Rep marks need to be kept per faction, otherwise a new one comes along and noone will bother since they've more than enough of the generic rep token from the launch of "delta grinding" and the romulan patrols which are still one of the quicker ways to get ship traits levelled.
From memory latinum and dabo came in before they added the zen exchange so choosing dilithium was obviously them taking a shortcut to avoid the inevitable downtime on stores as they changed latinum over to a semi precious currency and tried to avoid overlaps between what people bought with the quarkbucks.
Making a Generic Rep Mark would make the Queues even more dead than they are now, and kill the Battlezones outright. You want to know why? Because EVERYONE would decide to just run Infected. That's it. No need to bother with ANY OTHER QUEUE to advance Rep because "Its too hard. Infected is the end all Rep source because I can faceroll it!"
Right. They should instead go the other way and remove all the choice of marks nonsense from existing queues as well.
And Special Drops are not a viable option anymore. Relying on the Random Number Gods to smile on you for gear... you could spend MONTHS trying to get one piece while a fleetmate is getting swamped with them... and guess what? They're Bind on Pickup!
Rare drops are always a viable option. There were some complications back before S7 because the STF sets were pretty much the only mk12 equipment there was in the entire game (and back then, the game wasn't so incredibly easy either). That's no longer the case.
Rare drops are the best way to encourage playing diverse content. There's nothing wrong with spending months to get an item. That's what makes them valuable. Ideally, the drops should be tradeable, though. That would naturally encourage playing the least popular content (which would have the rarest thus most expensive reward), keeping the content in balance without constant dev intervention.
That would be supported by having the numeric rewards (dil/marks) automatically scaled to average completion time to avoid favoring short content.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
For your "short auto-win missions" comment, I have a whole other set of improvements I'd like to see where that's concerned, but that's beyond the scope of this thread (short version is they should not be auto win, but they shouldn't have outright fail conditions either). I'm not against having a separate instance set instead, but convincing Cryptic to create any more than the bare minimum would likely be impossible.
I could see putting variants of the rep project items into the ques, which start at a less rarity than the project ones, such as that if you got a covariant version of the rep's set shield it might start at a rare quality in normal as a drop an go up to a ultra rare in the elite difficulty of the stf. Also even if you did get the less quality version fo the rep item, it would still need to be upgraded thru the crafting system to the desired quality, thus meaning you have to spend time an resources anyways. One issue I find is that not always are the rep items of the best type, or even of a type I want to use, for instance i would love to have a beam bank or dual cannon version of some of the rep set weapons. Also I would not mind seeing a project added to the reps that has a rep-specific hanger pet/s that you need to collect items/marks specific to certain ques to complete the project.
An to me for optionals that should have been the way we get access to elite marks in the ques, with advanced an elite giving one to two elite marks baseline, but than for each optional (based on difficulty) you could get an additional elite mark via the completion. It would reward players for learning to do the content, and not block completely players from obtaining the higher gear, but punish them for ignoring the optionals as well.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
The temporal rep, for example, has 6 ground items, of which 3 are class-exclusive, so 4 items any one character could possibly want. With 3-5 drops (average 4) split between 5 players it would require 5 runs to get them all. With 30 min cooldown and assuming only one queue drops them, that's 2,5 hours. As good as instant.
I play lots of games with great drop systems. None of them have 3-5 guaranteed drops for easy small-group/solo content. I get that you're after raid loot, but STO doesn't have raids.
If STO ever gets missions that a well-coordinated, well-equipped team of 30 has to put several hours of their best effort to win, with a cooldown measured in days, they can have their guaranteed drops (to split between the 30 players, with a system that would have to be much better than need and greed). But as long as we're talking content that a team of 5 half-decent players (or 1 good player and 4 carry-ons) finishes in minutes, that mostly isn't even theoretically capable of failing and repeats every 30min, even one guaranteed drop is insanely high.
In this case the marks, dil and items we get from the missions can be considered a fraction of a guaranteed drop appropriate to the amount of gameplay required to acquire them.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
The temporal rep, for example, has 6 ground items, of which 3 are class-exclusive, so 4 items any one character could possibly want. With 3-5 drops (average 4) split between 5 players it would require 5 runs to get them all. With 30 min cooldown and assuming only one queue drops them, that's 2,5 hours. As good as instant.
I apologize for not being clear on one thing, but since not all reps have both a ground and a space instance, my idea would also combine both sets of gear as possible drop options, regardless of whether the instance is ground or space. So there never would be a situation where the item drop pool was only 6 items.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
The temporal rep, for example, has 6 ground items, of which 3 are class-exclusive, so 4 items any one character could possibly want. With 3-5 drops (average 4) split between 5 players it would require 5 runs to get them all. With 30 min cooldown and assuming only one queue drops them, that's 2,5 hours. As good as instant.
I apologize for not being clear on one thing, but since not all reps have both a ground and a space instance, my idea would also combine both sets of gear as possible drop options, regardless of whether the instance is ground or space. So there never would be a situation where the item drop pool was only 6 items.
Which would mean our example temporal rep would have a pool of 15 items. That's still at worst a ~30% chance for the item you want dropping with 5 drops, assuming you only want one of them. But also 3 queues to get them in, meaning the cooldown is no longer a factor at all.
And the fact remains, any drops at all would reduce people's incentive to play the queues, if they're the same items they'd otherwise build with the marks, dil and elite items.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
The temporal rep, for example, has 6 ground items, of which 3 are class-exclusive, so 4 items any one character could possibly want. With 3-5 drops (average 4) split between 5 players it would require 5 runs to get them all. With 30 min cooldown and assuming only one queue drops them, that's 2,5 hours. As good as instant.
I apologize for not being clear on one thing, but since not all reps have both a ground and a space instance, my idea would also combine both sets of gear as possible drop options, regardless of whether the instance is ground or space. So there never would be a situation where the item drop pool was only 6 items.
Which would mean our example temporal rep would have a pool of 15 items. That's still at worst a ~30% chance for the item you want dropping with 5 drops, assuming you only want one of them. But also 3 queues to get them in, meaning the cooldown is no longer a factor at all.
And the fact remains, any drops at all would reduce people's incentive to play the queues, if they're the same items they'd otherwise build with the marks, dil and elite items.
30% chance assumes each drop would be a different item, I never said I'd gauruntee that kind of thing. As far as I'm concerned, using Borg Disconnected as an example, seeing four compression phaser rifles drop should be just as likely as seeing four completely different items.
As I said earlier i wouldn't be against having a separate drop based set for each rep, but i highly doubt Cryptic would be willing to put the extra effort in to do that. One thing they could do is either make the drops non-upgradable, or much more expensive than normal to upgrade, which combined with reduced rarity and mark would leave plenty of incentive to participate in the terrible rep system.
My personal opinion on the drop situation for STO is that:
1) instance mobs should drop items from their associated rep store with a very small chance to drop mk10 rare versions of the actual rep gear
2) each phase of an instance should drop a random mk10 very rare version of a rep item with a small chance of it being mk12 instead
3) bosses should drop a random mk12 very rare rep item with a small chance of it being mk13 instead. If you feel it necessary
The current grind system could remain as bad luck protection if you'd like.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
3-5 guaranteed drops from short auto-win missions with no significant cooldowns is pure instant gratification, allowing players to collect all the rep gear for free in hours.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
The temporal rep, for example, has 6 ground items, of which 3 are class-exclusive, so 4 items any one character could possibly want. With 3-5 drops (average 4) split between 5 players it would require 5 runs to get them all. With 30 min cooldown and assuming only one queue drops them, that's 2,5 hours. As good as instant.
I apologize for not being clear on one thing, but since not all reps have both a ground and a space instance, my idea would also combine both sets of gear as possible drop options, regardless of whether the instance is ground or space. So there never would be a situation where the item drop pool was only 6 items.
Which would mean our example temporal rep would have a pool of 15 items. That's still at worst a ~30% chance for the item you want dropping with 5 drops, assuming you only want one of them. But also 3 queues to get them in, meaning the cooldown is no longer a factor at all.
And the fact remains, any drops at all would reduce people's incentive to play the queues, if they're the same items they'd otherwise build with the marks, dil and elite items.
30% chance assumes each drop would be a different item, I never said I'd gauruntee that kind of thing. As far as I'm concerned, using Borg Disconnected as an example, seeing four compression phaser rifles drop should be just as likely as seeing four completely different items.
No, it would would be 33% if each drop is guaranteed to be a different item. About 30% if they're not.
As I said earlier i wouldn't be against having a separate drop based set for each rep, but i highly doubt Cryptic would be willing to put the extra effort in to do that. One thing they could do is either make the drops non-upgradable, or much more expensive than normal to upgrade, which combined with reduced rarity and mark would leave plenty of incentive to participate in the terrible rep system.
If you make the drops reduced quality and non-upgradeable, then they're vendor trash just like all the other sub-par stuff that drops everywhere.
It's for Cryptic to decide if they would create entirely new drops or not. But dropping the rep gear is simply no good.
Not drop it but another way so you can complete old rep's as swell, for instant doing some rep's like romulan you have to run around on new romulus cause the queues that where made are completely dead in the water, this is the most common problem. like stated here before same goes for Delta Marks and Voth also you have to get it from battle zones. because queues are dead.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
all depends on what you class as currencies, many count reputation marks, XP and such as currency but they are not IMO.
the only stuff I class as currency is
zen, dilithium, lobi, EC and gold-pressed latinum.
but despite that any currency is only useful if you can exchange it for other currency or buy good stuff with it, the only currency that doesn't really fit this and is a waste of space in the game is gold-pressed latinum, considering this was the most mentioned form of currency in star trek episodes and movies that's rather ironic I think.
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,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Latinum was a retconned currency in TNG. in the first appearance of the Ferengi they were all about the gold in Riker's communicator, saying it was valuable. later, they established gold as worthless (In DS9 IIRC)
devs, stop making clutter mess, all we need is to have "universal currency", and no more "tiers of currencies". i played neverwinter, it get awful cluttered and easy to get lost and forget where the other currencies we get from while a long break from game.
speaking of reputation marks, it was good idea at that time, but no good for newer players when they find some "QUE" for reps they need, and all they find long waiting and those que zones are almost ghosttown, they dont want to wait for "scheduled events" for specific marks for months. we had hourly/weekly years ago before devs took them out, other devs did same mistake with Neverwinter's hourly timed quests and seriously nerfed the economy to super inflated cost at Auction House/Exchange.
i dont mind converting some marks into dil, since it is almost ghosttown for que zones, there need to have some way for solo version, kinda like shuttle vault quest to earn marks, since marks are bound to characters.
GPL need new love, vendor are outdated.
lobi vendor need something new, it need specific like "hull plates" and they can be craftable as upgrades, maybe new unique turret hybrid hull plates, it would make any ship heavy armed, or small torp salvo hull plates, remember japanese's anime series, Starblazer or Robotech Macross ship? those plates pop out turrets or set of torps come out blazing, weaponized hulls take longer cooldown for reloading.
dil are just fine for now, mostly for fleet ships and consoles, just too many and expensive, i feel some sci, tact, and eng consoles could move to lobi market.
rep marks should keep those shields, warp engine, and deflectors, and the weapons should only come from rep boxes.
not easy for new players to learn those at short notice, they get overwhelmed, and returning players often forgot or more confused when some contents were changed by updates when they came back.
Special Rep items aren't so much a currency, as a crafting material.
Rep Marks: Not a currency, anonther crafting item for rep gear.
This leaves your currencies as being.
EC - Super Easy to get
Dilithium - Just pass gas and there you go dil, easiest currency in game to get, and has a store.
Fleet Marks and Creds - Super Easy to get - Still only a single dedicated use.
Latinum, still easy to get. But of all the currencies, is the hardest to get, has a store, with nothing beyond the outfits and nullifier being the best buys. Everything else is fairly useless.
Some would say Dilithium should, replace Latinum. Sure, just as soon as they make it harder to get. With the over abundance of dil that we have in game, it would be the most worthless currency. The most used, but the most worthless. For this, if you want to make Dil the primary currency, sure we can do that. It can replace EC and everything can cost dil instead.
For Latinum, I wouldn't say the modules would cross over. But, from the Dil store, if they moved the Special items, not including lockboxes and promo pack, like phoenix, EVsuits, and hangar pets to the Latnium store, it would give latinum a use. Plus it would give the players and option to buy it with either dil or latinum. They could also put the lower tiered faction ships in there as well. Say 1mil Latinum for a t1, a t2 would be 2mil etc.
The problem is we don't have to many currencies. We only have a use for 3 of them. I've been saying that Latinum needed more use, and have been since the game went F2P.
The problem with latinum is it's just EC recycled through a dabo table. That's completely redundant.
Technically speaking. Energy credits shouldn't exist. These are based of the allotted energy one is allowed to use for a replicator. But the game had to have some form of standard currency. Which is why EC and Dil are so blasted easy to get. Dil use to be harder to obtain. Now the hardest currency to obtain is latinum.
And yes, this is by lore. As the Federations doesn't use any type of currency. But use the credit, something along the line of a credit card account here.
Klingons have the Darsek.
Cardassian have the Lek
Ferengi have Latinim
Bajorans have the Lita
Breen have the Mitondium
Dominon have the Lateral
Gorn have the Tokbar
Naussicanss have Chiv'vig
Romulans the T'chak
Tholians the Doleen.
The ferengi have three other currencies, other than latinium. But, as they seldom use them outside of ferengi territory, there was no need to list them. Of all the currencies, EC is actually the least recognized and used.
The Federation Credit line, is actually for the replicators. Inside the Federation they work. Outside of Federation Territory, they are suppose to replicate something they can exchange for the local currency. Which with just a quick search. Here are the conversation rates.
The problem with latinum is it's just EC recycled through a dabo table. That's completely redundant.
Technically speaking. Energy credits shouldn't exist. These are based of the allotted energy one is allowed to use for a replicator. But the game had to have some form of standard currency. Which is why EC and Dil are so blasted easy to get. Dil use to be harder to obtain. Now the hardest currency to obtain is latinum.
It's not hard to obtain at all, just boring and time-consuming. All you have to do is load your toon with the amount of EC you want to convert, park at a dabo table, set an autoclicker to push "play" every 20 seconds and come back in the morning.
If you do a lot of Ground Battlezones, Defera, Kobali Prime, Nakura, slot Somog from 'Time in a Bottle'. You'll end up with tons of GPL for doing what we do so well - killing things.
'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.'
Comments
From memory latinum and dabo came in before they added the zen exchange so choosing dilithium was obviously them taking a shortcut to avoid the inevitable downtime on stores as they changed latinum over to a semi precious currency and tried to avoid overlaps between what people bought with the quarkbucks.
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
Rare drops are always a viable option. There were some complications back before S7 because the STF sets were pretty much the only mk12 equipment there was in the entire game (and back then, the game wasn't so incredibly easy either). That's no longer the case.
Rare drops are the best way to encourage playing diverse content. There's nothing wrong with spending months to get an item. That's what makes them valuable. Ideally, the drops should be tradeable, though. That would naturally encourage playing the least popular content (which would have the rarest thus most expensive reward), keeping the content in balance without constant dev intervention.
That would be supported by having the numeric rewards (dil/marks) automatically scaled to average completion time to avoid favoring short content.
They should NOT drop rep gear. That would only give players an "early out" to abandon the content even faster if they get lucky before they've earned the stuff the hard way. The drops should be unique to the specific content.
And that's way, way, way too high odds to be worth anything. A guaranteed drop from every phase and every boss? Useless.
That should add up to about 3-5 drops per run, which is on par with literally every other MMO out there ... not my fault Cryptic releases a relatively small amount of new gear compared to other games, though the random nature and the fact that it would be need>greed rolled on by 5 players means it would still not be instant gratification. If you notice I suggested giving all but the final boss lower mark and/or rarity than normal (most instances only have 1 boss, which is why I threw in drops for different phases as well). The Temporal Agent rep bonus would also still be the only way to get an instant mk13 ultra rare. Also, clickfest cell phone games, which is exactly what the current rep system is, is not content, it's busy work and there's nothing hard about it.
The point of drops is to get players to play more, not less.
3-5 random drops split among 5 players. If you think that's instant gratification, then I doubt you've played a game with a decent drop system. There's what, 13+ rep project items per rep? First, there's a decent chance the item you're looking for won't drop (even more so if Cryptic would introduce more items), and when it does drop you still have to successfully roll against four other players to get it. Yes, it would be faster than the current mandatory 40 days of mindlessly clicking project buttons like a good little metric zombie, but it would not be instant, would get some people (like me) playing the game more, and it would actually be enjoyable. Would probably be a good idea to limit this to advanced and elite as well.
For your "short auto-win missions" comment, I have a whole other set of improvements I'd like to see where that's concerned, but that's beyond the scope of this thread (short version is they should not be auto win, but they shouldn't have outright fail conditions either). I'm not against having a separate instance set instead, but convincing Cryptic to create any more than the bare minimum would likely be impossible.
An to me for optionals that should have been the way we get access to elite marks in the ques, with advanced an elite giving one to two elite marks baseline, but than for each optional (based on difficulty) you could get an additional elite mark via the completion. It would reward players for learning to do the content, and not block completely players from obtaining the higher gear, but punish them for ignoring the optionals as well.
I play lots of games with great drop systems. None of them have 3-5 guaranteed drops for easy small-group/solo content. I get that you're after raid loot, but STO doesn't have raids.
If STO ever gets missions that a well-coordinated, well-equipped team of 30 has to put several hours of their best effort to win, with a cooldown measured in days, they can have their guaranteed drops (to split between the 30 players, with a system that would have to be much better than need and greed). But as long as we're talking content that a team of 5 half-decent players (or 1 good player and 4 carry-ons) finishes in minutes, that mostly isn't even theoretically capable of failing and repeats every 30min, even one guaranteed drop is insanely high.
In this case the marks, dil and items we get from the missions can be considered a fraction of a guaranteed drop appropriate to the amount of gameplay required to acquire them.
I apologize for not being clear on one thing, but since not all reps have both a ground and a space instance, my idea would also combine both sets of gear as possible drop options, regardless of whether the instance is ground or space. So there never would be a situation where the item drop pool was only 6 items.
And the fact remains, any drops at all would reduce people's incentive to play the queues, if they're the same items they'd otherwise build with the marks, dil and elite items.
30% chance assumes each drop would be a different item, I never said I'd gauruntee that kind of thing. As far as I'm concerned, using Borg Disconnected as an example, seeing four compression phaser rifles drop should be just as likely as seeing four completely different items.
As I said earlier i wouldn't be against having a separate drop based set for each rep, but i highly doubt Cryptic would be willing to put the extra effort in to do that. One thing they could do is either make the drops non-upgradable, or much more expensive than normal to upgrade, which combined with reduced rarity and mark would leave plenty of incentive to participate in the terrible rep system.
It's for Cryptic to decide if they would create entirely new drops or not. But dropping the rep gear is simply no good.
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
the only stuff I class as currency is
zen, dilithium, lobi, EC and gold-pressed latinum.
but despite that any currency is only useful if you can exchange it for other currency or buy good stuff with it, the only currency that doesn't really fit this and is a waste of space in the game is gold-pressed latinum, considering this was the most mentioned form of currency in star trek episodes and movies that's rather ironic I think.
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,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
speaking of reputation marks, it was good idea at that time, but no good for newer players when they find some "QUE" for reps they need, and all they find long waiting and those que zones are almost ghosttown, they dont want to wait for "scheduled events" for specific marks for months. we had hourly/weekly years ago before devs took them out, other devs did same mistake with Neverwinter's hourly timed quests and seriously nerfed the economy to super inflated cost at Auction House/Exchange.
i dont mind converting some marks into dil, since it is almost ghosttown for que zones, there need to have some way for solo version, kinda like shuttle vault quest to earn marks, since marks are bound to characters.
GPL need new love, vendor are outdated.
lobi vendor need something new, it need specific like "hull plates" and they can be craftable as upgrades, maybe new unique turret hybrid hull plates, it would make any ship heavy armed, or small torp salvo hull plates, remember japanese's anime series, Starblazer or Robotech Macross ship? those plates pop out turrets or set of torps come out blazing, weaponized hulls take longer cooldown for reloading.
dil are just fine for now, mostly for fleet ships and consoles, just too many and expensive, i feel some sci, tact, and eng consoles could move to lobi market.
rep marks should keep those shields, warp engine, and deflectors, and the weapons should only come from rep boxes.
not easy for new players to learn those at short notice, they get overwhelmed, and returning players often forgot or more confused when some contents were changed by updates when they came back.
Rep Marks: Not a currency, anonther crafting item for rep gear.
This leaves your currencies as being.
EC - Super Easy to get
Dilithium - Just pass gas and there you go dil, easiest currency in game to get, and has a store.
Fleet Marks and Creds - Super Easy to get - Still only a single dedicated use.
Latinum, still easy to get. But of all the currencies, is the hardest to get, has a store, with nothing beyond the outfits and nullifier being the best buys. Everything else is fairly useless.
Some would say Dilithium should, replace Latinum. Sure, just as soon as they make it harder to get. With the over abundance of dil that we have in game, it would be the most worthless currency. The most used, but the most worthless. For this, if you want to make Dil the primary currency, sure we can do that. It can replace EC and everything can cost dil instead.
For Latinum, I wouldn't say the modules would cross over. But, from the Dil store, if they moved the Special items, not including lockboxes and promo pack, like phoenix, EVsuits, and hangar pets to the Latnium store, it would give latinum a use. Plus it would give the players and option to buy it with either dil or latinum. They could also put the lower tiered faction ships in there as well. Say 1mil Latinum for a t1, a t2 would be 2mil etc.
The problem is we don't have to many currencies. We only have a use for 3 of them. I've been saying that Latinum needed more use, and have been since the game went F2P.
Technically speaking. Energy credits shouldn't exist. These are based of the allotted energy one is allowed to use for a replicator. But the game had to have some form of standard currency. Which is why EC and Dil are so blasted easy to get. Dil use to be harder to obtain. Now the hardest currency to obtain is latinum.
And yes, this is by lore. As the Federations doesn't use any type of currency. But use the credit, something along the line of a credit card account here.
Klingons have the Darsek.
Cardassian have the Lek
Ferengi have Latinim
Bajorans have the Lita
Breen have the Mitondium
Dominon have the Lateral
Gorn have the Tokbar
Naussicanss have Chiv'vig
Romulans the T'chak
Tholians the Doleen.
The ferengi have three other currencies, other than latinium. But, as they seldom use them outside of ferengi territory, there was no need to list them. Of all the currencies, EC is actually the least recognized and used.
The Federation Credit line, is actually for the replicators. Inside the Federation they work. Outside of Federation Territory, they are suppose to replicate something they can exchange for the local currency. Which with just a quick search. Here are the conversation rates.
http://www.coldnorth.com/owen/game/startrek/universe/source/money.htm
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.'