Pssh, Rattler is smallfry. He actually thinks it's worth noting that he ground out said packs in his sig as if this is some kind of achievement. The rest of us just go, "Wait...there's another serious way to actually get those?".
I don't see anyone else making that claim. Also... its a nice slap in the face for people who like to say anything about "P2W". If someone can grind ththose out... this game is not "P2W". Its just "pay2havenow".
The lockboxes super low RNG chance to get the top tier rewards is the problem as that normally means you need to spend more real world money on obtaining that item and that in turn that drives its value up in EC terms and that is what makes the econemy go completly out of balance with the game... If the chance to get a lockbox ship was say 1 in 10 then the highest price of a ship would be around 100mil and suddenly the market would be more reasonble as you can earn around 1mil in a few hours of gameplay.
No... I think the value of the lockbox ships would drop a LOT more than just 100-200 mil. They would most likely crash. You kinda underestimate how many lockboxes are being opened. If the odds were 1 in 10... we'd have quite a few people getting lockbox ships left and right by sheer volume alone. Some of the richest players in STO basically make a living off selling lockbox ships, and have the real world money to support that. They could buy pretty much anything they want without even breaking a sweat. The average price for a currently available lockbox ship is generally around 250 mil going up to maybe 300 mil.
Make the odds 1 in 10... and that average will probably go into freefall REAL fast. Market would get flooded within a day.
Pssh, Rattler is smallfry. He actually thinks it's worth noting that he ground out said packs in his sig as if this is some kind of achievement. The rest of us just go, "Wait...there's another serious way to actually get those?".
I don't see anyone else making that claim. Also... its a nice slap in the face for people who like to say anything about "P2W". If someone can grind ththose out... this game is not "P2W". Its just "pay2havenow".
The lockboxes super low RNG chance to get the top tier rewards is the problem as that normally means you need to spend more real world money on obtaining that item and that in turn that drives its value up in EC terms and that is what makes the econemy go completly out of balance with the game... If the chance to get a lockbox ship was say 1 in 10 then the highest price of a ship would be around 100mil and suddenly the market would be more reasonble as you can earn around 1mil in a few hours of gameplay.
No... I think the value of the lockbox ships would drop a LOT more than just 100-200 mil. They would most likely crash. You kinda underestimate how many lockboxes are being opened. If the odds were 1 in 10... we'd have quite a few people getting lockbox ships left and right by sheer volume alone. Some of the richest players in STO basically make a living off selling lockbox ships, and have the real world money to support that. They could buy pretty much anything they want without even breaking a sweat. The average price for a currently available lockbox ship is generally around 250 mil going up to maybe 300 mil.
Make the odds 1 in 10... and that average will probably go into freefall REAL fast. Market would get flooded within a day.
If lockboxes dropped ships 1 in 10, you could barely give the ships away for free. There would be more ships in the game than players.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
It would be nice to see some elite items dropped only through gameplay that aren't tradeable. Something that shows to other players that you are elite, that you've been deep in the trenches for a long time, that you've put in work. I love what they did with the Arena of Sompek, with the titles that you can only earn if you really have what it takes to reach that level. We need way more of that sort of thing.
The sad irony is that this is exactly what the Elite Honor Guard/M.A.C.O/Omega outfits used to be. But casual players with severe entitlement issues whined so much about not getting them(because they didn't want to put any effort into earning them) that Cryptic introduced the reputation system instead that just made them another buyable fashion statement.
Reps were a measure to eliminate the hell of obtaining gear representing the next step up in player progression from independent random probability drops, not mollify "whiny fan entitlement" with respect to a few customization unlocks. There's also no direct way of buying reputation items. They require time spent in queues/zones/patrols/events, which is now consistently moderated by fixed requirements (no lucking out for your bragging rights), for the requisite marks and tier progress.
Wrong, people whined explicitly about not having access to the more appealing Elite costumes that unlocked with full sets of Mk XII ground gear. This was way back before equipment got rebalanced and the difference between Mk XI and XII gear was so miniscule it was inconsequential, even to min-maxers. Mk XII sets were all about prestige and vanity.
And earning them was just as much about the challenge as it was RNG, which is why the best gear with their visual unlocks only dropped from the Elite Task Force missions. Now anyone can get anything by simply just following the path of least resistance, rather than actually mastering the content.
The overwhelming majority of the TFO's still aren't a worthwhile time and skill investment, which is why they had to introduce random TFO's as a band-aid rather than bothering to overhaul the reward structure.
And per the topic: just about everything you do in STO grants dilithium. Queues also provide R+D materials. Both can be used to generate a sizable income capable of buying just about anything from the exchange (save promo ships, realistically) through casual gameplay and careful saving. Add to that: admiralty (both EC and Dil), VR doffs from fleet marks, and the odd VR tac console or weapon. STO doesn't need to become more rewarding with respect to a single currency, as direct adjustments of this type wouldn't increase the purchasing power of most players but instead result in inflation.
Deeper structural modifications are necessary to change economic relationships, and incidentally this has already been done in STO through the crafting revamp and R+D system (making most players capable of producing items of interest to top earners, pulling EC down the ranks. Ie. upgrades) as well as adding dilithium to just about every activity in the game. STO offers a lot of upward mobility, provided you recognize that it has an industrial producer-consumer economy (which is pretty darn flexible and something that should be a hell of a lot more accessible to players than the alternative serfdom of "to earn, all you need to do is grind your brain out for direct gameplay payouts.")
Either you didn't bother to properly read the original post or you completely missed the point. Dilithium is a clear example of how broken the game economy is, it's directly linked to the lockbox economy rather than gameplay economy.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
The sad irony is that this is exactly what the Elite Honor Guard/M.A.C.O/Omega outfits used to be. But casual players with severe entitlement issues whined so much about not getting them(because they didn't want to put any effort into earning them) that Cryptic introduced the reputation system instead that just made them another buyable fashion statement.
I myself am one of those no-lifers that originally spent months grinding for a full Elite Honor Guard outfit, and the euphoria and rush of emotions I felt when I finally got the final piece was like nothing I've ever experienced before or since in STO. The potential loot drop has always been half the fun of killing a boss in MMORPG's and RPG's.
[off topic]In the inventory of my six-going-on-seven year old KDF character, I have a complete set of Mk X KDF Honor Guard gear which I've never upgraded. Took me days of of running Borg STFs to earn enough Encrypted Data Chips to acquire it. Because I earned it, instead of purchased it, it holds special meaning and is some of the gear on this character I value most.[/off topic]
Back on topic
I sometimes think of this game as Auction House Online or Inflationary Pressure Online. I am unsure if the game economy can be adjusted to be more favorable to newer players at this point. The loot drops in Missions are scaled to the player and this means a lvl 30 character is going to get something they can use right now, whether or not it is useful, or they can sell for half its value to a vendor, or they can place on the Exchange for a price which either ridiculously high or equally ridiculously low. The end result is the same. a small return on investment for spending time in the game.
I created an AoD char and if my other five characters were not sitting on enormous amounts of currency, I would not have been able to equip it with at least Uncommon grade gear of the appropriate level. And even this was expensive, let alone the Upgrading and Re-Engineering and Crafting expenses to get the gear to something close to what I wanted.
I have no ideas at all about how to adjust the current ingame economy. I'm a truck driver, not a banker. But if a long term player such as myself struggled, then I can only imagine with horror what that new player who just started playing last week is going through.
Sure, there are many reliable ways to generate income ingame. And there are also reliable ways to keep expenses down as well. One could also take the "Buy Zen and everybody's happy" path too. But when I login, I want to play in the Star Trek world. Not have to think about how expensive that Mk Thirty MegaOblivion Quad Beam Array is and how much time ingame I'll have to devote to acquiring currency to purchase it. Doing so detracts from immersion. It also detracts from the Star Trek experience. Kirk, Picard, et al never seem to worry about how much something costs. So why should I have to?
To continue to grow and thrive, STO needs to constantly attract new players. How many of them turn away after discovering they cannot do what their favorite Captain does due to the ingame economy as it is right now?
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
Dilithium is tied to the upgrade system, Fleet system, and Rep system. Not just the Dilithium Exchange.
And frankly I'm happy its not tied to other things as well. Neverwinter's version, Astral Diamonds, is actually used on their Auction House! And their Astral Diamond Exchange rates are much worse. In STO our DL Exchange averages out somewhere between 250 and 300. Pretty doable even for casuals to get some Zen. The Astral Diamond Exchange... is much higher because it is so integral to even using the frickin' Auction House and the much higher refine limit to accomidate that. STO only has 8k per character refine. 8.5 if you have a fleet mine, and 9 if you're a Lifer. Not really much of a blip on the exchange rate radar. And I doubt everyone makes use of them either.
Now... if we want to talk about something that is currently useless in the economy... GPL. We got squat to spend GPL on. I can build the frickin' Great Pyramid of Giza with the amount of GPL I have! I might as well be the frickin' Grand Nagus! Yet we got nothing to spend it all on.
If one in ten boxes dropped a ship, ships would tank in value to approximately 3K EC, since they'd be the most common item in the box, and therefore, completely worthless.
Hence saying they would crash. I'm honestly not sure if the wording of this line is agreeing with me or arguing with me...
The overwhelming majority of the TFO's still aren't a worthwhile time and skill investment, which is why they had to introduce random TFO's as a band-aid rather than bothering to overhaul the reward structure.
Unique rewards does nothing to improving long-term queue life. You earn the unique reward, you stop playing the queue immediately. It no longer has what you need. This is basic. Hence again reputations, adding more reasons to play queues than simply the unique items and customization unlocks (those are merely components of the system.)
Either you didn't bother to properly read the original post or you completely missed the point. Dilithium is a clear example of how broken the game economy is, it's directly linked to the lockbox economy rather than gameplay economy.
The two are part of the same integrated economic system, what you earn in gameplay can be used on (among other things in STO's wide ecosystem) lock box keys which (apart from using them) can be sold on the exchange in accordance with free economics. The EC can then be used to support gameplay (through new gear, traits, powers, ect.) either directly through the exchange or through the lock boxes themselves if you want to play the odds and don't care much what you pull from the grab bag. Note too that bridge officers, doff packs, fleet ship modules, and any other unbound c-store item can be used in the same way. Lock keys just offer the best return because, of these items, they're most in demand. Even if you went to the far extreme of removing lock boxes from STO, the effect here would be to shift emphasis on other transactions, not change underlying principles. They are NOT separate economies.
Use it, don't, there's other pathways to EC if the word "loot box" causes nervous twitching. STO's complex economy doesn't need to be remodeled (if your proposal has any real impact beyond causing EC inflation through peppering gameplay with higher value loot drops. Same effort, more return, MMO currency depreciates) per your reductive preferences.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
The overwhelming majority of the TFO's still aren't a worthwhile time and skill investment, which is why they had to introduce random TFO's as a band-aid rather than bothering to overhaul the reward structure.
Unique rewards does nothing to improving long-term queue life. You earn the unique reward, you stop playing the queue immediately. It no longer has what you need. This is basic. Hence again reputations, adding more reasons to play queues than simply the unique items and customization unlocks (those are merely components of the system.)
I grind a some marks (probably from allboxes, not the relevant queues), use half of them to unlock the rep and the other half on the ground set (for the costume unlock) then forget the rep existed. Because if I CAN get something at any time, I don't have to actually GET it until I need it, and nothing worth playing in STO requires any rep gear.
Reason to play it is not.
Once a player has got (enough copies of) a unique reward, they move on to the next one. If at any point any player has all the unique rewards, by any means other than paying through the nose to buy them, that's a cue for the devs to create more, rarer rewards and/or add more use for extra copies.
The overwhelming majority of the TFO's still aren't a worthwhile time and skill investment, which is why they had to introduce random TFO's as a band-aid rather than bothering to overhaul the reward structure.
Unique rewards does nothing to improving long-term queue life. You earn the unique reward, you stop playing the queue immediately. It no longer has what you need. This is basic. Hence again reputations, adding more reasons to play queues than simply the unique items and customization unlocks (those are merely components of the system.)
Either you didn't bother to properly read the original post or you completely missed the point. Dilithium is a clear example of how broken the game economy is, it's directly linked to the lockbox economy rather than gameplay economy.
The two are part of the same integrated economic system, what you earn in gameplay can be used on (among other things in STO's wide ecosystem) lock box keys which (apart from using them) can be sold on the exchange in accordance with free economics. The EC can then be used to support gameplay (through new gear, traits, powers, ect.) either directly through the exchange or through the lock boxes themselves if you want to play the odds and don't care much what you pull from the grab bag. Note too that bridge officers, doff packs, fleet ship modules, and any other unbound c-store item can be used in the same way. Lock keys just offer the best return because, of these items, they're most in demand. Even if you went to the far extreme of removing lock boxes from STO, the effect here would be to shift emphasis on other transactions, not change underlying principles. They are NOT separate economies.
Use it, don't, there's other pathways to EC if the word "loot box" causes nervous twitching. STO's complex economy doesn't need to be remodeled (if your proposal has any real impact beyond causing EC inflation through peppering gameplay with higher value loot drops. Same effort, more return, MMO currency depreciates) per your reductive preferences.
Again, still missing the point entirely and not even remotely what I'm talking about.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
If it were just players , you know, playing the game i.e leveling toons, gearing them up ... dressing them up ... grinding to get that one particular ship etc. then, no, the economy wouldn't need revamping/adjusting.
But it's not! The game is full of Gold Farming bots (or Dil/EC farming bots) It's full of people who do NOTHING else in the game except purposefully inflate the value of items on the exchange or those that run bots to pump out one specific item and the flood the market with it, to make EC to sell on Gold Seller websites.
As I mentioned, the recent influx of Specialization Manuals was a sure sign of external manipulation, not a player driven fluctuation. This Upgrade weekend is another example. At the start there were a lot of upgrades on the exchange, but they were slowly growing in price as the demand rose = a perfect opportunity for "players" to make some extra EC ... Then along came the Bots, and suddenly the exchange is literally flooded with 10's of thousands of stupidly low priced Upgrades so the Gold Seller sites can make some EC to sell to those foolish enough to give them money.
That is the kind of behaviour that should be monitored by a real person, but of course it never will be. And it's why items that require very specific behaviour to unlock would help "players" to earn EC as opposed to Bots, and "Whales" owning it all.
Not gonna happen, simply put because gamble boxes are their bread and butter money earner...so they want all of the good stuff coming from them.
That doesn't even make sense as the profitability of their gamble boxes would not be harmed in any way whatsoever.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
If it were just players , you know, playing the game i.e leveling toons, gearing them up ... dressing them up ... grinding to get that one particular ship etc. then, no, the economy wouldn't need revamping/adjusting.
But it's not! The game is full of Gold Farming bots (or Dil/EC farming bots) It's full of people who do NOTHING else in the game except purposefully inflate the value of items on the exchange or those that run bots to pump out one specific item and the flood the market with it, to make EC to sell on Gold Seller websites.
As I mentioned, the recent influx of Specialization Manuals was a sure sign of external manipulation, not a player driven fluctuation. This Upgrade weekend is another example. At the start there were a lot of upgrades on the exchange, but they were slowly growing in price as the demand rose = a perfect opportunity for "players" to make some extra EC ... Then along came the Bots, and suddenly the exchange is literally flooded with 10's of thousands of stupidly low priced Upgrades so the Gold Seller sites can make some EC to sell to those foolish enough to give them money.
So let me see if I understand correctly here. You're all TRIBBLED off because you were denied an opportunity to price gouge your fellow STO players this Upgrade weekend. Yet you are using your, "Concern For My Fellow STO Players", as a false flag.
So you can show the rest of us how deeply you care and what a good person you are.
That is the kind of behaviour that should be monitored by a real person, but of course it never will be. And it's why items that require very specific behaviour to unlock would help "players" to earn EC as opposed to Bots, and "Whales" owning it all.
I resent highly your implications I am somehow rigging the game entirely in my favor. I spend an average of about US $100.00 a month on this game. I guess I'm one of those mean people you're pretending to foam at the mouth about yet apparently desire above all else to become. I don't "own" anything at all in STO. The items I have, which includes a great many which are exclusive and no longer available to the proletariat, have exactly ZERO monetary value outside the confines of STO.
My last two comments on this.
- You're welcome to your, "Free To Play!" game. I reckon without alla us 'whales' you'd still be stuck in Farmville.
- Might wanna read Atlas Shrugged instead of all that Marxist stuff on how economies work. You're obviously not any smarter about the game economy than I am
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
Fun Fact that I just noticed: Even though Ultra Rare and Epic loot drops do not exist in the game, it is still possible to set either as the "Loot Threshold" in team settings.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
You know, I'd be happy if the loot tables simply got updated to be relevant with the current max item lvl. Even if they were only White/Green/Blue Mk XV drops, they would be better than the vendor/scrap garbage we get now, as there would be a random chance of getting something halfway decent (even if it is, say, an Armor for one of your BoFF's).
Not gonna happen, simply put because gamble boxes are their bread and butter money earner...so they want all of the good stuff coming from them.
That doesn't even make sense as the profitability of their gamble boxes would not be harmed in any way whatsoever.
Except if comparable loot dropped as random in game drops then that would lower the value of gamble boxes thus lower their revenue from it.
The only way it would lower the value of gamble boxes is if it dropped the SAME loot, which is not what we are talking about here.
Otherwise by that logic they should do away with the crafting system and reputation system entirely, because clearly its cutting into their lockbox profits!
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
A few things will put folk off buying into the gamble boxes.
The odds of the top prize being the most obvious but there's also how much useless padding gets dumped into them as well. And of course if the theme isn't interesting noone will want it as shown with the R&D promo ship that they changed that system to infinity promo for.
Even then the R&D promo is a total waste of time!
Other small niggles for me would be the randomised lobi reward per box, the cosmetics being buried under chance of a chance instead of a proper item.
As for missions, replay and loot, the new disco offering highlights nicely the problem there. Longish episode where no trash drops off kills and the rewards are junky mk11 greens. And of course there was the genius who thought a skippable cutscene was a barrier to replay value....
Comments
I don't see anyone else making that claim. Also... its a nice slap in the face for people who like to say anything about "P2W". If someone can grind ththose out... this game is not "P2W". Its just "pay2havenow".
No... I think the value of the lockbox ships would drop a LOT more than just 100-200 mil. They would most likely crash. You kinda underestimate how many lockboxes are being opened. If the odds were 1 in 10... we'd have quite a few people getting lockbox ships left and right by sheer volume alone. Some of the richest players in STO basically make a living off selling lockbox ships, and have the real world money to support that. They could buy pretty much anything they want without even breaking a sweat. The average price for a currently available lockbox ship is generally around 250 mil going up to maybe 300 mil.
Make the odds 1 in 10... and that average will probably go into freefall REAL fast. Market would get flooded within a day.
Wrong, people whined explicitly about not having access to the more appealing Elite costumes that unlocked with full sets of Mk XII ground gear. This was way back before equipment got rebalanced and the difference between Mk XI and XII gear was so miniscule it was inconsequential, even to min-maxers. Mk XII sets were all about prestige and vanity.
And earning them was just as much about the challenge as it was RNG, which is why the best gear with their visual unlocks only dropped from the Elite Task Force missions. Now anyone can get anything by simply just following the path of least resistance, rather than actually mastering the content.
The overwhelming majority of the TFO's still aren't a worthwhile time and skill investment, which is why they had to introduce random TFO's as a band-aid rather than bothering to overhaul the reward structure.
Either you didn't bother to properly read the original post or you completely missed the point. Dilithium is a clear example of how broken the game economy is, it's directly linked to the lockbox economy rather than gameplay economy.
[off topic]In the inventory of my six-going-on-seven year old KDF character, I have a complete set of Mk X KDF Honor Guard gear which I've never upgraded. Took me days of of running Borg STFs to earn enough Encrypted Data Chips to acquire it. Because I earned it, instead of purchased it, it holds special meaning and is some of the gear on this character I value most.[/off topic]
Back on topic
I sometimes think of this game as Auction House Online or Inflationary Pressure Online. I am unsure if the game economy can be adjusted to be more favorable to newer players at this point. The loot drops in Missions are scaled to the player and this means a lvl 30 character is going to get something they can use right now, whether or not it is useful, or they can sell for half its value to a vendor, or they can place on the Exchange for a price which either ridiculously high or equally ridiculously low. The end result is the same. a small return on investment for spending time in the game.
I created an AoD char and if my other five characters were not sitting on enormous amounts of currency, I would not have been able to equip it with at least Uncommon grade gear of the appropriate level. And even this was expensive, let alone the Upgrading and Re-Engineering and Crafting expenses to get the gear to something close to what I wanted.
I have no ideas at all about how to adjust the current ingame economy. I'm a truck driver, not a banker. But if a long term player such as myself struggled, then I can only imagine with horror what that new player who just started playing last week is going through.
Sure, there are many reliable ways to generate income ingame. And there are also reliable ways to keep expenses down as well. One could also take the "Buy Zen and everybody's happy" path too. But when I login, I want to play in the Star Trek world. Not have to think about how expensive that Mk Thirty MegaOblivion Quad Beam Array is and how much time ingame I'll have to devote to acquiring currency to purchase it. Doing so detracts from immersion. It also detracts from the Star Trek experience. Kirk, Picard, et al never seem to worry about how much something costs. So why should I have to?
To continue to grow and thrive, STO needs to constantly attract new players. How many of them turn away after discovering they cannot do what their favorite Captain does due to the ingame economy as it is right now?
And frankly I'm happy its not tied to other things as well. Neverwinter's version, Astral Diamonds, is actually used on their Auction House! And their Astral Diamond Exchange rates are much worse. In STO our DL Exchange averages out somewhere between 250 and 300. Pretty doable even for casuals to get some Zen. The Astral Diamond Exchange... is much higher because it is so integral to even using the frickin' Auction House and the much higher refine limit to accomidate that. STO only has 8k per character refine. 8.5 if you have a fleet mine, and 9 if you're a Lifer. Not really much of a blip on the exchange rate radar. And I doubt everyone makes use of them either.
Now... if we want to talk about something that is currently useless in the economy... GPL. We got squat to spend GPL on. I can build the frickin' Great Pyramid of Giza with the amount of GPL I have! I might as well be the frickin' Grand Nagus! Yet we got nothing to spend it all on.
Hence saying they would crash. I'm honestly not sure if the wording of this line is agreeing with me or arguing with me...
Unique rewards does nothing to improving long-term queue life. You earn the unique reward, you stop playing the queue immediately. It no longer has what you need. This is basic. Hence again reputations, adding more reasons to play queues than simply the unique items and customization unlocks (those are merely components of the system.)
The two are part of the same integrated economic system, what you earn in gameplay can be used on (among other things in STO's wide ecosystem) lock box keys which (apart from using them) can be sold on the exchange in accordance with free economics. The EC can then be used to support gameplay (through new gear, traits, powers, ect.) either directly through the exchange or through the lock boxes themselves if you want to play the odds and don't care much what you pull from the grab bag. Note too that bridge officers, doff packs, fleet ship modules, and any other unbound c-store item can be used in the same way. Lock keys just offer the best return because, of these items, they're most in demand. Even if you went to the far extreme of removing lock boxes from STO, the effect here would be to shift emphasis on other transactions, not change underlying principles. They are NOT separate economies.
Use it, don't, there's other pathways to EC if the word "loot box" causes nervous twitching. STO's complex economy doesn't need to be remodeled (if your proposal has any real impact beyond causing EC inflation through peppering gameplay with higher value loot drops. Same effort, more return, MMO currency depreciates) per your reductive preferences.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Reason to play it is not.
Once a player has got (enough copies of) a unique reward, they move on to the next one. If at any point any player has all the unique rewards, by any means other than paying through the nose to buy them, that's a cue for the devs to create more, rarer rewards and/or add more use for extra copies.
Haven't played many MMORPG's, have you?
Again, still missing the point entirely and not even remotely what I'm talking about.
dam boi, roflmao...
But it's not! The game is full of Gold Farming bots (or Dil/EC farming bots) It's full of people who do NOTHING else in the game except purposefully inflate the value of items on the exchange or those that run bots to pump out one specific item and the flood the market with it, to make EC to sell on Gold Seller websites.
As I mentioned, the recent influx of Specialization Manuals was a sure sign of external manipulation, not a player driven fluctuation. This Upgrade weekend is another example. At the start there were a lot of upgrades on the exchange, but they were slowly growing in price as the demand rose = a perfect opportunity for "players" to make some extra EC ... Then along came the Bots, and suddenly the exchange is literally flooded with 10's of thousands of stupidly low priced Upgrades so the Gold Seller sites can make some EC to sell to those foolish enough to give them money.
That is the kind of behaviour that should be monitored by a real person, but of course it never will be. And it's why items that require very specific behaviour to unlock would help "players" to earn EC as opposed to Bots, and "Whales" owning it all.
That doesn't even make sense as the profitability of their gamble boxes would not be harmed in any way whatsoever.
So let me see if I understand correctly here. You're all TRIBBLED off because you were denied an opportunity to price gouge your fellow STO players this Upgrade weekend. Yet you are using your, "Concern For My Fellow STO Players", as a false flag.
So you can show the rest of us how deeply you care and what a good person you are.
I resent highly your implications I am somehow rigging the game entirely in my favor. I spend an average of about US $100.00 a month on this game. I guess I'm one of those mean people you're pretending to foam at the mouth about yet apparently desire above all else to become. I don't "own" anything at all in STO. The items I have, which includes a great many which are exclusive and no longer available to the proletariat, have exactly ZERO monetary value outside the confines of STO.
My last two comments on this.
- You're welcome to your, "Free To Play!" game. I reckon without alla us 'whales' you'd still be stuck in Farmville.
- Might wanna read Atlas Shrugged instead of all that Marxist stuff on how economies work. You're obviously not any smarter about the game economy than I am
Except if comparable loot dropped as random in game drops then that would lower the value of gamble boxes thus lower their revenue from it.
The only way it would lower the value of gamble boxes is if it dropped the SAME loot, which is not what we are talking about here.
Otherwise by that logic they should do away with the crafting system and reputation system entirely, because clearly its cutting into their lockbox profits!
The odds of the top prize being the most obvious but there's also how much useless padding gets dumped into them as well. And of course if the theme isn't interesting noone will want it as shown with the R&D promo ship that they changed that system to infinity promo for.
Even then the R&D promo is a total waste of time!
Other small niggles for me would be the randomised lobi reward per box, the cosmetics being buried under chance of a chance instead of a proper item.
As for missions, replay and loot, the new disco offering highlights nicely the problem there. Longish episode where no trash drops off kills and the rewards are junky mk11 greens. And of course there was the genius who thought a skippable cutscene was a barrier to replay value....