I submitted a bug report stating a piece of equipment (temporal shield) isn't performing as per game description. The reponse I get "we are unable to provide hints to missions" blah blah blah.....Um, what? Where does it state I am asking for a hint? Last time I checked, I was talking about a shield not performing as per game description. Then on another ticket, they couldn't come up with a answer that even touched the issue so the closed the ticket without addressing the issue that the ticket was about. There customer service needs a overhaul if this is how it's going to be. Anyone else experience this? Also, when they do come up with a reasonable answer. It seems like a excuse. I do want to point out that they have helped in the past resolving a issue. Who ever it was that responded (customer service rep), I greatly appreciated it. As for the others............
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When dealing with customer support:
- Stay friendly
- Try to explain the issue as clearly as possible, possibly with a short summary and the relevant details. (Figuring out what is relevant can be a challenge on its own, admittedly*).
- When you're not happy with the response, state that you're not happy with the response and why you're not happy, again as clearly as possible, too.
*) For an item that doesn't work as expected, explain what your expectations are (and why), and then what it actually does and how that fails the expectation.
If an item is not performing correctly, then it's a game bug which is not something support handles. I'm not saying you're in the wrong here, you're not.. and you deserved a proper reply from support telling you how to go about getting your problem rectified.
The best way to get the problem addressed is to post exactly what the issue is in the Game Play Bugs Section of the forum. Select the one that is appropriate to the system you're playing on (PC,XBox. Playstation) and try to give as much information as possible on what exactly is wrong with the item.
It's unlikely that support will assist you with this issue, they deal more with purchase issues, compromised accounts, and stuff like that. You might have better luck filing a bug report.
Good luck, I hope you get your issue resolved.
Lately the "best" way has been to complain on reddit, or so it seems, but the gossip at the moment is that too many people have started doing this and posts there are falling by the wayside as well. I wasn't about to join Reddit just for this.
I honestly don't expect it to be adopted* but I'd dearly like to see a proper bug tracker for STO. No doubt the devs have one of their own (I hope!) but there needs to be something that players can interact with too. Raising tickets in-game seems to be broken and too many forum posts get buried under newer bugs without ever seeing an official answer.
Bugs that do get reported in the forum might be looked at, or they might not be; there's no way for players to tell. It would be a huge QoL improvement if we could actually search for a bug in a tracker (which has never worked in-game AFAICT), see how/if it's progressing and easily add our names/experiences to it if we're having the same issue.
Having bug reports in a forum isn't working well at all. Don't get me wrong, I've reported a couple of things that were fixed (but only because a bug tester read the thread and fed it up the chain), but I've also reported a much larger number of things that as far as I know went completely under the radar, and I've reached the point where a lot of the issues I see don't get reported because I think to myself "what's the point?".
*Because if it were then people would be able to easily see both how many bugs there are and how old some of them are.
Shield regeneration nowadays is almost a joke. Whether a lowly 200 something per second or 400-600 something per second doesn't really matter when most space encounters now involve facing entire fleets of NPCs throwing a combined total DPS at you numbered in the thousands from all directions. Even a 100% increase in regen rate means nothing when incoming damage is anywhere from 5-50 times higher than your regen capacity.
For the older missions, where you would usually face, at most, three small ships at a time, or one larger ship and one or two smaller ones, or just a single large ship, the higher shield regen came/comes in handy. Defeat the first group and you had less wait time to regain full shields before going after the second, or, one shield facing was running low so you just turn a different shield towards the enemy, with the "fast" regen, by the time the next shield was low, the first was recovered so you just turn again. Which is how regenerative shields help to withstand protracted battles, by allowing you switch which shield is taking damage while depleted ones regenerate quickly. This actually does still work, but only after you thin out the enemy numbers enough so that they aren't draining every shield facing way faster than they can regenerate.
This is...complicated to answer.
Mechanics generally fall into one of two categories:
This first makes numbers bigger, the second makes numbers smaller. While I am a huge proponent of making formulas and exact values more available to players, but I also know that if everything was plastered in math then very few of the current players may want to continue to play (even more so now that S13 has reduced players).
So, just knowing what form of bonus the above is in helps.
I'm going to try and explain how both parts of the temporal shield that make it stand out work here.
Bonus Shield Regeneration
This is a direct modifier of the shield regeneration. In common notation, this would best be described as a Final Shield Regeneration Buff.
Lets say you had, at 100% Shield Health, 400 Shield regen. As your shield facing value is reduced, then this regen would increase at a rate of 2-[Shield Health]. At 0% Shield HP, you have 2-0, or a 2x modifier (for exactly +100%).
Starship Drain Expertise (AKA DrainX)
This is an inherent addition to the skill, it is Not only an additional +30% Shield Drain Resistance. As such if you increase this value, then the resulting effect of shield drain resistance will change depending on the values you already have.
Using relative terms, we can find out how much +30 DrainX will actually affect 'drains'.
So we see that the effective result of adding+30 Starship DrainX changes depending on how much you already have.
DrainX as it affects incoming Shield Drains
Shield Drains and Shield Drain Resistance would fall into the second form of effect:
So lets say that you are hit with a borg tachyon beam (In HSE, or ISA, or KSA, or so on) for an outgoing tick of 5,000 (because this is actually a realistic value, they actually hit this much sometimes) shield drain per second. At only 30% Resistance (or 30 DrainX), it would drop to:
This is an effective 23% decrease. (1 - 3,846/5,000)
At 130 DrainX (30 From the shield and 100 from both DrainX Skill Nodes)
This is an effective 56% decrease. (1 - 2,174/5,000)
Even at only 2,000 shield drain per tick, after 10 ticks its drained 20,000 shield HP. This is a ridiculous amount, and basically forces you to only be reliant on your hull.
Hopefully this helps you understand the mechanics so you can better frame your issue your finding.
If it were supposed to stop drains completely, it would say drain IMMUNITY.
I'll just leave this here to lighten the mood.
Also... STO is serious business too.
That's a typical Customer Support reply. "We are unable to provide hints to missions" is just their way of saying they're utterly incompetent, and have the reading comprehension of a 5-year-old. The best way to deal with them, is to simply consider CS non-existent for this game, as actually approaching them means you're sure to get upset and fobbed off with some lame, totally irrelevant, lazy reply.
Fortunately, both bug reports and questions about how things work are best asked on this forum. Only ever contact CS for some financial issue (they do take those seriously), or when you got h-a-c-k-ed, or lost Epic items, and some such. Otherwise, they're a waste of space (and, for a space game, that's actually not good :P).
I think I've actually seen that list once. Or lists, rather: they were hanging on a wall behind Bort, in a vid, where I think he was talking about why certain abilities caused server lag. There were hundreds, if not thousand, items listed on there, row after row. Personally, I would probably ere get depressed reading them all, rather than anything else. "Ignorance is bliss!"
how do you know those weren't lists of the bugs that have been FIXED over the past 7+ years?
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Have you *played* this game at all?! :P The list of things fixed would fit in a Trump tweet.
Like I said such a list openly displayed to the public would be worse then useless as without context it's just a list of things without saying how hard or easy something is to fix, it's not like Cryptic knows the fix for every bug in game but is just doing them out of malice, rather some "simple" bugs might not be as simple to fix as people think.