That the TRIBBLE expansion is dropping at the same time as this tells me it has everything to do with CBS likely saying "if you kill your most played content then we can push more people into our new series". Which is pretty short-sighted but that's exactly what I expect from a bunch of myopic quarterly-reporting Ferengi spawn. A FtP IP-based game like this is, at it's heart, a giant advertising mechanism.
I haven't been playing as much as I used to, but I seem to recall any particular 'weekend event' didn't necessarily happen every weekend, so you may only see a specific event once every couple of months?
That's correct, weekend events occupy a rotation and depending on how long that rotation is, a particular event may only happen once every two months (judging from what we have right now.) That said, with these now a thing I would expect there to be fewer dormant weekends and Cryptic can opt to increase the frequency of a particularly popular item (so while the full rotation may cycle over a span of months, something like the RA's could pop once every 3 or 4 weeks if that's called for.)
If the RA's were 'easy mode' what you do consider CCA to be?!
Easy mode but with a much weaker impact on the reputation and ship mastery system. It's difficult to effectively level from CCA runs alone (even if you opt to finish off the tholians at the end of the round.) Plus Cryptic has looked into improving CCA mechanics through the revamp of the last crystalline event (some things, which proved themselves well, may eventually be ported back over to the normal queue.)
CCA may be popular, but that popularity only affects the PVE system through being a point of aggregation, which are inevitable (favorites will develop by any criteria.) The popularity of alerts neutered the design goal of reputations (encouraging players to play specific content for specific rewards) to nominally act as a stop-gap solution to PVE population distribution problems (blocking rep progress). Only, the effect was to make it even more difficult to find matches in other reps because player need was so neatly satisfied by a couple low-effort queues.
That's a **** situation, ie. where one activity becomes the sole focus in an expansive video game. For an MMO especially, that heavily risks increasing the rate of burnout in the population. It does behoove the devs to act on that, because that will affect the game's bottom line and prospects for longevity.
But the activity was not most players sole focus and it filled a needed gap that players found fun. Likewise taking fun content away and stopping players playing what they want to when they want to which the random STF changes and RA changes is doing to many of us is at high risk of causing those players to not log in as much. When players do not log in as much they are at a higher risk of quitting.
These changes to RA and random STF combined will only served to make it even more difficult for me and other players like me to find matches in queues we want to play. The changes will mean we are getting less queues played, less fun variety of what we want to play.
The changes will also stop or at the very least make is massively harder for us from being able to play a large group of low activity queues that we used to be able to play which is the very opposite goal of what the changes are meant to achieve. That could affect the games bottom line and negatively impact prospects for longevity worse then not making the changes in the first place.
Between the two changes we are now over 40+ queues which are going to be harder to play. Many of which are popular and fun, some of which are low activity but fun. All to try and make us play unpopular queues that most of us do not want to play. We don't play them for a good reason and stopping us playing the fun queues isn't going to move us into these bad queues.
This is a case of the cure is worse than the disease. The negatives outweigh the benefits by a large amount for many of us.
“Only, the effect was to make it even more difficult to find matches in other reps because player need was so neatly satisfied by a couple low-effort queues.”
Accept for the high effort queues are due to be hit in a matter of days. All the high effort queues are going to be much harder to join and play if the changes remain to what we see on Tribble. These changes to the low and high effort queues could negatively impact PVE queue population distribution at both ends to an even worse state then what we are in right now.
Like I said before forcing players out of the fun content is not going to make them play the bad content. This isn't about low-effort queues that's just a poor excuse for the changes. If you look at the entire picture its 40+ queues are being made harder to play. Many of which do not fit into the viewpoint you have been posting . You cannot just conveniently ignore them because they do not fit into your viewpoint.
I haven't been playing as much as I used to, but I seem to recall any particular 'weekend event' didn't necessarily happen every weekend, so you may only see a specific event once every couple of months?
That's correct, weekend events occupy a rotation and depending on how long that rotation is, a particular event may only happen once every two months (judging from what we have right now.) That said, with these now a thing I would expect there to be fewer dormant weekends and Cryptic can opt to increase the frequency of a particularly popular item (so while the full rotation may cycle over a span of months, something like the RA's could pop once every 3 or 4 weeks if that's called for.)
If the RA's were 'easy mode' what you do consider CCA to be?!
Easy mode but with a much weaker impact on the reputation and ship mastery system. It's difficult to effectively level from CCA runs alone (even if you opt to finish off the tholians at the end of the round.) Plus Cryptic has looked into improving CCA mechanics through the revamp of the last crystalline event (some things, which proved themselves well, may eventually be ported back over to the normal queue.)
CCA may be popular, but that popularity only affects the PVE system through being a point of aggregation, which are inevitable (favorites will develop by any criteria.) The popularity of alerts neutered the design goal of reputations (encouraging players to play specific content for specific rewards) to nominally act as a stop-gap solution to PVE population distribution problems (blocking rep progress). Only, the effect was to make it even more difficult to find matches in other reps because player need was so neatly satisfied by a couple low-effort queues.
That's a **** situation, ie. where one activity becomes the sole focus in an expansive video game. For an MMO especially, that heavily risks increasing the rate of burnout in the population. It does behoove the devs to act on that, because that will affect the game's bottom line and prospects for longevity.
But the activity was not most players sole focus and it filled a needed gap that players found fun. Likewise taking fun content away and stopping players playing what they want to when they want to which the random STF changes and RA changes is doing to many of us is at high risk of causing those players to not log in as much. When players do not log in as much they are at a higher risk of quitting.
These changes to RA and random STF combined will only served to make it even more difficult for me and other players like me to find matches in queues we want to play. The changes will mean we are getting less queues played, less fun variety of what we want to play.
The changes will also stop or at the very least make is massively harder for us from being able to play a large group of low activity queues that we used to be able to play which is the very opposite goal of what the changes are meant to achieve. That could affect the games bottom line and negatively impact prospects for longevity worse then not making the changes in the first place.
Between the two changes we are now over 40+ queues which are going to be harder to play. Many of which are popular and fun, some of which are low activity but fun. All to try and make us play unpopular queues that most of us do not want to play. We don't play them for a good reason and stopping us playing the fun queues isn't going to move us into these bad queues.
This is a case of the cure is worse than the disease. The negatives outweigh the benefits by a large amount for many of us.
“Only, the effect was to make it even more difficult to find matches in other reps because player need was so neatly satisfied by a couple low-effort queues.”
Accept for the high effort queues are due to be hit in a matter of days. All the high effort queues are going to be much harder to join and play if the changes remain to what we see on Tribble. These changes to the low and high effort queues could negatively impact PVE queue population distribution at both ends to an even worse state then what we are in right now.
Like I said before forcing players out of the fun content is not going to make them play the bad content. This isn't about low-effort queues that's just a poor excuse for the changes. If you look at the entire picture its 40+ queues are being made harder to play. Many of which do not fit into the viewpoint you have been posting . You cannot just conveniently ignore them because they do not fit into your viewpoint.
Empty random queues are not going to fill empty unpopular queues , the reason people are not in those queues is because they don't want to be. I will never join a random queue.
A better solution might have been to drop the base amount and have ONLY the daily bonus points as an ersatz cooldown for each type of mark the RA gives (most people seemed to us RAs in that way anyway, when they were not using them to test builds or as a quick wake up).
RAs were a great way to get a little jolt of adrenaline between boring stuff like Admiralty, doff, other stuff (like some of the missions are bad enough of a virtual mickey finn to recommend a pillow on the desktop for unexpected faceplants though fortunately the really bad ones are rare). They were also great to spin up the game as a quick break from non-game stuff without taking too long for that to be practical.
As it is now, it is highly likely that the bulk of the reputation system will pretty much fall to the wayside and people will grind only the ones that they absolutely have to instead of the wide approach that was popular before.
When my first character hit level 50 I ignored the reputation stuff (and ques) for a while because there is very little in the way of useful information about them (and NONE at all of that is provided by in-game help stuff. the little intro the game gives you for reputation is ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS for anything but the mechanics of using the popup and needs serious revamping), and what is available on the web is spotty and contradictory and often outdated. A friend introduced me to RAs and those were a very good introduction to ques and reputation, enough to bother with slogging through the web looking for what rep goes with which energy types and the relative merits of the sets.
Cryptic does not seem to realize that players come in from other games, many of which either have very rotten que play in general or else they are set up so that only very organized formal teams with specific roles need apply and so they need to make players aware that PUGs are not only viable, they are the majority of ques here.
A good example of truly toxic ques is in Defiance where the practice of someone setting up a pug run and waits until they get the preliminary stages done, kicks all the random players, and lets in their friends for the boss battle where they get all the rewards for very little time and effort was a serious problem. When you get burned by that nonsense often enough players start ignoring ques in whatever game they go to next.
Also, it does not help in STO that the majority of the "que up" mission things you get while leveling seem to lead to dead PvP areas, and the majority here are not PvP players in the first place.
Good they finally did this, they were easy mode and needed to be gone or something like this done.
There is no CD on them now, so getting marks is actually easier on the w/e, too easy, they need a CD.
Id prefer them like before once,a red Alert appear in one sector for awhile.
The Red Alerts, esp the BORG also need a rebalance, it takes me 2mins to clear it, solo. Man i could get thousands of marks, before this change i could do a ship Mastery in few hours, now gonna be even quick, why dont they scrap mastery then?
Current ques also need rebalancing, better rewards and linked into the Endevours, both daily and weeklies.
Better idea is the sector way as mentioned, also you should nt know who it is, it could be Borg or someone else, but then its just a Fleet Alert, so scrap that one.
Dont half **** it, take the one more step and do it right for once after all these years.
If the RA's were 'easy mode' what you do consider CCA to be?!
face-roll-keyboard-while-sleeping
It was also designed to be a DSE! It used to lurk near Memory Alpha and try to attack anyone who go to close!
Well I guess the queue system is dead now. In this timezone I have just spent 15+ min trying to get into an RA and the Crystalline queue at the same time and failing due to lack of players to even cause the accept popup to appear. This time last weekend or any weekend would have been 1min.
I am now logging out of the game without managing to get any queues played today. The very thing I feared, players haven't moved into other queues they just stopped running queues.
Well I guess the queue system is dead now. In this timezone I have just spent 15+ min trying to get into an RA and the Crystalline queue at the same time and failing due to lack of players to even cause the accept popup to appear. This time last weekend or any weekend would have been 1min.
We're playing at the same time yet the Borg RA is popping almost instantaneously. Have also done a couple CCA's with a couple minute wait. This is strange.
I am now logging out of the game without managing to get any queues played today. The very thing I feared, players haven't moved into other queues they just stopped running queues.
The TFO system isn't even up yet. Wouldn't the expected result for this event (for those that want to partake) be to run the RA's? This would pull players from other queues, something that is seen during many events.
Well I guess the queue system is dead now. In this timezone I have just spent 15+ min trying to get into an RA and the Crystalline queue at the same time and failing due to lack of players to even cause the accept popup to appear. This time last weekend or any weekend would have been 1min.
We're playing at the same time yet the Borg RA is popping almost instantaneously. Have also done a couple CCA's with a couple minute wait. This is strange.
I am now logging out of the game without managing to get any queues played today. The very thing I feared, players haven't moved into other queues they just stopped running queues.
The TFO system isn't even up yet. Wouldn't the expected result for this event (for those that want to partake) be to run the RA's? This would pull players from other queues, something that is seen during many events.
Word was all over zone (and at least the fleet channels I have) that RAs were dead as of the end of this weekend so many were running them one after the other for two days. It is possible that a lot of people are a bit crispy and taking it easy.
As for the time thing, two people can post here at the same time but one may be posting in the middle of the night while the other posts middle of the day depending on what time zone they are on. That can make a lot of difference in local experience the way instances seem to run.
So far, there does not seem to be much difference in the ques, people are spread out so it only shaves a tiny amount of time off what they were before, and a few previously dead altogether ques are up again with ridiculously long wait times.
The timing of the change is either very bad or fiendishly clever because tomorrow the ques are going to tank as they always do with recruitment style events so the numbers will be obscured for at least a week or so while everyone gets back up to que level with the new ones.
Time will tell I guess, though in this case it will be longer time than usual.
Well I believe that after patching today people will be running 'Assault on Starbase One' as that will probably be offering Gamma in the Choice Marks Box.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
On console we have always had the RA's as a special event and it's never really been a problem...players play other content. With the random system coming (hopefully soon, though for me you can keep the st:d content if you want) I think it's going to open up all kinds of queues....and for most of the content you really don't need to be specifically kitted out for ground or space...you can balance both just fine. So if you just want to hop in for a quick game then hit a random or specific queue you like or hit a patrol.
If you want xp hit a bz, they seem to be doing great for me leveling through ships fast. Yes you'll now have to play a bit different for your easy marks instead of just steam rolling the same mission over and over, but is it really so bad that they're encouraging players to play something different for a change?
Also, for some who claim that everyone plays those because that's the only queues they like and show the lack of players in other queues as evidence...that's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you get some players who just want to pew pew for easy marks with no work flocking to the RA's, then players naturally start to see those are the only busy queues so they in turn end up playing it as there is no other option that will pop quickly...sign up for three queues and the ra will likely come up first...so more and more it draws players in whether that's what they wanted or not. Now with a random system filling in players we might start to see a distribution of queues that's more indicative of what the players want to play as you pick what you want and random players will be included to fill it quicker.
Maybe the change of RA's isn't the end of the world, the lack of it hasn't hurt our side of the game.
All the above is just my opinion and I'm sure many of you are lining up to tear me a new one and tell me I'm wrong and ruining your fun...but it is an opinion...go to it.
Since when were Red Alerts ever daily? i only ever saw them during the special Red Alert's after a couple events were over. You can indeed get special marks for doing "Random TFO's" but i wouldn't call them random when we constantly get put into the same Borg ones which got annoying fast and it's always 99% of the time Space TFO's but What about ground? i think if you want us to do more Randoms then you need to fix it where it's 50/50 between space and ground.
Edit: Ahh... this post was from 2018 that's why, but i think randoms could be improve to make them totally random.
I call upon the Guardians of this realm @baddmoonrizin@darkbladejk@rattler2@wingedhussar#7584 to come forth and combine your powers to banish this zombie necro to the realm of eternal hell and darkness never to return to this earthly plain.
I call upon the Guardians of this realm @baddmoonrizin@darkbladejk@rattler2@wingedhussar#7584 to come forth and combine your powers to banish this zombie necro to the realm of eternal hell and darkness never to return to this earthly plain.
I don't post much but i'm clearly seeing old posts at the top, delete my posts if you wish, cheers.
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Comments
That the TRIBBLE expansion is dropping at the same time as this tells me it has everything to do with CBS likely saying "if you kill your most played content then we can push more people into our new series". Which is pretty short-sighted but that's exactly what I expect from a bunch of myopic quarterly-reporting Ferengi spawn. A FtP IP-based game like this is, at it's heart, a giant advertising mechanism.
These changes to RA and random STF combined will only served to make it even more difficult for me and other players like me to find matches in queues we want to play. The changes will mean we are getting less queues played, less fun variety of what we want to play.
The changes will also stop or at the very least make is massively harder for us from being able to play a large group of low activity queues that we used to be able to play which is the very opposite goal of what the changes are meant to achieve. That could affect the games bottom line and negatively impact prospects for longevity worse then not making the changes in the first place.
Between the two changes we are now over 40+ queues which are going to be harder to play. Many of which are popular and fun, some of which are low activity but fun. All to try and make us play unpopular queues that most of us do not want to play. We don't play them for a good reason and stopping us playing the fun queues isn't going to move us into these bad queues.
This is a case of the cure is worse than the disease. The negatives outweigh the benefits by a large amount for many of us.
Accept for the high effort queues are due to be hit in a matter of days. All the high effort queues are going to be much harder to join and play if the changes remain to what we see on Tribble. These changes to the low and high effort queues could negatively impact PVE queue population distribution at both ends to an even worse state then what we are in right now.
Like I said before forcing players out of the fun content is not going to make them play the bad content. This isn't about low-effort queues that's just a poor excuse for the changes. If you look at the entire picture its 40+ queues are being made harder to play. Many of which do not fit into the viewpoint you have been posting . You cannot just conveniently ignore them because they do not fit into your viewpoint.
Empty random queues are not going to fill empty unpopular queues , the reason people are not in those queues is because they don't want to be. I will never join a random queue.
A better solution might have been to drop the base amount and have ONLY the daily bonus points as an ersatz cooldown for each type of mark the RA gives (most people seemed to us RAs in that way anyway, when they were not using them to test builds or as a quick wake up).
RAs were a great way to get a little jolt of adrenaline between boring stuff like Admiralty, doff, other stuff (like some of the missions are bad enough of a virtual mickey finn to recommend a pillow on the desktop for unexpected faceplants though fortunately the really bad ones are rare). They were also great to spin up the game as a quick break from non-game stuff without taking too long for that to be practical.
As it is now, it is highly likely that the bulk of the reputation system will pretty much fall to the wayside and people will grind only the ones that they absolutely have to instead of the wide approach that was popular before.
When my first character hit level 50 I ignored the reputation stuff (and ques) for a while because there is very little in the way of useful information about them (and NONE at all of that is provided by in-game help stuff. the little intro the game gives you for reputation is ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS for anything but the mechanics of using the popup and needs serious revamping), and what is available on the web is spotty and contradictory and often outdated. A friend introduced me to RAs and those were a very good introduction to ques and reputation, enough to bother with slogging through the web looking for what rep goes with which energy types and the relative merits of the sets.
Cryptic does not seem to realize that players come in from other games, many of which either have very rotten que play in general or else they are set up so that only very organized formal teams with specific roles need apply and so they need to make players aware that PUGs are not only viable, they are the majority of ques here.
A good example of truly toxic ques is in Defiance where the practice of someone setting up a pug run and waits until they get the preliminary stages done, kicks all the random players, and lets in their friends for the boss battle where they get all the rewards for very little time and effort was a serious problem. When you get burned by that nonsense often enough players start ignoring ques in whatever game they go to next.
Also, it does not help in STO that the majority of the "que up" mission things you get while leveling seem to lead to dead PvP areas, and the majority here are not PvP players in the first place.
It was also designed to be a DSE! It used to lurk near Memory Alpha and try to attack anyone who go to close!
My character Tsin'xing
I am now logging out of the game without managing to get any queues played today. The very thing I feared, players haven't moved into other queues they just stopped running queues.
The TFO system isn't even up yet. Wouldn't the expected result for this event (for those that want to partake) be to run the RA's? This would pull players from other queues, something that is seen during many events.
Word was all over zone (and at least the fleet channels I have) that RAs were dead as of the end of this weekend so many were running them one after the other for two days. It is possible that a lot of people are a bit crispy and taking it easy.
As for the time thing, two people can post here at the same time but one may be posting in the middle of the night while the other posts middle of the day depending on what time zone they are on. That can make a lot of difference in local experience the way instances seem to run.
The timing of the change is either very bad or fiendishly clever because tomorrow the ques are going to tank as they always do with recruitment style events so the numbers will be obscured for at least a week or so while everyone gets back up to que level with the new ones.
Time will tell I guess, though in this case it will be longer time than usual.
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.'
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.'
With the random system coming (hopefully soon, though for me you can keep the st:d content if you want) I think it's going to open up all kinds of queues....and for most of the content you really don't need to be specifically kitted out for ground or space...you can balance both just fine. So if you just want to hop in for a quick game then hit a random or specific queue you like or hit a patrol.
If you want xp hit a bz, they seem to be doing great for me leveling through ships fast.
Yes you'll now have to play a bit different for your easy marks instead of just steam rolling the same mission over and over, but is it really so bad that they're encouraging players to play something different for a change?
Also, for some who claim that everyone plays those because that's the only queues they like and show the lack of players in other queues as evidence...that's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you get some players who just want to pew pew for easy marks with no work flocking to the RA's, then players naturally start to see those are the only busy queues so they in turn end up playing it as there is no other option that will pop quickly...sign up for three queues and the ra will likely come up first...so more and more it draws players in whether that's what they wanted or not.
Now with a random system filling in players we might start to see a distribution of queues that's more indicative of what the players want to play as you pick what you want and random players will be included to fill it quicker.
Maybe the change of RA's isn't the end of the world, the lack of it hasn't hurt our side of the game.
All the above is just my opinion and I'm sure many of you are lining up to tear me a new one and tell me I'm wrong and ruining your fun...but it is an opinion...go to it.
Edit: Ahh... this post was from 2018 that's why, but i think randoms could be improve to make them totally random.
I don't post much but i'm clearly seeing old posts at the top, delete my posts if you wish, cheers.
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