As the title says would adding the various rep marks to fleet holding projects entice you back to playing PvE ?
It would give older PvE queues where the Reputation system has been finished a reason outside of A. Earning marks for Dil and B. Playing for fun.
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
(not saying that I'm representative of a large portion of the playerbase. Just pointing out that, for those of us who avoid queues? There's plenty of ways to avoid queues.)
As a gameplay incentive the rep marks are well and truly busted even for the reps themselves, at least since they made the RA's give all marks if not earlier. There is no differential value in them anymore. I did the whole lukari rep without once touching relevant content and seeing how empty the queues and battlezone were, so did a lot of others.
It takes something unique to get people interested. The colony provisions in the latest queues have decent differential value, at least for now. They're not entirely unique, though. So they may be outperformed by other sources in the future.
Suggested changes: These changes I personally think would be good to be done incrementally over time. As I think the implementation of making it that failing an optional objective on advanced difficulty was just rolled out too fast.- Reward structure change: Right now we have the issue that most stfs give our pretty much the same reward based on the difficulty regardless of the length of the stf, with some even giving a choice of many mark types that it disincentives doing other content. Moving it back to where you needed to do specific stfs to get rep-marks of a specific type would help that, as well as breaking up the reward structure so that longer/harder stf had better rewards would help also. Though also making it that completing the optionals in the stfs gave you elite marks instead of additional normal rep-marks would help to make learning to do those optionals more appealing (also allowing people to get rep gear without feeling they have to go into advanced without the gear or knowledge needed.)
- Unique rewards: For me I would also say that the fact we only have the generic rewards (dil, ec, rep-mark) for completing stfs it hurts the desire/apeal to do anything other than the stf with the highest reward to time ratio. Putting in a pool of unique-drops that might be linked to specific stf/groups of stfs (and so might have a theme based on a rep too) could appeal to players to do other content. Also if you have it that finishing a stf has a base-chance to get a drop from the associated pool of drops, but also that maybe that chance is affected by the optional objectives could help too. This pool of drops could also be added to over time both as people get the items, but also as new stf/reps come in-game, and so would keep the appeal to do more content appealing.
- Weekly/Daily Rep-quests: Doing something like the Endeavor system that each day/weekly gives you a quest to do specific things ranging from doing specific stfs, to doing specific things in content tied to that rep. This would again give players an appealing incentive to do other content.
- Fleet mark/credit: It would be fun to see them make getting fleet marks, credits, and even fleet-tied items to doing content that is connected to the fleets (such as fleet action or fleet stfs). Then you could also take the idea of having a project that you can put rep-mark into an get either fleet credits and/or marks via. This would give a appeal to do fleet stfs an actions as doing just any stf would not give you credits/marks for fleets unless you convert them.
But that is the issue with such a system, as it will improve the pop of one or two select ques at a time, though I am not saying that having a system like that would help[ get other stfs to be populated though. Yet also not everyone is drawn by the same type of additional rewards, as some are drawn to the idea of getting a unique drop, while others are more drawn to additional rewards in the form of dil/marks/ec an such.
I prefer the idea of reps giving out missions/quests to do certain missions or stfs (even actions in a specific mission or stf) to get a box that might have additional marks/dil/ec or unique rewards in it. Doing that would create both an appeal as well as an incentive to do more than just a single additional stf.
I will say that yes alot of people/players hated the rang fact of the unique stf drops that were around prior to delta. Though that was alot to do with the fact that it was largely the only method of improving, if they had kept the unique-stf drops alongside the rep system such drops might have been more palatable. Though also it is unmistakable that when we had drops that were unique to sfs a larger variety of stfs were played, compared to when they dropped the unique drops (though also the completion time of stfs had an effect on it too).
You can literally complete every reputation bar the latest one on a toon by doing nothing but Borg RAs and that is just pushing people to do the path of least resistance. Why queue for slightly difficult Iconian queues for their rep if you can do the easy RA omni-reward ones instead. You don’t have to even fight most enemies to complete their reputations!
That sort of nonsense is killing the queues, combined with a crappy reward structure overall that doesn’t take into account that you can run things like ISA or CCA together faster than one run of any elite to get more rewards.
You want to get people playing ALL the queues? Add in unique reward drops, but not something I need to only get once. Add something highly prized I can/want to get again and again. Something I can trade perhaps, to those unwilling to play the queue it comes from. That gets people playing things repeatedly and it creates a market for the rewards, so those willing can earn something from their time played, and those unwilling to put time in must pay those who do for the shiny toys.
I think something similar may actually be healthy for STO's economy as right now we don't have any items of value to speak of that can be obtained through regular combat gameplay.
It’s gotta be done carefully, no use having stuff need upkeep where the cost is outlandishly large and off putting. Nor should it be so cheap it becomes a non-issue.
Actually a lot of people do the rep on different characters, if for no other reason than the Dilithium and trait rewards. The thing is though there is just so many sources of marks in the game, their nothing special, and A LOT of people take the opportunity to stock up big time on the marks they need during events.
Drops would also counter the devaluing of dilithium-equivalent by increasing idle gameplay sources like admiralty.
Especially when combined with culling the choice marks and scaling the numeric rewards to time and difficulty of the queue, it would effectively make it worth playing a diverse range of content again.
Thing is, the endeavor system rewards are objectively TRIBBLE. It only works because the endeavors themselves are so very limited people don't need to think economically about them. So you do something once, on one toon, maybe three times a week. And often it's something that pops during normal gameplay anyway. It's a quick, just-for-fun diversion.
If people could actually GRIND them, they would do the math and quickly realise 99% of the endeavor boxes contain something an admiralty assignment would give. And usually not even a good admiralty assignment. They'd realise that endeavor box or no, the "queue of the day" still loses horribly to CCA in reward over time. Except of course when CCA is the queue of the day.
Well that can be rectified with a combo of the old hourly events and the new weekend events merged in to one idea.
Have the game pick 3 random PVE queues every 3 days (same as the endeavor system time scale wise). Those 3 will include: 1 normal, 1 advanced, 1 elite, and at least one of them will be ground based. Also the algorithm for choosing said queues will be set so that it cannot select any of the top 5 most played queues of the last 3 days. This way things like ISA, CCA etc that get played to death don't appear, or only very rarely.
Now these 3 chosen queues will off some increased reward for anyone playing them. Be it double or even triple rewards, or some form of UR trade-able gear/cosmetic drop. Something so tempting it just drags people in and those unwilling to play said queues can still get those rewards by purchasing them off people via the exchange.
The algorithm that chooses those queues should also discard any of the previous set of 3 from being chosen the next time.
This system would run indefinitely and only require the initial coding to select the random queues.
This sort of system would do multiple things:
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.'
The problem before Season 5 with currencies was that there was a ton of currencies for the exact same thing. There was 6 different types of currency for exploration and 6 different types of currency for PvP. Spend a couple of hours working to get that Mk VI equipment from the Badges of Exploration store and unfortunately you leveled up to Captain making all your Mk VI Badges of Exploration completely worthless.
Having too many Reputation Marks is not a problem since Reputation Marks are always useful in buying Reputation gear or converting it to Dilithium. It doesn't make sense simplifying the Reputation Marks since they represent the reputation your character has built up with a particular faction. How is helping defeat the Borg in the Gamma Orionis sector block supposed to help New Romulus?