You get XP gain after getting certain Veteran Reward milestones.
Yes, you are correct, I was forgetting the 5% Skill Point bump and as you say, that's a Veteran Reward bonus, not a flat 10-20% bump like you'd normally see just for being subscribed...
I was playing a few years back, stopped a month or two after it went F2P and found the F2P option too restrictive to bother with.
You'll see the Wastelander Sub (which is the same price pre-F2P subs were) gives a 15% bump to XP gain, and a 30% bump to Random Ability Points (AP - FE's equivalent to skill points/Spec points), along with 30% bumps to Death Toll (PVP points) and Faction (Reputation) gains... They even get a 25% bump to crafting speed...
In case anyone missed the tribble patch notes, they are significantly nerfing XP from doffing in the next patch.
"Resolved an issue that was causing all assignments with durations between 12 hours and 15.9 hours to scale their rewards more aggressively than intended.
The Skillpoint, Expertise and CXP bonuses from these Assignments will be reduced accordingly."
What they mean by this is the 12 hour missions that yield decent xp, like Suppress Gorn Uprising, the 12-hour delta quadrant missions, etc.
Do you guys think this is a good idea? Should xp be nerfed even more, to make spec points take even longer to get than they do now?
I have been in game going on 4yrs now, daily player, life time member spent plenty of my hard earned real money on/in this game. Maybe not a Great Blue whale, but a killer whale at least.
I have had about enough of the nerfing of things, I play mostly KDF characters, I am the Fleet Admiral of my own fleet.
So when I say, "I have had about enough", I mean I am very close to quitting this game and taking my money elsewhere. They way I hear it they plan on cutting the experience points by approximately 90% on doff missions 12 hrs and up . So what would be the point of doing the missions? Doffing is 1 of the few things that I had continued to like about the game.
They have changed so many things in game in the past 2 years it is HARD to keep up, reputation, skill points, leveling, killed the exchange as far as consoles are concerned, etc. I am also SICK of the "We are introducing new ships with new abilities every other damn week." :mad:
The always creating new content that is always broken when introduced, the ignoring of tribble test server players that notify them what need to be fixed and they don't before putting it on holodeck. The 5-6 patches it takes to fix stuff, and of course don't forget the "Known Issues" that have been there for months and no patch in sight to correct them.
They finally get something right with Delta Recruit with the extra perks to give a guy a starting chance. So I guess the felt they had to balance it out and take something away that most of us like (doff nerf).
Sorry for the venting, but like I said I have had just about enough, so Rivera if you happened to read this, please reconsider. I already got 1 foot out the door.
Hey guys! Just wanted to get back to you on this. I'm talking with the team about the leveling curve and progression rates. I'll let you know once I have a little more info.
Thank you for raising the issue.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Hey guys! Just wanted to get back to you on this. I'm talking with the team about the leveling curve and progression rates. I'll let you know once I have a little more info.
Hold the phone!
The Developers are actually looking into the leveling curve? That's awesome, but are you (devs) looking into just doffing xp or the whole ball of wax?
P.S. Thank you for the frequent updates on issues, I, for one, appreciate being kept up to date, even if there's been little progress... lol
If you want to take a very one dimensional look at it and only look at XP/assignment length, then you're naturally going to get a very skewed picture. DOFFing has a lot of parameters to it. Assignment availability is a big one.
If, we can somehow find 20 12 hour assignments on Monday morning, can we find 20 more Monday night? Probably not. I don't think you can even find 20 12 hour assignments at the same time.
How many are there? Once done when do we get to use them again? If I do them Monday morning, when is the next time I can find them? Tuesday morning? Probably not. Wednesday? Thursday even?
If you get hung up on XP per assignment length, you're going to get a very distorted picture of things.
Further, what do these assignments require, what are the casualty risks and the success chance? That needs to be factored in as well.
The end result is that when Heretic made this 12 hour class of assignments, they were extremely rare to find and had other factors made them much more difficult than others, and thus more rewarding. There may have only been 2-3 total originally. When you look at it that way, they are far, far more balanced than just looking at XP/hour, yet that is being entirely ignored.
Now Cryptic is overusing the time class and nerfing everything rather than properly slotting the easy 12 hour jobs to another time class. That is the crux of the issue.
These assignments are not rare, and they don't have unusual requirements. They are uncommon, so you won't always see them, but they are not rare. You may have noticed that I annotated on my chart the requirements, if there were special requirements such as a doff with Telekinesis or Contraband(or both). Missions with special requirements should pay more.... the missions that are at the heart of this discussion are not special except for their ludicrous payouts. Seriously... their base payout is several times that of longer assignments with similar requirements.
I realize this opinion is heresy around here, but honestly, the endgame spec point grind in this game is pretty well on par with most other MMO endgames that I've seen. EQ2 or WoW, for example, particularly the former--once you get towards the level cap and start earning AP (EQ2's equivalent of spec points), you're often talking a week or more of regular, dedicated play to see even one point. I average about two spec points a week here, and that's mainly from weekday doffing and weekend play.
The problem is that the ramp-up in advancement requirements when you hit 50-60 is like hitting a brick wall, compared with the ludicrously easy, rapid pace of getting to that point. There's no real meaningful leveling curve, because even up to 50 you're still earning enough from story missions to level up about every other mission, especially if you throw in some doffing and patrols on the way from A to B.
Then you hit 50, and run into the progression that sarek93's post shows. It's such an abrupt change that it feels out of place and broken to the player--not because the requirements are excessive, but because they feel like an excessive change.
I would personally not significantly change the requirements of the endgame grind, except to perhaps provide more varied and interesting ways of earning meaningful SP.
IMO the real long-term fix is to significantly slow advancement from 1-50. As it stands right now, simply playing through the story missions advances a player so quickly that they outlevel content faster than they can appreciate it. This skews every other aspect of the game:
1. New players do not have a chance to polish their understanding of the game mechanics and abilities they already use before getting more pushed on them - this exacerbates the issue of high-level players who never actually learned to play the game, getting into advanced/elite queues and having no idea what to do.
2. Low-tier ships get outleveled so quickly that they are barely worth paying attention to for anything other than vanity value - if players spent longer in the lower tiers, they would have more reason to buy lower-tier ships.
3. A player unlocking the R&D system for the first time at Level 15 has no time to fully grasp or progress in the upgrade system until they are long, long past the point where they can craft anything useful for their character without a lengthy grind.
4. Most relevantly, players get so used to the rapid pace of leveling all the way up until 50 that hitting the sudden brick wall there feels frustrating and improperly scaled.
Keep the ramp-up from 1-20 about as rapid as it ought to be, but by that point advancement should start to slow. The SP requirement for 30 ought to be closer to what we have now for 50, if not moreso. The specific numbers are arguable, so let's not get hung up on them--the point is to smooth out the curve so that the progression after 50 feels natural, while breathing some life into the early game instead of having it disappear in literally a day's play.
Fleet Admiral L'Yern - Screenshot and doffing addict
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
What about a passive XP bonus based on the Spec tree's?
Like, completing a Spec tree gives a permanent bonus to the XP you get for that character? Each time you complete another Specialization you get an increase to that bonus.
This encourages people to complete the Spec trees, gives a good incentive while also making it easier to complete future ones.
"Why all the sales"?
And a merry freaking Christmas to you too, Ebenezer.
-jonsills, 'Cryptic Why the sales..instead of Fixing XP leveling and this game?'
I realize this opinion is heresy around here, but honestly, the endgame spec point grind in this game is pretty well on par with most other MMO endgames that I've seen. EQ2 or WoW, for example, particularly the former--once you get towards the level cap and start earning AP (EQ2's equivalent of spec points), you're often talking a week or more of regular, dedicated play to see even one point. I average about two spec points a week here, and that's mainly from weekday doffing and weekend play.
It's on par with keeping up with WoW raid tiers, I'd say.
Thing is, most WoW players don't raid (raiding progression is not really an accurate representation of the emergent endgame in WoW) and WoW is also very quick to implement catch-up mechanisms, such that, say, Intelligence and Commando and the early Pilot tiers likely would have been discounted somehow when Command and expanded Pilot options hit.
There is no flexibility for that kind of discounting.
If somebody plays for 7-10 hours a week in WoW, there will be a point several times a year where they "catch up" to people who played more and the advantage for playing more and more hardcore was accomplishing certain milestones FASTER. STO doesn't have that kind of catch-up mechanism and it isn't easily built into the game.
The best option I could see would be:
- To save new specializations for certain points
- To have spec point gains ramp up every week until a new spec launches
- To have spec points decay or get converted into something else so that the "discounted" spec points can't be spent on the new launching spec
That's the big reason I can see for them to be stingy with spec points; you don't want to high achievers to stock pile unspent spec points.
What's needed really is for some kind of bonus spec points that ramps up over time as a catch-up mechanism (or a QoL feature for golds) but which must be spent and can't be saved for future specs.
what im soo ****'d about right now that this is the first time i hear about these kind of doffing missions while im a pure kdf-side player with lvl'd up toons by boring and repetitive story-missions
you know, when those patrol missions in the early days of DR was actually worth of doing
secondly, the doff missions aint updating in any sector. instead of fixing that we get a nerfbat in our face..
I never post here but have been playing since Beta as a subscriber....this is just insane to me....if you arent a sub the skill pts are killer from 50-60....I just don't see how a casual gamer is gonna get interested enough if the doff missions get nerfed again....the points are lousy as is on most of them so the few that do reward big are so rare that its difficult to "game" the system that way anyway...let us have some kind of fun getting pts...its constantly something to try and kill off a part of the game we love
I never post here but have been playing since Beta as a subscriber....this is just insane to me....if you arent a sub the skill pts are killer from 50-60....I just don't see how a casual gamer is gonna get interested enough if the doff missions get nerfed again....the points are lousy as is on most of them so the few that do reward big are so rare that its difficult to "game" the system that way anyway...let us have some kind of fun getting pts...its constantly something to try and kill off a part of the game we love
They're not any easier for subber.
The subber could spend their stipend on skill point pools, I guess. That would give them an extra 2k skillpoints a month. Then they get a 5% bonus if they've been a vet long enough. Lifers get Talaxians for another 5%.
That's a 10% boost tops and it doesn't really alleviate much pain at the high levels.
The subber could spend their stipend on skill point pools, I guess. That would give them an extra 2k skillpoints a month. Then they get a 5% bonus if they've been a vet long enough. Lifers get Talaxians for another 5%.
That's a 10% boost tops and it doesn't really alleviate much pain at the high levels.
I totally agree with it....it is still difficult for us subbers, I'm just saying its hard enough for us let alone a casual player...it makes things almost insurmountable for them
A little off and on the subject both.......are we getting Epic doff officers? I didn't see any news about it....but it seems to me this could be the start of a cash grab for ppl to buy Epic rarity officers.....I did a search but didn't see any news about that rarity coming for doffs
I think he means the current one, Xindi-Terrestrial. It has a bunch of actual UR doffs, the first I've ever seen with that quality level. Some are quite good.
Fleet Admiral L'Yern - Screenshot and doffing addict
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
I know bugs aren't your role here, but I find it characteristic, that there are how many responses from a community rep in this thread, yet thread after thread in bug reports with no response.
I'm going to be talking to them about the whole proverbial ball of wax.
(I have never heard of that phrase, origin?)
I have done some preliminary checks on the origin of "Whole ball of wax." As there is no conclusive, agreed-upon answer, what I can tell you is that it's first dictionary appearance in America was in the 1960's but research can find the phase in use as far back at the early 1880's. The theory I find most plausible is the one in which "ball of wax" was derived as a bastardization of the English term "bailiwick" meaning "one's sphere of operations or particular area of interest." The word "bailiwick" was only used heavily from about 1800-ish until 1825-ish.
Other versions of origin:
a) Coming from workers in Madame Tussaud's Waxworks...Considered highly unlikely, although she did her first wax figure in 1777, she did not get the name Tussaud until 1795 and the museum didn't open until 1835, well after documented uses of the term in the 1820's.
b) Coming from a story written in 1620 saying that there was a practice of taking an inheritance, dividing the portions in writing on four scraps of paper, rolling said papers into four little balls of wax and having the heirs draw.
I have to say, as a casual player, I only found the grind annoying in certain areas. However, as I play RPGs to overlevel, uh.. I didn't find that bad.
HOWEVER...I think I'm a fan of slowing down earlier progression, or making it all even, so there's no sudden jump.
I realize this opinion is heresy around here, but honestly, the endgame spec point grind in this game is pretty well on par with most other MMO endgames that I've seen. EQ2 or WoW, for example, particularly the former--once you get towards the level cap and start earning AP (EQ2's equivalent of spec points), you're often talking a week or more of regular, dedicated play to see even one point. I average about two spec points a week here, and that's mainly from weekday doffing and weekend play.
I agree that this is a perception issue as noted in my post. It feels like a brick wall because it is in fact a proverbial brick wall compared to previous leveling.
However, STO is not WoW or EQ2 in terms of lower level activities. In WoW, for instance, there are numerous dungeons and side quests to take on leveling from 1-100. In STO, side quests don't exist. Instead you have more of a "dailies" type flavor of patrols and Red Alerts. The number of queues available to pre-50 captains is not very extensive and each has a 30 minute cooldown timer.
I think if the direction you (and/or the devs) want to go in smoothing out the curve is to raise the XP needed at lower levels, I think new queues and more content will need to be added at lower levels. After all, WoW and EQ2 do not force you to grind the same dailies over and over again to reach max level (in WoW you have new/different dungeons and new locales).
And thank you, Trendy, for taking these issues seriously and raising them to the dev team.
I have done some preliminary checks on the origin of "Whole ball of wax." As there is no conclusive, agreed-upon answer, what I can tell you is that it's first dictionary appearance in America was in the 1960's but research can find the phase in use as far back at the early 1880's. The theory I find most plausible is the one in which "ball of wax" was derived as a bastardization of the English term "bailiwick" meaning "one's sphere of operations or particular area of interest." The word "bailiwick" was only used heavily from about 1800-ish until 1825-ish.
Other versions of origin:
a) Coming from workers in Madame Tussaud's Waxworks...Considered highly unlikely, although she did her first wax figure in 1777, she did not get the name Tussaud until 1795 and the museum didn't open until 1835, well after documented uses of the term in the 1820's.
b) Coming from a story written in 1620 saying that there was a practice of taking an inheritance, dividing the portions in writing on four scraps of paper, rolling said papers into four little balls of wax and having the heirs draw.
Either way it's so old we may never know... :P Tracking down the origin of a 200 year old colloquialism is about as easy as figuring out the origins of certain nursery rhymes...
round and round the mulberry bush
the monkey chased the weasel
the monkey thought it was all in fun,
but pop goes the weasel....
I figured out it was nonsense when I was a little kid, but it still makes me wonder who came up with something like that....
Hey guys! Just wanted to get back to you on this. I'm talking with the team about the leveling curve and progression rates. I'll let you know once I have a little more info.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
I think if the direction you (and/or the devs) want to go in smoothing out the curve is to raise the XP needed at lower levels, I think new queues and more content will need to be added at lower levels. After all, WoW and EQ2 do not force you to grind the same dailies over and over again to reach max level (in WoW you have new/different dungeons and new locales).
I'm not so sure about that, to be honest. Very little of the content in STO seems to be strictly tied to level or tier in any intrinsic way--there are some very broadly-spaced minimum levels for the episodes, and of course the PvE queue requirements et al, but all of it scales. If you started raising the leveling curve sooner and more gradually, the SP from all of those missions would just get spread out across a lower, narrower range.
If anything, it would be an opportunity to add or revamp endgame content. That's ultimately where everyone spends the majority of their time anyway, so why not focus on providing endgame replay value with rewarding progression?
And thank you, Trendy, for taking these issues seriously and raising them to the dev team.
Yes, thank you very much.
Fleet Admiral L'Yern - Screenshot and doffing addict
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
Comments
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
Yes, you are correct, I was forgetting the 5% Skill Point bump and as you say, that's a Veteran Reward bonus, not a flat 10-20% bump like you'd normally see just for being subscribed...
For example : Fallen Earth...
I was playing a few years back, stopped a month or two after it went F2P and found the F2P option too restrictive to bother with.
You'll see the Wastelander Sub (which is the same price pre-F2P subs were) gives a 15% bump to XP gain, and a 30% bump to Random Ability Points (AP - FE's equivalent to skill points/Spec points), along with 30% bumps to Death Toll (PVP points) and Faction (Reputation) gains... They even get a 25% bump to crafting speed...
Thank you for raising the issue.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Hold the phone!
The Developers are actually looking into the leveling curve? That's awesome, but are you (devs) looking into just doffing xp or the whole ball of wax?
P.S. Thank you for the frequent updates on issues, I, for one, appreciate being kept up to date, even if there's been little progress... lol
My character Tsin'xing
(I have never heard of that phrase, origin?)
The problem is that the ramp-up in advancement requirements when you hit 50-60 is like hitting a brick wall, compared with the ludicrously easy, rapid pace of getting to that point. There's no real meaningful leveling curve, because even up to 50 you're still earning enough from story missions to level up about every other mission, especially if you throw in some doffing and patrols on the way from A to B.
Then you hit 50, and run into the progression that sarek93's post shows. It's such an abrupt change that it feels out of place and broken to the player--not because the requirements are excessive, but because they feel like an excessive change.
I would personally not significantly change the requirements of the endgame grind, except to perhaps provide more varied and interesting ways of earning meaningful SP.
IMO the real long-term fix is to significantly slow advancement from 1-50. As it stands right now, simply playing through the story missions advances a player so quickly that they outlevel content faster than they can appreciate it. This skews every other aspect of the game:
1. New players do not have a chance to polish their understanding of the game mechanics and abilities they already use before getting more pushed on them - this exacerbates the issue of high-level players who never actually learned to play the game, getting into advanced/elite queues and having no idea what to do.
2. Low-tier ships get outleveled so quickly that they are barely worth paying attention to for anything other than vanity value - if players spent longer in the lower tiers, they would have more reason to buy lower-tier ships.
3. A player unlocking the R&D system for the first time at Level 15 has no time to fully grasp or progress in the upgrade system until they are long, long past the point where they can craft anything useful for their character without a lengthy grind.
4. Most relevantly, players get so used to the rapid pace of leveling all the way up until 50 that hitting the sudden brick wall there feels frustrating and improperly scaled.
Keep the ramp-up from 1-20 about as rapid as it ought to be, but by that point advancement should start to slow. The SP requirement for 30 ought to be closer to what we have now for 50, if not moreso. The specific numbers are arguable, so let's not get hung up on them--the point is to smooth out the curve so that the progression after 50 feels natural, while breathing some life into the early game instead of having it disappear in literally a day's play.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
Beat me to it! :eek:
Lol, anyway Thank you Miss Trendy for the quite expedient answer!
Thanks, you may not get them to listen much , but the effort is appreciated by the players. :cool:
Like, completing a Spec tree gives a permanent bonus to the XP you get for that character? Each time you complete another Specialization you get an increase to that bonus.
This encourages people to complete the Spec trees, gives a good incentive while also making it easier to complete future ones.
And a merry freaking Christmas to you too, Ebenezer.
-jonsills, 'Cryptic Why the sales..instead of Fixing XP leveling and this game?'
It's on par with keeping up with WoW raid tiers, I'd say.
Thing is, most WoW players don't raid (raiding progression is not really an accurate representation of the emergent endgame in WoW) and WoW is also very quick to implement catch-up mechanisms, such that, say, Intelligence and Commando and the early Pilot tiers likely would have been discounted somehow when Command and expanded Pilot options hit.
There is no flexibility for that kind of discounting.
If somebody plays for 7-10 hours a week in WoW, there will be a point several times a year where they "catch up" to people who played more and the advantage for playing more and more hardcore was accomplishing certain milestones FASTER. STO doesn't have that kind of catch-up mechanism and it isn't easily built into the game.
The best option I could see would be:
- To save new specializations for certain points
- To have spec point gains ramp up every week until a new spec launches
- To have spec points decay or get converted into something else so that the "discounted" spec points can't be spent on the new launching spec
That's the big reason I can see for them to be stingy with spec points; you don't want to high achievers to stock pile unspent spec points.
What's needed really is for some kind of bonus spec points that ramps up over time as a catch-up mechanism (or a QoL feature for golds) but which must be spent and can't be saved for future specs.
you know, when those patrol missions in the early days of DR was actually worth of doing
secondly, the doff missions aint updating in any sector. instead of fixing that we get a nerfbat in our face..
just wow.
They're not any easier for subber.
The subber could spend their stipend on skill point pools, I guess. That would give them an extra 2k skillpoints a month. Then they get a 5% bonus if they've been a vet long enough. Lifers get Talaxians for another 5%.
That's a 10% boost tops and it doesn't really alleviate much pain at the high levels.
I totally agree with it....it is still difficult for us subbers, I'm just saying its hard enough for us let alone a casual player...it makes things almost insurmountable for them
My character Tsin'xing
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
I know bugs aren't your role here, but I find it characteristic, that there are how many responses from a community rep in this thread, yet thread after thread in bug reports with no response.
I have done some preliminary checks on the origin of "Whole ball of wax." As there is no conclusive, agreed-upon answer, what I can tell you is that it's first dictionary appearance in America was in the 1960's but research can find the phase in use as far back at the early 1880's. The theory I find most plausible is the one in which "ball of wax" was derived as a bastardization of the English term "bailiwick" meaning "one's sphere of operations or particular area of interest." The word "bailiwick" was only used heavily from about 1800-ish until 1825-ish.
Other versions of origin:
a) Coming from workers in Madame Tussaud's Waxworks...Considered highly unlikely, although she did her first wax figure in 1777, she did not get the name Tussaud until 1795 and the museum didn't open until 1835, well after documented uses of the term in the 1820's.
b) Coming from a story written in 1620 saying that there was a practice of taking an inheritance, dividing the portions in writing on four scraps of paper, rolling said papers into four little balls of wax and having the heirs draw.
As always, thank you for the update and for taking feedback under advisement.
Obviously, we won't always get 'our way,' but it's highly encouraging to know that concerns are heard and taken under advisement.
Thank you for all you continue to do.
HOWEVER...I think I'm a fan of slowing down earlier progression, or making it all even, so there's no sudden jump.
I agree that this is a perception issue as noted in my post. It feels like a brick wall because it is in fact a proverbial brick wall compared to previous leveling.
However, STO is not WoW or EQ2 in terms of lower level activities. In WoW, for instance, there are numerous dungeons and side quests to take on leveling from 1-100. In STO, side quests don't exist. Instead you have more of a "dailies" type flavor of patrols and Red Alerts. The number of queues available to pre-50 captains is not very extensive and each has a 30 minute cooldown timer.
I think if the direction you (and/or the devs) want to go in smoothing out the curve is to raise the XP needed at lower levels, I think new queues and more content will need to be added at lower levels. After all, WoW and EQ2 do not force you to grind the same dailies over and over again to reach max level (in WoW you have new/different dungeons and new locales).
And thank you, Trendy, for taking these issues seriously and raising them to the dev team.
round and round the mulberry bush
the monkey chased the weasel
the monkey thought it was all in fun,
but pop goes the weasel....
I figured out it was nonsense when I was a little kid, but it still makes me wonder who came up with something like that....
My character Tsin'xing
I am both worried and intrigued.
If anything, it would be an opportunity to add or revamp endgame content. That's ultimately where everyone spends the majority of their time anyway, so why not focus on providing endgame replay value with rewarding progression?
Yes, thank you very much.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster