Ummm... I'm NOT a voice for Cryptic. See signature below.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Now you might say tough S**t, you already got the main reward, but I still invested the requisite amount of time. That's what those shards represent, the fourteen runs worth of time that I put in for those events. A time investment which has just been needlessly rendered useless.
Except it's not useless. You already got the base rewards for doing the queue, the daily mark package and a little dilithium. IMO it's not a fair statement to say you wasted all your time. You just lost the bonus reward value. No different than playing the same queue multiple times a day on the same character.
It is quite a fair statement. I wouldn't have played those additional times at all if not for the shard. Shards that have been good for the Crystalline Entity event for over five years now and are now being thrown in the trash. There is no reasonable expectation that they would change the input for the event and give nothing in return.
That said, I have probably 50 tokens per character for each of those events combined, so I lost quite a lot as well.
I would have preferred a buy-back system like we had for the Qmendations.
A simple 1:1 swap for FTFO Commendations will not happen, since that will cut into the C-Store buyout pack, and keep people from playing new content for years.
And there is the truth of the matter. Profit Motive.
That said, I already have at least 14 FTFO Commendations on each of my 12 characters, so I still don't have to actually play for the next year if I don't want to.
And if they changed the system again for some reason with no buyout then those become useless and you will have to play again regardless. That's why I feel that this is bad form.
Overall, this is definitely a positive change. It'll make combining rewards from different events easier, and it'll simplify the 'currencies' in game. Excellent. I'll lose out on some (not many) stockpiled tokens, but I can deal with that.
They've been trying to simplify currencies for years. They decommission some currencies and then introduce new ones.
Why not enable the "1 token project" permanently/semi permanently for each of the token types you're retiring? That way, people will be able to get something for their saved tokens. Keep it to a 20 hour cooldown, so the game doesn't get flooded with marks/dilithium, and it should remain quite balanced.
Now you might say tough S**t, you already got the main reward, but I still invested the requisite amount of time. That's what those shards represent, the fourteen runs worth of time that I put in for those events. A time investment which has just been needlessly rendered useless.
I would not say that to you at all.
I would say that to the other poster ranting like a child and calling people names because he's not getting his way.
In your case, I hope that something is put in place to give you some form of compensation.
So...basically unified 21 day event token. Cool. Not a fan of losing out on the various tokens I have collected up to random degrees for the next event to roll around so I can get the goodies faster...but whatever, if we can use this one token for ALL the events, it means banking those tokens for the next event even faster.
I have a nagging suspicion that once they realize that's what's going to happen and it will actually decrease the metrics in runs on events down the line they'll switch back to different tokens.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
'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.'
Personally I'm a hoarder of everything, including old event currency, thus is my inner dragon. And while I am of course a wee bit miffed that those old currencies is turning out to be worthless, my inner dragon is very happy with the fact that I'll now have far more inventory space (really I have an ungodly amount of these things on some toons) because that means more room for new shinies. My inner dragon loves shinies.
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.
so we will loose all out 14 day event currency from past? very bad i always saved those in case i couldnt make the event in time... no compensation i guess... not fun
Well some people like me, played more on these events when work or family life was slow knowing that next time the event happened life would likely not be that way. So we built up tokens. Us evil hoarders who tried to balance life with a game until we got crypticed.
I have a nagging suspicion that once they realize that's what's going to happen and it will actually decrease the metrics in runs on events down the line they'll switch back to different tokens.
That's a possibility after so many players have been hurt by this change they wont want to run the events past the extra 14days. I know I wont be running extra days anymore past a set amount. I cannot speak for everyone but I expect the change will hurt metrics and cause some people to do less runs.
In the past 10 years I have ran just about every day of every event. No more. I will run a few backup days and that's it. I don't like all this simplification and streamlining, its good up to a point. To much simplification and streamlining is worse then being overcomplicated.
I have 1084 shards, 45 the breech tokens and 158 the mirror tokens. It's 1287 tokens in total. Also I have 5 the same the breech events sloted with 0 tokens in them. This is -70 tokens from my total. Where is my compensation for over than 1200 tokens?
That's a possibility after so many players have been hurt by this change they wont want to run the events past the extra 14days. I know I wont be running extra days anymore past a set amount. I cannot speak for everyone but I expect the change will hurt metrics and cause some people to do less runs.
I think that metrics will shift to a new normal. Some events like Crystalline are a combination of easy/fast and even fun. I will run the living TRIBBLE out of that event so I can stockpile 100+ tokens across multiple accounts to use on events that are not fast and/or boring. Events like Mirror Invasion, DISCO-Dranuur, and the most ludicrously boring one of all: Battle of the Binary Stars. Yes, the Battle in which we mop the floor with 200 Klingon ships without suffering a single loss only to hear T'Kuvma tell us how fortunate we are to have witnessed his arrival.
The only thing that could blunt future event token hoarding would be events like the free T6 ship one going on right now. Such an event requires that you continue to play despite token hoarding.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
Ummm... I'm NOT a voice for Cryptic. See signature below.
I'm glad we covered that legally.... I was however not referring to the legal definition or disclosures. It is not possible not to be seen connected to cryptic when you are a mod in their forums.
Looking back since my post though, things got way OTT on this subject and would like to thank you for taking the high road.
Clearly, mods are needed...geez!
Deleting players' FTFO tokens could be seen as deleting something players paid for. The last time, I bought the 10 tokens but still did the full event. So it could be argued that you are now about to delete the 10 tokens I paid for. At the very least, there should be some Dilthium exchange value for them. Preferably what you would have made if you had spent them on the secondary event turn-ins.
It seems funny that people are looking for a payout on something they decided to hoard for reasons that could only be described as hope for the future. It's much the same way as many in the Southern States did the exact same thing with Confederate Dollars and then expect them to have value once the Civil War was over and the Northern States had won.
Yet, with all this screaming of outrage has it ever occurred to such people that this is exactly the reason why Cryptic is doing what they're doing with the seasonal events: to stop those hoarding previous event-related currency for trying to take shortcuts on a similar projects in future content/projects.
It's no secret that Cryptic -- like so many other independent and Triple-A games -- have access to butt-tons of record keeping and statistical software to see all this information and then enacting upon on it accordingly? I learned this a long time ago when this game went F2P when they stepped forward and made offers to assist the playerbase with the unrefined dilithium hoarding to turn it into something else.. And they had said they knew people were hoarding millions in unrefined. So this decision came when they collected all this information and saw all the hoarding going on.
I'm not even going to cover the elephant some people keep trying to point to, and many others trying to dismiss. So I'll leave these questions to consider:
How my bytes and kilobytes (and perhaps even megabytes) are being used per account?
How many users are there in this game (active and inactive)?
How many of these inactive users come back during an event? How many additional bytes are being used per event currency in a person's inventory?
Anyone tries to answer this, good luck proving you work for Cryptic or have experience knowing that infrastructure in a game. Otherwise it's just proof you don't want to listen to anything other than the cacophony of hoarding for the sake of hoarding. Or a payout for the sake of something for -- and I'll continue to refer to it as -- useless currency.
And if there's going to be any finger wagging, consider this. When Cryptic made this decision, who do you think is really to blame for this? It's all black and white in their reports.
Don't be surprised when such decisions are made because of reports on the game manager's desk.
This outrage is good, it might get them to stop being pointy haired. Hopefully by the end of the summer, they'll come to something mutually beneficial. At least better than what happened when the New Romulus episodes dropped and they broke their promises back then. (And in case anyone remembers this -- player outrage caused the Dilithium Exchange to tank to record lows).
The auto-finishing thing doe one important thing: It ensures that everyone that was around when the event existed and slotted it will get an opportunity to actually get the item(s) e slotted it for.
That is the most valuable thing to save.
The fact that you also could earn some Dilithium or Marks is basically irrelevant. You can always make more Marks and more Dilithium later. But you'll never get those items account unlocked again without the project being completed.
Giving people something for unspent items would however be unfair to people that always put their tokens into projects immediately, instead of holding them back until they had enough to finish it.
Someone is always going to lose out.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
It is quite a fair statement. I wouldn't have played those additional times at all if not for the shard. Shards that have been good for the Crystalline Entity event for over five years now and are now being thrown in the trash. There is no reasonable expectation that they would change the input for the event and give nothing in return.
You choose to play them, with no guarantee the extras would be worth anything. Just because they have been in the past, doesn't mean they'd continue to be. Cryptic never made a guarantee that currency would be reused. We all took that gamble, and now we lost on it.
The difference with TFO tokens IMO is that now you can pay for them. So if they decided to remove them, they would have a serious problem on their hands. It would be like removing R&D packs or BOFFs you bought.
I still don't know if Cryptic is guaranteeing they'll work, but I'm still taking that gamble again.
Cryptic is being super generous on this one. Anyone hording tokens they COULD have put into the intended daily missions to earn their bit of dil and mark box. Was speculating. Speculation can go either way... you can get paid out when the next event comes and your ahead of the game. Or it can go pear shaped when that event is removed / deleted / or new versions use a new token. No one is owned anything for unspent tokens.
That Cryptic is kind enough to auto complete missions you had partially completed is fantastic... and frankly pretty unexpected.
The horders of the tokens clearly completed the 14 day missions already and claimed the items. They are out nothing at all.
People in general need to stop worrying about what some other person gets. Someone got to skip a few days of an old event... why should that bother you. Some folks sound like 2 year olds. Its NOT FAIR. Get over it. Life isn't fair. If you speculated you could skip a future event and that didn't pan out so be it.
Having said that unless Cryptic walks back their single token idea. Or adds better (collect the 3 events worth of completions) prizes (cause one single T6 ship after 3 full events isn't that great). I think I can see a lot of future events being skipped by many players. They will stock up on 14 of the new tokens on 10 alt toons during something quick like Crystaline... and skip more annoying newer 10-15min Disco events. (I will be)
Cryptic is being super generous on this one. Anyone hording tokens they COULD have put into the intended daily missions to earn their bit of dil and mark box. Was speculating. Speculation can go either way... you can get paid out when the next event comes and your ahead of the game. Or it can go pear shaped when that event is removed / deleted / or new versions use a new token. No one is owned anything for unspent tokens.
That Cryptic is kind enough to auto complete missions you had partially completed is fantastic... and frankly pretty unexpected.
The horders of the tokens clearly completed the 14 day missions already and claimed the items. They are out nothing at all.
People in general need to stop worrying about what some other person gets. Someone got to skip a few days of an old event... why should that bother you. Some folks sound like 2 year olds. Its NOT FAIR. Get over it. Life isn't fair. If you speculated you could skip a future event and that didn't pan out so be it.
Having said that unless Cryptic walks back their single token idea. Or adds better (collect the 3 events worth of completions) prizes (cause one single T6 ship after 3 full events isn't that great). I think I can see a lot of future events being skipped by many players. They will stock up on 14 of the new tokens on 10 alt toons during something quick like Crystaline... and skip more annoying newer 10-15min Disco events. (I will be)
The bolded area is a sweeping generalization, and ignores the fact that there ARE people who were waiting for 14 tokens to accumulate before slotting the event and missed it because of RL. I am one of those, a single toon has 12 crystals, and a few have multiple mirror tokens, because RL got in the way of finishing(I was already only running it on one toon, but It happens).
As for the rest, am i upset that I am not getting the Items while people who still have some slots filled from previous events(even if they have NO progress on them) are? No. Am i a bit upset that I will be losing those tokens w/o compensation? Yeah a bit. It is understandable in light of the fact that some people have hundreds or more of the things across their muiltiple toons/accounts, but still slightly annoying.
Also, pointing out at the end that you plan to "hoard" FTFO tokens kind of illustrates the problem with the single token for the different events, which was probably your point now that i think about it...
As for the rest, am i upset that I am not getting the Items while people who still have some slots filled from previous events(even if they have NO progress on them) are? No. Am i a bit upset that I will be losing those tokens w/o compensation? Yeah a bit. It is understandable in light of the fact that some people have hundreds or more of the things across their muiltiple toons/accounts, but still slightly annoying.
Also, pointing out at the end that you plan to "hoard" FTFO tokens kind of illustrates the problem with the single token for the different events, which was probably your point now that i think about it...
Not slotting the project meant you would NEVER get the item. The stack of tokens in the bank was never getting used to get OLD stuff.
I think the reason Cryptic did it this way is that if you want to treat the tokens as having value: what is the difference between an empty project and 7 tokens or a partially completed project with 7 tokens? They represent the same amount of effort.
It seems simple to me. Some people put in as little as 1 days effort and get the full reward while others that put in 13 days effort get zero reward. After 6+ years there was clear trend and reasonable expectation of saving tokens to be used next time.
For a lot of people it was common practice to not slot an event until you had the full amount of tokens. It’s hardly super generous to remove that after 6+years without reasonable notice to do anything about it. In fact it breaks one of the golden rules of MMORPS’s. Which is taking things away from players they spent time earning without compensation. Its even worse when you take away something from a player that spent many hours earning and give them nothing in return. Then give another player that did next to nothing and give them the full reward.
From a players point of view they have spent many hours earning these tokens with 6+ years of reasonable expectations of being able to reuse them. Now all of a sudden all those hours of playtime has been mostly wasted with little to show for it.
It doesn’t bother but I can see why others are upset.
For a lot of people it was common practice to not slot an event until you had the full amount of tokens.
Which has proven to be an incredibly bad decision on the part of those players. It's so obviously bad that it never even crossed my mind that someone would do it before people in this thread brought it up. Frankly, it sounds implausibly bad. It sounds more like a reverse-engineered argument to make their plight sound more sympathetic.
Anything, and I mean ANYTHING can happen to you any day. You finish 12 rounds of mirror and without warning the next day, BAM, you're in a car crash and in the hospital. If only you had slotted the project at the beginning. You would have avoided not only this mess, but the previously established problem of having to now acquire the event item from the phoenix pack over a year later.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
Crystalline Cataclysm 12
Into the Breach 11
First Contact Day 1 (forget to slot project after getting the Item)
Kobayashi Maru ?
Mirror Universe Invasion 8
Sompek Arena 8
When I read about the event I was lucky and happy for the stock, because of a 3 week holiday trip. But now I am disappointed.
Other Chars look nearly the same.
Instead of removing them and finished slotted projects, they should make
old project use new marks (as Summer/Winter event)
For a lot of people it was common practice to not slot an event until you had the full amount of tokens.
Which has proven to be an incredibly bad decision on the part of those players. It's so obviously bad that it never even crossed my mind that someone would do it before people in this thread brought it up. Frankly, it sounds implausibly bad. It sounds more like a reverse-engineered argument to make their plight sound more sympathetic.
Anything, and I mean ANYTHING can happen to you any day. You finish 12 rounds of mirror and without warning the next day, BAM, you're in a car crash and in the hospital. If only you had slotted the project at the beginning. You would have avoided not only this mess, but the previously established problem of having to now acquire the event item from the phoenix pack over a year later.
^ This
Back when the Winter/Summer ship events were made "exclusive" to that event, it was clear that you needed to slot it during that event or lose it forever. The first thing I did on login during an event was made sure I slotted the event in every character. As long as you slotted the event reward, even if you never contributed, you could still get it in the future, regardless of current token state. In fact, for the winter/summer event, even though the tokens expired, you could still slot next year's tokens in that old project iirc.
It seems simple to me. Some people put in as little as 1 days effort and get the full reward while others that put in 13 days effort get zero reward. After 6+ years there was clear trend and reasonable expectation of saving tokens to be used next time.
For a lot of people it was common practice to not slot an event until you had the full amount of tokens. It’s hardly super generous to remove that after 6+years without reasonable notice to do anything about it. In fact it breaks one of the golden rules of MMORPS’s. Which is taking things away from players they spent time earning without compensation. Its even worse when you take away something from a player that spent many hours earning and give them nothing in return. Then give another player that did next to nothing and give them the full reward.
From a players point of view they have spent many hours earning these tokens with 6+ years of reasonable expectations of being able to reuse them. Now all of a sudden all those hours of playtime has been mostly wasted with little to show for it.
It doesn’t bother but I can see why others are upset.
I'm not trying to fight with you... your argument simply sounds like the type I have to dissuade my grandchildren from making when one of them gets something the other doesn't.
As has been said if you didn't slot the project for some reason that is your fault. You where never getting a reward you didn't slot. Really where people collecting items without bothering to slot the project ? That to be frank sounds stupid.
Yes I am generalising that people with many tokens completed the project already and where stockpiling for the next event. That was always a gamble. I don't get upset when I TRIBBLE out. If I couldn't afford to loose the bet I wouldn't have made it.
As far as wasting your time... Did those event missions reward you nothing ? I guess they didn't give you dil and mark choice boxes for every complete. (often for little actual game play investment as half the people playing afk half the events) Keeping the token items was always a gamble... the ah why should someone else (who was working on the project) get rewarded retroactive?
Well why not... they where working on the project they never completed it believing they would be able to complete it later. I admit that was also a gamble. Cryptic could have likewise said to those people those events are over not coming back and we will deleted all uncompleted with no compensation. They could have which is why I say they where kind. Either way no sense getting hung about it. Anyone that was working on a previous event... congrats on your wind fall. For those that never slotted the project. Well lesson learned you have multiple project slots... slot them day one. For those hording after completion... all well the speculation went south. It happens.
Back when the Winter/Summer ship events were made "exclusive" to that event, it was clear that you needed to slot it during that event or lose it forever. The first thing I did on login during an event was made sure I slotted the event in every character. As long as you slotted the event reward, even if you never contributed, you could still get it in the future, regardless of current token state. In fact, for the winter/summer event, even though the tokens expired, you could still slot next year's tokens in that old project iirc.
First all Characters needed 1k tokens. Then there was the discount. Later it was changed to be a global unlock.
Using 2 Toons, so you have 1k at the beginning of the next year made sense.
Now doing the daily mission on multiple toons every day is senseless, because you will have tokens left.
So you need to slot it only at one char now.
Back when the Winter/Summer ship events were made "exclusive" to that event, it was clear that you needed to slot it during that event or lose it forever. The first thing I did on login during an event was made sure I slotted the event in every character. As long as you slotted the event reward, even if you never contributed, you could still get it in the future, regardless of current token state. In fact, for the winter/summer event, even though the tokens expired, you could still slot next year's tokens in that old project iirc.
First all Characters needed 1k tokens. Then there was the discount. Later it was changed to be a global unlock.
Using 2 Toons, so you have 1k at the beginning of the next year made sense.
Now doing the daily mission on multiple toons every day is senseless, because you will have tokens left.
So you need to slot it only at one char now.
Yes, now. However keep in mind most of the events included in this update are still character only projects (only a few were made account bound before the switch to FTFO).
No, the T6 Ship event was not about furthering the Discovery storyline. It just so happened that the first FTFO of the event happened to be a Discovery one.
If you have one of those projects slotted, even without a single token in them, they will auto complete. If you didn't slot the project, though, then yes, you're out of luck.
It's not a kick to anything, though. Everyone was given an opportunity to run the event, slot the project, and allocate their tokens. If you completed the main project, then you were given a secondary project to allocate extra tokens to, if you chose to run the event past the initial required number. If you chose not to turn those in, that's on you. You were given an opportunity to get rewarded for those, though.
I like the change, seems like a fair way for everyone.
If someone has been hoarding (I don't care of that offends you) event marks without slotting the projects then you have lost nothing, suck it up.. move on. If anything, they have done you a favor and given you back the bank space you have been needlessly wasting. Next time, slot the project like the rest of us.
I have 14 Crystalline Shards on some characters. I actually completed those events though, what happened was I played everyday for all 21 days of the event. Why? It saves me the time when some of my multiple characters already have some tokens ready to go.
So after two Crystalline entity events I end up with seven spare shards per run, ending up with 14 shards. Enough to complete the event and focus on doing it for someone else.
I CAN'T reslot the project after I finish it, so I hold the shards. And it's not as economical to simply do the daily afterwards as that would only net me 28,000 dilithium as opposed to 50,000.
Now you might say tough S**t, you already got the main reward, but I still invested the requisite amount of time. That's what those shards represent, the fourteen runs worth of time that I put in for those events. A time investment which has just been needlessly rendered useless.
The Crystalline Entity is an old event. So old it's currently in its third iteration. This can easily come off as change for change's sake, and it there's no carry over. I remember when they changed the tokens for the Summer Event. They still allowed you to use the previous tokens you already had. They didn't erase them from your inventory and say, "Tough Luck kid."
This is a bad call because they've told me retroactively, you wasted your time. I'm working now, I have less time to actually invest in these events, so this preemptive time saving by..."hoarding" is less offensive than imprecise, it's stockpiling has just been erased like profit in a Ferengi Stockmarket Crash.
I personally think that them just making everything a single TFO Commendation is redundant, but if it's what they're set on it's their prerogative.
But a buy back system would at least ameliorate that by giving us something for the time invested and the game work put in.
Them autocompleting slotted projects is generous, I don't deny that, and I'll get some benefit out of that on some characters.
But just Thanos Snapping the shards and other tokens we already have for nothing is just....wasteful. At least let us buy something with them, if not dilithium and marks, then Phoenix Packs, Universal upgrades. I don't recall them ever just nuking stuff we've earned out of existence.
The management of this game over the past 10 months has been atrocious. This type of "thinking" is a great example of it: If you didn't play and don't have tokens we will give you everything for free. If you did play and have tokens we will take those away and give you nothing.
Exactly.
I am in the same boat as you. I did the events, got the items, but did more runs and ended up with 14+ shards on more than one character. I still havent checked if I have any of the other tokens, but I guess that is moot now anyways.
I always did more runs of other events, so I had some to put towards events that I hated doing (Mirror event, I am looking at you).
But I guess that is no longer an option for me, as I don't trust Cryptic in not deciding 6 months from now to change them again, so I will actually skip the events I dislike, instead of doing them a few times and using saved up tokens.
They could have put a buyback npc or store in place, but I guess that would affect their profits. It was obviously a far better idea to annoy the playerbase just a little bit more, which I find both hilarious and quite sad...
“Which has proven to be an incredibly bad decision on the part of those players. It's so obviously bad that it never even crossed my mind that someone would do it before people in this thread brought it up. Frankly, it sounds implausibly bad. It sounds more like a reverse-engineered argument to make their plight sound more sympathetic.”
For 6+ years it wasn’t a bad decision it was the smart thing to do. For 6+ years there was a reasonable expectation that you could spend time earning tokens and reuse them at a later date. It was good practice to do extra runs and earn extra tokens and now those extra runs have been turned into wasted time. Which is another reason why some players are upset.
Another negative to this change it is has removed the backups people spent hours earning to cover future missed days. I am more bothered about that then missed events. I had enough tokens saved up so if something happened I wouldn’t miss the item from the next event. All that work has been made meaningless.
“As has been said if you didn't slot the project for some reason that is your fault. You where never getting a reward you didn't slot. Really where people collecting items without bothering to slot the project ? That to be frank sounds stupid.”
It’s not stupid as it made sense and for 6+ years it was a smart thing to do that offered benefits. It wasn’t all about getting the missed event; it was about using the tokens for the next event. If it was impossible complete the event because of X reason you could save the tokens for next time around and make sure you could get that one. Depending on how many days you missed and depending on what the reward was, you wouldn’t slot the event and use the events tokens towards next time.
Or like me you would keep enough spares so that if anything happened next time those spares could be used to make up for missed days. There was a reasonable expectation that those spares where not wasted time and could be used for future events.
“As far as wasting your time... Did those event missions reward you nothing ? I guess they didn't give you dil and mark choice boxes for every complete. (often for little actual game play investment as half the people playing afk half the events) Keeping the token items was always a gamble... the ah why should someone else (who was working on the project) get rewarded retroactive?”
Yes they rewarded nothing of value apart from tokens. Personally I find those dill and marks choices useless and meaningless. So I completely ignore them because they don’t do anything for me. From my point of view the only reason to run the events was to earn tokens and do things with the tokens. My personal policy was after unlocking the event, earn and keep 14 token spare in case next time around I missed a ton of days. That 14 days of running the queue has now been made meaningless. It didn't seem like a gamble because no one expected the devs to suddenly make the change without offering a chance to use the tokens. Every time something like that has happened in the past we had a chance to use the old currency or it was converted. Based on the past 10 years it was not unreasonable to save up tokens and expect to be able to use them later.
While it doesn't brother as I managed to unlock all the items I wanted and that was the core reason for me to run the events. I understand why it bothers some other people. I don't see it happening but what I would like to see is a way to convert some of the old tokens into new tokens so I could maintain a few backup days. It would be very frustrating if I missed the next event item because say my PC blow up or my internet dropped and all my backup tokens have been deleted. Although unlikely that's a real possibility now with the new system which is not something I had to worry about in the old system. I am more worried about this then any lost dill or lost marks which frankly I don't care about.
Collecting items for projects you don't have slotted is dumb. Sorry it just is. They gave us tons of project slots... you should have just filled them up if you didn't feel like running them now. Finnish them later. (although if they choose to just delete them instead of auto complete them so be it)
As far as the other rewards for events being worthless. If that was the case you where a fool for doing them over and over. OR the crystal was just so stupid easy you AFKed it. In which case again why should you get rewarded for AFKing the event ques ?
Also the rewards for the events where designed to be very good. You got your standard basic que reward... a universal mark box... AND either extra 3571 DIL for the first 14 runs, and 2000 (think it was can't remember) bonus every day for turning in your extra widget. That is hardly terrible rewards compared to standard ques.
Really the daily box rewards where almost as good as the big rewards anyway. There was little reason to hoard them... other then being able to skip the odd bad que. The only reward was being able to skip the worst events rather then afk them up.
I think the reason Cryptic did it this way is that if you want to treat the tokens as having value: What is the difference between an empty project and 7 tokens or a partially completed project with 7 tokens? They represent the same amount of effort.
This, pretty much...2 folks have the same number of tokens but one bothered to make the extra effort to be sure and slot the project during it's first run. One person made a bet, and the other hedged their bet.
If both folks having 7 is a result of one person with 7 and someone with 21, the person who earned 21 already got their payoff, and the person who tried and didn't quite make it for whatever reason now gets the reward because everyone's in the same boat of no longer being able to complete old events.
Since every non-completion could POTENTIALLY be a result of something out of people's control, the only fair way is how it's being done.
An Event starts, I slot the Project and put the Token in each day. I finish the Event Project. What I generally don't do is slot the Daily on the Character that ran the Event Project, I save those for the future. I may run a Daily on a Character or two. That is why one Character has 7 Shards, a few others have a Transporter, Shard, or Transmission. No thousands or even dozens. Not much of a loss for me. That is not the point.
The last time I ran all my Characters through an Event, was March 2017 for the first run of the new new Breach Event. Even though it was less than forty days since the Lukari Reputation released it was included for that Event and everyone needed Lukari Marks.
They will NOT ever deprecate the TFO Commendations - they sell them.
'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.'
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It is quite a fair statement. I wouldn't have played those additional times at all if not for the shard. Shards that have been good for the Crystalline Entity event for over five years now and are now being thrown in the trash. There is no reasonable expectation that they would change the input for the event and give nothing in return.
And there is the truth of the matter. Profit Motive.
And if they changed the system again for some reason with no buyout then those become useless and you will have to play again regardless. That's why I feel that this is bad form.
They've been trying to simplify currencies for years. They decommission some currencies and then introduce new ones.
I like that, solutions.
Well I appreciate the courtesy.
I have a nagging suspicion that once they realize that's what's going to happen and it will actually decrease the metrics in runs on events down the line they'll switch back to different tokens.
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.'
i am in the camp of ,slotted missions. but then there are players with half completed slotted. do they deserve both auto completion and token rewards?
then there are acc. with different number of captains ...
In the past 10 years I have ran just about every day of every event. No more. I will run a few backup days and that's it. I don't like all this simplification and streamlining, its good up to a point. To much simplification and streamlining is worse then being overcomplicated.
"You! Get! Nothing! You lose! Good day, Sir!"
I think that metrics will shift to a new normal. Some events like Crystalline are a combination of easy/fast and even fun. I will run the living TRIBBLE out of that event so I can stockpile 100+ tokens across multiple accounts to use on events that are not fast and/or boring. Events like Mirror Invasion, DISCO-Dranuur, and the most ludicrously boring one of all: Battle of the Binary Stars. Yes, the Battle in which we mop the floor with 200 Klingon ships without suffering a single loss only to hear T'Kuvma tell us how fortunate we are to have witnessed his arrival.
The only thing that could blunt future event token hoarding would be events like the free T6 ship one going on right now. Such an event requires that you continue to play despite token hoarding.
I'm glad we covered that legally.... I was however not referring to the legal definition or disclosures. It is not possible not to be seen connected to cryptic when you are a mod in their forums.
Looking back since my post though, things got way OTT on this subject and would like to thank you for taking the high road.
Clearly, mods are needed...geez!
It seems funny that people are looking for a payout on something they decided to hoard for reasons that could only be described as hope for the future. It's much the same way as many in the Southern States did the exact same thing with Confederate Dollars and then expect them to have value once the Civil War was over and the Northern States had won.
Yet, with all this screaming of outrage has it ever occurred to such people that this is exactly the reason why Cryptic is doing what they're doing with the seasonal events: to stop those hoarding previous event-related currency for trying to take shortcuts on a similar projects in future content/projects.
It's no secret that Cryptic -- like so many other independent and Triple-A games -- have access to butt-tons of record keeping and statistical software to see all this information and then enacting upon on it accordingly? I learned this a long time ago when this game went F2P when they stepped forward and made offers to assist the playerbase with the unrefined dilithium hoarding to turn it into something else.. And they had said they knew people were hoarding millions in unrefined. So this decision came when they collected all this information and saw all the hoarding going on.
I'm not even going to cover the elephant some people keep trying to point to, and many others trying to dismiss. So I'll leave these questions to consider:
How my bytes and kilobytes (and perhaps even megabytes) are being used per account?
How many users are there in this game (active and inactive)?
How many of these inactive users come back during an event? How many additional bytes are being used per event currency in a person's inventory?
And something you folk want to ignore:
How much slack (https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/slack-space-file-slack-space) is this information taking on the accounts (Yes, this exists in everything data on drives, people often forget it as modern OS kernels ignore it).
Anyone tries to answer this, good luck proving you work for Cryptic or have experience knowing that infrastructure in a game. Otherwise it's just proof you don't want to listen to anything other than the cacophony of hoarding for the sake of hoarding. Or a payout for the sake of something for -- and I'll continue to refer to it as -- useless currency.
And if there's going to be any finger wagging, consider this. When Cryptic made this decision, who do you think is really to blame for this? It's all black and white in their reports.
Don't be surprised when such decisions are made because of reports on the game manager's desk.
This outrage is good, it might get them to stop being pointy haired. Hopefully by the end of the summer, they'll come to something mutually beneficial. At least better than what happened when the New Romulus episodes dropped and they broke their promises back then. (And in case anyone remembers this -- player outrage caused the Dilithium Exchange to tank to record lows).
That is the most valuable thing to save.
The fact that you also could earn some Dilithium or Marks is basically irrelevant. You can always make more Marks and more Dilithium later. But you'll never get those items account unlocked again without the project being completed.
Giving people something for unspent items would however be unfair to people that always put their tokens into projects immediately, instead of holding them back until they had enough to finish it.
Someone is always going to lose out.
You choose to play them, with no guarantee the extras would be worth anything. Just because they have been in the past, doesn't mean they'd continue to be. Cryptic never made a guarantee that currency would be reused. We all took that gamble, and now we lost on it.
The difference with TFO tokens IMO is that now you can pay for them. So if they decided to remove them, they would have a serious problem on their hands. It would be like removing R&D packs or BOFFs you bought.
I still don't know if Cryptic is guaranteeing they'll work, but I'm still taking that gamble again.
Cryptic is being super generous on this one. Anyone hording tokens they COULD have put into the intended daily missions to earn their bit of dil and mark box. Was speculating. Speculation can go either way... you can get paid out when the next event comes and your ahead of the game. Or it can go pear shaped when that event is removed / deleted / or new versions use a new token. No one is owned anything for unspent tokens.
That Cryptic is kind enough to auto complete missions you had partially completed is fantastic... and frankly pretty unexpected.
The horders of the tokens clearly completed the 14 day missions already and claimed the items. They are out nothing at all.
People in general need to stop worrying about what some other person gets. Someone got to skip a few days of an old event... why should that bother you. Some folks sound like 2 year olds. Its NOT FAIR. Get over it. Life isn't fair. If you speculated you could skip a future event and that didn't pan out so be it.
Having said that unless Cryptic walks back their single token idea. Or adds better (collect the 3 events worth of completions) prizes (cause one single T6 ship after 3 full events isn't that great). I think I can see a lot of future events being skipped by many players. They will stock up on 14 of the new tokens on 10 alt toons during something quick like Crystaline... and skip more annoying newer 10-15min Disco events. (I will be)
The bolded area is a sweeping generalization, and ignores the fact that there ARE people who were waiting for 14 tokens to accumulate before slotting the event and missed it because of RL. I am one of those, a single toon has 12 crystals, and a few have multiple mirror tokens, because RL got in the way of finishing(I was already only running it on one toon, but It happens).
As for the rest, am i upset that I am not getting the Items while people who still have some slots filled from previous events(even if they have NO progress on them) are? No. Am i a bit upset that I will be losing those tokens w/o compensation? Yeah a bit. It is understandable in light of the fact that some people have hundreds or more of the things across their muiltiple toons/accounts, but still slightly annoying.
Also, pointing out at the end that you plan to "hoard" FTFO tokens kind of illustrates the problem with the single token for the different events, which was probably your point now that i think about it...
I think the reason Cryptic did it this way is that if you want to treat the tokens as having value: what is the difference between an empty project and 7 tokens or a partially completed project with 7 tokens? They represent the same amount of effort.
My character Tsin'xing
For a lot of people it was common practice to not slot an event until you had the full amount of tokens. It’s hardly super generous to remove that after 6+years without reasonable notice to do anything about it. In fact it breaks one of the golden rules of MMORPS’s. Which is taking things away from players they spent time earning without compensation. Its even worse when you take away something from a player that spent many hours earning and give them nothing in return. Then give another player that did next to nothing and give them the full reward.
From a players point of view they have spent many hours earning these tokens with 6+ years of reasonable expectations of being able to reuse them. Now all of a sudden all those hours of playtime has been mostly wasted with little to show for it.
It doesn’t bother but I can see why others are upset.
Anything, and I mean ANYTHING can happen to you any day. You finish 12 rounds of mirror and without warning the next day, BAM, you're in a car crash and in the hospital. If only you had slotted the project at the beginning. You would have avoided not only this mess, but the previously established problem of having to now acquire the event item from the phoenix pack over a year later.
Crystalline Cataclysm 12
Into the Breach 11
First Contact Day 1 (forget to slot project after getting the Item)
Kobayashi Maru ?
Mirror Universe Invasion 8
Sompek Arena 8
When I read about the event I was lucky and happy for the stock, because of a 3 week holiday trip. But now I am disappointed.
Other Chars look nearly the same.
Instead of removing them and finished slotted projects, they should make
^ This
Back when the Winter/Summer ship events were made "exclusive" to that event, it was clear that you needed to slot it during that event or lose it forever. The first thing I did on login during an event was made sure I slotted the event in every character. As long as you slotted the event reward, even if you never contributed, you could still get it in the future, regardless of current token state. In fact, for the winter/summer event, even though the tokens expired, you could still slot next year's tokens in that old project iirc.
I'm not trying to fight with you... your argument simply sounds like the type I have to dissuade my grandchildren from making when one of them gets something the other doesn't.
As has been said if you didn't slot the project for some reason that is your fault. You where never getting a reward you didn't slot. Really where people collecting items without bothering to slot the project ? That to be frank sounds stupid.
Yes I am generalising that people with many tokens completed the project already and where stockpiling for the next event. That was always a gamble. I don't get upset when I TRIBBLE out. If I couldn't afford to loose the bet I wouldn't have made it.
As far as wasting your time... Did those event missions reward you nothing ? I guess they didn't give you dil and mark choice boxes for every complete. (often for little actual game play investment as half the people playing afk half the events) Keeping the token items was always a gamble... the ah why should someone else (who was working on the project) get rewarded retroactive?
Well why not... they where working on the project they never completed it believing they would be able to complete it later. I admit that was also a gamble. Cryptic could have likewise said to those people those events are over not coming back and we will deleted all uncompleted with no compensation. They could have which is why I say they where kind. Either way no sense getting hung about it. Anyone that was working on a previous event... congrats on your wind fall. For those that never slotted the project. Well lesson learned you have multiple project slots... slot them day one. For those hording after completion... all well the speculation went south. It happens.
First all Characters needed 1k tokens. Then there was the discount. Later it was changed to be a global unlock.
Using 2 Toons, so you have 1k at the beginning of the next year made sense.
Now doing the daily mission on multiple toons every day is senseless, because you will have tokens left.
So you need to slot it only at one char now.
Yes, now. However keep in mind most of the events included in this update are still character only projects (only a few were made account bound before the switch to FTFO).
I am in the same boat as you. I did the events, got the items, but did more runs and ended up with 14+ shards on more than one character. I still havent checked if I have any of the other tokens, but I guess that is moot now anyways.
I always did more runs of other events, so I had some to put towards events that I hated doing (Mirror event, I am looking at you).
But I guess that is no longer an option for me, as I don't trust Cryptic in not deciding 6 months from now to change them again, so I will actually skip the events I dislike, instead of doing them a few times and using saved up tokens.
They could have put a buyback npc or store in place, but I guess that would affect their profits. It was obviously a far better idea to annoy the playerbase just a little bit more, which I find both hilarious and quite sad...
Another negative to this change it is has removed the backups people spent hours earning to cover future missed days. I am more bothered about that then missed events. I had enough tokens saved up so if something happened I wouldn’t miss the item from the next event. All that work has been made meaningless.
It’s not stupid as it made sense and for 6+ years it was a smart thing to do that offered benefits. It wasn’t all about getting the missed event; it was about using the tokens for the next event. If it was impossible complete the event because of X reason you could save the tokens for next time around and make sure you could get that one. Depending on how many days you missed and depending on what the reward was, you wouldn’t slot the event and use the events tokens towards next time.
Or like me you would keep enough spares so that if anything happened next time those spares could be used to make up for missed days. There was a reasonable expectation that those spares where not wasted time and could be used for future events.
Yes they rewarded nothing of value apart from tokens. Personally I find those dill and marks choices useless and meaningless. So I completely ignore them because they don’t do anything for me. From my point of view the only reason to run the events was to earn tokens and do things with the tokens. My personal policy was after unlocking the event, earn and keep 14 token spare in case next time around I missed a ton of days. That 14 days of running the queue has now been made meaningless. It didn't seem like a gamble because no one expected the devs to suddenly make the change without offering a chance to use the tokens. Every time something like that has happened in the past we had a chance to use the old currency or it was converted. Based on the past 10 years it was not unreasonable to save up tokens and expect to be able to use them later.
While it doesn't brother as I managed to unlock all the items I wanted and that was the core reason for me to run the events. I understand why it bothers some other people. I don't see it happening but what I would like to see is a way to convert some of the old tokens into new tokens so I could maintain a few backup days. It would be very frustrating if I missed the next event item because say my PC blow up or my internet dropped and all my backup tokens have been deleted. Although unlikely that's a real possibility now with the new system which is not something I had to worry about in the old system. I am more worried about this then any lost dill or lost marks which frankly I don't care about.
Collecting items for projects you don't have slotted is dumb. Sorry it just is. They gave us tons of project slots... you should have just filled them up if you didn't feel like running them now. Finnish them later. (although if they choose to just delete them instead of auto complete them so be it)
As far as the other rewards for events being worthless. If that was the case you where a fool for doing them over and over. OR the crystal was just so stupid easy you AFKed it. In which case again why should you get rewarded for AFKing the event ques ?
Also the rewards for the events where designed to be very good. You got your standard basic que reward... a universal mark box... AND either extra 3571 DIL for the first 14 runs, and 2000 (think it was can't remember) bonus every day for turning in your extra widget. That is hardly terrible rewards compared to standard ques.
I think the reason Cryptic did it this way is that if you want to treat the tokens as having value: What is the difference between an empty project and 7 tokens or a partially completed project with 7 tokens? They represent the same amount of effort.
This, pretty much...2 folks have the same number of tokens but one bothered to make the extra effort to be sure and slot the project during it's first run. One person made a bet, and the other hedged their bet.
If both folks having 7 is a result of one person with 7 and someone with 21, the person who earned 21 already got their payoff, and the person who tried and didn't quite make it for whatever reason now gets the reward because everyone's in the same boat of no longer being able to complete old events.
Since every non-completion could POTENTIALLY be a result of something out of people's control, the only fair way is how it's being done.
The last time I ran all my Characters through an Event, was March 2017 for the first run of the new new Breach Event. Even though it was less than forty days since the Lukari Reputation released it was included for that Event and everyone needed Lukari Marks.
They will NOT ever deprecate the TFO Commendations - they sell them.
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.'