I have been here since beta, and i can say that the problema with dead queues is simple, too long, low rewards... so a rotation system and a rework of the queues, so they can be fun (for example, the new breach is quite fun and kinda fast) is needed.
The fake cores in the breach seem to be shot just as often by pets than actual players. Easy enough to assume it'll happen and be ready to pop sci team.
I remember the old timed brackets for doing stuff and also remember how frustrating it was as the enjoyable ones never seemed to be active during reasonable times. The curse of a global game being forced to run to us time.
Better alternative would be to have then as a daily thing, could then add a reward tracker for doing enough consecutive ones and have rewards unlocking at various milestones. It'd then be a variation of the daily login rewards found in some games (neverwinter for example) combined with a daily dungeon type thing. Rewards could go from xp/mark boosts up to exclusive boffs, doffs, hangar pets and maybe even a ship for going a full year but character locked unlike the annual "festival" ones.
Of course they'd have to make sure to sort out the afk penalty popping up on folk who end up in a pug with the dps junkies where they can't get enough of a shot in.
Removing is not necessary, I think, at least not completely.
I like the idea of a new approach to Featured Queue. I don't agree that such a rotation should be hourly. That's micro-managing the players for questionable gains.
Here's one system.
Each week (from patch day to patch day), Cryptic selects one Ground and one Space Queue as Featured Queues. The queue should be selected from the least played queues in the past week, and not be selected again for 4 weeks.
In addition, every newly introduced queue since the last patch is considered "featured", until the next season.
A featured queue always rewards a choice of marks in addition to the marks of the type it normally grants. (If it's already a choice of marks queue, only the marks are increased). Advanced and Elite Queues also grand a choice of Elite Marks.
In addition, once per day, you earn a Featured Queue Prize Token for playing a featured queue on a character.
A Special Project in the Event Store can be slotted and filled. It takes 5 featured queue tokens and awards you a pack containing 100 Marks, 2 Elite Marks, 5.000 Dilithium, and a Phoenix Prize pack.
Basically, this is a "lighter" form of the Special Event Queues.
The requirement to be "least played" means that already very popular queues will never receive these bonuses - the obviously don't need an extra incentive.
A harsher form:
1) All existing queues remain available for Privately started queues. Privately started queues don't count for the Featured Rewards.
2) Only 1 Ground and one Space Queue for each reputation is available in the public queue. The available queues rotate weekly (patch day to patch day.)
3) In addition, all newly introduced queues with the latest season or expansion are available as public queues. (For at least 4 weeks, maybe as long as they are the newest.)
3) Each Week, two queues, one ground, one space, are singled out as Featured Queue. Rest see above.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I'm for the rotation idea and revamping of rewards from the ques since I think most do the ques just for marks mainly..The rotation system could bring life back into the PvE area of the game where all PvE's are actually opened up and a revamped rewards structure could make it more inviting..
Removing is not necessary, I think, at least not completely.
I like the idea of a new approach to Featured Queue. I don't agree that such a rotation should be hourly. That's micro-managing the players for questionable gains.
Here's one system.
Each week (from patch day to patch day), Cryptic selects one Ground and one Space Queue as Featured Queues. The queue should be selected from the least played queues in the past week, and not be selected again for 4 weeks.
In addition, every newly introduced queue since the last patch is considered "featured", until the next season.
A featured queue always rewards a choice of marks in addition to the marks of the type it normally grants. (If it's already a choice of marks queue, only the marks are increased). Advanced and Elite Queues also grand a choice of Elite Marks.
In addition, once per day, you earn a Featured Queue Prize Token for playing a featured queue on a character.
A Special Project in the Event Store can be slotted and filled. It takes 5 featured queue tokens and awards you a pack containing 100 Marks, 2 Elite Marks, 5.000 Dilithium, and a Phoenix Prize pack.
Basically, this is a "lighter" form of the Special Event Queues.
The requirement to be "least played" means that already very popular queues will never receive these bonuses - the obviously don't need an extra incentive.
A harsher form:
1) All existing queues remain available for Privately started queues. Privately started queues don't count for the Featured Rewards.
2) Only 1 Ground and one Space Queue for each reputation is available in the public queue. The available queues rotate weekly (patch day to patch day.)
3) In addition, all newly introduced queues with the latest season or expansion are available as public queues. (For at least 4 weeks, maybe as long as they are the newest.)
3) Each Week, two queues, one ground, one space, are singled out as Featured Queue. Rest see above.
I like these ideas, and i think a variation on something like this could help a lot. Everyone and their mother knows the old hourly event rotations got the featured events filled up nicely and people were always looking forward to their favourite showing up.
To be honest their reasoning to change this into a weekend event type of situation helped people who couldn't catch the hour of an event due to timezones; but it didn't help keep the queues filled up. Because now people mostly just play the current featured event run until they get their prize doohickey or finish the latest rep and then things die again.
They need an incentive for people to run the less used content and keep it going. It must be pretty disheartening to be a fresh lvl 50 player who joined recently and ground your way up to end-game, only to see nobody plays anything and the queues look dead.
I mean how often do you see the Vault Ensnared or Storming the Spire pop? There's literally no incentive to play them outside of premade channel runs for fun.
Removing is not necessary, I think, at least not completely.
I like the idea of a new approach to Featured Queue. I don't agree that such a rotation should be hourly. That's micro-managing the players for questionable gains.
Here's one system.
Each week (from patch day to patch day), Cryptic selects one Ground and one Space Queue as Featured Queues. The queue should be selected from the least played queues in the past week, and not be selected again for 4 weeks.
In addition, every newly introduced queue since the last patch is considered "featured", until the next season.
A featured queue always rewards a choice of marks in addition to the marks of the type it normally grants. (If it's already a choice of marks queue, only the marks are increased). Advanced and Elite Queues also grand a choice of Elite Marks.
In addition, once per day, you earn a Featured Queue Prize Token for playing a featured queue on a character.
A Special Project in the Event Store can be slotted and filled. It takes 5 featured queue tokens and awards you a pack containing 100 Marks, 2 Elite Marks, 5.000 Dilithium, and a Phoenix Prize pack.
Basically, this is a "lighter" form of the Special Event Queues.
The requirement to be "least played" means that already very popular queues will never receive these bonuses - the obviously don't need an extra incentive.
That's nice, but as it has already been calculated that even the "heavier" form of the event queues (with the 50k dil) lose to bog-standard pug CCA in reward/time, it would fail. In fact you could give that 5k dil and 100 marks for every single run of a 15-20 minute queue, and it would still lose to CCA in reward/time.
Same goes to any kind of percent reward bonus, unless it's something unreasonably high.
There is no saving the long queues without a revamp of the underlying reward structure. Either to have unique rare rewards for each queue, to scale the numerics by average completion time or preferably both.
Or at least honouring the commitment given when they were removed to have weekly events (which to be fair, they've been getting better at the last few months, finally).
Without enhanced rewards, even with "balance" passes that usually amount to nerfing things people paid for and padding XP on dumb as bricks AI opponents, people are going to gravitate to best reward/time ratio.
I have been calling for a return to the return of the hourly events for a while now, but I take issue with the fact that especially with the return of the Breach, which is now no longer any fun because of people skipping the trench run! Part of the opening dialogue is that 'we can deal them a death of a thousand cuts'. Now it's just an optional! What Cryptic should have done was to have the original first part where you could freely fly around the hull to take out hardpoints, then once enough damage was done, the ship became vunerable to to enter.
My main issue is people who think 'fun' is getting it done with as little effort as possible, especially those that still AFK. It's not fun in the slightest! It's STO Farmville! When the queue was originally launched, it was one of the best to play because it required tactics, such as dashing to free ships (which people STILL don't get) that will help them in the fight and not destroying the FAKE ? cores, again which people still shoot because they are using auto-fire (I still find it amusing that people don't realise the reason why these ? cores are in there....they are traps folks, designed to slow you down or destroy you!).
People seem more concerned about whether the reward after is worth it, compared to a 1 minute run of Crystal Cat, which needs to go as it's not up to standard now. When this was originally released, it had insane resistances and regen, and was hard to beat, but Cryptic nerfed it to what it is now.
What Cryptic needs to do is return back to decent challenges rather than satisfying farmers. Making things so easy now that grinding is rife is not the way to go. There are alot of decent queues out there now, and the players do share the blame on this because some aren't prepared to put the effort in because they have to actually participate!! When the original Borg queues were running before the Rep system was put in, it was alot harder to get equipment because you needed the salvaged tech (it was a random-chance reward) and those queues were always busy. If Cryptic had stuck to the same prinicple throughout, then I truly believe that all these queues would still be populated.
CCA = One minute? It almost never lasts that long anymore. It's usually anywhere between 10 - 45 seconds. I find it ironic actually - they removed No Win Scenario as it was "too easy" and yet CCA which is infinitely easier (and I would argue is the easiest PvE mission in the game) remains..... Hmmmmm
Yeah, some of their decision making can really boggle the mind.
Maybe they know something we don't ?
Or perhaps they don't always think things through. I dunno.
*shrug*
Comments
I remember the old timed brackets for doing stuff and also remember how frustrating it was as the enjoyable ones never seemed to be active during reasonable times. The curse of a global game being forced to run to us time.
Better alternative would be to have then as a daily thing, could then add a reward tracker for doing enough consecutive ones and have rewards unlocking at various milestones. It'd then be a variation of the daily login rewards found in some games (neverwinter for example) combined with a daily dungeon type thing. Rewards could go from xp/mark boosts up to exclusive boffs, doffs, hangar pets and maybe even a ship for going a full year but character locked unlike the annual "festival" ones.
Of course they'd have to make sure to sort out the afk penalty popping up on folk who end up in a pug with the dps junkies where they can't get enough of a shot in.
I like the idea of a new approach to Featured Queue. I don't agree that such a rotation should be hourly. That's micro-managing the players for questionable gains.
Here's one system.
Basically, this is a "lighter" form of the Special Event Queues.
The requirement to be "least played" means that already very popular queues will never receive these bonuses - the obviously don't need an extra incentive.
A harsher form:
1) All existing queues remain available for Privately started queues. Privately started queues don't count for the Featured Rewards.
2) Only 1 Ground and one Space Queue for each reputation is available in the public queue. The available queues rotate weekly (patch day to patch day.)
3) In addition, all newly introduced queues with the latest season or expansion are available as public queues. (For at least 4 weeks, maybe as long as they are the newest.)
3) Each Week, two queues, one ground, one space, are singled out as Featured Queue. Rest see above.
Adu-Uss Firefox NCC-93425-F (LVL 65 FED AoY ENG) UR/VR MKXV Fleet Intel Assault Cruiser (July 2016)
Jean-Uss Seratoga Ravenna (LVL 60 FED Delta ENG) UC/R MKVI Bajoran Escort (April 2018)
Dubsa-RRW Mnaudh (LVL 50 FED allied ROM Delta ENG) Warbird (May 2018)
Marop-IKS Orunthi (LVL 50 KNG Delta ENG) BoP (May 2018)
Kanak'lan-TRIBBLE (LVL 65 DOM Gamma ENG) TRIBBLE (June 2018)
I like these ideas, and i think a variation on something like this could help a lot. Everyone and their mother knows the old hourly event rotations got the featured events filled up nicely and people were always looking forward to their favourite showing up.
To be honest their reasoning to change this into a weekend event type of situation helped people who couldn't catch the hour of an event due to timezones; but it didn't help keep the queues filled up. Because now people mostly just play the current featured event run until they get their prize doohickey or finish the latest rep and then things die again.
They need an incentive for people to run the less used content and keep it going. It must be pretty disheartening to be a fresh lvl 50 player who joined recently and ground your way up to end-game, only to see nobody plays anything and the queues look dead.
I mean how often do you see the Vault Ensnared or Storming the Spire pop? There's literally no incentive to play them outside of premade channel runs for fun.
Same goes to any kind of percent reward bonus, unless it's something unreasonably high.
There is no saving the long queues without a revamp of the underlying reward structure. Either to have unique rare rewards for each queue, to scale the numerics by average completion time or preferably both.
Or at least honouring the commitment given when they were removed to have weekly events (which to be fair, they've been getting better at the last few months, finally).
Without enhanced rewards, even with "balance" passes that usually amount to nerfing things people paid for and padding XP on dumb as bricks AI opponents, people are going to gravitate to best reward/time ratio.
I really, really miss that queue.
Yeah, some of their decision making can really boggle the mind.
Maybe they know something we don't ?
Or perhaps they don't always think things through. I dunno.
*shrug*
Original STO beta tester.