RA were my second favorite part of this game. (First favorite was running around Defera or Dyson BZ, which is currently not doable due to the kit/module cluster****). It wasn't so much the XP bonus, it was a nice bonus but that was all, it was the "jump in and just start shooting stuff" part without any waiting that I loved. Yes that meant that now and again you got dumped in a done or nearly done instance, but that was a price I for one gladly paid.
So I'm part of the "Bring this back to how it was" coir. And really, where did the devs get the diea that what this game needed was more queues?
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.
For some reason, they've always seemed to be of the idea that more queues are better... Remember, when a lot of things - Iconian Marks, Salvaged Technology, etc. - first came out, the one way to get them were queues...
There are a number of different one ( you even got a accolade for doing them all ) an at times you could get 3-4 or more different ones in the different instances you get left in once you finished one.
Thats another thing, anyone who was part through getting that accolade, is left up the creek without a paddle now this change has dropped
Oh, that one's nothing new. How many people have the accolades for the old version of the Featured Episode Replay 'Lobi Scavenger Hunt' or 'Trace Tracker' for scanning all the different particle traces sitting incomplete because there's no way to finish them?
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." -- Q, TNG: "Q-Who?"
^Words that every player should keep in mind, especially whenever there's a problem with the game...
Don't like the new format, at all. The Tholian Red Alert is seriously messed up. I have yet to complete one in the time allotted. I guess I'll have to grind my nukara marks on the ground.
Are you HEALING them?!? No seriously...
Because even moderately built ships can solo these. So unless you are ACTIVELY working against your team somehow...how is this even happening?!?
Why do you assume it's me causing the issue, without knowing any facts about my build and experience level? I'm not a high DPS guy, but know how to get to 50K-60k DPS, and know the tactics to play the tholian red alert.
I agree with your assessment of how easy the red alerts were- prior to the change.
This is a newer tune, but capable of 18K DPS in CCA. Before the change, this same toon was able to glide through the Tholian Red Alert without any issues.
The point is that the Red Alerts were a great way to enjoy low difficulty battles, level up your ships, and pick up your daily marks bonus. They've screwed that up...
I don't think it's with Geko, but there's a Twitch livestream event this Saturday (11-5); thirteen hours, several games, STO's time is 8 to 10 Pacific, so you could throw it under their noses then....
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." -- Q, TNG: "Q-Who?"
^Words that every player should keep in mind, especially whenever there's a problem with the game...
Caught this post on lunch at work today, and I have to say, this was IMO a very poor choice. I like many before me, liked the randomness of finding a red alert, the fast start even if it came with just the borg mother ship, and the exp boost. This for me was certainly a go to place for exp, like battle zone for marks or tour the galaxy for EC.
Now i have to play the same episodes over and over on each alt for exp. No thanks.
Like others have said this means, I most likly wont be playing these "ques" much, if at all. and it defintely means i'll think twice before buying a ship for a trait or even buying ship to see if they are anygood.
But dont worry about me or anyone else here, we read the forums. This just means that like others i'll wait a bit longer and let someone else do some work before throwing my money at something that now takes alot more work realize the full potential of the purchase.
I hate the queue times, luv the new Borg run intensity (and its mark options now) & hate how the tholian run was amped up too much intensity wise, considering the lack of Mark choices you get there...
In a way I understand why they qued them, too many of us were running in and one shotting them, so by the time the late comers got there they got squat for rewards, which only forced them to have to instance hop for ages just to find a low populated instance where an alert would show up at so they could run into them, this way they try to force the instance only in full squad mode so everyone can get their marks. But still I wish they'd either make the tholians a full choice of marks for its intensity, or drop its new intensity level to halfway between the old version and this one, because I've been in alot of the runs there and half the time either someone deliberately lures the mother ships group onto the respawn area, or does it by pure stupiditys sake, and ends up ruining the run while the rest of us watch our tier 6's get shredded over again & again, wasting precious time to finish the run in its time limit, my last run some jerkoff lured them intentionally, then left and we then had 2 more squad members give up and quit it, leaving only those that stayed to barely finish it with about 14 seconds to spare, and in that time I still died like 6 times, the new tholian run version is annoying to say the least, do to its lack of quality rewards (per effort) I get the feeling its going to soon be another dead instance that no one will want to go into soon, the way that it stands now...
I'd like them if they had more of a variety and were the better xp zones. Personally along with something Geko once said about too much content. Some of the queues should be taken down and replaced with a battlezone of that map or red alert. No need going through 57 gazillion queues on the list and see zero's on each one lol.
If this game had more of a get in the game and play type content like battlezones and red alerts it would make the game more appealing to play again. That as well some of the unfinished story arcs to a degree like house of torg just throwing in like a red alert and a cross faction raid against their bases etc would be good too same with like fek'ihr and the tal shiar(turn in prisoners to d'tan that will be called milk and cookie time).
To me most of the reasons I don't play isn't really cryptic's fault but at same time that burn out of the existing content over like half a decade. There kinda needs to be something fun to do than reputations and fleet holding grinding which is just a 2 sec resource dump a day.
So new style RA's popped up tonight, and gotta say, im not a fan.
I think its great the Borg have some of thier teeth back and if your not careful they can make you look very silly indeed.
Having said that, im lamenting the loss of the XP boost and not at all a fan of the queing method.
Before the revamp i could get maybe 3-4 RA's done before hitting cooldowns, so far under the new method 1 it seems, is all you get.
In the tholian RA, the daily has also vanished. SO it seems a nerf all around.
Just wondered what everyone else thought.
Don't care for the queueing. If they're going to do that just ADD them to the list and be done with it. I HASTE that not only do they randomly pop - but now when they do, you have to then sit and wait for 5 people to be in the queue and then the Instance spawns.
DEVS NEED TO PICK ONE METHOD (either Random Popup OR Queueing) AND STICK WITH IT. There's too much 'queue up and wait' in STO currently as it stands (IMO).
As for 'difficulty - IMO - didn't seem any harder then the earlier version to me.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
He is at the root of all that has been nerfed or changed for changes sake in this game.
So far in the last two days I have done each of the Borg and Tholian four times each. Never had more than a few seconds wait time for the Queue to pop. None ever failed or got remotely close to the time limit. Not thrilled about the Tholian Webs new look.
Still not ONE official word on their disappearance and return as PVE Queues.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
So...I think these will be a staple...because the dil rewards they give now is STUPID silly. You run both RA, CCA and the rom diplo patrol mission and you have like 4k dil in under 15 min of play. I mean the marks and RD box for borg is nice and all...but yeah...stupid silly amounts of dil for these.
You're probably right, if content is rewarding people will play it. If that's the case, then it's unlikely to change.
Hopefully, enough people realize the benefit and the queues for these events remain filled.
A plus point is that teams are made automatically now and those who have traits and skills that boost team mates have a use for them now. So keep that in mind.
I also like the multiple mark choice now.
I do think it takes away from the jump in and out experience and if the boost is gone too, it's a great loss for those grinding ship traits. Maybe they should just account unlock those that you unlock.. because it's a huge hassle to complete all the ships you really don't want to fly.
Tholian red alert helped me greatly when it came to starship mastery.
He is at the root of all that has been nerfed or changed for changes sake in this game. .
If that is true, then you have to assume that he's also the root of everything that has been buffed or changed for the sake of improving this game, and that the game has continued to go on for as long as it has, with regular content expansions and updates.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
2:03 am PST - I queue for RA, zero instances were ongoing, wait time listed is 4:38
2:07 - second player joins queue
2:08 - third player joins
2:09 - fourth player joins
2:10 - fith and final player joins, countdown to join starts
2:10:30 - all players join instance according to queue roster
2;11 - game starts
2;12 - instance ends
8 minutes of waiting
1 minute of playing
edit: I coppied my latest post in from my own thread about DSEs - This illustrates what bothers me most about the changes to Red Alerts - not the HP or XP changes, but rather that I now spend hugely more time waiting to play than playing. if the ratio was 3:1 it would still be unsatisfactory.
If they change nothing at all they should in the interests of honesty at least change the names of these formerly RAs from Red Alert to Borg mini-STF and Tholian mini-STF. (maybe mirco-STF is even more befitting them in their current state)
And why oh why am I as a KDF player deposited outside ESD at the end. I click join RA, auto warp to the start point, click to join queue, WAIT, play the thing and get dumped at ESD upon concluding the instance. That makes zero sense at all.
So...I think these will be a staple...because the dil rewards they give now is STUPID silly. You run both RA, CCA and the rom diplo patrol mission and you have like 4k dil in under 15 min of play. I mean the marks and RD box for borg is nice and all...but yeah...stupid silly amounts of dil for these.
You're probably right, if content is rewarding people will play it. If that's the case, then it's unlikely to change.
Hopefully, enough people realize the benefit and the queues for these events remain filled.
I am not doing the Red Alerts for Dilithium, I was doing them for the starship XP, though.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Today i noticed that the Tholian RA also show up in the alpha quadrant. No complaints there.
While the old style RA were more efficient for XP gathering the new style, especially the borg, are pretty efficient for gathering dilithium and marks.
Gotta say that the new layout is growing on me.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Yeah, that 1 Mark that you get from the Marks Choice Box as the second reward from the Borg Red Alert will have you swimming in Marks in no time. It is good only in that it allows you to select one of the Reputations that has not already gotten its Daily.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Yeah, that 1 Mark that you get from the Marks Choice Box as the second reward from the Borg Red Alert will have you swimming in Marks in no time. It is good only in that it allows you to select one of the Reputations that has not already gotten its Daily.
You only run it once each day for each type of marks to grab the daily for that type.
It's a nice supplement, but not a substitute.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Precisely what I said. It provides a way of clearing Reputations of their Daily as a Bonus to doing the Borg Red Alert. Should bring the Tholian up to this as well.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Pretty much these two snippets cover my feelings on the topic. I never cared about the marks, or the dil, or the exp... I cared only about the "AND THEN, SUDDENLY!"-factor.
Comments
They're harder? Cool. I kinda noticed, but only kinda.
But being yoinked away from wherever you are to start a que is just DAFT. If I wanted to do ques... I'D BE DOING QUES.
RA were my second favorite part of this game. (First favorite was running around Defera or Dyson BZ, which is currently not doable due to the kit/module cluster****). It wasn't so much the XP bonus, it was a nice bonus but that was all, it was the "jump in and just start shooting stuff" part without any waiting that I loved. Yes that meant that now and again you got dumped in a done or nearly done instance, but that was a price I for one gladly paid.
So I'm part of the "Bring this back to how it was" coir. And really, where did the devs get the diea that what this game needed was more queues?
Oh, that one's nothing new. How many people have the accolades for the old version of the Featured Episode Replay 'Lobi Scavenger Hunt' or 'Trace Tracker' for scanning all the different particle traces sitting incomplete because there's no way to finish them?
^Words that every player should keep in mind, especially whenever there's a problem with the game...
Why do you assume it's me causing the issue, without knowing any facts about my build and experience level? I'm not a high DPS guy, but know how to get to 50K-60k DPS, and know the tactics to play the tholian red alert.
I agree with your assessment of how easy the red alerts were- prior to the change.
This is a newer tune, but capable of 18K DPS in CCA. Before the change, this same toon was able to glide through the Tholian Red Alert without any issues.
The point is that the Red Alerts were a great way to enjoy low difficulty battles, level up your ships, and pick up your daily marks bonus. They've screwed that up...
^Words that every player should keep in mind, especially whenever there's a problem with the game...
Now i have to play the same episodes over and over on each alt for exp. No thanks.
Like others have said this means, I most likly wont be playing these "ques" much, if at all. and it defintely means i'll think twice before buying a ship for a trait or even buying ship to see if they are anygood.
But dont worry about me or anyone else here, we read the forums. This just means that like others i'll wait a bit longer and let someone else do some work before throwing my money at something that now takes alot more work realize the full potential of the purchase.
Gecko couldn't possibly care any less what the players think.
In a way I understand why they qued them, too many of us were running in and one shotting them, so by the time the late comers got there they got squat for rewards, which only forced them to have to instance hop for ages just to find a low populated instance where an alert would show up at so they could run into them, this way they try to force the instance only in full squad mode so everyone can get their marks. But still I wish they'd either make the tholians a full choice of marks for its intensity, or drop its new intensity level to halfway between the old version and this one, because I've been in alot of the runs there and half the time either someone deliberately lures the mother ships group onto the respawn area, or does it by pure stupiditys sake, and ends up ruining the run while the rest of us watch our tier 6's get shredded over again & again, wasting precious time to finish the run in its time limit, my last run some jerkoff lured them intentionally, then left and we then had 2 more squad members give up and quit it, leaving only those that stayed to barely finish it with about 14 seconds to spare, and in that time I still died like 6 times, the new tholian run version is annoying to say the least, do to its lack of quality rewards (per effort) I get the feeling its going to soon be another dead instance that no one will want to go into soon, the way that it stands now...
dont underestimate him like that... I am sure he could care less
If this game had more of a get in the game and play type content like battlezones and red alerts it would make the game more appealing to play again. That as well some of the unfinished story arcs to a degree like house of torg just throwing in like a red alert and a cross faction raid against their bases etc would be good too same with like fek'ihr and the tal shiar(turn in prisoners to d'tan that will be called milk and cookie time).
To me most of the reasons I don't play isn't really cryptic's fault but at same time that burn out of the existing content over like half a decade. There kinda needs to be something fun to do than reputations and fleet holding grinding which is just a 2 sec resource dump a day.
Don't care for the queueing. If they're going to do that just ADD them to the list and be done with it. I HASTE that not only do they randomly pop - but now when they do, you have to then sit and wait for 5 people to be in the queue and then the Instance spawns.
DEVS NEED TO PICK ONE METHOD (either Random Popup OR Queueing) AND STICK WITH IT. There's too much 'queue up and wait' in STO currently as it stands (IMO).
As for 'difficulty - IMO - didn't seem any harder then the earlier version to me.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
So far in the last two days I have done each of the Borg and Tholian four times each. Never had more than a few seconds wait time for the Queue to pop. None ever failed or got remotely close to the time limit. Not thrilled about the Tholian Webs new look.
Still not ONE official word on their disappearance and return as PVE Queues.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
You're probably right, if content is rewarding people will play it. If that's the case, then it's unlikely to change.
Hopefully, enough people realize the benefit and the queues for these events remain filled.
I also like the multiple mark choice now.
I do think it takes away from the jump in and out experience and if the boost is gone too, it's a great loss for those grinding ship traits. Maybe they should just account unlock those that you unlock.. because it's a huge hassle to complete all the ships you really don't want to fly.
Tholian red alert helped me greatly when it came to starship mastery.
2:03 am PST - I queue for RA, zero instances were ongoing, wait time listed is 4:38
2:07 - second player joins queue
2:08 - third player joins
2:09 - fourth player joins
2:10 - fith and final player joins, countdown to join starts
2:10:30 - all players join instance according to queue roster
2;11 - game starts
2;12 - instance ends
8 minutes of waiting
1 minute of playing
edit: I coppied my latest post in from my own thread about DSEs - This illustrates what bothers me most about the changes to Red Alerts - not the HP or XP changes, but rather that I now spend hugely more time waiting to play than playing. if the ratio was 3:1 it would still be unsatisfactory.
If they change nothing at all they should in the interests of honesty at least change the names of these formerly RAs from Red Alert to Borg mini-STF and Tholian mini-STF. (maybe mirco-STF is even more befitting them in their current state)
And why oh why am I as a KDF player deposited outside ESD at the end. I click join RA, auto warp to the start point, click to join queue, WAIT, play the thing and get dumped at ESD upon concluding the instance. That makes zero sense at all.
I am not doing the Red Alerts for Dilithium, I was doing them for the starship XP, though.
While the old style RA were more efficient for XP gathering the new style, especially the borg, are pretty efficient for gathering dilithium and marks.
Gotta say that the new layout is growing on me.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
You only run it once each day for each type of marks to grab the daily for that type.
It's a nice supplement, but not a substitute.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Pretty much these two snippets cover my feelings on the topic. I never cared about the marks, or the dil, or the exp... I cared only about the "AND THEN, SUDDENLY!"-factor.