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Save Mine Trap (and other 20-person queues)
alex284
Member Posts: 366 Arc User
There are a few, older 20-person queues that never pop anymore, making it the same as if these queues didn't exist at all. Which is sad, because the content has already been created and they could be saved quite easily.
I'm thinking about The Big Dig, Breaking the Planet, and Mine Trap, as well as Starbase Defense in space. The most important one, though, is definitely Mine Trap, which is a hidden gem among STO's queues, one of the most fun maps the game has to offer (saving silly Romulan miners from salt vampires, what could be better?). To get it to pop, though, you have to wait for 17 people to sign up for it, and that's a lot in the current state of the game. The other 20-person queues have the same problem.
So here's what the devs could do: just get rid of 3/4 of Mine Trap. It's set up for 4 teams of 5, and each team (if they know what they're doing) stays in their area and does the same thing as the other teams but independently of them. So why not just make it a 5-person queue and have one team focused on one area? Now the queue only needs 5 players to pop and everyone has the same gaming experience as they would have with 20 players.
The Big Dig, which is less fun but still somewhat engaging, is even easier to save: just let the queue pop with 5 players. Maybe reduce the mobs a bit, but who cares. I soloed that pre-DR, and I've since taken 5-person teams into it with fleeties who say they're awful at ground, why am I suggesting they do ground, oh wait it's not so bad, everything just melts, lol a giant fek'ihri on a pyramid defended by Remans. It's easy enough that 5 people can beat it in 15 minutes, but I could see a benefit to reducing the mobs just to reduce tedium.
Just as simple solutions could be found for Breaking the Planet and Starbase Fleet Defense. The latter is also super-laggy with 20 players on the map, so reducing it to a 5-person mission would help with that too.
Anyway, I just really like mine trap and would love to play it again as a pug instead of having to round up people for premades who are cool with doing it wrong (that is, forgetting 3/4 areas and just trying to do one well). I don't see these queues getting played ever anyway, so no one's good time would be ruined if they got modified a bit.
A Mine Trap Elite would also be nice....
I'm thinking about The Big Dig, Breaking the Planet, and Mine Trap, as well as Starbase Defense in space. The most important one, though, is definitely Mine Trap, which is a hidden gem among STO's queues, one of the most fun maps the game has to offer (saving silly Romulan miners from salt vampires, what could be better?). To get it to pop, though, you have to wait for 17 people to sign up for it, and that's a lot in the current state of the game. The other 20-person queues have the same problem.
So here's what the devs could do: just get rid of 3/4 of Mine Trap. It's set up for 4 teams of 5, and each team (if they know what they're doing) stays in their area and does the same thing as the other teams but independently of them. So why not just make it a 5-person queue and have one team focused on one area? Now the queue only needs 5 players to pop and everyone has the same gaming experience as they would have with 20 players.
The Big Dig, which is less fun but still somewhat engaging, is even easier to save: just let the queue pop with 5 players. Maybe reduce the mobs a bit, but who cares. I soloed that pre-DR, and I've since taken 5-person teams into it with fleeties who say they're awful at ground, why am I suggesting they do ground, oh wait it's not so bad, everything just melts, lol a giant fek'ihri on a pyramid defended by Remans. It's easy enough that 5 people can beat it in 15 minutes, but I could see a benefit to reducing the mobs just to reduce tedium.
Just as simple solutions could be found for Breaking the Planet and Starbase Fleet Defense. The latter is also super-laggy with 20 players on the map, so reducing it to a 5-person mission would help with that too.
Anyway, I just really like mine trap and would love to play it again as a pug instead of having to round up people for premades who are cool with doing it wrong (that is, forgetting 3/4 areas and just trying to do one well). I don't see these queues getting played ever anyway, so no one's good time would be ruined if they got modified a bit.
A Mine Trap Elite would also be nice....
Post edited by alex284 on
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But if I had to choose between dev time beefing up NPC AI and pathing on those maps vs new content, well I know what I'd choose.
Episodes: Players get their reward items and initial chunk of XPs for doing the mission for the very first time. It does NOT help that replays get you inferior rewards. Why the hell would I want to suffer that from replays?
Reputation Queues/Adventure Zones: In general, when a new Reputation comes up content related to that new Rep is popping with activity. Very easy for the queues to go off. Tons of people at the Adventure Zones to make it easy. But after enough time, people get what they want from Reputation and move to the new Rep that just came out with its exclusive Queues and possibly an Adventure Zone.
It's the Locust Nature of gaming in STO. If your'e not aboard the initial rush when everyone is doing it, then you missed the bus. Very few of the older queues are still regularly running. We have tons of older queues that once were very busy but are now dead. If players have no reason to come back to them, they won't.
As for 20-player content, the only way to save this stuff might be to redesign it so that it requires fewer players.
This I must agree with, I'd enjoy doing many of the episodes again if the rewards made them worth the time expenditure...
Aye, Cryptic wants us (players) to play the new content, I suspect to justify the expense of making it to management, so they naturally try to draw in players often at the expense of older content. While I cannot disagree with the Dev's motives, I do question their implementation, we shouldn't be drawn to new missions and queues like moths to a flame, players WILL play new missions just because they are new and fresh, if they are good missions (not too difficult, decent rewards vs. effort vs. time to play) then players will continue to play the missions...
This should not render older missions obsolete, as I have played Mine Trap and actually enjoyed it, but it's so difficult to get 20 people together to play it I haven't done it recently...
I think it boils down to reward versus effort. In the case of Mine Trap it did get revived for a brief period when crafting materials became available from the mission but they killed it by adding a cool down to the mission.
Personally speaking I love doing solo or small team private matches of Big Dig and Breaking the Planet so will be sad to see these go.
I think 20 person pve is really fun, but they seriously need to overhaul the rewards on them to make them something people want to play again.
I'd love to see something like the old nano-tech drops used for these missions. So marks and a chance to get a really rare piece of equipment.
As much as people hate it, all the Queues "NEED" unique and desirable RNG based rewards like the Borg STF's used to have before the reputation systems showed up.
Its really the only way to actually make people play ALL the content and keep them playing it.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
I'd also like to see these queues continue with fewer people required, or allow our boffs to substitute.
I would love that.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
quite true, 20 player maps were hard enough to fill when the marks there were the in thing, now there are not so many players needing these marks its just impossible.
I am sure it would not take much to scale down these missions so 5 player teams could play.
alternatively make all these missions choice of marks so any players regardless of the rep they are working on even iconian would play these missions.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
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I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Much like how episode replays worked in the past with providing rare, unique items (i.e. Ophidian Cane) as rewards for replaying the episodes, they should do something similar to the older PvE queues in STO. A player's love for the old content only goes so far in terms of their willingness to replay it.
The content isn't too hard. I'd like that minetrap be redone to either offer better rewards, maybe bonus xp... or reduced to smaller teams.
Breaking the planet really should stay, but it could be done as a training exercise to be honest. I'd just have it redone to have the premise to be: Okay folks, this is a training exercise between us and the Klingons. Their goal is to take this platform. Our goal is to push them back and destroy their siege equipment. It should be done for two maps, with the normal open to below 50, in which it will be the current mission. The advanced would be 50+ with harder Klingons, time objective like 'we gotta defeat the Klingons before the Fleet arrives. If they arrive they'll beam us out and glass the planet from orbit." To start, 5 players must join. Once started, anyone can join it up to 20 players.
Starbase 24 should be redone to 5 players to join then people can join en mass. I rather like it. Rewards should be like a double xp zone? same for Breaking the planet.
Unfortunately, Cryptic doesn't think in those terms. We're supposed to play the game the way they want us to.
It's just a shame so many missions the development team has worked on is getting left in the dust because of the carrot-and-stick method Cryptic uses.
I personally loved Mine Trap.
I like the OP's suggestion about reducing these missions to 5 man teams, but the above could work too, depending on the awards .
These are some crazy awesome missions (provided you have the numbers to start one) !
Far superior in terms of fun game mechanics to many of the missions that were slapped together for the sake of yet another Reputation .
... but Geko loves his Reputations , so ...
Eventually the AFK penalty was added, but by that time it was too late. Mine Trap was pretty much dead at that point.
I did manage to get into it a couple of times many months after the AFK penalty was added to PVE queued events but it was still the same situation.
I say revamp it to a 5-10-15 or 20 man mission. If you are on a team and the team ques,, then you only have the complete one of the 4 sections. if two teams of 5 que at roughly the same time, then each team complete one section,,and so on and so forth.
Make the rewards chooseable marks and give a little extra for completeing within a certain time, or having 0 team mates die during the mission,, etc,,, etc..
Many complain ( sometimes rightly so ) about a lack of content in this game. The issue is that a significant portion of the content has all but been abandoned. Perhaps with the seeming success of the Delta Recruitment event the Devs will be more open to revamping some of the older content in the game.
I for one would LOVE to play Mine Trap as lvl 60 with the newest gear,, just for the possibility of challenge and needing to use a little strategy to get max rewards.
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As for Big Dig et al, they would run just fine (at least on days when the random daily +dil mission is on) if the minimum players to start was lowered from 15 to the range of 3-5. They can be completed solo by a competent player, so 3-5 average players should be enough to get started. And once it's running, more people would quickly join because there would be no waiting. Big Dig could also be made cross-faction rather than having separate Fed and KDF versions, the others unfortunately can't because of faction enemies.
Starbase Fleet Defense...it's probably not going to be popular until there are new fleet holdings or other large fleet mark sinks again.
And of course all queues would benefit from more general incentives for diversification. For example:
1. Longer cooldowns.
2. Rotating/randomly selected bonus rewards for playing a specific queue (something similar to the already existing Big Dig/Klingon Scout Force/Gorn Minefield dil bonus missions that randomly appear one per day).
3. Bonus reward for playing a queue you haven't played recently.
4. Unique rewards specific to a each queue.
5. More queue accolades. Only the old Borg STFs currently have a "play it 100 times" type of accolade.
Cryptic should tune them around 10 people and implement them as Red Alerts.
I enjoy most aspects of STO, but queue events are really what got me hooked on both logging in pretty much daily and upgrading my gear and ships to be a more effective team mate. This past year or so has sucked. Nearly all queues dead, save for the few that are quick and players are most comfortable with/confident their time won't be wasted by a failure.
What I would love to see is a day when I open the list of queue events and am spoiled for choice as to what to play. There are a lot of good ideas in this thread. I can only hope some will be acted upon.
Some of my favorites:
Increase rewards for longer queues (Time:Reward)
Spotlight Queue events (Event of the week, maybe a special reward)
Daily bonus (First play of the day gets more rewards or a unique reward)
Another idea I've had, which basically automates the "extra rewards" idea, is to have the queues pay out rewards proportional to the time it takes to have them pop then finish them successfully, with that measured each week to set the rewards for the next week. This would naturally make queues that were less popular a week ago more enticing, because if they were taking forever to pop last week, they'll have substantially higher rewards this week.
Mission quality seems to have very little to do with how often people play the queues - Infected Space, quite frankly, is a miserable, easily-trollable slog, and seems to still be the most popular of the lot by a wide margin. So "just make the queues better" isn't a solution.
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Same with Defera, just a bit busier there as it's a good place for Omega marks.
I do really enjoy all of the adventure zones and Mine Trap etc, hell anything to escape doing endless ISA runs! But they need a rethink, the player number is the biggest problem. Getting 20 people is a tall order when most are running Iconian rep stuff or off farming in the Voth Battlezone which has higher payouts.
Lower player requirements and/or higher rewards = more participation.
When I was last there about 12 hours ago, there were about 7 instances of Kobali Prime up and running. At least three of them were full. You can get through those final two missions in about 10 minutes, with the amount of people around. Sometimes even less.
Just sayin' :P
Breaking and Big Dig are actually pretty easy even when you only have 5. If you had 20 it'd be like one of those 2 minute ISA videos. :P
Wait scratch that.... I've seen Breaking with 20. The Klingons get mowed down like redshirts. With 5 it's a bit time consuming, but not hard mission.
In Tribble during LoR beta I once attempted to 2-man it with a pair of level 25-ish Romulan Science officers. We got half way through but ended up in a spot where we just couldn't kill the Klingons faster than they spawned. And that was with 2 low level characters on tribble with crappy gear. I imagine that a team of 2 level 60 characters could do it.
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