So I've been playing SWTOR more lately and I noticed that their queues seem more active then over here. I noticed they got weekly missions for their version of normal, advanced, and elite queues that rewards a good chunk of change for the weekly effort of five random dungeons. Maybe that's what needs to happen here? Have missions where you can do 5 random normal, advanced, and elite with scaling rewards? I'm not talking chump change either, say like 2000 dilithium for normal, 4000 for advanced, and 6000 ore for elite queues plus some ECs. It would certainly break up the most used STFs more and encourage people to take what they get for randoms.
Green people don't have to be.... little.
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Well, the endeavours partly cover that, but it would be better to cycle themed STF's hourly and increase reward on an average time scale basis, so CCA gets the lowest, and the Breach gets the highest, but reduce cooldown to ten minutes to stop mass farming.
If you had random queues you wouldn't have to worry about scaling so much. Just set things up so people don't hit the same queues as much in order to get the reward. That way CCA and such won't get flooded while others are empty.
* (Which could be like 10k dil + 1k marks or some other combination)
Never mind Admiralty gives so much dilithium you rarely have to play much of anything else at all to hit the refining quota.
Having everything reward the same thing doesn't work.
Cryptic doesn't have a great track record of learning from their competition, heck their games don't even learn much from each other. but maybe, maybe it might happen.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
The problem its how the queues are made. You see, before the cursed Delta Rising expansion, the queues were pretty populated. After that they become way too difficult, even to masochistic levels. All queues after DR are just horrible, not mainly becouse the moobs are giant hp sponges, but also becouse of the objectives and fail conditions. Some very devious mechanics were introduced, like "intrerupt clicky mechanic" or the "protect idiotic AI", on purpose, to make players fail as much as possible. And popular queues like Borg queues and Crystaline Entity were deemed too easy and didnt even got elite levels, again, on purpose, so players couldnt play and succede on those either. Heck we even dont get Crystaline entity 14 days event anymore
So is not as much as spicing up the queues, but rather the devs to want that players to play the queues. At this point, and the general direction of this game is going to, they simply dont. If they would want that, they would make more of the popular queues and less of the sick and masochistic ones... Heck the last queues were actually dead on arrival, thats how "great" they were. The developers are confortable (and probably glad) knowing that only a very small percent of the players are playing the queues, while the majority of 95% of the playerbase is forced to play red alert (this was an actual devs statement, that most players play red alerts)
Actually... when Delta Rising hit, they DID have Elite Borg STFs. However the way they restructured the objectives made it EXTREMELY difficult.
Normal had optional of not letting the Transformer get healed by Nanite Spheres.
Advanced took Normal's optional and made it a required, adding in a fail condition. Advanced Optional was beat within the time limit.
Elite took Advanced's optional and made it a required on top of the Advanced required, meaning there were 2 fail conditions.
Add that STEEP learning curve over what had come before, ontop of the HP sponges they became and the fact players with previously top end gear no longer had top end gear...
Two things came up.
I was once in an Infected run where some bozo decided to "look for his spec point". We followed the usual formula of go to one side to try and take out the transformer, the bozo... went the opposite direction and popped 1 generator "looking for his spec point" and "didn't find it". What followed was a mad scramble to try and salvage the run before it ultimately failed, locking us out of Infected for 30 minutes with no reward except for frustration.
As for Crystailline... power creep has made it possible to melt the giant snowflake before it can even unleash the first chargeup blast. As much as I enjoyed the Crystalline event... until it can be revamped to take into account player power creep we're not going to see it again because literally everyone can run all their alts and get maximum reward.
I can't imagine ISE being that much harder. The original objective already contained a time limit (15 minutes) to destroy the generators. IIRC the second timer was 30 minutes to completion which was a complete joke. I did other Elites like Korfez back then (in pugs, with my old ship and build), it wasn't bad at all. In fact, I did believe they could've added a fourth level above Elite that would've actually required some of the power boosts we got (and with today's power creep, another 3 levels).
The "steep learning curve" was a hint some players were in over their heads and needed to play an easier level. Too bad Cryptic didn't have the balls to stick with that, the game would be lightyears ahead of where it is now if they hadn't started rolling the Easy Mode ball down the slipperly slope.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
They made it to basic and frequent. They should have set it up as a weekly system and had the objects directly tied to doing multiple random STFs. Not just specific STFs but make it completely random so groups can be fitted together easier while cycling through more STFs at various levels of difficulty depending on if you queue for Normal, Advanced, or Elite endevors. Also don't lock people out of one endevor just because they did another for that week. Let them have both normal, advanced, and elite endevors queued up at the same time in their quest logs.
don't think i have ever played any of the 20 player ones.
That's the lovely thing about random in this particular case. You could get ground and you could get space. Ground queues would see more action as well.
In 3 months playing I've got into Infected and Terrok Nor. Both were tedious affairs as Infected has that thing where if you die in the last room you get locked out until it's either completed or EVERYBODY dies. Then Terrok Nor is a slightly more complex affair than "kill dey ***", so that didn't go well either.
1. Time vs. rewards. As many have pointed out the amount of time relative to the rewards is our of sync. Many people have limited amount of play time. Depending on how many alts you have, just doing the daily clicking can take a huge chunk of time. CCA and ISA along with Tholian and Borg Red Alerts are really the only queues which can be completed quickly (less than 5 min each).
2. Reward scaling and difficulty. The queues can be frustrating for pugs when you get groups that don't know what they're doing or simply don't have the fire power to complete the mission. There ought to be a greater degree of differentiation between Norm, ADV, and Elite. Additionally, a greater degree of reward scaling based on performance might induce greater differentiation - introduce risk based rewards, i.e., you get more reward for doing well in Normal than poorly in ADV - as well as a more general performance based scaling on rewards.
3. Fewer queues. There are simply too many queues. Since the majority of them now offer "choice" of rewards, fewer choices might populate remaining queues. Perhaps have 5 standard queues and rotate 3-5 queues periodically.
Norman newbie rocks up with his shiny new T6 which he hasn't specced properly yet into a normal queue, then Joe 40K rocks up in his annihilator of worlds and obliterates everything in seconds leaving Norman with a bad taste in his mouth about queuing again.
At this point they may as well just add RAs for each enemy faction in the game and ditch a few of the neglected queues.
Having 3 tiers to them would indeed be good. Each step increasing the length and/or difficulty of the task as well as the reward. Run queue X once, 5 times, 25 times, something like that.
I'd have unique random drops in at least the top two tiers (with higher chance on higer tier, of course). And maybe in addition to the random box, some tokens or points you could buy stuff from an "endeavor store" with...possibly even an endeavor rep.
Then it'd be an interesting system to play with and plan for, instead of a little something extra I occasionally get when it asks for something I'm doing anyway.