I read today's patchnotes and found the following information:
Resolved an issue which caused some items which activate Duty Officer missions or tasks such as the Temporal Beacons and the Lore Datachips to not function.
Now, I've never known about a relationship between duty officers assignments and the lore datachips.
All I knew was that I could get the datachips at the academies in a daily mission. Before Delta Grinding... sorry, Delta Rising came out, the main use for those seemed to be accolade points (i.e. no use at all, since those don't actually do anything). Now, there's a handful of skill points / specialisation XP available and it'll help you on your three-year quest to eventually unlock all the specialisation points of the space and ground specialisations you intend to use, worthwhile only when you're going for the lore question dilithium anyway.
Okay, part of this paragraph contains a rant but the gist of it is:
They seemed pointless to me.
Now I'm being told they have some kind of unspecified effect on duty officer mission availability?
Likewise, I have no idea what temporal beacons do to duty officer missions.
Is this a new / hidden feature? I was unable to find any information using google.
Is this, perhaps, just an unfortunate wording of the patch note, with no actual relationship existing? Please help me.
Comments
The doff have names that have to do with time travel so there are Back to the Future and Dr. Who references in there.
Doing doff missions in a particular field increases your rank in that field.
At each new rank, you can requisition a new doff, free from the store tab pertaining to that field.
Higher rank means better doff requisitions, better doffs means more success in that field.
Some fields also affect player mission availability from specialist npcs.
Diplomacy is an example, the 'Diplomatic Corps' npc in Qunn's office for example, doing diplomacy doff missions raises diplomacy doff rank, and that rank unlocks more player missions from that npc or while traveling around sector space. Get your doff diplomacy to tier whatever unlocks 'First contact' missions etc.
Various chips/research notes etc also unlock doff missions, or doffs
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You're explaining how the doff system works. That's not what I asked, though. The patch notes suggest a relationship between doffs and the lore accolades, and that seems odd.
Also, thank you luncho80 for clearing up that part of the question. I should've known that if it's something I'd never heard of, it had to do with one of those stupid lockboxes.
Well, they changed so many things that the transwarps now suck, and the first contact stuff has been gone for a while. Frankly, the only good benefit is access to free purple doffs at rank for, including 2 RSL doffs which are good for R&D. The game is now all destroying stuff left and right.
No arguments there... Damn shame...
Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...</b></size></center>
Your're welcome.
So as to the datachips. Yes, the datachips from SFA and New Romulus are ONLY for accolades and nothing more.
The Iconian reputation now gives a datachip, but it was bugged and a bit complicated to use if you didn't know how because the Use right menu option was taken out with the item update that came with S10. They fixed that which affected all datachips including the temporal beacons. So you have 4-5 chips affected that were fixed.
1) NR lore
2) SFA lore chips
3) Datachip you get at beginning with Spock voiceovers
4) Iconian datachip with Sela communications
5) Temporal beacons (The only doff one in this list)
6) Maybe the holonovel ones were also affected? (Doff also)
Also, I agree they completely screwed up all the transwarps, especially the no-cooldown mission transwarps which used to be great for getting around (return to Drozana from anywhere for only 500ECs, best transwarp option ever) - now they're all 20k+, a damn shame.
Oh well, back to grinding I suppose. I might actually succeed in logging on later tonight, right now I'm only getting timeouts. I wonder why Craptic seems not to have anticipated an increased server load when releasing a ton of new content and a lengthy event requiring grind, grind and again, grind.
The romulan chip from the Tal Shiar lockbox was affected and fixed as well.