryptic. Unfortunately they are of no use for me as long as the problem remains the same: Empty Queues!
I really thought that the DR release was the low point in queue participation in STOs history but I was wrong. It was the 5th anniversary event, tendency dropping.
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This is a VERY good point here and it seems Cryptic has really accomplished the very opposite of what would make rational business sense to do. The long slog is more likely to keep the customer hooked than kicking them out after 2 minutes and ripping away any sense of being invested in the match--even in an "I stuck it out to the bitter end" way.
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1) I actually quit the Advanced & Elite queues altogether. I still use Normal queues for daily rep grinds on alts, or the occasional lark. Daily reputation bonus marks & reward boxes make this pseudo-tolerable.
2) I made the mistake of trying to contribute to team efforts in Advanced post-DR as I had pre-DR; without spacebar.txt or fleet consoles or unique exchange doffs or plasmonic leech or mk xiv weapons and even committing the deadly sins of torpedo and 4-forward escort use. Naturally, nothing could be killed in any timely fashion. What had been more than adequate previously was now abysmally useless. I did not want to "leech" my way back to competence, and essentially all lost interest in the queues I had previously enjoyed.
3) Cryptic removed the forgiving, gradual progression that existed prior to the Queue Revamp. They need to reintroduce the missing steps in difficulty progression somehow and allow sub-optimally equipped casual players (or alternate characters) to attain endgame competency without having to be dragged along by the higher echelon players.
And now a bit of personal digression.
Among the things that new/casual/alt. characters/etc. need better forms of access to:
- ancient power cells, borg neural processors, isomorphic injections, voth cybernetic implants
- fleet consoles & equipment (small fleets & independents often only learn about the value of these through informal means such as player chatter, forum discussions or websites)
- useful doffs, traits, consoles that do not require tens of millions of EC on the exchange or supernatural lockbox luck (also an awareness issue)
- Very Rare R&D materials and faster, less time-gated options for R&D progression / perks
- casual options to remain competitive with fleet-T5U, T5U & T6 mastery ships (tricky issue)
- less obtuse specialization grind, or less glaringly top-heavy specialization rewards
- methods to remain competitive with intel officer abilities (balancing would help)
This is not about invalidating the commitment of the higher echelons of players and their maxxed-out characters and optimized loadouts. It isn't about turning STO into the "easymode" of yesteryear. It's about providing a means to reopen the game to people who aren't quite there yet; the ones who steer clear of group play because they're constantly being yelled at for inferior numeric performance ratings, the ones who give up characters between 50 and 60 because they're being told to repeat content or jump into the queues they're having poor experiences with, the ones who want to run multiple competent characters instead of one all-powerful investment character requiring months of time and countless sums of time-gated resources.
I would personally participate in STO's endgame queues and group content far more often if I was able to feel more immediately useful. The current situation, where you need to play Advanced to earn the resources to gear up and be ready to play Advanced, is a closed-loop frustration machine generating disgruntled players on both ends of the competency spectrum. The dilithium, specialization and R&D grinds are bad enough without needing to be difficulty-locked out of other forms of progression as well.
I'm not going to comment on Elite difficulty, as I lack any experience with the new Elite level, and personally feel that it fully belongs to the people who are willing to commit to it.
Totally a nitpick but the Isomorphics and Implants can be gained through battlegrounds. BNPs and APC can only* be gained through queues.
On the other issue, slightly lesser version of the IWIN fleet two-in-one consoles should be available through non-fleet means. RCS with ResAll has no downside.
*as seen by a normal person
Good catch & agreed with your suggestion.
I think you missed the point of what I was saying: I was responding to the other poster you quoted and I was NOT speaking about the grind when I referred to the "long slog," but rather to what we used to be able to do if for whatever reason we blew an optional, which was to continue fighting for however long it took to win. Even a sloppy win that didn't give as many marks, but more than the insultingly minimal "rewards" from being failed out of the match, you could at least have the pride of knowing that you were not a quitter and you took the time it took to finally get the job done.
That satisfaction is nonexistent with the failoptionals--you just get kicked out after 2 minutes and a huge cooldown before you can try again that...why would you risk it? And of course Normal does not help you progress to Advanced--only Advanced helps you progress to Advanced, yet you are stuck making no progress and just failing again and again (or getting abuse from other players) because of that.
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IMO it is not too much to ask of Cryptic that the jumps in difficulty be set in a way that makes sense and actually allows for proper at-level "on-the-job training." As it is it's barely even possible to help each other without being heavily penalized for it.
I can see ELITES potentially having fails because by then you should be geared and highly skilled. But IMO that has no place in Advanced whatsoever. NOR was it advertised that way pre-DR, and frankly I think the false advertising has people equally mad if not madder than they are about the actual end result.
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You can practice optional objectives in normals.
The one example now that I think about it, where we largely GOT what was advertised, is Undine Infiltration. Get your first exposure to the questions on UIN, step up to a tougher fight and lose marks if you miss a question (but still have the opportunity to complete the fight) on UIA and get the isomorphic injections you need to be ready for the next level, and then step up to UIE where you must answer the questions perfectly and keep one person alive. About the only tweak I would make to UIE is make it so that only the person who screws up a question gets severely penalized, since there is less logic in claiming it's a team fail if one person cannot read and nobody else had the opportunity to change or compensate for that person's actions. But at least with the failoptionals we do have, they are on Elite only, so the situation is more livable than it is with most of the other STF's and allows for *proper* training and gearing progression.
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You can put together reasonable gear builds without touching another advanced queue. Sure, much of what I use is fleet gear, but there are far more sources of fleet credits than advanced rep rewards.
You dont need to upgrade any of your items from mk 12 from any of the content. I was hitting 500-600 DPS with mk 12 items at Bug Hunt Elite which is sufficient to carry the whole PuG team.
Advance/elite queues can be done using pre DR gear Space or ground. You just need the player to be NOT spoiled, self entitled nor have a bad performance.
Also choosing the right toon at Bug Hunt. Bug Hunt is an Eng Toons play ground. Although the Tac can compete, the Tac needs a high performance team just to be at par with an Eng toon doing it in a PuG.
Although gear Helps. I upgrade my stuff to mk 14 although still at VR quality. Took my dps to 871 presently at BHE.
Optionals should be turned back into optionals with enhanced rewards. These new random critical fail optionals have killed the public queues because heaps of pugs just can't cut it anymore. I dunno if devs expect the player's long established habits to miraculously change... cause that's a foolish assumption to make. People who never spoke a word in old cure even as their team shouted at them in all caps "DON'T YOU F*KING DARE KILL THAT CUBE!" as they proceeded to do so anyway, are still not going to respond to a "how's kang doing?" query in new cure.
I mean, before if you were a super star in a TRIBBLE pug, at least the team could grab your coat tails so you could drag them along and finish the match if only to avoid a leaver penalty, but now if you have to carry the team, you best be able to hoist them all onto your shoulders and sprint a mile in 30 seconds while singing the national anthem backwards.
The new difficulty of stfs is just "artificial" difficulty of bloated HP and critical fail not-so-optionals. One doesn't require some new level of skill, just heaps of dps and maybe a splash of CC on occasion... for when DPS hasn't been applied liberally enough the first time. Though I imagine if the devs made the AI more challenging there'd probably be a bunch of complaints on that too... those mirror event ships healing each other and themselves instead of just being floating meat bags sure is inconvenient after all... oh god... have the devs taken the smart npcs into consideration when bloating everything? If not, those mirror ships are going to be unkillable, lol.
Joined January 2009
If you've done ISA over and over and over(like I have), and have combat parses and personal performance meters, you know how the fight is done, you do all the things right, and you STILL LOSE the not-optional, what do you do? Do you get fired up? I'll tell you what I do. I get mad. At the other players. And I don't want to be mad at the other players.
Hehe, know the feeling there.
Considering how often ISA has been mentioned now this map seems to have a harder fail than most of the elite runs I do (with pugs or premades alike by the way).
I doubt we ever see a change. Like pointed out I strongly think cryptic wants players off those old Borg maps to enjoy newer contend. I bet the popularity of former ISE was their biggest problem to deal with.
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I PUGged exclusively on the old Elite STFs, usually 3-4 per day. About 1 in 10 we'd fail an optional and get a reduced reward. 1 in 50 we'd hose it so badly we'd fail the entire mission.
I don't think I've played more than 10 STFs since the new system. Only had one success due to two of us doing dedicated crowd control.
2) Can you describe the exact experience that caused you to reach that decision? Anything you can do within the limits of civility to bring home to the reader exactly what that experience was like for a player would be helpful. (No flaming or trolling.)
When I realised that in Infected Space Advanced if the naninte spheres heal the transformer at all, it's a fail. Then I swear I saw nanite spheres spawning as soon as the generators started taking damage (possibly AOE damage hitting the Generator?)
3) What could Cryptic do to change your mind and get you to participate in the queues again?
Easy.
Do what they said they were going to do in the first place, and make the Advanced exactly the same as the old Elite. No fail optionals.