When 'Participate in a PVP Match' comes up in the Universal, I normally Queue for Ground. I die a few times but it's not too bad. I do get some kills in.
One night Ground wouldn't pop, so I switched to Space. Never again. I constantly blew up and when respawned was blown up practically immediately by campers. Seemed much more toxic than Ground.
When Competitive first came out, I had one Character do 'Binary Circuit' to unlock the discount. That Character ran it on Elite. That was and has been the only TFO that I have ever run on Elite. With a few exceptions all other Characters got the Rep done with Marks from other sources.
Strategums have been gotten through Marks conversion, when needed. I tried to do 'Binary Circuit' on Elite for Universal but had to dial back to Advanced to get it to pop.
'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.'
I honestly don't really understand the purpose of the 20 hour cooldown on buying elite marks, so that is something I'd like to see gone anyway, but it would obviously help most here.
I think its to prevent people with huge stockpiles of marks from converting all at once. Currently, being able to have choice boxes, if the cooldown was removed, someone could theoretically just run the easiest content in the game with choice boxes, spam the marks, and then spam convert to get gear, all without EVER touching associated content. It would be like saying "I want Discovery Rep gear... lets go run Infected and fight Borg!"
The cooldown is annoying yes, but I can kinda see a method to the madness. Get players to run associated content. But when it comes to the Competitive Rep... it is far more annoying.
I don't know if there's a difference in turning in converted Elite Marks for DL and turning in marks for DL, as I haven't mathed it out, but it could also be an economy thing as well.
that's what i absolutely HATED about red alerts going away. that was my main source of getting the harder to get marks, like Competitive.
Not everything needs to be instant. Ask people to join you on weekends or at peek times... people don't mind running those ques but they won't randomly que it and sit there for hours either. Ask in one of the major in game channels and you can get them going. There are days when Cryptic adds comp que stuff to the endeavor list... on those days run it a few times and store them.
Also run the 1 hr missions. The gear boxs can drop them.... so run the 1hr mission as often as its up when your on. When you have a stack of 20-30 of them open them and hopefully pull 2-3 Stratagems.
On the plues side. Once you have the bits you want you will have no need for them ever again. Its ok for it to be a few week grind. Frankly Crytpic gives away the other rep bits far to easily... they should all be random drops from ques with the chance of a drop increasing with difficulty. In most MMOs putting together full sets of end game gear isn't a 20 min process, its ok for it to take a few weeks.
clearly you have not been around long. in the bad old days people would queue for the Omega STFs in the hopes of getting the bits they needed for the gear.. old timers will tell you how badly it sucked. literally play 50 -80 times and MAYBE get one drop.
Anyways... while it is mostly my own views, it is coming from a casual who doesn't do hardcore PvP but has experienced PvP. I love a good fight. One where one wrong move may turn the tide. But also one that isn't literally just buff until you can oneshot your opponent before they can even react to your appearance.
If I wanna PvP, I wanna be able to actually fight back. Not just boost the opponent's kill score by my mere existance.
Honestly I always preferred Twin Tribulations over Core Assault. Because it didn't matter if you were geared for direct PvP or not. It was more of a mechanics race than anything. Even a PvE group could do it. Core Assault was more popular for some reason. And unfortunately... I once had the "fun" of being oneshot multiple times and being unable to even get out to attack the opponent's core because they were camping our exit point and killing anything they see instantly. My entire team was spawn camped. The only thing we were able to do was at least introduce them to a Megawell, which doesn't care if you live or not to stay active, and they had fun trying to esape it. Still didn't help us in the end though.
I don't find being on the recieving end of instakills fun. I find it frustrating and demoralizing. Especially when you're in a situation where the opponent is literally spawn camping you FOR THE LULZ. Its not a fight. Its shooting fish in a barrel. And I'm pretty sure most players would agree that being in that situation is not fun. It was literally "Why bother?"
It is not fair, honorable, or sportsmanlike to the team on the recieving end. Pick whatever analogy fits.
On the other hand.... If you get the stuff you want even if you get your face wrecked for 20 minutes straight.... Does it really matter whether you won or lost? this is the #1 thing I've noticed with games that have PvP. People hate it a lot less if they get a decent reward even if they lose. It's why "winning" in the Comp Rep TFO is an optional side payout, and not the main payout.
Yes adding elite marks to open PvP zones would be horrible IF only the winners get them.... Although one of my runs of Otha, the guys who KOed me still ended up staring at a "You lost" screen. In Otha the real goal is not to KO the other players, that's just for fun. the real goal is to push the buttons on the Borg consoles. I pushed the button first. Doesn't matter if I got one shotted by a lunge attack afterwards. I completed the open PvP mission, so I got the mission reward. They still got something though.
clearly you have not been around long. in the bad old days people would queue for the Omega STFs in the hopes of getting the bits they needed for the gear.. old timers will tell you how badly it sucked. literally play 50 -80 times and MAYBE get one drop.
Been there, done that, watched feetmates get the gubbins. A couple multiple times in a row.
Not everything needs to be instant. Ask people to join you on weekends or at peek times... people don't mind running those ques but they won't randomly que it and sit there for hours either. Ask in one of the major in game channels and you can get them going. There are days when Cryptic adds comp que stuff to the endeavor list... on those days run it a few times and store them.
Also run the 1 hr missions. The gear boxs can drop them.... so run the 1hr mission as often as its up when your on. When you have a stack of 20-30 of them open them and hopefully pull 2-3 Stratagems.
On the plues side. Once you have the bits you want you will have no need for them ever again. Its ok for it to be a few week grind. Frankly Crytpic gives away the other rep bits far to easily... they should all be random drops from ques with the chance of a drop increasing with difficulty. In most MMOs putting together full sets of end game gear isn't a 20 min process, its ok for it to take a few weeks.
clearly you have not been around long. in the bad old days people would queue for the Omega STFs in the hopes of getting the bits they needed for the gear.. old timers will tell you how badly it sucked. literally play 50 -80 times and MAYBE get one drop.
and because of that it popped and started
today, you could get all your marks via the events, basically no need to play anything else anymore. i mean right now you could get up to 270! marks of choice from phavo ground elite (including competitive marks).
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its not needed to add anything new to get those marks, the elite marks could be gained by conversion once per day. if you want it faster, just get the tfo running, binary circuit elite is usualy the best way to do so. advertise it in serveral pve centered channels like dps-bronze etc and it usualy will start. You wil get one of the elite marks for loosing too, just more for winning
(p.s. its a race not a pvp match, just keep an eye on enemy agons field generator spheres, thats the only source an enemy player could actually kill you)
I think the issue is that its set up to build a team of 5, then pop. With the majority of TFOs being 5 man jobs, how the hell do you enable something for twice that many players? Its going to throw the first 5 people into something before you get 10 people gathered. We'd probably need a seperate system for 10 man TFOs. Problem is... there's pretty much just... um... 1 than I can think of?
So yea its a technical issue.
Actually (as I think another poster already pointed out) there are about six or seven TFOs that have numbers of players greater than five. Crystalline, all the Comp Rep ones, and a couple more. (Ignoring the teaming issue; these operate with multi teams.)
My point was that all of those are excluded from the random TFO system. Which, in the topic of this thread, makes the Comp rep elite marks hard to get because this includes ALL of the TFOs that award them.
On a side note, there's one that I recall that is event-only, from an event which hasn't run in years... it might be fun if the devs brought that back. (The Shuttle Event, which included 20-players-in-shuttles versions of the usually-5-player factional Fleet Alerts. And it is a simple rejiggering of the player settings: the enemies are identically in full size starships.)
Coming back to topic though... I still think the best solution would simply be to reduce the cooldown on marks conversion (possibly for all the reps, to be equal) to something in the 1-4 hour range. And it should have no effect on the dilithium economy because I'm pretty sure that the exchange rate is better on the normal marks, so this would be of no benefit to dilithium farming.
there are a few queues rewarding all marks all the time like the breach if i remember correctly. in addition, you could get competitive marks via the random tfo system. in worst case, queue for random tfos and get your competitive marks that way.
I seem to remember one of the Recruitment Event unlocks are 5 Elite Marks - I recommend holding that in reserve if you have access to it. If not, the Elite Mark conversion project really seems the only reliable choice. Or getting 9 friends that are willling to queue up with you for the Competitive TFOs.
Other than that... Cryptic needs a way to get RTFOs to also work with the Competitive Queues.
Or alternatively, they could build a Competitive Battle Zone? Maybe they could rework mechanics from the Competitive Queues for that purpose. Each side has to 3 rooms they can do together or in parallel, and that eventually opens a shared room with a warp core for each faction where people can go at each other until one core finally explodes. Maybe as improvement at a one-way-shield to protect spawn points.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
the thing that hurts Competitive rep is the only way to get the stratagems aside from marks is to do the Competitive queues, which have the stigma of being attached to pvp, even if only one of them has direct PVP potential at the end of it. Personally that's still one queue too many for my tastes but more power to the folks that like it. I've never liked the ideas of forced pvp, or feeling pigeonholed into doing pvp to advance something. Far as I'm concerned forced pvp is a cancer that needs to be eradicated from online gaming completely, as I feel no player should have a right to force their style of play on another. I also think pigeonholing folks into something they have no desire of doing, such as when Kobali ground used to be mandatory, is bad design. However those are different arguments for different days. The fact that folks associate it with pvp hurts it immensely as the community has more than made clear they have no desire for major pvp anything. At this point balancing would be an absolute nightmare and would negatively effect PVE unless they put a modifier onto the code of every ability. "If target is player apply X, if target is NPC apply Y."
I still say stick the stratagems into something like Gamma Quadrant, or another similar area and call it a day. Put a cheapo competitive queue together or something if need be where folks compete in something similar to First Contact Day event and stick them in there. For that matter they could bring in the Stratajama game and let people compete against each other in that. Loser gets 1 stratagem guaranteed at least, winner gets 3. can double those numbers on elite. Personally I would play the living daylights out of a Stratajama type thing.
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
Or alternatively, they could build a Competitive Battle Zone? Maybe they could rework mechanics from the Competitive Queues for that purpose. Each side has to 3 rooms they can do together or in parallel, and that eventually opens a shared room with a warp core for each faction where people can go at each other until one core finally explodes. Maybe as improvement at a one-way-shield to protect spawn points.
So... just a big battlezone sized version of Core Assault?
And the one way shield didn't help my team as the ONLY safe spot... was our respawn point. We go anywhere near the door that leads out to the Core Room... we die. We literally COULD NOT MOVE without dying. They couldn't come in, but they didn't need to. With weapons ranges they could touch us without coming into our room. You could tweak it to say you can't even target anything on the other side of the shield, but that won't solve the problem. You still have to come out to fight and go after the objective. All they have to do is wait until you come out, then kill you the second you're targetable. For all intents and purposes... nothing will have changed from the scenario I was in. The only thing that does change... is where you die from camping. Right outside the door rather than inside.
I had similar experiences of it. Not too long after Core Assualt etc appeared it became obvious that some PvPers had taken to queueing for it for no reason other than to prove their superiority over PvE players. I distinctly remember feeling dismayed when the oposing team were all from a known PvP fleet (I won't name and shame) and predictably wiped the floor with the PuG team I was in when we got to the core room.
Which is a situation that honestly should have been considered with the Competitive queues. Its basically allows professionals to team up against a PUG team... and guarantee a win.
I don't mind the mechanics race elements because that's PvE, and also a test of coordination. I find that a fun challenge as it also doesn't matter if you're a PvP God, the odds are still relatively even. But the second direct PvP comes into play... the deck is stacked in favor of the professionals.
The thing that sets the competitive TFOs apart from the others is that you're actually competing with another team to win. Yes you still get a reward, but its like any team sport. You still want to win.
Experienced a minor miracle this evening: one of the advanced competitive TFO's i queued for actually popped.
I'm not sure if i am in favor of adding Assessed Stratagems to Gamma Quadrant content.
That would be like adding them to some unrelated content simply because no Elite marks were added there yet.
Taking Assessed Stratagems and nailing them to undead content (sorry for those who enjoy PVP but the description fits) with an often questionable reputation doesn't sound like it will solve the availability either.
War Zones are also a bit of a double edged sword. It is readily available, but it is associated with PVP which has a bad reputation.
Adding those 5/5 TFO's to the RTFO list would be preferable, but as pointed out we do not know if the mechanic can actually handle it.
So since all options mentioned above come with severe drawbacks the only remaining options would be to either reduce the 20hour cooldown or allow more marks to be converted at once (5 per period of 20 hours?)
Post edited by questerius on
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
One more suggestion, how do people feel about adding Stratagems to Sompek?
E.g. as a reward for reaching level 40, then another at 60, then 70 etc.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
One more suggestion, how do people feel about adding Stratagems to Sompek?
E.g. as a reward for reaching level 40, then another at 60, then 70 etc.
Too high for a single stratagem but otherwise I like the idea.
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
Been running the disco full set but I am eying up the competitive gear, definitely sad panda over the fact I'll be needing to grind 1 elite mark a day.
One more suggestion, how do people feel about adding Stratagems to Sompek?
E.g. as a reward for reaching level 40, then another at 60, then 70 etc.
Too high for a single stratagem but otherwise I like the idea.
40 too high? Last Saturday we took a PUG into sompek and easily got to 42 with 1-2 dropping out halfway.
Anyway, it's an example so an arbitrary level below that would do.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Currently in the process of gathering Assessed Stratagems for some rep gear.
However, Advanced or Elite difficulty TFO for the Assessed Stratagems rarely pop and are excluded from the random queue.
IMO this makes gathering said Assessed Stratagems IMO a huge annoyance. In your opinion could we do with another source for those Stratagems?
Or should the 20 hour restriction for converting marks into Assessed Stratagems be lifted?
Is waiting 10 days for a 2 piece space set unreasonable? 5 more days if you'd like to try a different space set piece? 15 days for a 3 piece ground set to unlock visuals? Reaching Tier 5 in this rep rewards 5 Stratagems so the first rep item is instant and you could subtract 5 days off any of the above.
Lot's of things in this game aren't instant. 20 days to Tier 5 reputations, another 30 or so to Tier 6. Also event rewards, doffing, spec points, admiralty, refining dilithium, etc...
Looking at a new character created April 8th of this year the toon had everything they needed about 20 days after spending almost 4 days to rank up to level 65.
Earlier this week the same toon had fully filled out both of their primary and secondary specialization point trees and is now mature in every way in that respect as well aside from a alternate tertiary specialization such as Commando and Tier 6 reputations that I'd expect to have on more senior toons that have been around for much longer.
All this was achieved playing nothing more than events.
I'm pretty sure the devs have two main ideas in mind when setting stuff like this:
Does the reward feel thematically appropriate?
Is making it worth the time?
With those in mind, I'd be very surprised if they built a new map just to let people get more assessed stratagems. Also they're not gonna put them into something that has no PvP. This is the PvP rep. The enemies the rep is tailored to fight are OTHER PLAYERS. So any source they add has to be PvP oriented, and they're not gonna build a brand new BZ. So either they revamp an old BZ, or there won't be one that rewards Assessed Stratagems. And there's only 2 thematically appropriate BZs that exist.
Reworking Breaking the Planet could be a viable idea... but how would that be better than simply adding them to Otha?
Currently in the process of gathering Assessed Stratagems for some rep gear.
However, Advanced or Elite difficulty TFO for the Assessed Stratagems rarely pop and are excluded from the random queue.
IMO this makes gathering said Assessed Stratagems IMO a huge annoyance. In your opinion could we do with another source for those Stratagems?
Or should the 20 hour restriction for converting marks into Assessed Stratagems be lifted?
Is waiting 10 days for a 2 piece space set unreasonable? 5 more days if you'd like to try a different space set piece? 15 days for a 3 piece ground set to unlock visuals? Reaching Tier 5 in this rep rewards 5 Stratagems so the first rep item is instant and you could subtract 5 days off any of the above.
Lot's of things in this game aren't instant. 20 days to Tier 5 reputations, another 30 or so to Tier 6. Also event rewards, doffing, spec points, admiralty, refining dilithium, etc...
Looking at a new character created April 8th of this year the toon had everything they needed about 20 days after spending almost 4 days to rank up to level 65.
Earlier this week the same toon had fully filled out both of their primary and secondary specialization point trees and is now mature in every way in that respect as well aside from a alternate tertiary specialization such as Commando and Tier 6 reputations that I'd expect to have on more senior toons that have been around for much longer.
All this was achieved playing nothing more than events.
The question is: why is there a disparity between the competitive reputation and others in the availability of Elite Marks?
I can gather enough Elite marks for a 3-piece of Omega or Dyson gear in less than a day simply because i can queue for one of their advanced TFO and the random system fills out the queue.
For a 3-piece of the competitive reputation i need to spend 15x20 hours (with sleep involved) 15 days to gather the necessary elite marks because the advanced/elite queues for it rarely pop. It's not about instant gratification, but rather an aggravating delay.
I am actually rooting for an universal endeavor so i can gather Stratagems in a way other than convert 100 marks or start an hourly project and hope to get lucky.
Since the devs made a conscious decision not to include this rep in the RTFO is it really too much to ask that they level the playing field for acquiring the necessary materials?
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
I honestly don't really understand the purpose of the 20 hour cooldown on buying elite marks, so that is something I'd like to see gone anyway, but it would obviously help most here.
I think its to prevent people with huge stockpiles of marks from converting all at once. Currently, being able to have choice boxes, if the cooldown was removed, someone could theoretically just run the easiest content in the game with choice boxes, spam the marks, and then spam convert to get gear, all without EVER touching associated content. It would be like saying "I want Discovery Rep gear... lets go run Infected and fight Borg!"
The cooldown is annoying yes, but I can kinda see a method to the madness. Get players to run associated content. But when it comes to the Competitive Rep... it is far more annoying.
I don't know if there's a difference in turning in converted Elite Marks for DL and turning in marks for DL, as I haven't mathed it out, but it could also be an economy thing as well.
that's what i absolutely HATED about red alerts going away. that was my main source of getting the harder to get marks, like Competitive.
Have I missed something? RTFO gives you a mark box worth at least 50 marks that you can open for any rep.
Have I missed something? RTFO gives you a mark box worth at least 50 marks that you can open for any rep.
The subject at hand is the availability of the ELITE marks that you get from Advanced queues or trading 100 marks for one elite. Its the Competitive Rep version of the Borg Neural Processor from advanced Borg TFOs.
Have I missed something? RTFO gives you a mark box worth at least 50 marks that you can open for any rep.
The subject at hand is the availability of the ELITE marks that you get from Advanced queues or trading 100 marks for one elite. Its the Competitive Rep version of the Borg Neural Processor from advanced Borg TFOs.
and since there is the 1 elite mark per day via mark trade in already, there is really no need to actually change something at all. its just that some people want it faster without playing the queues / trying sto get the queues running. the ONLY reason why those queues actually start sometimes is because they reward you with those marks. dont take those away or remove those queues directly.
i mean at the end we could remove all the queues, place a ncp somewhere to claim all the stuff directly, would solve a lot of problems for most people i guess;)
I would love to play the queues, but for the past two weeks while i queued every moment i was online i only got a competitive queue to pop once.
The competitive TFO are outside the Random TFO and require 2x5 so they rarely get played.
This leads to having to invest 300 hours (with sleep 360 hours) to gather enough Stratagems for a full 3-piece set.
Yeah, totally lazy when one asks for a more efficient way to gather those elite marks especially considering how easy elite marks are to obtain for every other reputation which has them.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
I would love to play the queues, but for the past two weeks while i queued every moment i was online i only got a competitive queue to pop once.
The competitive TFO are outside the Random TFO and require 2x5 so they rarely get played.
This leads to having to invest 300 hours (with sleep 360 hours) to gather enough Stratagems for a full 3-piece set.
Yeah, totally lazy when one asks for a more efficient way to gather those elite marks especially considering how easy elite marks are to obtain for every other reputation which has them.
sitting there and waiting for the queue to pop without any form of promotion in dedicated pve channels (dps-bronze and so on as example) would lead to exactly what you see there.
promoting them (even add zonechat, reddit etc into it) and you will get a pop with a decent amount of time, for me it was the last time i've tried like maybe 15 minutes or so till it started.
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promote it, let people know you wanna play binary circuit elite (yes do that one, not the space ones and yes use elite) and here you go
I have actually tried those channels as well, only to be met with silence.
Must be great living your life and having your availability to those queues , but it blows for everyone else.
Not to mention that if you need to use a third party resource to play anything in the game then that feature in the game is seriously lacking.
The suggestions made here like adding them to sompek or reducing the cooldown of the mark conversion are the way to move forward.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
I have actually tried those channels as well, only to be met with silence.
Must be great living your life and having your availability to those queues , but it blows for everyone else.
Not to mention that if you need to use a third party resource to play anything in the game then that feature in the game is seriously lacking.
The suggestions made here like adding them to sompek or reducing the cooldown of the mark conversion are the way to move forward.
no, thats the way to remove those queues directly from the game, because they dont solve any purpose anymore. actually a lot of queues are pertty much useless due to the all marks form the event we get 3 out of 4 weeks a month
and if the dedicated pve channels dont work (you should tell them to "queue up for bce please" as example), extend to the reddit chat, to your fleet chars, to the zone chat...
or just convert one mark once per day and wait.
because, you got 2 possiblities, slow and easy = convert the normal marks, fast and a bit more difficult = play the queue.
you just want it fast and easy, thats all. its not blocked or anything.
I have actually tried those channels as well, only to be met with silence.
Must be great living your life and having your availability to those queues , but it blows for everyone else.
Not to mention that if you need to use a third party resource to play anything in the game then that feature in the game is seriously lacking.
The suggestions made here like adding them to sompek or reducing the cooldown of the mark conversion are the way to move forward.
no, thats the way to remove those queues directly from the game, because they dont solve any purpose anymore. actually a lot of queues are pertty much useless due to the all marks form the event we get 3 out of 4 weeks a month
and if the dedicated pve channels dont work (you should tell them to "queue up for bce please" as example), extend to the reddit chat, to your fleet chars, to the zone chat...
or just convert one mark once per day and wait.
because, you got 2 possiblities, slow and easy = convert the normal marks, fast and a bit more difficult = play the queue.
you just want it fast and easy, thats all. its not blocked or anything.
It is not simply "a bit more difficult". It is a lot harder to queue up for a Competitive TFO than it is for any other reputation related TFO. And that is simply a problem.
No one is benefitting from the difficulty of getting the Competitive TFOs to start. Not people that just want "cheap and easy Elite Marks". Not people that want to enjoy playing Competitive TFOs. Not Cryptic, because they spend a lot of development time on them and only very few people actually engage in it.
That is a problem. Don't try to make this about "slow and easy" when it's really just that the system as it is just is bad for everyone. The only people that might benefit are those that don't want people to do the Competitive TFOs, but those people should have as much voice in the matter as people that don't want Discovery or TOS or Romulan content or Tier 6 Oberts or Norways in the game. Which is none.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
They don't serve their purpose NOW if one needs a third party resource so play it.
At least by adding the Astrogems to Sompek and reducing the cool down on the mark conversion people get access to the resources for that reputation gear within a reasonable period of time and they're not forced into third party content for it either.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Comments
One night Ground wouldn't pop, so I switched to Space. Never again. I constantly blew up and when respawned was blown up practically immediately by campers. Seemed much more toxic than Ground.
When Competitive first came out, I had one Character do 'Binary Circuit' to unlock the discount. That Character ran it on Elite. That was and has been the only TFO that I have ever run on Elite. With a few exceptions all other Characters got the Rep done with Marks from other sources.
Strategums have been gotten through Marks conversion, when needed. I tried to do 'Binary Circuit' on Elite for Universal but had to dial back to Advanced to get it to pop.
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.'
that's what i absolutely HATED about red alerts going away. that was my main source of getting the harder to get marks, like Competitive.
clearly you have not been around long. in the bad old days people would queue for the Omega STFs in the hopes of getting the bits they needed for the gear.. old timers will tell you how badly it sucked. literally play 50 -80 times and MAYBE get one drop.
Yes adding elite marks to open PvP zones would be horrible IF only the winners get them.... Although one of my runs of Otha, the guys who KOed me still ended up staring at a "You lost" screen.
My character Tsin'xing
Been there, done that, watched feetmates get the gubbins. A couple multiple times in a row.
and because of that it popped and started
today, you could get all your marks via the events, basically no need to play anything else anymore. i mean right now you could get up to 270! marks of choice from phavo ground elite (including competitive marks).
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its not needed to add anything new to get those marks, the elite marks could be gained by conversion once per day. if you want it faster, just get the tfo running, binary circuit elite is usualy the best way to do so. advertise it in serveral pve centered channels like dps-bronze etc and it usualy will start. You wil get one of the elite marks for loosing too, just more for winning
(p.s. its a race not a pvp match, just keep an eye on enemy agons field generator spheres, thats the only source an enemy player could actually kill you)
there are a few queues rewarding all marks all the time like the breach if i remember correctly. in addition, you could get competitive marks via the random tfo system. in worst case, queue for random tfos and get your competitive marks that way.
ingame: @Felisean
Other than that... Cryptic needs a way to get RTFOs to also work with the Competitive Queues.
Or alternatively, they could build a Competitive Battle Zone? Maybe they could rework mechanics from the Competitive Queues for that purpose. Each side has to 3 rooms they can do together or in parallel, and that eventually opens a shared room with a warp core for each faction where people can go at each other until one core finally explodes. Maybe as improvement at a one-way-shield to protect spawn points.
I still say stick the stratagems into something like Gamma Quadrant, or another similar area and call it a day. Put a cheapo competitive queue together or something if need be where folks compete in something similar to First Contact Day event and stick them in there. For that matter they could bring in the Stratajama game and let people compete against each other in that. Loser gets 1 stratagem guaranteed at least, winner gets 3. can double those numbers on elite. Personally I would play the living daylights out of a Stratajama type thing.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
So... just a big battlezone sized version of Core Assault?
And the one way shield didn't help my team as the ONLY safe spot... was our respawn point. We go anywhere near the door that leads out to the Core Room... we die. We literally COULD NOT MOVE without dying. They couldn't come in, but they didn't need to. With weapons ranges they could touch us without coming into our room. You could tweak it to say you can't even target anything on the other side of the shield, but that won't solve the problem. You still have to come out to fight and go after the objective. All they have to do is wait until you come out, then kill you the second you're targetable. For all intents and purposes... nothing will have changed from the scenario I was in. The only thing that does change... is where you die from camping. Right outside the door rather than inside.
Which is a situation that honestly should have been considered with the Competitive queues. Its basically allows professionals to team up against a PUG team... and guarantee a win.
I don't mind the mechanics race elements because that's PvE, and also a test of coordination. I find that a fun challenge as it also doesn't matter if you're a PvP God, the odds are still relatively even. But the second direct PvP comes into play... the deck is stacked in favor of the professionals.
The thing that sets the competitive TFOs apart from the others is that you're actually competing with another team to win. Yes you still get a reward, but its like any team sport. You still want to win.
I'm not sure if i am in favor of adding Assessed Stratagems to Gamma Quadrant content.
That would be like adding them to some unrelated content simply because no Elite marks were added there yet.
Taking Assessed Stratagems and nailing them to undead content (sorry for those who enjoy PVP but the description fits) with an often questionable reputation doesn't sound like it will solve the availability either.
War Zones are also a bit of a double edged sword. It is readily available, but it is associated with PVP which has a bad reputation.
Adding those 5/5 TFO's to the RTFO list would be preferable, but as pointed out we do not know if the mechanic can actually handle it.
So since all options mentioned above come with severe drawbacks the only remaining options would be to either reduce the 20hour cooldown or allow more marks to be converted at once (5 per period of 20 hours?)
E.g. as a reward for reaching level 40, then another at 60, then 70 etc.
Too high for a single stratagem but otherwise I like the idea.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
40 too high? Last Saturday we took a PUG into sompek and easily got to 42 with 1-2 dropping out halfway.
Anyway, it's an example so an arbitrary level below that would do.
Mark conversion works fine for me at least.
Is waiting 10 days for a 2 piece space set unreasonable? 5 more days if you'd like to try a different space set piece? 15 days for a 3 piece ground set to unlock visuals? Reaching Tier 5 in this rep rewards 5 Stratagems so the first rep item is instant and you could subtract 5 days off any of the above.
Lot's of things in this game aren't instant. 20 days to Tier 5 reputations, another 30 or so to Tier 6. Also event rewards, doffing, spec points, admiralty, refining dilithium, etc...
Looking at a new character created April 8th of this year the toon had everything they needed about 20 days after spending almost 4 days to rank up to level 65.
Earlier this week the same toon had fully filled out both of their primary and secondary specialization point trees and is now mature in every way in that respect as well aside from a alternate tertiary specialization such as Commando and Tier 6 reputations that I'd expect to have on more senior toons that have been around for much longer.
All this was achieved playing nothing more than events.
Does the reward feel thematically appropriate?
Is making it worth the time?
With those in mind, I'd be very surprised if they built a new map just to let people get more assessed stratagems. Also they're not gonna put them into something that has no PvP. This is the PvP rep. The enemies the rep is tailored to fight are OTHER PLAYERS. So any source they add has to be PvP oriented, and they're not gonna build a brand new BZ. So either they revamp an old BZ, or there won't be one that rewards Assessed Stratagems. And there's only 2 thematically appropriate BZs that exist.
Reworking Breaking the Planet could be a viable idea... but how would that be better than simply adding them to Otha?
My character Tsin'xing
The question is: why is there a disparity between the competitive reputation and others in the availability of Elite Marks?
I can gather enough Elite marks for a 3-piece of Omega or Dyson gear in less than a day simply because i can queue for one of their advanced TFO and the random system fills out the queue.
For a 3-piece of the competitive reputation i need to spend 15x20 hours (with sleep involved) 15 days to gather the necessary elite marks because the advanced/elite queues for it rarely pop. It's not about instant gratification, but rather an aggravating delay.
I am actually rooting for an universal endeavor so i can gather Stratagems in a way other than convert 100 marks or start an hourly project and hope to get lucky.
Since the devs made a conscious decision not to include this rep in the RTFO is it really too much to ask that they level the playing field for acquiring the necessary materials?
Have I missed something? RTFO gives you a mark box worth at least 50 marks that you can open for any rep.
The subject at hand is the availability of the ELITE marks that you get from Advanced queues or trading 100 marks for one elite. Its the Competitive Rep version of the Borg Neural Processor from advanced Borg TFOs.
and since there is the 1 elite mark per day via mark trade in already, there is really no need to actually change something at all. its just that some people want it faster without playing the queues / trying sto get the queues running. the ONLY reason why those queues actually start sometimes is because they reward you with those marks. dont take those away or remove those queues directly.
i mean at the end we could remove all the queues, place a ncp somewhere to claim all the stuff directly, would solve a lot of problems for most people i guess;)
ingame: @Felisean
The competitive TFO are outside the Random TFO and require 2x5 so they rarely get played.
This leads to having to invest 300 hours (with sleep 360 hours) to gather enough Stratagems for a full 3-piece set.
Yeah, totally lazy when one asks for a more efficient way to gather those elite marks especially considering how easy elite marks are to obtain for every other reputation which has them.
sitting there and waiting for the queue to pop without any form of promotion in dedicated pve channels (dps-bronze and so on as example) would lead to exactly what you see there.
promoting them (even add zonechat, reddit etc into it) and you will get a pop with a decent amount of time, for me it was the last time i've tried like maybe 15 minutes or so till it started.
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promote it, let people know you wanna play binary circuit elite (yes do that one, not the space ones and yes use elite) and here you go
ingame: @Felisean
Must be great living your life and having your availability to those queues , but it blows for everyone else.
Not to mention that if you need to use a third party resource to play anything in the game then that feature in the game is seriously lacking.
The suggestions made here like adding them to sompek or reducing the cooldown of the mark conversion are the way to move forward.
no, thats the way to remove those queues directly from the game, because they dont solve any purpose anymore. actually a lot of queues are pertty much useless due to the all marks form the event we get 3 out of 4 weeks a month
and if the dedicated pve channels dont work (you should tell them to "queue up for bce please" as example), extend to the reddit chat, to your fleet chars, to the zone chat...
or just convert one mark once per day and wait.
because, you got 2 possiblities, slow and easy = convert the normal marks, fast and a bit more difficult = play the queue.
you just want it fast and easy, thats all. its not blocked or anything.
ingame: @Felisean
It is not simply "a bit more difficult". It is a lot harder to queue up for a Competitive TFO than it is for any other reputation related TFO. And that is simply a problem.
No one is benefitting from the difficulty of getting the Competitive TFOs to start. Not people that just want "cheap and easy Elite Marks". Not people that want to enjoy playing Competitive TFOs. Not Cryptic, because they spend a lot of development time on them and only very few people actually engage in it.
That is a problem. Don't try to make this about "slow and easy" when it's really just that the system as it is just is bad for everyone. The only people that might benefit are those that don't want people to do the Competitive TFOs, but those people should have as much voice in the matter as people that don't want Discovery or TOS or Romulan content or Tier 6 Oberts or Norways in the game. Which is none.
At least by adding the Astrogems to Sompek and reducing the cool down on the mark conversion people get access to the resources for that reputation gear within a reasonable period of time and they're not forced into third party content for it either.
ingame: @Felisean