The plural of "player" is "players," it is a countable noun, so it takes the word "fewer" instead of "less."
Please edit the mistake out of your title.
Does it really matter if the correct term is being used? Seriously?
The nature of the topic and the context makes perfect sense to everyone else posting here. If you have nothing to add to the topic why post at all.....unless you jut be trolling the thread? Surely not?
Clarity and technical accuracy are key to communication.
Ah so are you struggling to understand the subject of this thread then? Is the title so confusing you cannot fathom what it could possibly mean?
Come on guys, this UI is clearly a major concern for nearly all players, no need to derail or troll a thread with this sort of thing. Everyone should be in agreement that this topic needs to keep being brought up to show it's not acceptable to be left this way.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
This is nothing new. The player count has been dropping since they implemented LoR, Reps, and teh Fleet System. I've been playing since the game went Free to Play in 2012. Back then I had a friends list that contained about 200 players. At any given time when I signed on, there would always be a good 50-60 players on in my friends list. I took a break right after LoR and came back at Delta Recruit and I didn't bother my old friends list at this time. In the first couple of months, not a single one of my old friends bothered to log on. SO the player base has been steadily dropping since then.
I really can't blame them either. Here of late all I can bring myself to do is login, doff, adm, refine dil, alt, rinse, repeat, maybe catch a fleet queue or two, and log out and go do something else.
The faction system has failed, because all they can do is force feed you, "Do it the Starfleet way."
The queues have failed, because they went to a more pure reliance on DPS, than teamwork.
The episodes have become so dull and boring, that they've just become, "ignore the story and kill everything."
The entire premise of Star Trek has always been progression, moving forward in to the future. But, they managed to progress 1 whole year ingame, in 7 years IRL. That's right, we started in 2409. It is now firmly 2410 in game, thanks to the Nexus. The next appearance of the Nexus is in 2439 - 2440, every 39.1 years.
The new queue system doesn't bother me much here, as I already know what I'm queuing up for when I open it. Though, yes, the fact that is as buggy as it is, does get annoying.
Right now, I imagine, those metrics for login and such they use to say, "See, everything is good." is 70% Bots. Which is why they don't do anything about them. The bots are what's keeping the numbers up, so that CBS doesn't pull the plug.
Powercreep and Easy Mode are the two things that will kill any game. For an example of this, all one needs to do it look at World of Warcraft. They started this at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and have continued to carry it over through the next four expansions. Between Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlord's of Draenor, they lost 6 million subscriptions. Let me re-iterate that, 6 MILLION players left their game. That's half their player base at the time. I went back to check out Legion, and they had instituted more Easy Mode and powercreep, and while they got a spike up in players coming to the game for it, that eventually died off as people left again.
On this, for those leaving the game, like the OP, or taking a break from it. I imagine the new queue system is more the final nail in the coffin, than the overall reason for leaving the game. Because, lets face it, there are a lot of other issues one can blame this on as well.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
This is nothing new. The player count has been dropping since they implemented LoR, Reps, and teh Fleet System. I've been playing since the game went Free to Play in 2012. Back then I had a friends list that contained about 200 players. At any given time when I signed on, there would always be a good 50-60 players on in my friends list. I took a break right after LoR and came back at Delta Recruit and I didn't bother my old friends list at this time. In the first couple of months, not a single one of my old friends bothered to log on. SO the player base has been steadily dropping since then.
I really can't blame them either. Here of late all I can bring myself to do is login, doff, adm, refine dil, alt, rinse, repeat, maybe catch a fleet queue or two, and log out and go do something else.
The faction system has failed, because all they can do is force feed you, "Do it the Starfleet way."
The queues have failed, because they went to a more pure reliance on DPS, than teamwork.
The episodes have become so dull and boring, that they've just become, "ignore the story and kill everything."
The entire premise of Star Trek has always been progression, moving forward in to the future. But, they managed to progress 1 whole year ingame, in 7 years IRL. That's right, we started in 2409. It is now firmly 2410 in game, thanks to the Nexus. The next appearance of the Nexus is in 2439 - 2440, every 39.1 years.
The new queue system doesn't bother me much here, as I already know what I'm queuing up for when I open it. Though, yes, the fact that is as buggy as it is, does get annoying.
Right now, I imagine, those metrics for login and such they use to say, "See, everything is good." is 70% Bots. Which is why they don't do anything about them. The bots are what's keeping the numbers up, so that CBS doesn't pull the plug.
Powercreep and Easy Mode are the two things that will kill any game. For an example of this, all one needs to do it look at World of Warcraft. They started this at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and have continued to carry it over through the next four expansions. Between Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlord's of Draenor, they lost 6 million subscriptions. Let me re-iterate that, 6 MILLION players left their game. That's half their player base at the time. I went back to check out Legion, and they had instituted more Easy Mode and powercreep, and while they got a spike up in players coming to the game for it, that eventually died off as people left again.
On this, for those leaving the game, like the OP, or taking a break from it. I imagine the new queue system is more the final nail in the coffin, than the overall reason for leaving the game. Because, lets face it, there are a lot of other issues one can blame this on as well.
Well to be fair, most players in this game expect stuff to be easy. Just look at all the threads filled with rage because a reward is per-character unlock instead of account wide. Usually the first discussion is about the rewards, not even about how fun a mission like the Breach or Sompek can be. Or look at any thread complaining about much needed corrections w.r.t. DPS and power creep.
Players in this game have become spoiled. And because the Devs see no other option anymore, they're once again giving in to it by adding another account-wide store. The problem with giving in to such attitudes is, of course, that it'll never be easy enough to obtain rewards. Just look at how CCA is still rewarding so much compared to more difficult missions and everyone can see that it's true that the poor state of the queues is, to some extent, the players' fault as well.
On the one hand, players keep asking for stuff to be made more easy, oppose any kind of necessary correction to power creep (safe for a few like myself and @nikeix, @reyan01 or @lordsteve1 for example) and on the other hand, people complain that only the easy stuff is worth doing or being played because these missions reward the most - can you see the problem here?
Now, of course there's only one group to blame for the UI debacle and that's not the players. But generally speaking, I am not too surprised that only a handful of queues have players in them. That's something we, the players ourselves in general, are also doing and just blaming Cryptic for this is too easy and unfair. They've added enough interesting missions where team work is necessary and 'kill stuff' is not the only objective. The aforementioned Breach queue, Gravity kills, Tzenkethi front etc. are all examples that come to mind.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
It's put me in an uneasy position where i'm no longer comfortable spending money, upgrade item's ect as the part of the game I play and enjoy which requires Player participation feels empty and abandoned. Why upgrade gear, buy a new ship from the C-Store when the content I want to play is dying and making me feel like the game is in decline and thus my enjoyment for logging in is dimishing.
You could say I could go to the Undine and Terran Battlezones but they are soo time consuming and the real rewards from them are capturing the zone to trigger the boss fight which again requires Player participation.
Lers hope this new fleet holding isn't the cluster flurk I've been reading about and doesn't turn more people off the game.
"Its a big world outside, past that doorstep, but its an even bigger step to make to go out into it"
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
Agree on both counts. And to do something about it implies that they'e acknowleged that it's a problem. And they haven't.
Even if internally the Dev's all agree the new UI sucks and should be removed they will not do anything about it as they would never want to publicly admit they made a mistake.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
Agree on both counts. And to do something about it implies that they'e acknowleged that it's a problem. And they haven't.
Even if internally the Dev's all agree the new UI sucks and should be removed they will not do anything about it as they would never want to publicly admit they made a mistake.
Well this right here is why people get so angry with them. And this in turn is why they act like this forum is too toxic. They never bloody respond to the serious concerns so people get angry, then they get ranty, then they turn the atmosphere toxic.
If they actually responded to things posted here (and this is also getting raised on Reddit right now too) then perhaps people would acknowledge they are human after all. But to just ignore a topic that is being raised literally every single week for months at a time seems utterly ridiculous.
Even if they just came in here and told us "we don't care what you think of the UI, we ain't changing it so like it or GTFO" it would be better than total silence.
Because the problem with silence is that the players start to put words in the mouths of the devs, to make up their own ideas of why they are being ignored or something is broken. And that is a sure way to TRIBBLE people off an/or drive them away.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
This is nothing new. The player count has been dropping since they implemented LoR, Reps, and teh Fleet System. I've been playing since the game went Free to Play in 2012. Back then I had a friends list that contained about 200 players. At any given time when I signed on, there would always be a good 50-60 players on in my friends list. I took a break right after LoR and came back at Delta Recruit and I didn't bother my old friends list at this time. In the first couple of months, not a single one of my old friends bothered to log on. SO the player base has been steadily dropping since then.
I really can't blame them either. Here of late all I can bring myself to do is login, doff, adm, refine dil, alt, rinse, repeat, maybe catch a fleet queue or two, and log out and go do something else.
The faction system has failed, because all they can do is force feed you, "Do it the Starfleet way."
The queues have failed, because they went to a more pure reliance on DPS, than teamwork.
The episodes have become so dull and boring, that they've just become, "ignore the story and kill everything."
The entire premise of Star Trek has always been progression, moving forward in to the future. But, they managed to progress 1 whole year ingame, in 7 years IRL. That's right, we started in 2409. It is now firmly 2410 in game, thanks to the Nexus. The next appearance of the Nexus is in 2439 - 2440, every 39.1 years.
The new queue system doesn't bother me much here, as I already know what I'm queuing up for when I open it. Though, yes, the fact that is as buggy as it is, does get annoying.
Right now, I imagine, those metrics for login and such they use to say, "See, everything is good." is 70% Bots. Which is why they don't do anything about them. The bots are what's keeping the numbers up, so that CBS doesn't pull the plug.
Powercreep and Easy Mode are the two things that will kill any game. For an example of this, all one needs to do it look at World of Warcraft. They started this at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and have continued to carry it over through the next four expansions. Between Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlord's of Draenor, they lost 6 million subscriptions. Let me re-iterate that, 6 MILLION players left their game. That's half their player base at the time. I went back to check out Legion, and they had instituted more Easy Mode and powercreep, and while they got a spike up in players coming to the game for it, that eventually died off as people left again.
On this, for those leaving the game, like the OP, or taking a break from it. I imagine the new queue system is more the final nail in the coffin, than the overall reason for leaving the game. Because, lets face it, there are a lot of other issues one can blame this on as well.
Well to be fair, most players in this game expect stuff to be easy. Just look at all the threads filled with rage because a reward is per-character unlock instead of account wide. Usually the first discussion is about the rewards, not even about how fun a mission like the Breach or Sompek can be. Or look at any thread complaining about much needed corrections w.r.t. DPS and power creep.
Players in this game have become spoiled. And because the Devs see no other option anymore, they're once again giving in to it by adding another account-wide store. The problem with giving in to such attitudes is, of course, that it'll never be easy enough to obtain rewards. Just look at how CCA is still rewarding so much compared to more difficult missions and everyone can see that it's true that the poor state of the queues is, to some extent, the players' fault as well.
On the one hand, players keep asking for stuff to be made more easy, oppose any kind of necessary correction to power creep (safe for a few like myself and @nikeix, @reyan01 or @lordsteve1 for example) and on the other hand, people complain that only the easy stuff is worth doing or being played because these missions reward the most - can you see the problem here?
Now, of course there's only one group to blame for the UI debacle and that's not the players. But generally speaking, I am not too surprised that only a handful of queues have players in them. That's something we, the players ourselves in general, are also doing and just blaming Cryptic for this is too easy and unfair. They've added enough interesting missions where team work is necessary and 'kill stuff' is not the only objective. The aforementioned Breach queue, Gravity kills, Tzenkethi front etc. are all examples that come to mind.
Of course players expect things to be easy, after however many years of Cryptic stripping any semblance of challenge from the game. Barely any actually hard content is ever even added and whatever does exist is not worth playing because it gives the same standard reward as the easy stuff. The fail conditions in Advanced queues, probably the best thing ever happened in this game challengewise, lasted less than a year. Nothing requires anything, auto-win timers are the order of the day...I'm genuinely surprised they haven't started just putting out straight login bonuses.
It appears that Cryptic has focused on a part of the playerbase that doesn't actually want to play the game, but only want all the rewards to "get it over with" (for whatever purpose). The type of player that complains all the time that they "have to" do this and that to get stuff that is in fact completely optional and oftentimes not even particularly useful.
And players following the rewards is not the players' fault. Cryptic made it so that only the easy stuff is worth doing with the aforementioned standard rewards that aren't scaled to anything, removal of the unique STF drops, choice marks everywhere, etc. There's nothing unfair about calling them out for that. The "interestingness" of content fades with repetition, rewards stay.
This queue UI is killing this game and Cryptic doesn't seem to care.
It's like they won't be happy until they have no players left at all.
I agree 100% that the Devs "Don't Care". It has been 6 months since they replaced a perfectly working queue system with this garbage.
I am telling you the devs don't even play the game nor do they even care about you and I. (Which was recently proven when a dev answered a similar thread, he said he didn't care about people who play this game every day and didn't understand how people could only play one game. To me it was a slap across the face to all us Fleet leaders who do play everry day and spend the most money in this game.
This is the basic problem. The dev's don't know their customer and they don't care to know them.
This will be proven by the coming new year and the queue system will still be broken.
This is why I point out the obvious things. I don't know what's going on at Cryptic. However, yes, if they would actually address the players concerns, in whatever manner, the forums would be less toxic. Even if it was just to tell us, "This is how it is, deal with it." We would at least know their stand point and be able to figure out how to work with it from there. The overall silence doesn't help. Though, I do try not to put words in the Dev's mouths. I just express my opinion, whether it's acknowledged or not. Because that all we can do.
The problem here does spawn from that. But it's also half on the player as well. The expectation of Cryptic acknowledging what the players are saying. When Cryptic remains silent, it drives the wedge of frustration between them and their players. Then the players start marking assumptions about what Cryptic is doing. There is a line from Under Siege II, with Stephen Segall that fits here, "Assumption is the mother of all TRIBBLE ups." Cryptic's silence causes those assumptions. Then players run away with said assumptions, which in turn causes the toxic environment. So, on this, it's still a half and half problem. Half the fault of the players and half the fault of dev's.
And as Fleetcaptin5 pointed out, the state of the game is also half and half. The players cry and complain when they don't get everything they want handed to them on the silver platter of easy mode. The other half is on Cryptic for giving it to them. Right now, with all the problems, I look at is as Cryptic doing what they can to maintain the player base that they do. Because after all these years, they've kind of back themselves in to that corner. They aren't trapped there, but they are stuck with the problem of to get out of it. Because if you look at from their point of view, whatever they do to get out of that corner is going to cost them more players. The majority of the players won't ever bother to offer any help here either. They'd rather pitch a fit and hold out their hands, screaming, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!", like a three year old, pitchign a fit over a piece a candy at the grocery store. Instead of sitting back and going, "What am I willing to deal with, for them to be able to fix these problems?", or, "What suggestions can I make to help make the game better?" For the latter one here, the Dev's remaining silent and not acknowledging the suggestions, or complaints, inspires the toxic community. Because it leaves us, the players, feeling like we are not important to the game.
I can see the game needs some serious debugging and balancing. I'm willing to give Cryptic the time to work on that. I can deal without having any new content for a year, if I see that they're actually working on fixing the game. Besides, we can always have plenty of new content in that time period via the Foundry. But this would also run off some players that would complain because there is nothing new in the game. On the flip side, because they aren't fixing the bugs and such, players are leaving. Which means we're at the ogre's choice of "Damned if you do and damned if you don't." I'm not saying stop production of new content entirely. But, to shift a bit and focus more on the debugging and balancing side of it. Then once that's done, shift back in to full production mode.
My one suggestion here would be to find out what the players would be willing to forgo, for a time, in order to give Cryptic time to address these problems. Because this is where the main problem is going to be with all this.
wait your complaining about the pve queue UI or the wait times??
because the UI is very old school basic style but it could use some updating but sounds more like your having first world problems if you find the UI hard to use.
the real problem is to much group pve to choose from,which spreads out the players which leads to longer wait times.maybe the dev's should look at taking out some of the old group pve or put them on a rotate system like borg one week a different faction next week and so on.
you also need to remember this game has been around 5-6yrs and like most gamers we tend to go oh look at the knew shinny and move on.we need to take into account that the mmo market is flooded with games compared to 2012 and the current young gamer has a very short attention span.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
This is nothing new. The player count has been dropping since they implemented LoR, Reps, and teh Fleet System. I've been playing since the game went Free to Play in 2012. Back then I had a friends list that contained about 200 players. At any given time when I signed on, there would always be a good 50-60 players on in my friends list. I took a break right after LoR and came back at Delta Recruit and I didn't bother my old friends list at this time. In the first couple of months, not a single one of my old friends bothered to log on. SO the player base has been steadily dropping since then.
I really can't blame them either. Here of late all I can bring myself to do is login, doff, adm, refine dil, alt, rinse, repeat, maybe catch a fleet queue or two, and log out and go do something else.
The faction system has failed, because all they can do is force feed you, "Do it the Starfleet way."
The queues have failed, because they went to a more pure reliance on DPS, than teamwork.
The episodes have become so dull and boring, that they've just become, "ignore the story and kill everything."
The entire premise of Star Trek has always been progression, moving forward in to the future. But, they managed to progress 1 whole year ingame, in 7 years IRL. That's right, we started in 2409. It is now firmly 2410 in game, thanks to the Nexus. The next appearance of the Nexus is in 2439 - 2440, every 39.1 years.
The new queue system doesn't bother me much here, as I already know what I'm queuing up for when I open it. Though, yes, the fact that is as buggy as it is, does get annoying.
Right now, I imagine, those metrics for login and such they use to say, "See, everything is good." is 70% Bots. Which is why they don't do anything about them. The bots are what's keeping the numbers up, so that CBS doesn't pull the plug.
Powercreep and Easy Mode are the two things that will kill any game. For an example of this, all one needs to do it look at World of Warcraft. They started this at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and have continued to carry it over through the next four expansions. Between Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlord's of Draenor, they lost 6 million subscriptions. Let me re-iterate that, 6 MILLION players left their game. That's half their player base at the time. I went back to check out Legion, and they had instituted more Easy Mode and powercreep, and while they got a spike up in players coming to the game for it, that eventually died off as people left again.
On this, for those leaving the game, like the OP, or taking a break from it. I imagine the new queue system is more the final nail in the coffin, than the overall reason for leaving the game. Because, lets face it, there are a lot of other issues one can blame this on as well.
Well to be fair, most players in this game expect stuff to be easy. Just look at all the threads filled with rage because a reward is per-character unlock instead of account wide. Usually the first discussion is about the rewards, not even about how fun a mission like the Breach or Sompek can be. Or look at any thread complaining about much needed corrections w.r.t. DPS and power creep.
Players in this game have become spoiled. And because the Devs see no other option anymore, they're once again giving in to it by adding another account-wide store. The problem with giving in to such attitudes is, of course, that it'll never be easy enough to obtain rewards. Just look at how CCA is still rewarding so much compared to more difficult missions and everyone can see that it's true that the poor state of the queues is, to some extent, the players' fault as well.
On the one hand, players keep asking for stuff to be made more easy, oppose any kind of necessary correction to power creep (safe for a few like myself and @nikeix, @reyan01 or @lordsteve1 for example) and on the other hand, people complain that only the easy stuff is worth doing or being played because these missions reward the most - can you see the problem here?
Now, of course there's only one group to blame for the UI debacle and that's not the players. But generally speaking, I am not too surprised that only a handful of queues have players in them. That's something we, the players ourselves in general, are also doing and just blaming Cryptic for this is too easy and unfair. They've added enough interesting missions where team work is necessary and 'kill stuff' is not the only objective. The aforementioned Breach queue, Gravity kills, Tzenkethi front etc. are all examples that come to mind.
It appears that Cryptic has focused on a part of the playerbase that doesn't actually want to play the game, but only want all the rewards to "get it over with" (for whatever purpose). The type of player that complains all the time that they "have to" do this and that to get stuff that is in fact completely optional and oftentimes not even particularly useful.
And players following the rewards is not the players' fault. Cryptic made it so that only the easy stuff is worth doing with the aforementioned standard rewards that aren't scaled to anything, removal of the unique STF drops, choice marks everywhere, etc. There's nothing unfair about calling them out for that. The "interestingness" of content fades with repetition, rewards stay.
You know, what you describe in that first paragraph... that's something I never really understood. But it is something we see indeed, with every announced event. It's an attitude that I really can't understand.
As for that second paragraph: that's true, that Cryptic hasn't differentiated the rewards with respect to difficulty, duration and such. But if they did that, we both know that we'd see the same complaining that easy stuff such as CCA would, in fact, reward less relatively speaking.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
The UI would be ok if it didn't keep auto booting at random, I mean I sit there waiting for a while, then check the numbers to see how it's going, and see it's booted me out of all the ques.
Never got a warning or a notice. Nor a accept button. And sometimes just after choosing STF's, its gone and booted me out!
That's the main problem with it, it's boot happy and there is never a fix in the patch notes, what so ever.
yup this is annoying. And it even happens when queueing for CCA, had it happen just before downtime. I was booted less than 30 seconds after entering it.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
wait your complaining about the pve queue UI or the wait times??
because the UI is very old school basic style but it could use some updating but sounds more like your having first world problems if you find the UI hard to use.
the real problem is to much group pve to choose from,which spreads out the players which leads to longer wait times.maybe the dev's should look at taking out some of the old group pve or put them on a rotate system like borg one week a different faction next week and so on.
you also need to remember this game has been around 5-6yrs and like most gamers we tend to go oh look at the knew shinny and move on.we need to take into account that the mmo market is flooded with games compared to 2012 and the current young gamer has a very short attention span.
People are complaining about both.
The UI is a nightmare to fight with sometimes, it's like it's taken over the role of true endgame PVE from the queues it's meant to be launching.
Read through this thread for a list of people having issue after issue with it.
The wait times people are experiencing are due to either:
a) being kicked from a queue but being unaware of this, so they are essentially sitting wasting their time.
or
b) the lack of people actually willing to play the queues at all because of said bugginess of aforementioned UI.
Neither of these problems are really to do with it being an older game, or short attention spans or even too many queues to choose from. I'll not deny there is a bit of oversaturation in queue numbers but the issue here is bigger that this. When the popular queues like ISA or CCA take upwards of 5-10 mins just to launch then you have a serious issue at hand. Because those two (and a few others) are pretty much the only content people play these days, so if even they cannot pop then something is very wrong. But have you ever tried getting a Vault Ensnared to pop? Or Storming the Spire? Or even Core Assault? The fact is nobody is queuing for these other missions or the popular ones, so regardless of the reasons for lack of players it's not just the less popular ones suffering.
Sure there are people doing premades but those are separate and even those have issues too.
wait your complaining about the pve queue UI or the wait times??
because the UI is very old school basic style but it could use some updating but sounds more like your having first world problems if you find the UI hard to use.
the real problem is to much group pve to choose from,which spreads out the players which leads to longer wait times.maybe the dev's should look at taking out some of the old group pve or put them on a rotate system like borg one week a different faction next week and so on.
you also need to remember this game has been around 5-6yrs and like most gamers we tend to go oh look at the knew shinny and move on.we need to take into account that the mmo market is flooded with games compared to 2012 and the current young gamer has a very short attention span.
People are complaining about both.
The UI is a nightmare to fight with sometimes, it's like it's taken over the role of true endgame PVE from the queues it's meant to be launching.
Read through this thread for a list of people having issue after issue with it.
The wait times people are experiencing are due to either:
a) being kicked from a queue but being unaware of this, so they are essentially sitting wasting their time.
or
b) the lack of people actually willing to play the queues at all because of said bugginess of aforementioned UI.
Neither of these problems are really to do with it being an older game, or short attention spans or even too many queues to choose from. I'll not deny there is a bit of oversaturation in queue numbers but the issue here is bigger that this. When the popular queues like ISA or CCA take upwards of 5-10 mins just to launch then you have a serious issue at hand. Because those two (and a few others) are pretty much the only content people play these days, so if even they cannot pop then something is very wrong. But have you ever tried getting a Vault Ensnared to pop? Or Storming the Spire? Or even Core Assault? The fact is nobody is queuing for these other missions or the popular ones, so regardless of the reasons for lack of players it's not just the less popular ones suffering.
Sure there are people doing premades but those are separate and even those have issues too.
the only time i've had to wait over 10mins is on ground pve but its always be bad since launch though having said that i don't grind much group pve because it gets boring doing the same thing over and over again.
as for the accept button not responding could be afew things from server side issues to your pc side issues and the dev's would have to look at each reported cased as it is not happening to everyone.as for the drops i'm surprised they have not at least put in a popup or something by now.
We can theorize and guess all day about who has what agreement and who's trying to do what. The only thing that remains a clear fact is that player count is dropping and that the Queue UI is a contributing factor.
The other fact is that Cryptic is doing nothing about it.
It's put me in an uneasy position where i'm no longer comfortable spending money, upgrade item's ect as the part of the game I play and enjoy which requires Player participation feels empty and abandoned. Why upgrade gear, buy a new ship from the C-Store when the content I want to play is dying and making me feel like the game is in decline and thus my enjoyment for logging in is dimishing.
You could say I could go to the Undine and Terran Battlezones but they are soo time consuming and the real rewards from them are capturing the zone to trigger the boss fight which again requires Player participation.
Lers hope this new fleet holding isn't the cluster flurk I've been reading about and doesn't turn more people off the game.
"Its a big world outside, past that doorstep, but its an even bigger step to make to go out into it"
I get it man.. I really do. I'm right there with you.
You feel the desire to upgrade your gear, to acquire that awesome new ship that just came out.. but then you really think about it and why would you?
Why put in the time and effort, or especially the money to obtain these great items if there is no content to actually use them in? The only thing you can use all these shiny new toys for are the story missions and battlezones where they're overkill anyway. You want to use them in mission queues but that's impossible when no one else queues up.
I'm in the same position you're in, as are a lot of players and Cryptic just doesn't seem to get it. They want to sell us all shiny new items, but between them nerfing things after you buy them and making it practically impossible to play Queue missions, people are just getting discouraged and finding other things to play.
My fear is that they won't get it until it's too late. And honestly, I'm concerned with how quickly things are going downhill. Like you, I'm taking a somewhat 'aggressive' stance in my posts, but it's because I'm seriously concerned about the future of a game I have enjoyed for years. I don't like where things are going and I am hoping they wake up before it's too late.
As for that second paragraph: that's true, that Cryptic hasn't differentiated the rewards with respect to difficulty, duration and such. But if they did that, we both know that we'd see the same complaining that easy stuff such as CCA would, in fact, reward less relatively speaking.
Undoubtedly. But easy stuff is in fact supposed to reward less. Sometimes complaints are just wrong and should be ignored.
I must say that I myself started running notably less queues since the new UI was implemented. I think the whole thing is counter-intuitive and does not encourage queueing.
By that logic anyone who completes Korfez should get a free T6 Nagus.
Certainly a whole lot more than two round of CCA.
I can never decide if some queues are overly generous, or others are just not generous enough tbh.
CCA is a good example of a queue giving out too much for the input involved i'd say, but that is mainly the result of powercreep.
Compare that to something like Azure Neb Rescue which is timegated but still pays out like TRIBBLE, or Storming the Spire, again timegated and the pay is frankly an insult.
So to fix that, do they drop the CCA rewards (a nerf in other words), or do they buff up all the other queues? I'm just not sure.
Because if they made Korfez give out the equivalent reward for time spent they'd then claim the top DPS peeps were expoiting the game and getting too many rewards, because CCA takes what 60 seconds, so even a 5 min run would need to reward 5x the prize money from a CCA run. Once you look at timed things like STSE or THSE and the rewards would be enormous.
The plural of "player" is "players," it is a countable noun, so it takes the word "fewer" instead of "less."
Please edit the mistake out of your title.
I used Player as I am referring to myself rather than speaking about other Players. So the title of the thread is correct.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
I hear the OPs pain and happy for those that you still have enough active in your fleets to actually run what you want or need to run , outside the "popular ones " i have alts that have ceased progress due to the current state of the queues , which has been this way for a long time , Cryptic needs to replace ALL THE QUEUED CONTENT , With BATTLEZONES , where you can jump in and earn what you need to progress , outside of SPECIAL EVENTS which are the only QUEUES that end up having a population ,
or the other option is for Cryptic to FILL SLOTS in QUEUE with AI teammates to at least help those that cant really get players to play the old QUEUED content for ALTS cuz everyone finished it a yr ago.
I only log in lately to do new story episodes , and the occasional event to earn a universal marks for my alts to progress in the REPS there working on , otherwise its a waste of time . im frustrated with Cryptic having broken ships that after a year dont get fixed or just plain ignored cuz they got my money SOL attitude , i refuse to spend a dime more in the game till these things are addressed , i payed for content that doesn't work as intended so till that is resolved my wallet stays closed plain and simple . its a shame the game has great potential , but its bugs ans qwerks and creep tend to ruin the experience
The plural of "player" is "players," it is a countable noun, so it takes the word "fewer" instead of "less."
Please edit the mistake out of your title.
I used Player as I am referring to myself rather than speaking about other Players. So the title of the thread is correct.
No it isn't. You also need to stop randomly capitalizing "player" since it isn't a proper noun.
Sorry but if I changed the title to Congratulations Cryptic you have 1 less players using the PvE UI and Queues then it is mistitled as the 1 would need to be removed. But seeing as I am referring to myself as the "1" and the "player" the title is as I mentioned is correct.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Comments
Ah so are you struggling to understand the subject of this thread then? Is the title so confusing you cannot fathom what it could possibly mean?
Come on guys, this UI is clearly a major concern for nearly all players, no need to derail or troll a thread with this sort of thing. Everyone should be in agreement that this topic needs to keep being brought up to show it's not acceptable to be left this way.
This is nothing new. The player count has been dropping since they implemented LoR, Reps, and teh Fleet System. I've been playing since the game went Free to Play in 2012. Back then I had a friends list that contained about 200 players. At any given time when I signed on, there would always be a good 50-60 players on in my friends list. I took a break right after LoR and came back at Delta Recruit and I didn't bother my old friends list at this time. In the first couple of months, not a single one of my old friends bothered to log on. SO the player base has been steadily dropping since then.
I really can't blame them either. Here of late all I can bring myself to do is login, doff, adm, refine dil, alt, rinse, repeat, maybe catch a fleet queue or two, and log out and go do something else.
The faction system has failed, because all they can do is force feed you, "Do it the Starfleet way."
The queues have failed, because they went to a more pure reliance on DPS, than teamwork.
The episodes have become so dull and boring, that they've just become, "ignore the story and kill everything."
The entire premise of Star Trek has always been progression, moving forward in to the future. But, they managed to progress 1 whole year ingame, in 7 years IRL. That's right, we started in 2409. It is now firmly 2410 in game, thanks to the Nexus. The next appearance of the Nexus is in 2439 - 2440, every 39.1 years.
The new queue system doesn't bother me much here, as I already know what I'm queuing up for when I open it. Though, yes, the fact that is as buggy as it is, does get annoying.
Right now, I imagine, those metrics for login and such they use to say, "See, everything is good." is 70% Bots. Which is why they don't do anything about them. The bots are what's keeping the numbers up, so that CBS doesn't pull the plug.
Powercreep and Easy Mode are the two things that will kill any game. For an example of this, all one needs to do it look at World of Warcraft. They started this at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and have continued to carry it over through the next four expansions. Between Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlord's of Draenor, they lost 6 million subscriptions. Let me re-iterate that, 6 MILLION players left their game. That's half their player base at the time. I went back to check out Legion, and they had instituted more Easy Mode and powercreep, and while they got a spike up in players coming to the game for it, that eventually died off as people left again.
On this, for those leaving the game, like the OP, or taking a break from it. I imagine the new queue system is more the final nail in the coffin, than the overall reason for leaving the game. Because, lets face it, there are a lot of other issues one can blame this on as well.
Well to be fair, most players in this game expect stuff to be easy. Just look at all the threads filled with rage because a reward is per-character unlock instead of account wide. Usually the first discussion is about the rewards, not even about how fun a mission like the Breach or Sompek can be. Or look at any thread complaining about much needed corrections w.r.t. DPS and power creep.
Players in this game have become spoiled. And because the Devs see no other option anymore, they're once again giving in to it by adding another account-wide store. The problem with giving in to such attitudes is, of course, that it'll never be easy enough to obtain rewards. Just look at how CCA is still rewarding so much compared to more difficult missions and everyone can see that it's true that the poor state of the queues is, to some extent, the players' fault as well.
On the one hand, players keep asking for stuff to be made more easy, oppose any kind of necessary correction to power creep (safe for a few like myself and @nikeix, @reyan01 or @lordsteve1 for example) and on the other hand, people complain that only the easy stuff is worth doing or being played because these missions reward the most - can you see the problem here?
Now, of course there's only one group to blame for the UI debacle and that's not the players. But generally speaking, I am not too surprised that only a handful of queues have players in them. That's something we, the players ourselves in general, are also doing and just blaming Cryptic for this is too easy and unfair. They've added enough interesting missions where team work is necessary and 'kill stuff' is not the only objective. The aforementioned Breach queue, Gravity kills, Tzenkethi front etc. are all examples that come to mind.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
It's put me in an uneasy position where i'm no longer comfortable spending money, upgrade item's ect as the part of the game I play and enjoy which requires Player participation feels empty and abandoned. Why upgrade gear, buy a new ship from the C-Store when the content I want to play is dying and making me feel like the game is in decline and thus my enjoyment for logging in is dimishing.
You could say I could go to the Undine and Terran Battlezones but they are soo time consuming and the real rewards from them are capturing the zone to trigger the boss fight which again requires Player participation.
Lers hope this new fleet holding isn't the cluster flurk I've been reading about and doesn't turn more people off the game.
"Its a big world outside, past that doorstep, but its an even bigger step to make to go out into it"
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Even if internally the Dev's all agree the new UI sucks and should be removed they will not do anything about it as they would never want to publicly admit they made a mistake.
Well this right here is why people get so angry with them. And this in turn is why they act like this forum is too toxic. They never bloody respond to the serious concerns so people get angry, then they get ranty, then they turn the atmosphere toxic.
If they actually responded to things posted here (and this is also getting raised on Reddit right now too) then perhaps people would acknowledge they are human after all. But to just ignore a topic that is being raised literally every single week for months at a time seems utterly ridiculous.
Even if they just came in here and told us "we don't care what you think of the UI, we ain't changing it so like it or GTFO" it would be better than total silence.
Because the problem with silence is that the players start to put words in the mouths of the devs, to make up their own ideas of why they are being ignored or something is broken. And that is a sure way to TRIBBLE people off an/or drive them away.
It appears that Cryptic has focused on a part of the playerbase that doesn't actually want to play the game, but only want all the rewards to "get it over with" (for whatever purpose). The type of player that complains all the time that they "have to" do this and that to get stuff that is in fact completely optional and oftentimes not even particularly useful.
And players following the rewards is not the players' fault. Cryptic made it so that only the easy stuff is worth doing with the aforementioned standard rewards that aren't scaled to anything, removal of the unique STF drops, choice marks everywhere, etc. There's nothing unfair about calling them out for that. The "interestingness" of content fades with repetition, rewards stay.
I agree 100% that the Devs "Don't Care". It has been 6 months since they replaced a perfectly working queue system with this garbage.
I am telling you the devs don't even play the game nor do they even care about you and I. (Which was recently proven when a dev answered a similar thread, he said he didn't care about people who play this game every day and didn't understand how people could only play one game. To me it was a slap across the face to all us Fleet leaders who do play everry day and spend the most money in this game.
This is the basic problem. The dev's don't know their customer and they don't care to know them.
This will be proven by the coming new year and the queue system will still be broken.
The problem here does spawn from that. But it's also half on the player as well. The expectation of Cryptic acknowledging what the players are saying. When Cryptic remains silent, it drives the wedge of frustration between them and their players. Then the players start marking assumptions about what Cryptic is doing. There is a line from Under Siege II, with Stephen Segall that fits here, "Assumption is the mother of all TRIBBLE ups." Cryptic's silence causes those assumptions. Then players run away with said assumptions, which in turn causes the toxic environment. So, on this, it's still a half and half problem. Half the fault of the players and half the fault of dev's.
And as Fleetcaptin5 pointed out, the state of the game is also half and half. The players cry and complain when they don't get everything they want handed to them on the silver platter of easy mode. The other half is on Cryptic for giving it to them. Right now, with all the problems, I look at is as Cryptic doing what they can to maintain the player base that they do. Because after all these years, they've kind of back themselves in to that corner. They aren't trapped there, but they are stuck with the problem of to get out of it. Because if you look at from their point of view, whatever they do to get out of that corner is going to cost them more players. The majority of the players won't ever bother to offer any help here either. They'd rather pitch a fit and hold out their hands, screaming, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!", like a three year old, pitchign a fit over a piece a candy at the grocery store. Instead of sitting back and going, "What am I willing to deal with, for them to be able to fix these problems?", or, "What suggestions can I make to help make the game better?" For the latter one here, the Dev's remaining silent and not acknowledging the suggestions, or complaints, inspires the toxic community. Because it leaves us, the players, feeling like we are not important to the game.
I can see the game needs some serious debugging and balancing. I'm willing to give Cryptic the time to work on that. I can deal without having any new content for a year, if I see that they're actually working on fixing the game. Besides, we can always have plenty of new content in that time period via the Foundry. But this would also run off some players that would complain because there is nothing new in the game. On the flip side, because they aren't fixing the bugs and such, players are leaving. Which means we're at the ogre's choice of "Damned if you do and damned if you don't." I'm not saying stop production of new content entirely. But, to shift a bit and focus more on the debugging and balancing side of it. Then once that's done, shift back in to full production mode.
My one suggestion here would be to find out what the players would be willing to forgo, for a time, in order to give Cryptic time to address these problems. Because this is where the main problem is going to be with all this.
because the UI is very old school basic style but it could use some updating but sounds more like your having first world problems if you find the UI hard to use.
the real problem is to much group pve to choose from,which spreads out the players which leads to longer wait times.maybe the dev's should look at taking out some of the old group pve or put them on a rotate system like borg one week a different faction next week and so on.
you also need to remember this game has been around 5-6yrs and like most gamers we tend to go oh look at the knew shinny and move on.we need to take into account that the mmo market is flooded with games compared to 2012 and the current young gamer has a very short attention span.
You know, what you describe in that first paragraph... that's something I never really understood. But it is something we see indeed, with every announced event. It's an attitude that I really can't understand.
As for that second paragraph: that's true, that Cryptic hasn't differentiated the rewards with respect to difficulty, duration and such. But if they did that, we both know that we'd see the same complaining that easy stuff such as CCA would, in fact, reward less relatively speaking.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
yup this is annoying. And it even happens when queueing for CCA, had it happen just before downtime. I was booted less than 30 seconds after entering it.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
People are complaining about both.
The UI is a nightmare to fight with sometimes, it's like it's taken over the role of true endgame PVE from the queues it's meant to be launching.
Read through this thread for a list of people having issue after issue with it.
The wait times people are experiencing are due to either:
a) being kicked from a queue but being unaware of this, so they are essentially sitting wasting their time.
or
b) the lack of people actually willing to play the queues at all because of said bugginess of aforementioned UI.
Neither of these problems are really to do with it being an older game, or short attention spans or even too many queues to choose from. I'll not deny there is a bit of oversaturation in queue numbers but the issue here is bigger that this. When the popular queues like ISA or CCA take upwards of 5-10 mins just to launch then you have a serious issue at hand. Because those two (and a few others) are pretty much the only content people play these days, so if even they cannot pop then something is very wrong. But have you ever tried getting a Vault Ensnared to pop? Or Storming the Spire? Or even Core Assault? The fact is nobody is queuing for these other missions or the popular ones, so regardless of the reasons for lack of players it's not just the less popular ones suffering.
Sure there are people doing premades but those are separate and even those have issues too.
the only time i've had to wait over 10mins is on ground pve but its always be bad since launch though having said that i don't grind much group pve because it gets boring doing the same thing over and over again.
as for the accept button not responding could be afew things from server side issues to your pc side issues and the dev's would have to look at each reported cased as it is not happening to everyone.as for the drops i'm surprised they have not at least put in a popup or something by now.
I get it man.. I really do. I'm right there with you.
You feel the desire to upgrade your gear, to acquire that awesome new ship that just came out.. but then you really think about it and why would you?
Why put in the time and effort, or especially the money to obtain these great items if there is no content to actually use them in? The only thing you can use all these shiny new toys for are the story missions and battlezones where they're overkill anyway. You want to use them in mission queues but that's impossible when no one else queues up.
I'm in the same position you're in, as are a lot of players and Cryptic just doesn't seem to get it. They want to sell us all shiny new items, but between them nerfing things after you buy them and making it practically impossible to play Queue missions, people are just getting discouraged and finding other things to play.
My fear is that they won't get it until it's too late. And honestly, I'm concerned with how quickly things are going downhill. Like you, I'm taking a somewhat 'aggressive' stance in my posts, but it's because I'm seriously concerned about the future of a game I have enjoyed for years. I don't like where things are going and I am hoping they wake up before it's too late.
It was just easier that way...
I can never decide if some queues are overly generous, or others are just not generous enough tbh.
CCA is a good example of a queue giving out too much for the input involved i'd say, but that is mainly the result of powercreep.
Compare that to something like Azure Neb Rescue which is timegated but still pays out like TRIBBLE, or Storming the Spire, again timegated and the pay is frankly an insult.
So to fix that, do they drop the CCA rewards (a nerf in other words), or do they buff up all the other queues? I'm just not sure.
Because if they made Korfez give out the equivalent reward for time spent they'd then claim the top DPS peeps were expoiting the game and getting too many rewards, because CCA takes what 60 seconds, so even a 5 min run would need to reward 5x the prize money from a CCA run. Once you look at timed things like STSE or THSE and the rewards would be enormous.
I used Player as I am referring to myself rather than speaking about other Players. So the title of the thread is correct.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
or the other option is for Cryptic to FILL SLOTS in QUEUE with AI teammates to at least help those that cant really get players to play the old QUEUED content for ALTS cuz everyone finished it a yr ago.
I only log in lately to do new story episodes , and the occasional event to earn a universal marks for my alts to progress in the REPS there working on , otherwise its a waste of time . im frustrated with Cryptic having broken ships that after a year dont get fixed or just plain ignored cuz they got my money SOL attitude , i refuse to spend a dime more in the game till these things are addressed , i payed for content that doesn't work as intended so till that is resolved my wallet stays closed plain and simple . its a shame the game has great potential , but its bugs ans qwerks and creep tend to ruin the experience
Sorry but if I changed the title to Congratulations Cryptic you have 1 less players using the PvE UI and Queues then it is mistitled as the 1 would need to be removed. But seeing as I am referring to myself as the "1" and the "player" the title is as I mentioned is correct.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.