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Why are calls for more content not better received.
wry1
Member Posts: 117 Arc User
Recently I composed a post that expressed my hopes for more mission content and meaningful rewards for running missions. it disappeared in less than 10 minutes. Why is it wrong to express a dislike for the current content meta of an FE that has to be repeated to earn rewards, a rep system that produces a que that once rep is filled is never played? I will restate it again Devs, you have done a great job improving this game, I and others would love more mission content. Please do not say go play foundry, their is a difference between dev created content and fan content as well as issues with reward for game time. I would love seasons that stop focusing on a particular system and instead push out lots of content and gives out meaningful rewards for that content. wanting to play the game more is a good thing.
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- you edited it one time too many and the forum "edit monster" bug devoured it. See the sticky thread for more about this beast.
- your post contained flaming, trolling, insults and was moderated for violating forum rules, not for your opinion
We all would like more content. The problem is that Cryptic is a business not a charity. Creating more content would require hiring more people and paying more salaries. They create as much content as they can based on the income from C-store sales and lock boxes.
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As to being a business, I get it. but lets be real. I just leveled an alt. the moment I hit 60, I loaded and dry docked every ship I own to create an admiralty fleet and then set missions and logged. most of the que content centers on two or three ques that sustain a player driven dps league. If people want to do that, great, but many don't and it can't be a good model for the game.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Eh, it could be much, much worse, believe me...
To my knowledge, Champions Online, for instance, didn't get any new content at all in over one year. Which is a shame, because it is based on a great RPG, and the game itself could be a ton more fun if it received more love from the developers.
Also, what Zorbane just said.
There are "some" foundry missions that are as good or better, and the trickle of dil for playing them is hardly an ample reward. But it's hit and miss and the tools are limited. There are missions I run a lot, "A Step Between Star", "Sunrise", "Temporal Front" because the rewards from those missions are usable loot I can equip to my alts.
I have never understood the apologist attitude of STO can't do missions. Many other games do missions, and I'm not just talking about the hugest sub game ever. There was a time when STO ran a series of FE's those missions delivered in that package were well received. By all Dev accounts the lockbox micro economy has been a savior for this game. But this grind without rewards is baffling to me. 90% of ques never fill, entering almost every instance mission will cause you to freeze loading because that instance hasn't been utilized in awhile. And if people want to chase DPS, great, but what happens when that portion of the fan base burns out on running ISA 6 times a day over a 3 hour period, just to compare bench marks. 90% of all published ship builds on reddit are soley to max dps for ISA or HSE. At the very least fix pvp, it's been broken for so long. I've enjoyed STO since closed Beta, the game is 300 times better today than at launch, but there is not much more to do...
Also let me just say I liked the new FE, but running that mission 4 times, well it makes me like it a lot less, and I think that is a valid point. One of my characters has the Bajor Defense set, I won't be getting it for anyone else.
Also, if you want loot do queues and admiralty. The point of playing story episodes (and the foundry) is to enjoy the story.
Agreed with coldnapalm here. Foundry missions are actually very worth playing, would it be only for the story and character development put into them. Given, you'll also come across a lot of "pew-pew" content that isn't as good, but many Foundry missions available both in the Spotlight and the main list are really good.
Do you realize that time+ risk/ reward ratio is a game design standard? One that Al Rivera and other devs have spoken about at length. To hold player interest a reward has to be commensurate with the time and risk it takes to obtain it. I have long played the Foundry and am a foundry reviewer, it's not the ideal long term soloution, especially when you add in the fact that a lot of the missions become broken with new game updates. The biggest problem is there is no meaningful progression of a character for playing the Foundry mission. Even at end game people want to continue to improve their character, and right now there is no incentive to do that. Heck even leveling ships in story arcs is pointless. to test it out it I took a fresh ship into the Solanae arc, by the end of the arc the ship was still not t-5. Your forced to run Red Alerts to level the ship in an efficent manor. Also skill points are way easier to gain in Admiralty. why spend hours repeating mission, log on for 5 minutes 1 a day and send your fleet out, come back and pick up your points till you get spec points. The admiralty system has also made doffing irrelevant. There is more incentive to not play this game than play it, I wish that wasn't so.
What the "reward" is depends on the player, it often is not loot or XP. In many games it's a new cosmetic item, or a new attack or spell that looks cool even if it isn't really more powerful. In many games it's seeing the story unfold. In Elder Scrolls games it's often seeing new scenery or discovering some interesting cave that doesn't really matter in terms of "winning."
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What the "reward" is depends on the player, it often is not loot or XP. In many games it's a new cosmetic item, or a new attack or spell that looks cool even if it isn't really more powerful. In many games it's seeing the story unfold. In Elder Scrolls games it's often seeing new scenery or discovering some interesting cave that doesn't really matter in terms of "winning."
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I never said winning, I would welcome cosmetic items. I would love a TOS era mission that rewards the Capt/ Engineer vest or the Wrath of Khan away team jackets, that would be preferred over the huge dil cost for those items.
And these responses bring me to the larger issue of my thread, I would understand a Crytpic response to more content being a cost benefit analysis, but why do players take the same perspective? Why would any of us be opposed to multiple paths of progression? In an ideal world however you enjoy this game ( Que's, Story content, foundry, pvp) there should be equitable paths for progression. without it the game as a whole suffers. Right now the progression is narrow 3 Ques, and admiralty, throw in the occasional FE, but that only represents a small fraction of the content of this game.
Speaking only for myself: because I work for a small software company and understand that it's money that keeps the lights on and salaries paid.
We get requests for features that will only be used by handful of users but cost just as much to create as something that thousands will use. We get suggestions that everyone would like but would take more resources to develop than makes sense for any increase in sales or in customer satisfaction. We have only so many hours of development time per month and must budget them wisely.
I progress my 16 characters just fine without ever playing those "narrow 3 queues". I play what I want when I want. Your narrow view is not the "only" or "best" way to play and never will be.
You claim to have been around since launch but I jave not seen you mention once the entire year we went without new content of any kind before the LoR launch.
Nowadays we get new missions and queues and other things on a very regular basis, its slowed down a bit from what it was at just before AoY, where we had a new FE every month (except for seasonal event times). Of course then we had people complaining about too much new content.[/quote]
How exactly is calling for more viable paths a narrow view? I've never once said what is the "only" or "best" ways I've just pointed out the unbalance of what is being played at this point. So I don't understand where your coming from. And there where issues surrounding those content droughts, new ownership, critical game system issues that had to be revamped. etc.
As others have said, storyboarding, writing, mapping, developing etc. for 'free' content that no one actually pays for is a loss leader. I would be happy to see more content, but I know a F2P game has to maintain a balance.
Explore the Foundry lists and you will find more content than you can play, with more variety, and no need to repeat anything ever.
If what you are really saying is 'we need more free ship, more consoles, more bonus rewards that Foundry doesn't give', STO already gives away more of that stuff than virtually any other MMO I know.
Every last one of them that does not include team content.
I am repeat them endlessly....switching characters for rewards.
I can see Omegas in my night terrors, right now.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
I believe one thing you run into when suggesting things on an STO forum is that a lot of players are older, have played many games, have played STO for years, and seen development waves come and go.
We've seen content that was rushed, or buggy, or unbalanced. We've seen content that just didn't make sense in the context it was released. We've seen content you couldn't complete 'because issues'. We've seen content that had obvious exploits that then turned out to bite a lot of people on the tuckus because they didn't realize they were 'exploiting' the content by playing it.
(Not saying all these cases came from STO btw, but it's had many similar situations.)
Some of us are here because games we loved shut down, not due to lack of content, but because costs overran income and the decision was made to shut'er down.
Some of us are aware that the costs of development, voice actors, new maps, new ships etc that come with the new content are a lot higher than many people assume them to be.
Thus, a reasonable amount of content, reasonably bug-and-issue free, free to all players, while the ships and packs and lockboxes pay for continued operation, looks like a working compromise to many.
Would I like to see a FE released as 4 separate episode? Or make the current content of an FE 50% longer, then split that longer into 4 parts, each unique? Sure I would. The question is, where does the extra 50% of development money come from?
Edit: Also, TBH, even though doing the same FE 4 times over seems boring, I often find that doing it in a different ship, or a different setup, or even in a different pattern, I learn or find something new even on the 2nd or 3rd run. Not usually by the 4th though.
Sometimes, 'content' is what you create with the options and tools available to you.
They have made some wonderful strides to improve this game. But the same excuses they make for not going back and fixing some buggy missions is the same excuse they give for not producing content. A lot of this could be addressed by tying gear that we would grind in reps to missions, and giving us a reason to play. I would even go further and say I would love to see ground missions drop competitive space loot, giving people a reason to play ground. I'm not asking for more free stuff. Believe me I could drag fleet-mates in her to testify it took me over 600 runs to get my Borg Shield to drop in the old STF's. I'm not even asking for Free ships. honestly I have a T6 Connie, and Cryptic made out like a bandit on me alone for the keys that cost. I no longer chase lock bock ships, I only buy ships from C-store when there is value. I just picked up the Andorian Pilot bundle. I'm just saying make new missions for us to enjoy, or make it worthwhile to rerun missions or even do Foundry, if Foundry missions awarded the same amount of spec xp as a story mission run on first time, I would play foundry a lot, just to level up alt spec trees.
I think it's even simpler than that: players can always consume new content endlessly faster than Cryptic can make it. There's simply no keeping up, even if they wanted to. The 'grind' is really the necessary filler. Always.
Thanks.
Lets hope one's "wide array of things to do" doesn't include one of the numerous ques that never pop. Also you seem to transform my message into " I don't want to play anything that isn't optimize." That's a vastly different argument than the one I make which is there are unbalance rewards for time spent in game doing different activities. For instance the reward for admiralty is too great for the time invested. It also ignores the problematic issue of the ques, of which the only ones that pop on a regular basis are the same few ones that are the benchmarks for the DPS league. Honestly if the most popular activities in the game are driven by an arbitrary player DPS league that is separate from the game that's an issue. You seem to think the only model for a F2P game is grind, grind, grind, and somehow missions are a P2P model? The Truth is neither you nor I know what the finacial situation of Cryptic is. What I do know is they have a few monster IP's STO and Never Winter, and extrapolating what I and many of my friends spent on keys to get Connies, I can assume ( with some certainty ) they profited nicely off that.
Cryptic will probably never do what I'm asking, because it would lower their profit margins. So not to worry.
Oddly enough one of the reasons that queues rarely pop is because too many of them have been provided.
The primary issue however is that queues are a sort of filler, challenge-providing content with the side issue of providing certain reputation resources. Yet the average gamer, once they have done 'the basics' for their character (completed the content necessary to obtain the items they primarily desire), either seeks a new distraction, or seeks to optimize their time/reward ratio.
New stuff gets played through, although as Meimeitoo points out, 50 times faster than Cryptic can create it even if they did nothing else. And once the new toy is unwrapped, players toss it aside and seek out the one thing that gives them the most of what they need with the least time and effort and grind that hard. So a few queues pop and nothing else does.
Adding more content won't alleviate that particular issue. That would require a re-think or rebalance of the setup of STFs and queues.
Edit: Also, the issue of 'only the DPS queues pop, driven by the DPS league' is a red herring. DPS League has made some use of certain fast, straightforward queues with a clear 1-2-3 set of directives. Because that makes comparisons handy. Those same characteristics are also the ones that appeal to players grinding out rewards - fast, straightforward, easy. Having a little extra population in them because some are DPS testing and some are reward grinding just reinforces the popularity for both groups.