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Don't bother with doffing now
admiraltroika
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
The only ones worth doing anymore are contraband turnins and the ones that have a chance to reward purple doffs.
I guess all of the doff missions ARE equal now: they all give equally terrible rewards for the time and effort you put into them.
I guess all of the doff missions ARE equal now: they all give equally terrible rewards for the time and effort you put into them.
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*sits in a corner, cradling his legs and rocking back and forth*
It'll all be good...There's nothing to worry about. It'll all be good again...
Yes...
Even after you need that Epic DOFF from a Lock Box that will sell for more than a promo ship so you can build a barn with the vague talk of DOFFing becoming more like Magic the Gathering and Farmville from PO219?
* * * * *
But yeah, hrmm, I wasn't exploiting XP - so nothing changed for me - just DOFFing away per usual.
God, it's exhausting..
Wish they'd unnerf Prisoners. I liked when it just filled them and if I didn't want one there, I could remove it - instead of having to load them all up. Sometimes I have to take a break before I'm halfway through...it's dreadful.
What, all of maybe half an hour a day across a dozen characters?
Why would I need that? I just pick whatever missions look good, send off my doffs, and that's it for the morning/evening. I never felt I had to min-max a side-game.
But I doubt the OP meant that. I get the feeling he'd rather have the status quo remain.
They "normalized/ balanced" a bunch of 12 hr doff missions that were rewarding to much xp . . . they are now rewarding about 10% as much.
According to the devs, the 12-15 hour missions were rewarding more XP than what they were supposed to because there was an addition to the coding that wasn't supposed to be there. In other words, it wasn't intentional.
Yeah . . . I know . . . BTW, I fixed your post
Seriously? Is THIS what all the Doffing hysteria is about? How much XP and resources do people really expect to get from a few mouse clicks?
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
I fully intend to continue with bothering to Doff. I cannot emphasise how much benefit my toons generate for me each time do that. I think in my case (and even after the removal of the 1k+ XP assignments) I grab some 10-20k Dil (not even contraband counted) 1k fleet marks and some 100k SP each day spread throughout my 9 toons.
And if any DEV happens to read this, I use that income to have a better active time in a laggy and buggy game so nerf it and you may witness the greatest drop in daily log in numbers you have ever seen. A lot of peeps I know are a lot more impatient than I am and are just dropping by at the moment to doff, can you imagine?
Pleas pass on to Geko that if he tends to normalize anything he better starts elsewhere. With normalizing meaning bring the game more in line with industry standards compared to others games where you in game progression does not result in lag spikes on your customers favourite stages.
Thank you.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Where do you get the fmarks from? 100 fmarks per char and day sounds a bit much for doffing..
You can exchange 10k cxp for fm at your starbase. You need to have rank 4 (over 100k), so when you reach 110k you can swap the 10k for 75fm (100 crit). Bit of a slog if you haven't got to rank 4 in anything yet, but is worth it.
Here's the thing. The vast majority of the formerly desirable 12-hour assignments required some effort and time to seek out. For seasoned (read: bored) doffers grinding out spec points--an activity designed to liven up the endgame, which in turn livened up doffing--those assignments provided motivation to take the time to visit different areas in the game: the Dyson sphere, the Delta Quadrant, Eta Eridani.
I don't agree with OP that doffing isn't worth doing now. However, since XP rewards from doffing have been more or less normalized, for leveling or grinding out spec points via doffing there's really no reason to beam off of a starbase. I can actually play less now--30 minutes to cycle a dozen alts, filling up on assignments available at a base--and I never have to walk away from contraband turn-in. An activity that used to reward well no longer does, which means that a reason to play the game more no longer exists.
"Correcting" the supposed over-rewarding of 12-hour assignments eliminated a longstanding incentive to explore STO's universe in search of better rewards. The notion that there was something wrong with the reward rate also ignores a few things: 1) 12-hour assignments were for a long time mainly the domain of the KDF; 2) the doffing system is intentionally asymmetrical, and has always had better rewards KDF-side; 3) most of the KDF 12-hour assignments have a medium/high injury risk, just as marauding assignments do; 4) some of the KDF 12-hour assignments require contraband (trading contraband for what is now a base reward of 144 XP is quite laughable); 5) many 12-hour assignments now reward about the same as junk common 2- and 4-hour assignments.
I don't accept the premise that the 12-hour reward rate was unintentional, and even if it was I think it was poor game design to reduce it. The end result for me is not playing more to make up for the loss in XP accumulation, nor is it spending close to $10 for 1/1680th of the XP needed to max out the spec point system. It's playing less.
Yes before the big nerv i was flying around alpha, beta and delta sector to get the good missions, now i sit in 1 place and select all missions without looking, they all suck (75% nerv is just insane !!!)
On the contrary, it was an lower end estimation and I get probably much more than that.
9 toons with 23 doff assignments each. Run my assignments to 90% in the sectors around DS9 so no huge SP or CXP or anything. Just the sum of it and each day my toons have to fly to base to at least trade in 10.000 for 75/100 fleet marks from one of the 11 categories.
Its the only way in this game small fleets get a chance to progress at all. Patch that out and small fleets will hold.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Thanks for pointing this out . . . These will be "normalized" next, they are obviously rewarding too much skill points.
Or not.
Fact is, there are a lot of sentences written in this thread that would be more accurate if they included a couple of qualifying words.
"Doffing isn't rewarding"
For you.
"only ones worth doing"
For you.
"all give equally terrible rewards"
To you.
"wasted time and effort"
To you.
"not really fun"
For you.
...seeing a pattern here?
You will get precisely nowhere--achieve no traction at all with devs--by making sweeping generalizations that present your personal opinions of a system as some kind of conclusive, objective fact. Why? Because all it takes is one counter-example, one person saying, "you know, actually I like that", to make it clear that no, you don't speak for everyone--that's just your take on it. Hyperbolic statements like thse are like farts in the wind.
Doffing is my primary activity in this game, one of the things I spend the most time on and enjoy greatly. Most of my crew is purple/UV or blue (you can browse my roster in my sig), and I rake in a vast amounts of rare mats, more dil than I can refine, a few hundred flarks a day from CXP reports, and a few spec points a week--almost all of it by doffing.
And somehow I managed to achieve all of this without having ever heard of these bugged 12-hour missions before this whole uproar. Does that make me better than anyone? No. There's plenty of people who know more about doffing than I do; I just don't spend much time in the DQ. But you'll forgive me if I kind of roll my eyes every time I hear someone start bleating about how unrewarding and pointless it is now that the exploit has been fixed.
It's all a matter of perspective. If you think you can't progress briskly in this game by doffing, I would encourage you to reach out to someone who does for help and advice so that you can learn otherwise.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
Those DOFF missions were not "rewarding more XP than what they were supposed to." Those XP rewards on those Pre-Nerfed, 12hr+ missions were that way since the DOFFing system was introduced. But before DR and before the XP nerfs, before the Tau Dewa Patrol Nerf, it was never a concern because leveling to the cap of Lv50 was easy.
The only thing that changed was Cryptic's quest in removing more good XP sources since Profits Rising Came out. And the Solanae Allied Space Development, Suppress Gorn Uprising, and myriad of missions providing good XPs can't be allowed, I guess.
Shortly after Profits Rising and Cryptic started to nerf many XP related things, Non-Delta Patrols, there were people complaining about the slower XP progress. It was often thrown out that you should be DOFFing to get good XPs.
Well, that's gone now. What's next?
Indeed. Leveling 1-50 is still easy. The big change is 51+. It doesn't stop at 60.
From another thread:
My character Tsin'xing
Doff smart, D smart, GOT IT !!!!! THIS HEAR IS MY BOOM STICK !!! oops sorry..got carried away. you know what I mean.
There is a list in the server-side game resources, of course. That list consists of every mission that can potentially spawn in the game, and it is that list from which the game draws in order to choose which assignments are spawning where.
Whether these assignments exist or not in the game is not the question here--we obviously know they still exist, because some people are finding them. The question is, why are they not appearing for most people?
Here's how this works, at a very high level. Some of the mechanics are informed conjecture, but I believe this is accurate enough to understand.
The game used to be divided into sector blocks, right? In order to get a new set of assignments, you had to travel to a new sector block. There was a procedure in the code that was triggered at some point during the zone change process (most likely during loading of the new zone) which queried the list of assignments and selected a random sampling of them.
Those zone changes don't exist in the game anymore--or rather, they don't exist when moving between sector blocks within the same quadrant. So the old code that used to update the assignments? It can't work exactly the same way as before. They had to change it so that the list updated dynamically as the player moved around, when crossing a sector block border. That means adding a hook to detect when this happens and trigger the appropriate code.
However, there seems to be a defect in the way this change was implemented. The check that results in the assignment list repopulating does still successfully repopulate the list when you change sector blocks--that is, when you move from a sector that was part of one of the old blocks to a sector that used to be part of a different block.
The problem is that the assignment list is not consistently updating correctly if a player crosses the boundary between two sectors from the SAME "legacy" sector block--likely because crossing an intra-block sector boundary never updated the assignments before, so it's completely new functionality.
There are probably more complexities to the issue, and I'm intentionally glossing over a lot of them for the sake of understandability.
Unfortunately, simply knowing that this is so--or at least suspecting it--isn't necessarily enough to fix it. There are many different paths the code might have to go through in order to get to where the issue is occurring, and any one of those paths might be contributing in some way to the error. It may take time to chase down the bug.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
If you are talking about the thread below, then you are misunderstanding something.
Assignments Reportedly Missing
That thread was started by Borticus long before the recent bugs caused by the sector space revamp. The assignments identified by players in that thread were lost because of the removal of the cluster maps. The lost assignments could have been found by searching their database.
The above comment by Borticus leads me to suspect that at least one of the following is true:
(a) Cryptic has no database administrators on staff to assist with such queries.
(b) The doff assignments are not stored in a database.
(c) The doff assignments are stored in flat files, and Borticus doesn't know how to use grep. Usually only programmers and IT staff know about grep, but it comes in handy when you need to search a large number of text files for specific information.
Whereas limiting the possibilities to these three as you have done here suggests to me that you may not clearly understand the complexities of troubleshooting an issue like this, or for that matter in constructing a database query. It is also possible that you do have experience with these things and are simply not being fair here.
Consider another comment by Bort in that thread: Now consider his later comment after fixing the issue: Emphasis mine in both. Now I will do my best to explain.
The assignments were not appearing for players because they were flagged to appear on specific maps, and when the exploration clusters were removed, players could no longer be present in the only location where they could spawn.
It wasn't that the assignments didn't exist, or that they couldn't be found in the database. It wasn't even that the game wasn't checking them. It's that it was no longer possible for the requirements of their appearance to be met, and it was impossible in a way that would not produce an error. After all, from the perspective of that code path, all that's happened is that a player is not currently in the correct location to spawn that assignment. The game has no way of procedurally distinguishing that result from the result of any other assignment not appearing because the player isn't currently in the correct location--it is a legitimate outcome.
I deal with SQL queries and data visualization every day at work. Without knowing the specific assignments that are not appearing to use as a starting point, what kind of broad query would show you what was broken, given what we now know about the cause?
The most useful thing I can think of to try would be to take the metrics collected on doff assignment completion, aggregate at the individual assignment ID level, and query the MAX of the timestamp column. This would return the most recent date on which any given assignment was completed by a player, and assignments that literally cannot be completed or never appear should show up as clear outliers.
If you visualize the COUNTD of completions per assignment across the time dimension, you should also see a very clear dropoff for certain assignments at a given point in time, and the timestamp of the cliff for that dropoff would give you a place to start looking for changes
Now, with all of that said, here's what you wrote that I replied to: To answer your semi-rhetorical questions: of course there's a list somewhere. Of course they can see every doff mission that exists in the database.
Without the further information provided in that thread, that simply isn't enough to identify which assignments aren't appearing for players or why--when as far as the game is concerned, the assignments are appearing whenever it is legitimate for them to do so based on its appearance criteria.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster