While there sure aren't MMOs who have player rivaling AI they do have other things to compensate for that.
Stuff like varying behavior patterns, changing battle conditions, basic buffs for enemies (tactical team would be our example), etc . STO really has nothing besides insane HP scaling to ramp up the difficulty and the devs are caught in a terrible, lazy, loop. Make stronger weapons => buff mob hp => make stronger weapons => buff mob hp =>...... etc, etc.
Generally STO has one of the worst mob AIs I've seen in a MMO and no amount of hp scaling can hide that.
We dont know what exactly what all players are capable Not unless you have the Cryptic statistics for that.
We do have a publicly available statistics like ISA. The average mean for Players is around 9k+ DPS.
To do optional Advance in ISA is around 9k+ DPS per player via 42M+ HP, 15mins optional divided among 5 players equally.
The minimum requirement of ISA is roughly around 5-7k DPS in the current difficulty, roughly around 2k or less DPS increase minimum requirement vs the ISE of pre-DR even if you account the scaling of HP buffs and power creep.
That means all this complaint of HP increase or DPS increase requirement really happened except all this complaint about DPS requirement/HP bloating is totally exaggerated since the minimum requirement increase is very small.
Essentially, You need to be below than your average STO player to able to not complete or at least contribute your own load in Advance.
They will NEVER learn. Delta rising clearly showed that. Instead of turning to dps community for ideas and advice most just whined at the increased difficulty. And it is not that you needed "supercharged scimitard beamboat" - at least on advanced difficulty.
Another thing is that gameplay is now too much skewed towards dps builds. Sure, you need a team, but most of it is for that you don't do 60-80% of team dps or to stack debuffs and team buffs to decrease queue length.
the real question here is weather cryptic can DESIGN harder content... and by that I mean, actual difficulty increas/smarter AI not a few million hit points and large AoE spam
But it is not the question of this poll. So asking, if Cryptic did give us smarter AI used some of the tactics of lets say The Wizards of STO. Do you think most players would rise to fight the mobs or devs?
They will fight the Devs 110%...just like they did with DR when they couldn't be carried and there was no more face rolling of elite stfs.
This is a rather loaded question because 'performance' in this game has become a question of how badly you can break/abuse the game mechanics.
If you consider the difficulty difference between level 10 content and level 50 content, I think players generally dealt relatively well with the ramp-up(even if there was a lot of 'sub-optimal' setups leaking through). The ramp up between 50 and 60 and then advanced/elite content requires a lot of obscure setups and player behavior that is simply not explained, or even expected, within the game itself.
Furthermore, we have all the bloat from lockboxes, C-store ships, and the specialization system. I don't really think it's reasonable to expect the average player to have full mastery over every obscure ability that can allow you to do crazy-stupid things when combining certain abilities that are sometimes fairly rare to actually acquire.
In synopsis, STO's "Metagame" is a nonsensical mess that renders 'difficulty' a HIGHLY subjective opinion.
The best AI out there is the human mind, and that content is provided by PvP.
But PvE has had such a horrific impact on game mechanics that there's no way you can get to have a decent fight anymore.
And PvE is so dumb and easy to do at all... "difficulties" (<- lol) that it's not even worth looking at.
Faster healing damage sponges. More broken mechanics. More one shot invisa-torps.
That will go over like a f@rt in church, with the general playerbase.
How many games even exist where NPCs actually fight like PCs, and have access to all the same perks and benefits?
Can Foundry NPC's be made like that? I've never put too much into trying to learn the Foundry myself. When I read how difficult it was to get things to sit on a table, for example, I figured it needed some time to mature to make the creation controls more user friendly. I'm not sure where that stands even now. Does the Foundry even still work?
Anyways, if the Foundry does work, is functional, then, yeah...can we make our own "smart" npc's to fight?
Yes I know Cryptic should be doing this already but this thread makes that concept invalid for this post.
I see carebears everywhere. It bothers I am fast becoming one too. I don't know what it is about this game, it encourages ultra casual fooling/TRIBBLE around playstyle.
I see carebears everywhere. It bothers I am fast becoming one too. I don't know what it is about this game, it encourages ultra casual fooling/TRIBBLE around playstyle.
10/10 would give them to GLaDOS for deadly test chambers.
0/10 of them would complete GLaDOS's cooperative deadly test chambers.
I see carebears everywhere. It bothers I am fast becoming one too. I don't know what it is about this game, it encourages ultra casual fooling/TRIBBLE around playstyle.
Faster healing damage sponges. More broken mechanics. More one shot invisa-torps.
That will go over like a f@rt in church, with the general playerbase.
No amount of player skill will able to counter that. Borg Tachyon Beams, Player shield drops. While player shield drops AI computes how long it takes to launch high yield before player can react, if can kill player, Borg High Yield torps worth 500k damage even at 60%+ kinetic resistance. Player dies. If player can react faster, Borg keeps on tachyon beaming and we are back to the same loop of Borg launching torps while shields are down.
If we want an even smarter AI, you go even further. Multiple borg debuffs you, chain disable is you, borg tachyon beam, Shield down, torps you. If not, cycles back. Even best Pvp Players die in the first few seconds of the STF.
It takes less than a second for a very good AI to do all of those actions while the reaction of a player takes more than that to realize they need to counter.The level of difficulty your are asking is a pipe dream.
I already don't do STFs. there is no point on normal, and I don't play enough/have the build to be of any use in elite. can't get Omega or delta (and I assume Iconian) gear without the mats dropped from elite, so casual player like myelf are spitting in the wind
I already don't do STFs. there is no point on normal, and I don't play enough/have the build to be of any use in elite. can't get Omega or delta (and I assume Iconian) gear without the mats dropped from elite, so casual player like myelf are spitting in the wind
What cannot you get in Normal that you think you need in Elite? Nowadays, every rep gear you can acquire can be done thru normal.
The only thing needed for Omega or Delta or Iconian gear are the marks which can be acquired thru Normal. The BNPS and the like are optionals since the marks can be converted in to the likes of BNP.
In time it will be just like the original STF missions and too easy for standard players. Though I'm not sure to laugh or cry to see these same missions made so difficult yet again with the same concern toward difficulty. Though this time I do agree that the non-optional optionals was a bad idea.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I was Klingon before Klingon was cool.
I think eventually the player-base can cope. As a huge fan of pugging, I've been noticing PUG teams getting better. I've rarely been in an ISA PUG that fail in the past several weeks. Maybe 1 in 10 would fail compared to the 50:50 chance it used to be.
Overall I think the player base is improving. And that's a good thing.
I'd love a more challenging game something beyond mindless pew pew with the spacebar, but to answer you're question about how the player base would respond to harder content i point to these examples to give an indicator of the level of stupidity which haunts this game.
1. V-Rex fight, single player at a Silo, Voice warnings, Text Warnings, A indicator bar showing the progress of the Voth Engineers/Medics stealing Omega particles yet said player will ignore and shoot at V-Rex ending in zone failure
2. Simular to 1. But a group of players doing the same thing causing zone to fail.
3. The Capture point with 5 generators to disable in a circle. I've had a player either stand guard whilst i disable them or as i'm disabling a generator, instead of going to 1 of the other 5, they try to disable the generator i'm disabling ?.
4. Its good grace in a Pre-Made team when the lobby/game creator calls for wait for pets and everyone acknowledges that request to wait for pets, Yet you still get people flying off even though they've read and acknowledged the request for WFP.
5. Khitomer Space. People letting probes fly right past them into the time portal despite saying i'll cover probes and ending up shooting a transformer instead (Spheres/Cube already dead just unguarded Transformer)
6. Cure Space Normal, I'll protect the kang comes the call (Kang shouldn't need the babysitter in normal) Said player instead of going to engage approaching BOP's where they don't fire back, waits for them to be right on top of Kang and hasn't the firepower to kill a single one and dies due to a bad build and half a dozen ship injuries. (Got to love those types)
I'm not even going to go there with spawning of cover shields or the misuse of tractor beam repulsors
So a smarter AI would be nice, but the current AI being able to add 1+1 and make 2 is still smarter than some players logging in everyday.
Advanced/Elite queues aren't hard just boring with the brick wall of shields and hit points, making high DPS to kill them quick preferable to having a long/slow battle of attrition where you have to out heal the NPC.
cryptics idea of harder is not the same as the majority of the playerbase; players want smarter NPCs not harder to knock down overpowered shields and dreadnought hull strength on a escort/frigate. versatile NPC that make the players think and work as a team is wanted, not fights drawn out because your shooting a battleship with a pellet gun.
So a smarter AI would be nice, but the current AI being able to add 1+1 and make 2 is still smarter than some players logging in everyday.
Advanced/Elite queues aren't hard just boring with the brick wall of shields and hit points, making high DPS to kill them quick preferable to having a long/slow battle of attrition where you have to out heal the NPC.
The thing you describe happens in certain elite STFs. You need survival whether healing or immunity, you need counters to disable beside the standard Dps.
Although all of these are random skill spam though, the next step of any improvement what they AI can do now would mean a player wouldn't able to counter. The AI is a machine which should be able to do all of this faster than Any players reaction time if you have a smart AI that can recognize disable+vape chains before the player realize they need to counter.
I think the issue would be how far of an AI players would want to improve from since any improvement would result to an AI better than your best group pvpers teamwork performance.
Other - If Cryptic lowered the upgrade costs by having only a 100 dilithium requirement except during actually upgrades, then players wouldn't be hurting so much for DPS. Also, so give elitist their "ultimate" ships add Pen, Thrust, Over, Snare, and Rapid to upgrade options allowing all these "whales" to experiment away with X2 regular gear and special upgraded lockbox weapons. This would allow a standard in upgrading but not reduce the amount of Uber powered whales in the game. The problem with just increasing the difficulty is many of the weapons people would need to pass Elite, no matter how great the teamwork, require insane amount of "FAILURE" dilithium which is stupid and just pisses people off to the point they don't want to play the game.
Why do you need to upgrade stuff? Are you aiming for top 1 Dps charts? You don't need to upgrade stuff to complete or contribute your part at normal and advance content including some easy elites.
When I say harder content I don't just mean things like new (soon to be old) Advanced. It could be things like no gear switching on combat maps, NPCs that use the same types of powers and tactics of players, and more. Do you think players would adapt or would they push back until NPCs are nerfed into pointlessness?
You and I both know that people are literally unable to adapt to any changes in any way. The ones who will adapt are the exceptions that proves the rule. The rest are irrelevant.
Until the power creep stops, people will never be satisfied with the content because in a week theres a new OP ship build which can solo it in half a second. (exaggerating but only a bit )
Stop making more powerful ships, start making more INTERESTING ships. encourage people to buy new ships by offering unique mechanics and trade offs which are worth it, but no more OP than the last boring beamspam build.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Players can adapt if they are made to adapt. By which I mean tested for qualifications before being allowed to queue up. Then the players who have the skills and build to handle harder content could do so and the ones that don't would stay at a level more appropriate for them.
The problem with the difficulty changes introduced in DR is not that they made the game too hard, but that the game doesn't properly direct low-performance players to the lower difficulty levels.
Players don't rise to the occasion, contrary to the myth that the OP is trying to spread. Blizzard found that, and STO's playerbase is less skilled than that of you-know-which-MMO-I'm-on-about. Buffing NPCs is bad.
DPS-Bronze, DPS-Silver, DPS-Gold, etc. are FAKE! They were created by an outvoted minority who destroyed the original DPS channels!
Tactical Team sucked, once upon a time. I got it buffed. Don't think for a minute that Cryptic ignores forum feedback.
I must admit that I also have doubts that the people that ask for a bigger challenge really realize what it means.
The "worst case" scenario would be like fighting an experienced PvP fleet. And there is no guarantee that your group is as good or better as them. And there is certainly a high chance that any PUG you fly will not be so good.
Challenge means that you can fail. It means you can't afford to make mistakes or bide your time. It means that you can't carry a team to victory. It means that the success of a mission isn't guaranteed, every time you join the game.
And people complain about Cryptic just adding hit points to NPCs and say it's harder now. But that is pretty much what "smart "enemies means. Sure, the hit points aren't static. But they will cross-heal. They will counter your attack moves, subnukes your buffs or extend shields when another NPC just got into trouble.
Heck, the cross-heal alone will ensure that the DPS fight isn'T over. If we're lucky, it might mean a return to cannon boats, because you don't beat a dedicated cross-healing capable set of ships with sheer DPS usually - you need to bring burst damage that overwhelms the healing capabilities in the short term.
That would certainly be more fun for quite a few PvPers. I still remember the good old days, even if I was barely competent in PvP... How improtant timing of subnukes and stuns was. How critical it was to burst at the right target, how to make "fake" bursts to overextend the healer before you strike the real target.
But you can sure as hell that random PUGs where you don't even now if there is a good healer and a good crowd controller in.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I'd love a more challenging game something beyond mindless pew pew with the spacebar, but to answer you're question about how the player base would respond to harder content i point to these examples to give an indicator of the level of stupidity which haunts this game.
1. V-Rex fight, single player at a Silo, Voice warnings, Text Warnings, A indicator bar showing the progress of the Voth Engineers/Medics stealing Omega particles yet said player will ignore and shoot at V-Rex ending in zone failure
2. Simular to 1. But a group of players doing the same thing causing zone to fail.
3. The Capture point with 5 generators to disable in a circle. I've had a player either stand guard whilst i disable them or as i'm disabling a generator, instead of going to 1 of the other 5, they try to disable the generator i'm disabling ?.
4. Its good grace in a Pre-Made team when the lobby/game creator calls for wait for pets and everyone acknowledges that request to wait for pets, Yet you still get people flying off even though they've read and acknowledged the request for WFP.
5. Khitomer Space. People letting probes fly right past them into the time portal despite saying i'll cover probes and ending up shooting a transformer instead (Spheres/Cube already dead just unguarded Transformer)
6. Cure Space Normal, I'll protect the kang comes the call (Kang shouldn't need the babysitter in normal) Said player instead of going to engage approaching BOP's where they don't fire back, waits for them to be right on top of Kang and hasn't the firepower to kill a single one and dies due to a bad build and half a dozen ship injuries. (Got to love those types)
I'm not even going to go there with spawning of cover shields or the misuse of tractor beam repulsors
So a smarter AI would be nice, but the current AI being able to add 1+1 and make 2 is still smarter than some players logging in everyday.
Advanced/Elite queues aren't hard just boring with the brick wall of shields and hit points, making high DPS to kill them quick preferable to having a long/slow battle of attrition where you have to out heal the NPC.
Yep I'd say...fifty to sixty percent of the ppl who play this game have never played any other game before in their lives, maybe Tetris or Super Mario.
Then again, I have never done voip or used my mic to play STO. I have a feeling that's the only way to ever really beat Adv. or Elite level STFs. Or really good premade groups who know their roles. This game is too much forced grouping of people who have no limbo bar to go under. Everyone rides for free!
I see carebears everywhere. It bothers I am fast becoming one too. I don't know what it is about this game, it encourages ultra casual fooling/TRIBBLE around playstyle.
Yep, and then at some point - as you notice more and more folks leave, you notice you're just on the forums arguing things from the past and repeating yourself over and over, and you notice that Netflix has added a bunch of awesome movies from the 80s and early 90s...well, you just kind of walk away.
Comments
We dont know what exactly what all players are capable Not unless you have the Cryptic statistics for that.
We do have a publicly available statistics like ISA. The average mean for Players is around 9k+ DPS.
To do optional Advance in ISA is around 9k+ DPS per player via 42M+ HP, 15mins optional divided among 5 players equally.
The minimum requirement of ISA is roughly around 5-7k DPS in the current difficulty, roughly around 2k or less DPS increase minimum requirement vs the ISE of pre-DR even if you account the scaling of HP buffs and power creep.
That means all this complaint of HP increase or DPS increase requirement really happened except all this complaint about DPS requirement/HP bloating is totally exaggerated since the minimum requirement increase is very small.
Essentially, You need to be below than your average STO player to able to not complete or at least contribute your own load in Advance.
Another thing is that gameplay is now too much skewed towards dps builds. Sure, you need a team, but most of it is for that you don't do 60-80% of team dps or to stack debuffs and team buffs to decrease queue length.
They will fight the Devs 110%...just like they did with DR when they couldn't be carried and there was no more face rolling of elite stfs.
If you consider the difficulty difference between level 10 content and level 50 content, I think players generally dealt relatively well with the ramp-up(even if there was a lot of 'sub-optimal' setups leaking through). The ramp up between 50 and 60 and then advanced/elite content requires a lot of obscure setups and player behavior that is simply not explained, or even expected, within the game itself.
Furthermore, we have all the bloat from lockboxes, C-store ships, and the specialization system. I don't really think it's reasonable to expect the average player to have full mastery over every obscure ability that can allow you to do crazy-stupid things when combining certain abilities that are sometimes fairly rare to actually acquire.
In synopsis, STO's "Metagame" is a nonsensical mess that renders 'difficulty' a HIGHLY subjective opinion.
But PvE has had such a horrific impact on game mechanics that there's no way you can get to have a decent fight anymore.
And PvE is so dumb and easy to do at all... "difficulties" (<- lol) that it's not even worth looking at.
That will go over like a f@rt in church, with the general playerbase.
Can Foundry NPC's be made like that? I've never put too much into trying to learn the Foundry myself. When I read how difficult it was to get things to sit on a table, for example, I figured it needed some time to mature to make the creation controls more user friendly. I'm not sure where that stands even now. Does the Foundry even still work?
Anyways, if the Foundry does work, is functional, then, yeah...can we make our own "smart" npc's to fight?
Yes I know Cryptic should be doing this already but this thread makes that concept invalid for this post.
10/10 would give them to GLaDOS for deadly test chambers.
0/10 of them would complete GLaDOS's cooperative deadly test chambers.
This one's for true connoisseurs.
I agree with you.
No amount of player skill will able to counter that. Borg Tachyon Beams, Player shield drops. While player shield drops AI computes how long it takes to launch high yield before player can react, if can kill player, Borg High Yield torps worth 500k damage even at 60%+ kinetic resistance. Player dies. If player can react faster, Borg keeps on tachyon beaming and we are back to the same loop of Borg launching torps while shields are down.
If we want an even smarter AI, you go even further. Multiple borg debuffs you, chain disable is you, borg tachyon beam, Shield down, torps you. If not, cycles back. Even best Pvp Players die in the first few seconds of the STF.
It takes less than a second for a very good AI to do all of those actions while the reaction of a player takes more than that to realize they need to counter.The level of difficulty your are asking is a pipe dream.
What cannot you get in Normal that you think you need in Elite? Nowadays, every rep gear you can acquire can be done thru normal.
The only thing needed for Omega or Delta or Iconian gear are the marks which can be acquired thru Normal. The BNPS and the like are optionals since the marks can be converted in to the likes of BNP.
I was Klingon before Klingon was cool.
Overall I think the player base is improving. And that's a good thing.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
1. V-Rex fight, single player at a Silo, Voice warnings, Text Warnings, A indicator bar showing the progress of the Voth Engineers/Medics stealing Omega particles yet said player will ignore and shoot at V-Rex ending in zone failure
2. Simular to 1. But a group of players doing the same thing causing zone to fail.
3. The Capture point with 5 generators to disable in a circle. I've had a player either stand guard whilst i disable them or as i'm disabling a generator, instead of going to 1 of the other 5, they try to disable the generator i'm disabling ?.
4. Its good grace in a Pre-Made team when the lobby/game creator calls for wait for pets and everyone acknowledges that request to wait for pets, Yet you still get people flying off even though they've read and acknowledged the request for WFP.
5. Khitomer Space. People letting probes fly right past them into the time portal despite saying i'll cover probes and ending up shooting a transformer instead (Spheres/Cube already dead just unguarded Transformer)
6. Cure Space Normal, I'll protect the kang comes the call (Kang shouldn't need the babysitter in normal) Said player instead of going to engage approaching BOP's where they don't fire back, waits for them to be right on top of Kang and hasn't the firepower to kill a single one and dies due to a bad build and half a dozen ship injuries. (Got to love those types)
I'm not even going to go there with spawning of cover shields or the misuse of tractor beam repulsors
So a smarter AI would be nice, but the current AI being able to add 1+1 and make 2 is still smarter than some players logging in everyday.
Advanced/Elite queues aren't hard just boring with the brick wall of shields and hit points, making high DPS to kill them quick preferable to having a long/slow battle of attrition where you have to out heal the NPC.
The thing you describe happens in certain elite STFs. You need survival whether healing or immunity, you need counters to disable beside the standard Dps.
Although all of these are random skill spam though, the next step of any improvement what they AI can do now would mean a player wouldn't able to counter. The AI is a machine which should be able to do all of this faster than Any players reaction time if you have a smart AI that can recognize disable+vape chains before the player realize they need to counter.
I think the issue would be how far of an AI players would want to improve from since any improvement would result to an AI better than your best group pvpers teamwork performance.
Why do you need to upgrade stuff? Are you aiming for top 1 Dps charts? You don't need to upgrade stuff to complete or contribute your part at normal and advance content including some easy elites.
You and I both know that people are literally unable to adapt to any changes in any way. The ones who will adapt are the exceptions that proves the rule. The rest are irrelevant.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10052253
Why are you not rejoicing?
Stop making more powerful ships, start making more INTERESTING ships. encourage people to buy new ships by offering unique mechanics and trade offs which are worth it, but no more OP than the last boring beamspam build.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
The problem with the difficulty changes introduced in DR is not that they made the game too hard, but that the game doesn't properly direct low-performance players to the lower difficulty levels.
Tactical Team sucked, once upon a time. I got it buffed. Don't think for a minute that Cryptic ignores forum feedback.
The "worst case" scenario would be like fighting an experienced PvP fleet. And there is no guarantee that your group is as good or better as them. And there is certainly a high chance that any PUG you fly will not be so good.
Challenge means that you can fail. It means you can't afford to make mistakes or bide your time. It means that you can't carry a team to victory. It means that the success of a mission isn't guaranteed, every time you join the game.
And people complain about Cryptic just adding hit points to NPCs and say it's harder now. But that is pretty much what "smart "enemies means. Sure, the hit points aren't static. But they will cross-heal. They will counter your attack moves, subnukes your buffs or extend shields when another NPC just got into trouble.
Heck, the cross-heal alone will ensure that the DPS fight isn'T over. If we're lucky, it might mean a return to cannon boats, because you don't beat a dedicated cross-healing capable set of ships with sheer DPS usually - you need to bring burst damage that overwhelms the healing capabilities in the short term.
That would certainly be more fun for quite a few PvPers. I still remember the good old days, even if I was barely competent in PvP... How improtant timing of subnukes and stuns was. How critical it was to burst at the right target, how to make "fake" bursts to overextend the healer before you strike the real target.
But you can sure as hell that random PUGs where you don't even now if there is a good healer and a good crowd controller in.
Yep I'd say...fifty to sixty percent of the ppl who play this game have never played any other game before in their lives, maybe Tetris or Super Mario.
Then again, I have never done voip or used my mic to play STO. I have a feeling that's the only way to ever really beat Adv. or Elite level STFs. Or really good premade groups who know their roles. This game is too much forced grouping of people who have no limbo bar to go under. Everyone rides for free!
In a word, no.
Expanded, there is a better chance of getting TNG back on the air than the majority of the playerbase adapting to harder content.
They can't even handle the level of content we already have.
Fleet Admiral Space Orphidian Possiblities Wizard
Yep, and then at some point - as you notice more and more folks leave, you notice you're just on the forums arguing things from the past and repeating yourself over and over, and you notice that Netflix has added a bunch of awesome movies from the 80s and early 90s...well, you just kind of walk away.