Oh, Geezus! Can we stop sniping each other, please?
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And I've explained it to you several times, even in past threads IIRC that Korfez has been changed. You still complain (or fair enough, *wonder*) why you can't beat it anymore.
Oh, I remember it well. Picture the start of Dilithium Rising. Geko had (more-or-less openly) gotten into an e-peen contest with the top DPS-ers, taking it upon himself to make Korfez as good as undoable. And for a poor lass like me, LOL, it certainly is now. Literally only a handful of ppl can now do it (and complete it properly). So, that's pretty much what 'happened' to Fez. I thought it was common knowledge.
And I've explained it to you several times, even in past threads IIRC that Korfez has been changed. You still complain (or fair enough, *wonder*) why you can't beat it anymore.
Oh, I remember it well. Picture the start of Dilithium Rising. Geko had (more-or-less openly) gotten into an e-peen contest with the top DPS-ers, taking it upon himself to make Korfez as good as undoable. And for a poor lass like me, LOL, it certainly is now. Literally only a handful of ppl can now do it (and complete it properly). So, that's pretty much what 'happened' to Fez. I thought it was common knowledge.
I've completed it with worse teammates than you. You'd do fine in there, really.
This thread just shows that really there's a big gulf between players who are pretty casual and don't worry about DPS and those who are willing/able to push the game to the limits.
The two groups are never going to see eye to eye and arguments like this will always pop up.
When you are doing 100K+ and throwing nukes around everything (bar Korfez possibly) is going to seem easy and you don't need to know your enemy as much as someone who has very limited firepower.
For some of us, going up against a simply Borg Sphere is a daunting fight if we don't know what to expect, hence the knowing your enemy part. Someone doing 100K+....they'd probably just run that sphere over and not even notice it. Big difference.
The changes to queues might get people playing missions again. The random TFO's might do the same, and so might some new-fangled reward system were they to put one in place. But you're never going to remove that divide between those who see everything as too easy, and those who really do struggle with more complex content. Some of us just aren't going to be up to the standard of the top players, and maybe many of us are not too bothered about that.
So give the stabbing each other a break and try to remember that we're all just playing a game for fun.
I can't agree with Steve's post more if I tried. He explains why I think High DPS players might argue that an Average of 5K might seem too low to be real perfectly. It's the "gulf" between players. Yes, knowledge of the game and an enjoyment of the pursuit of higher DPS numbers results in some insane numbers. Yes, there are people doing well over 100K for whom say D'D or a Cube isn't even a road bump. At the same time there are players who can't defeat a D'D without help. That's a huge difference. And explains to me how an average could be so low.
Quick Story Time. I have a 2nd Account besides my lifetime, because reasons. Mainly I wanted to see what a full F2P experience would be like. No subscriber bonuses , not Delta Recruit, No Agent of Yesterday. Just a F2P account. So today I logged on to that account and asked for a parse of an ISA if someone could. Explained it was a total F2P account but I knew the run and would try my very best in the advanced. That I wanted to get a baseline for what kind of damage that account could so.
2.2\It did 2.2K ... Thats using samey weapon types and proper tac consoles for said weapons. Many players out there ... well look at any "build" group not part of the DPS crowd. People run Disrupters with Polaron consoles for example, or 5 weapon types, etc etc. A large percent of the game has no "game" background, they just go pew pew because it's Star Trek.
It's a huge discrepancy between DPS and the ability to get the cool new widgets, and someone in a fully F2P scenario.
People struggle with D'Ds , some people struggle with Klingon fights. There are a LOT of full F2P who have never spent a dime , have no Delta Recruit, lucky to understand not to mix weapon flavors players out there, probably doing even less than the 2.2 I managed in that scenario.
Sorry , haven't heard back from anyone as to where Bort talked DPS in that interview. But realizng the numbers come from the whole game not just the Queues used as the DPS measure, I still say 5K doesn't sound so low as an average.
You don't need to do anywhere near 100k to make the game a piece of cake.
A lot of it has to do with point of view rather than actual difficulty. If you dread seeing a respawn button then sure, an inexperienced player may find common enemies daunting. But when you realize that "death" means basically nothing and 99% of the content has no fail conditions whatsoever...what's not easy?
What are the enemies gonna do? They can't kill you and they can't make you lose the mission. The worst they can do is take so long to kill you get bored and leave. But don't worry, more DPS helps with that. Or just play a timed-to-win mission, then the enemy will get bored and leave when the time runs out, congratulations you win.
And thats why, once you have enough DPS you won't run out of patiece before the enemy runs out of HP, that the game is inevitably too easy.
But the conflicts between high and low performance players aren't caused by the existence of easy content, but rather the fact the easy content is always the most rewarding, even for experienced players who could be playing something harder. This puts players of vastly different levels all in the same sandbox and conflicts are inevitable. People complaining about better players upstaging them, weaker players not pulling their weight, etc, etc.
Wow this thread went downhill since the last time I visited/posted. I'm not even sure where to pick up from the original topic.
Name a TFO and speculate on what motivates people to play it?
Every single time I log in I queue for Big Dig praying it will pop.
It's older , but I love the whole mission, and am sad as heck it never pops.
Why I'd play it is the entire mission from start to finish.
I just enjoy the goals and the somewhat required teamwork to fully succeed.
Could care less about the Dil.
I just want to have fun with other players.
TFOs with interesting combination of light story and fun mechanics should be played more.
We get Dili and other "rewards" so easily without needing TFOs ... I wish more people were motivated by just having fun with other players.
-Hippie
BTW very nice redirect back to the topic , Mark Thanks.
Don't know what other problems there are with it off the top of my head. Been forever since I saw the map.
Oh it's totally the 20 person requirement to even pop that makes it unplayed. Total agreement there.
I'd love to see it get the remastering treatment like the Minefield did.
Again, this thread was about fixing the queues but people are so obsessed with DPS that the topic keeps going back there.
The point of the thread was to suggest fixes to certain missions to make them more desirable to play. These changes would help those of all DPS levels, it's also about the rewards those queues pay and how to motivate people to want to spend time playing the content. There are certain people who keep shifting the topic back to DPS no matter how hard anyone tries to stay on the actual topic. We have visited that topic in the interest of furthering the discussion, but that topic doesn't conclude and ends up dominating the talk and taking away from the actual point.
The original proposal is a good one, and it would be a shame to see it get buried under all this off topic b.s. about peoples "game knowledge" and their DPS. Some things are good to get out in the open and discuss, it's just a shame that it's being done at the expense of the original idea. In the end, it probably doesn't matter much since it's doubtful that Cryptic is going to listen to any suggestions to begin with, they're going to do what they always do. Slap a band aid on it (TFO's) that doesn't address the root problem and then when it doesn't fix the problem they'll blame the player base and say that 'players don't like queued content.' TFOS's do nothing to address the real problems, the time gates, the content that lacks enjoyable game play, and the paltry rewards for such content. All TFO's are is a random mix of unsatisfying results..
Slap a band aid on it (TFO's) that doesn't address the root problem and then when it doesn't fix the problem they'll blame the player base and say that 'players don't like queued content.' TFOS's do nothing to address the real problems, the time gates, the content that lacks enjoyable game play, and the paltry rewards for such content. All TFO's are is a random mix of unsatisfying results..
How is that supposed to fix anything?
As people have noted above in the thread , we get everything we need reward wise by okaying reports on our Bridge (Admirality, Reps, etc) ... for me "paltry" reqwards are not what is keeping me away. It's simply the apparent need others have for rewards that keep them from queing up and then seeing empty queues is just disheartening. I personally enjoy the TFOs with interesting fun ways to "win".
Hell I love it when a TFO goes south , and its a challenge to get it done.
It's just about the fun to me./
Playing with others is fun.
Wish more queues provided enough fun for folks.
TFOS's do nothing to address the real problems, the time gates, the content that lacks enjoyable game play, and the paltry rewards for such content. All TFO's are is a random mix of unsatisfying results..
Random 'missions' in Endeavors is one thing: the RNG picks one, and I can choose to either do it or not. But queueing for... yes, for what exactly?! I will have no idea. And will assuredly suck at certain things (if for nothing else, for not having done them often). What was that, Cryptic?! I will be doing the TFO's so many times, I eventually will have learnt it all? Yeah, no. Instead, ppl will get highly frustrated with half the teams severely underperforming/TRIBBLE up, and quit doing TFO's long before that. Plus, I run the risk of getting Ground too. GTFO, indeed!
You don't need to do anywhere near 100k to make the game a piece of cake.
You don't? I dare you try to HSE, then. Your sub-100K isn't going to cut it there, HSE is like 200K DPS to pass.
Think we tended to HSE a lot as of late. 200k DPS should be pretty much the minimum number for the timer of stage one to be beaten so what is required to bring from a team.
Key word here is “team” as 200k/5 leaves 40k DPS for every player there to have. Bring less and others need to make up for you, bring more and you have the potential to carry others.
I am not an expert on all elite space maps but on those few I run (CPE, TFE, GGE, GKE, VCE) I suspect the DPS checks to have similar requirements. Unlike HSE they are often just brief there but tied to a fail-condition anyway.
FEZ seems to be a major exception here. Abstracted from ISA players found that Gold DPS (so around 80k atm) is required per player. Due to the discrete objectives and the resulting team-splits there is also far less room for team interaction (for example making up for the DPS of another one or combining it) so everybody should bring Gold DPS to get his part of the map done.
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FEZ seems to be a major exception here. Abstracted from ISA players found that Gold DPS (so around 80k atm) is required per player. Due to the discrete objectives and the resulting team-splits there is also far less room for team interaction (for example making up for the DPS of another one or combining it) so everybody should bring Gold DPS to get his part of the map done.
Storming the Spire Elite is another one with similarly high DPS requirement, with very little possibility of success even with a single weak link, even when the rest are capable of doing 3-digit scores. I think requirements for Herald Sphere and the dreaded Dranuur Gauntlet are also higher due to team needing to split up, but on both of those at least part of the team can stay together, so some form of "carrying" can take place.
But yeah, for rest of the elites (bar CPE cause only fail conditions are failing to close portals or playing taxi) 40k per teammate seems to be about right for the absolute minimum, provided they carefully select their targets and don't die at all. So still, in order to leave you a bit room for errors, widely cited 50k requirement really works for the majority of elite maps.
What was that, Cryptic?! I will be doing the TFO's so many times, I eventually will have learnt it all? Yeah, no. Instead, ppl will get highly frustrated with half the teams severely underperforming/**** up, and quit doing TFO's long before that.
I think that is exactly what they're thinking. That eventually, people will get comfortable with all the queues through random playing and start to enjoy them. I honestly think that Cryptic is so deluded that they believe all their queues are enjoyable and people just haven't tried them so they don't know. This 'solution' is clearly aimed at trying to get players to play what's there and is in no way aimed at making any change or adjustment to what currently exists and that, in my opinion, is the inherent flaw in the system. The proposal makes sense if all the content is working properly, the rewards are balanced, and the problem is that people just aren't trying it. Since that is not the problem though, the solution is addressing a problem that doesn't exist. My fear is that once this system inevitably fails, they will consider that their last attempt at addressing the queues and simply give up. The problem is two fold:
1. Cryptic doesn't want to admit that some of their content is poorly made and players don't enjoy it.
2. They don't want to take the time and devote the resources needed to fix this content.
It obviously doesn't apply to everything, some of these missions are pretty good.. they're fun, it's not all bad by any means. They have done a lot of stuff right, it would be nice to see them take inspiration from their successes and use it to fix the less successful queues. I think a lot of the suggestions posted in this thread, both from Tunebreaker on actual changes and from others about the rewards would go a long way toward accomplishing that.
FEZ seems to be a major exception here. Abstracted from ISA players found that Gold DPS (so around 80k atm) is required per player. Due to the discrete objectives and the resulting team-splits there is also far less room for team interaction (for example making up for the DPS of another one or combining it) so everybody should bring Gold DPS to get his part of the map done.
Yeah, HSE doesn't have nearly the DPS requirement that people think it has. Fez is the one that requires the big guns.. that last Elite run we did, we had a very capable team of gold level DPS'ers and barely passed it. You have to dish out some serious punishment on that map.
This thread just shows that really there's a big gulf between players who are pretty casual and don't worry about DPS and those who are willing/able to push the game to the limits.
The two groups are never going to see eye to eye and arguments like this will always pop up.
I refuse to believe that and if it would turn out to be true it would put my presence here in forum at question. There is or at least should be always a place for some middle ground and mutual understanding.
Just look at @seaofsorrows. He is the incarnation of mutual understanding and middle ground!
He has but a fraction of my online time in STO but it never stopped him to do his homework as in studying of builds and grinding the resources to use what he likes to have for his own. As Gold DPSer he will cope with each and every situation PvE throws at him and will be the most valuable team-mate anyone could wish for. Bring Sea and you have won.
Still, at least until now, he never expressed the wish that I often have which is to push the DPS of his builds to absurdity. For that he would need to make build adjustments that would leave him naked in a bad pug. He would also need to have access to players who master team interaction to a level that only few in game do. Neither of which is something that would serve his daily play so I guess that is what puts him on this middle ground where he can understand both sides (DPS as well as peeps struggling) as best as it gets.
That it works so well for him but not for others can have many reasons of course but the most common one as in “limited gaming time” or "casual" simply gets questionable when you try to discuss something with players that have over FORTYTHOUSAND forum posts.
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Using a forum is not the same as gaming time. I have a pretty laid back job so have time to browse forums, but I can’t use that time in STO. So claiming forum post counts says anything about how casual a player is in the actual game is not true at all. Being casual doesn’t mean you don’t play for x time or don’t post in the forums. It’s not something you can measure with timers or post counts; it’s not anything you can easily quantify. So yes there are casuals who spend hours online and have massive post counts.
Using a forum is not the same as gaming time. I have a pretty laid back job so have time to browse forums, but I can’t use that time in STO. So claiming forum post counts says anything about how casual a player is in the actual game is not true at all.
Of course you're right. There are just a very small group of people that seem to think that high post count means they're an authority. Obviously, that is not the reality of things.
I blame the time invested vs reward mentality of the players. Why play something different with a lower payout then the same old thing that can be facerolled in two minutes for a higher payout? Also... why bother to learn how to do the new stuff if we can just faceroll the old stuff we can do in our sleep?
Infected Advanced used to be the end all DPS Measuring stick. Which frankly is a bit of a bad example because it is totally dependant on how well you and your team perform and synergize.
Knowing your enemy... THAT is important. Knowledge is Power Guard it well
This thread was never about DPS or ISA in particular. Players who set DPS records in ISA can all easily beat other maps in game as well but choose to focus on ISA or play it more often than the others.
Why not just let them? Ah because the queue list is empty and it is their fault!
Instead of respecting the wishes of DPSer and letting them be forumitees choose to criticize our ideal of heaving a good time in game and tease us with a supposedly lack of knowledge to explain our absence on other maps.
If those forumitees would have what it takes to play the other maps and/or would be in large enough number to represent major parts of the community there would be no reason for such threads in the first place and all would work but it does not.
Instead the literally finest example of a kind and selfless player like @tunebreaker who spends countless hours of his free time to help others in PvE (actively and passively) gets cornered as being elitists. And sure when he dares to defend himself once in a while gets claimed to be an “attacker”. Ok the last part was even a new low around here where the forumitee felt nothing better to do than to hide himself bluntly in a victim role! Of course with the support of new forum audience and mods trying to keep this place in order he even succeeded up until the next time. It is pathetic!
None of the suggestions the OP made are here to transform the mentioned PvE into another DPS measuring ground. They are just meant to give DPSer as well as others a more common ground to play with one another.
Be assured @rattler2 we have what it takes to play the other maps no matter what cryptic does to change them. We just feel that a change is in order if we are expected to play them more often.
I guess you do too or I would have encountered you at least once in a while in there the past 6 years.
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Getting other people to carry you does not count as "easy", though. Everything's EASY if you're just gonna get someone to do all the lifting. To pretend "the game is easy because I can just get 3 or 4 people to carry me" is simply dishonest. And for this, 100K is simply lacking and forces everyone else to carry your slack. You can't pretend it's "easy" under those conditions.
Yea that is quite correct!
Think what most players sadly can’t comprehend when they resort to the “DPS is the answer to everything” is that the task at hand is never easy. You and your team either are below a certain DPS threshold where the map itself still poses obstacles and is thereby difficult or you move beyond that to a point where the aimed record will force you to be challenged. In both cases it’s the same. The moment you get the feeling that the respective run was easy you won’t have been the one who was put to the test.
Two extremes from my yesterday game:
1) HSE 2 man with a friend: ~160k combined team DPS. We both decided to use jack of all trade builds (DPS, tank & crowd control elements)
2) HSE 5 man with DPS Diamond admins and members: ~1000k combined team DPS. We favor 4 DPS centric builds and 1 crowd controller there at the moment
Both runs were not successful. The first one failed in light of the timer of stage one. No prob there as I know which strings to pull to get better in the future. The other one was unsuccessful as well as we did not manage another recorded speed record of the map. A bit tired and uncoordinated, we also encounter bugs there surfacing in too powerful groups.
On both occasions I felt highly challenged though either by the stage itself or the self-set goal to achieve. So did the other simply because they gave thier best and were on equal skill. And yea, in both cases the scrubs are correct as well: DPS seems to be the answer to everything.
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While there is plenty of useful information in this thread, I suspect that the beginning of the end was when someone decided to kill the hourly bonus for STF's. That action always struck me as an extreme solution to what could have become a major issue over time, i.e. making the Grind too easy. I hate Grind as much as anyone, but I recognize its value as well. The trick is to implement the Grind in such a manner that the Grind is well disguised by fun.
Well, it's not fun being limited to Red Alerts, nor will it be fun to be forced into some random encounter (To be clear, I know there are ways to get into what one wants to get into, and I'm looking at this as one who usually plays solo.).
I would suggest the following:
1. Keep the Red Alerts and continue to apply the Daily Bonus Marks.
2. Return the Hourly Bonus to Mark-Type Specific Queues (One Mark-Type per hour, randomized)
3. Keep the Daily Mark Bonus system wide.
4. Do not apply the Hourly Mark Bonus to Red Alerts.
5. Do not use the old Hourly Mark Bonus formula, as that was obviously a problem. Reduce it appropriately.
I suspect this will go some distance toward re-populating the queues.
I would suggest the following:
Keep the Red Alerts and continue to apply the Daily Bonus Marks.
Counter-proposal: Remove non-thematic marks, restore XP multiplier. Now both types of content have a point: Thematic queues for thematic marks, red alerts for ship XP grinding. They thus no longer compete against each other for the same market share.
Because reward homogenization is ultimately what kills queues: Only the most efficient reward-to-effort ratios survive in a homogenized market where everything pays the same stuff.
Woa... that sounds... well good.
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I would suggest the following:
Keep the Red Alerts and continue to apply the Daily Bonus Marks.
Counter-proposal: Remove non-thematic marks, restore XP multiplier. Now both types of content have a point: Thematic queues for thematic marks, red alerts for ship XP grinding. They thus no longer compete against each other for the same market share.
Because reward homogenization is ultimately what kills queues: Only the most efficient reward-to-effort ratios survive in a homogenized market where everything pays the same stuff.
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Oh, I remember it well. Picture the start of Dilithium Rising. Geko had (more-or-less openly) gotten into an e-peen contest with the top DPS-ers, taking it upon himself to make Korfez as good as undoable. And for a poor lass like me, LOL, it certainly is now.
I've completed it with worse teammates than you. You'd do fine in there, really.
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The two groups are never going to see eye to eye and arguments like this will always pop up.
When you are doing 100K+ and throwing nukes around everything (bar Korfez possibly) is going to seem easy and you don't need to know your enemy as much as someone who has very limited firepower.
For some of us, going up against a simply Borg Sphere is a daunting fight if we don't know what to expect, hence the knowing your enemy part. Someone doing 100K+....they'd probably just run that sphere over and not even notice it. Big difference.
The changes to queues might get people playing missions again. The random TFO's might do the same, and so might some new-fangled reward system were they to put one in place. But you're never going to remove that divide between those who see everything as too easy, and those who really do struggle with more complex content. Some of us just aren't going to be up to the standard of the top players, and maybe many of us are not too bothered about that.
So give the stabbing each other a break and try to remember that we're all just playing a game for fun.
Quick Story Time. I have a 2nd Account besides my lifetime, because reasons. Mainly I wanted to see what a full F2P experience would be like. No subscriber bonuses , not Delta Recruit, No Agent of Yesterday. Just a F2P account. So today I logged on to that account and asked for a parse of an ISA if someone could. Explained it was a total F2P account but I knew the run and would try my very best in the advanced. That I wanted to get a baseline for what kind of damage that account could so.
2.2\It did 2.2K ... Thats using samey weapon types and proper tac consoles for said weapons. Many players out there ... well look at any "build" group not part of the DPS crowd. People run Disrupters with Polaron consoles for example, or 5 weapon types, etc etc. A large percent of the game has no "game" background, they just go pew pew because it's Star Trek.
It's a huge discrepancy between DPS and the ability to get the cool new widgets, and someone in a fully F2P scenario.
People struggle with D'Ds , some people struggle with Klingon fights. There are a LOT of full F2P who have never spent a dime , have no Delta Recruit, lucky to understand not to mix weapon flavors players out there, probably doing even less than the 2.2 I managed in that scenario.
Sorry , haven't heard back from anyone as to where Bort talked DPS in that interview. But realizng the numbers come from the whole game not just the Queues used as the DPS measure, I still say 5K doesn't sound so low as an average.
A lot of it has to do with point of view rather than actual difficulty. If you dread seeing a respawn button then sure, an inexperienced player may find common enemies daunting. But when you realize that "death" means basically nothing and 99% of the content has no fail conditions whatsoever...what's not easy?
What are the enemies gonna do? They can't kill you and they can't make you lose the mission. The worst they can do is take so long to kill you get bored and leave. But don't worry, more DPS helps with that. Or just play a timed-to-win mission, then the enemy will get bored and leave when the time runs out, congratulations you win.
And thats why, once you have enough DPS you won't run out of patiece before the enemy runs out of HP, that the game is inevitably too easy.
But the conflicts between high and low performance players aren't caused by the existence of easy content, but rather the fact the easy content is always the most rewarding, even for experienced players who could be playing something harder. This puts players of vastly different levels all in the same sandbox and conflicts are inevitable. People complaining about better players upstaging them, weaker players not pulling their weight, etc, etc.
My character Tsin'xing
Every single time I log in I queue for Big Dig praying it will pop.
It's older , but I love the whole mission, and am sad as heck it never pops.
Why I'd play it is the entire mission from start to finish.
I just enjoy the goals and the somewhat required teamwork to fully succeed.
Could care less about the Dil.
I just want to have fun with other players.
TFOs with interesting combination of light story and fun mechanics should be played more.
We get Dili and other "rewards" so easily without needing TFOs ... I wish more people were motivated by just having fun with other players.
-Hippie
BTW very nice redirect back to the topic , Mark
Main issue: 20 man queue.
Don't know what other problems there are with it off the top of my head. Been forever since I saw the map.
Oh it's totally the 20 person requirement to even pop that makes it unplayed. Total agreement there.
I'd love to see it get the remastering treatment like the Minefield did.
The point of the thread was to suggest fixes to certain missions to make them more desirable to play. These changes would help those of all DPS levels, it's also about the rewards those queues pay and how to motivate people to want to spend time playing the content. There are certain people who keep shifting the topic back to DPS no matter how hard anyone tries to stay on the actual topic. We have visited that topic in the interest of furthering the discussion, but that topic doesn't conclude and ends up dominating the talk and taking away from the actual point.
The original proposal is a good one, and it would be a shame to see it get buried under all this off topic b.s. about peoples "game knowledge" and their DPS. Some things are good to get out in the open and discuss, it's just a shame that it's being done at the expense of the original idea. In the end, it probably doesn't matter much since it's doubtful that Cryptic is going to listen to any suggestions to begin with, they're going to do what they always do. Slap a band aid on it (TFO's) that doesn't address the root problem and then when it doesn't fix the problem they'll blame the player base and say that 'players don't like queued content.' TFOS's do nothing to address the real problems, the time gates, the content that lacks enjoyable game play, and the paltry rewards for such content. All TFO's are is a random mix of unsatisfying results..
How is that supposed to fix anything?
As people have noted above in the thread , we get everything we need reward wise by okaying reports on our Bridge (Admirality, Reps, etc) ... for me "paltry" reqwards are not what is keeping me away. It's simply the apparent need others have for rewards that keep them from queing up and then seeing empty queues is just disheartening. I personally enjoy the TFOs with interesting fun ways to "win".
Hell I love it when a TFO goes south , and its a challenge to get it done.
It's just about the fun to me./
Playing with others is fun.
Wish more queues provided enough fun for folks.
-Hippie
Random 'missions' in Endeavors is one thing: the RNG picks one, and I can choose to either do it or not. But queueing for... yes, for what exactly?! I will have no idea. And will assuredly suck at certain things (if for nothing else, for not having done them often). What was that, Cryptic?! I will be doing the TFO's so many times, I eventually will have learnt it all? Yeah, no. Instead, ppl will get highly frustrated with half the teams severely underperforming/TRIBBLE up, and quit doing TFO's long before that. Plus, I run the risk of getting Ground too. GTFO, indeed!
Think we tended to HSE a lot as of late. 200k DPS should be pretty much the minimum number for the timer of stage one to be beaten so what is required to bring from a team.
Key word here is “team” as 200k/5 leaves 40k DPS for every player there to have. Bring less and others need to make up for you, bring more and you have the potential to carry others.
I am not an expert on all elite space maps but on those few I run (CPE, TFE, GGE, GKE, VCE) I suspect the DPS checks to have similar requirements. Unlike HSE they are often just brief there but tied to a fail-condition anyway.
FEZ seems to be a major exception here. Abstracted from ISA players found that Gold DPS (so around 80k atm) is required per player. Due to the discrete objectives and the resulting team-splits there is also far less room for team interaction (for example making up for the DPS of another one or combining it) so everybody should bring Gold DPS to get his part of the map done.
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Storming the Spire Elite is another one with similarly high DPS requirement, with very little possibility of success even with a single weak link, even when the rest are capable of doing 3-digit scores. I think requirements for Herald Sphere and the dreaded Dranuur Gauntlet are also higher due to team needing to split up, but on both of those at least part of the team can stay together, so some form of "carrying" can take place.
But yeah, for rest of the elites (bar CPE cause only fail conditions are failing to close portals or playing taxi) 40k per teammate seems to be about right for the absolute minimum, provided they carefully select their targets and don't die at all. So still, in order to leave you a bit room for errors, widely cited 50k requirement really works for the majority of elite maps.
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I think that is exactly what they're thinking. That eventually, people will get comfortable with all the queues through random playing and start to enjoy them. I honestly think that Cryptic is so deluded that they believe all their queues are enjoyable and people just haven't tried them so they don't know. This 'solution' is clearly aimed at trying to get players to play what's there and is in no way aimed at making any change or adjustment to what currently exists and that, in my opinion, is the inherent flaw in the system. The proposal makes sense if all the content is working properly, the rewards are balanced, and the problem is that people just aren't trying it. Since that is not the problem though, the solution is addressing a problem that doesn't exist. My fear is that once this system inevitably fails, they will consider that their last attempt at addressing the queues and simply give up. The problem is two fold:
1. Cryptic doesn't want to admit that some of their content is poorly made and players don't enjoy it.
2. They don't want to take the time and devote the resources needed to fix this content.
It obviously doesn't apply to everything, some of these missions are pretty good.. they're fun, it's not all bad by any means. They have done a lot of stuff right, it would be nice to see them take inspiration from their successes and use it to fix the less successful queues. I think a lot of the suggestions posted in this thread, both from Tunebreaker on actual changes and from others about the rewards would go a long way toward accomplishing that.
Yeah, HSE doesn't have nearly the DPS requirement that people think it has. Fez is the one that requires the big guns.. that last Elite run we did, we had a very capable team of gold level DPS'ers and barely passed it. You have to dish out some serious punishment on that map.
I refuse to believe that and if it would turn out to be true it would put my presence here in forum at question. There is or at least should be always a place for some middle ground and mutual understanding.
Just look at @seaofsorrows. He is the incarnation of mutual understanding and middle ground!
He has but a fraction of my online time in STO but it never stopped him to do his homework as in studying of builds and grinding the resources to use what he likes to have for his own. As Gold DPSer he will cope with each and every situation PvE throws at him and will be the most valuable team-mate anyone could wish for. Bring Sea and you have won.
Still, at least until now, he never expressed the wish that I often have which is to push the DPS of his builds to absurdity. For that he would need to make build adjustments that would leave him naked in a bad pug. He would also need to have access to players who master team interaction to a level that only few in game do. Neither of which is something that would serve his daily play so I guess that is what puts him on this middle ground where he can understand both sides (DPS as well as peeps struggling) as best as it gets.
That it works so well for him but not for others can have many reasons of course but the most common one as in “limited gaming time” or "casual" simply gets questionable when you try to discuss something with players that have over FORTYTHOUSAND forum posts.
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I have a pretty laid back job so have time to browse forums, but I can’t use that time in STO. So claiming forum post counts says anything about how casual a player is in the actual game is not true at all.
Being casual doesn’t mean you don’t play for x time or don’t post in the forums. It’s not something you can measure with timers or post counts; it’s not anything you can easily quantify. So yes there are casuals who spend hours online and have massive post counts.
Of course you're right. There are just a very small group of people that seem to think that high post count means they're an authority. Obviously, that is not the reality of things.
I agree.
But what can be done? I am clueless here. Every time we start talking about PvE it does not take long until we see such post:
This thread was never about DPS or ISA in particular. Players who set DPS records in ISA can all easily beat other maps in game as well but choose to focus on ISA or play it more often than the others.
Why not just let them? Ah because the queue list is empty and it is their fault!
Instead of respecting the wishes of DPSer and letting them be forumitees choose to criticize our ideal of heaving a good time in game and tease us with a supposedly lack of knowledge to explain our absence on other maps.
If those forumitees would have what it takes to play the other maps and/or would be in large enough number to represent major parts of the community there would be no reason for such threads in the first place and all would work but it does not.
Instead the literally finest example of a kind and selfless player like @tunebreaker who spends countless hours of his free time to help others in PvE (actively and passively) gets cornered as being elitists. And sure when he dares to defend himself once in a while gets claimed to be an “attacker”. Ok the last part was even a new low around here where the forumitee felt nothing better to do than to hide himself bluntly in a victim role! Of course with the support of new forum audience and mods trying to keep this place in order he even succeeded up until the next time. It is pathetic!
None of the suggestions the OP made are here to transform the mentioned PvE into another DPS measuring ground. They are just meant to give DPSer as well as others a more common ground to play with one another.
Be assured @rattler2 we have what it takes to play the other maps no matter what cryptic does to change them. We just feel that a change is in order if we are expected to play them more often.
I guess you do too or I would have encountered you at least once in a while in there the past 6 years.
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Yea that is quite correct!
Think what most players sadly can’t comprehend when they resort to the “DPS is the answer to everything” is that the task at hand is never easy. You and your team either are below a certain DPS threshold where the map itself still poses obstacles and is thereby difficult or you move beyond that to a point where the aimed record will force you to be challenged. In both cases it’s the same. The moment you get the feeling that the respective run was easy you won’t have been the one who was put to the test.
Two extremes from my yesterday game:
1) HSE 2 man with a friend: ~160k combined team DPS. We both decided to use jack of all trade builds (DPS, tank & crowd control elements)
2) HSE 5 man with DPS Diamond admins and members: ~1000k combined team DPS. We favor 4 DPS centric builds and 1 crowd controller there at the moment
Both runs were not successful. The first one failed in light of the timer of stage one. No prob there as I know which strings to pull to get better in the future. The other one was unsuccessful as well as we did not manage another recorded speed record of the map. A bit tired and uncoordinated, we also encounter bugs there surfacing in too powerful groups.
On both occasions I felt highly challenged though either by the stage itself or the self-set goal to achieve. So did the other simply because they gave thier best and were on equal skill. And yea, in both cases the scrubs are correct as well: DPS seems to be the answer to everything.
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Well, it's not fun being limited to Red Alerts, nor will it be fun to be forced into some random encounter (To be clear, I know there are ways to get into what one wants to get into, and I'm looking at this as one who usually plays solo.).
I would suggest the following:
1. Keep the Red Alerts and continue to apply the Daily Bonus Marks.
2. Return the Hourly Bonus to Mark-Type Specific Queues (One Mark-Type per hour, randomized)
3. Keep the Daily Mark Bonus system wide.
4. Do not apply the Hourly Mark Bonus to Red Alerts.
5. Do not use the old Hourly Mark Bonus formula, as that was obviously a problem. Reduce it appropriately.
I suspect this will go some distance toward re-populating the queues.
Woa... that sounds... well good.
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Good point.