As bad as this queue is, at least it can be completed. Unlike the patrols they keep introducing. I sat in the one with the starbase for over 20 minutes waiting for it to progress before giving up on it. The others were no better so I'm stuck with the queue if I want to finish this event.
I have done the patrols every day except the first one which was the one and only time I did the terrible queue.
I don't doubt you had a glitch and that's unfortunate, but it's a far more rare occurrence then the AFK'ers in the Queue. The Patrols are by far the fastest way to get your daily progress. The issue you had might have been fixed.. but even if not, there are 3 patrols to choose from so just do the other 2.
I have noticed quite a few people who AFK once they do damage in the first part to avoid the AFK penalty. I would say about a third of my runs I see at least 2 people AFK.
I haven't seen that, but I guess I've been lucky -- though I have seen carrier types park on one station or another and not do much beyond their strike craft picking off infiltrators, so that was probably a 'functionally useful' form of afk. I have, however, been grouped up with players who can't coordinate to save their lives: nobody going after the transports at all, nobody defending a station, etc. I'll do my best with whichever role needs to be done, but I'm nowhere near top-tier with anything, so my effectiveness is somewhat limited.
As for gamma getting wrecked, that's happens 9 out 10 runs: it's close enough to pull the full fleet of attack ships that spawn at both of the nearby asteroids. Those two fleets then proceeds to decimate the defense stations...and then the players who are unfortunate enough to be at gamma. If a heavy hitter goes in and grav wells just *one* of those asteroids (grav well 3 equivalent or better), that makes keeping Gamma alive dramatically easier. If someone hits both like that, phase 3 basically becomes fail-proof.
It is definitely a good TFO for a Science build with a potent GW III. Mine isn't record-setting, but it does reach a 12km radius when I use Quantum Singularity Manipulation, and 10.5 km without. It's all about how you choose to balance EPG and CtrlX.
It's also worth noting that VCIS III* in the Lt Cmdr slot pairs well with GW III in the Cmdr slot. Using those two together is fun if you have good high EPG, and a PEP torpedo is like a Maraschino cherry on top; EPG boosts the plasma burn. The transports go pop pop pop like popcorn.
*(Very Cold In Space, buy the manuals from the Winter Event store)
I have done the patrols every day except the first one which was the one and only time I did the terrible queue.
I don't doubt you had a glitch and that's unfortunate, but it's a far more rare occurrence then the AFK'ers in the Queue. The Patrols are by far the fastest way to get your daily progress. The issue you had might have been fixed.. but even if not, there are 3 patrols to choose from so just do the other 2.
Easy.
I tried 2 of the 3, both of them got stuck after a certain point. I don't feel like bothering with #3 since most of the prior patrols have had similar issues and still glitch out 9/10 of the time for me when I've retried them after they were "fixed". I don't have time to "beta test" and see if they've actually been fixed. Real life has taken a lot of my free time away.
So since I want to actually finish this event, I run the queue and guarantee I finish, since I've never seen the queue fail even when most of the prisoners escape or all 3 stations get destroyed. Or I can risk getting stuck on the patrols, running out of free time and making no progress.
So as broken, unfun and annoying as the queue is, it is at least completable in the time I have each day. I will though give the patrols another chance this weekend when I might have extra time.
Hello. My name is iamynaught and I am an altaholic.
I'll add a good one which happened to me recently.
There I was in the Defense of Starbase One (Discovery content) - Advanced.
Roaming from spawnpoint to spawnpoint and raining CSV over the enemies.
Suddenly, a guy in a Vorcha sends privately: "Mind your f*k1ng targets." or something similar.
Then cloaks and sits afk to the end of the run just to be carried.
Opinions?
Opinions? That guy has a small tribble and he's angry at the world. Seriously, people like that are a disgrace to the KDF.
As a Science enthusiast, I love working with CSV types. It's the perfect combination. I bunch 'em up with GW III and you hose 'em down. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
running the TFO for the event. I am alone @ alpha station. that's ok, I'm good with that and can handle it easily.
and then the transports come up.. I end up having to capture 9 of them, three get away. final stage, Gamma station gets wrecked.... I'm good with pulling my weight, but what the heck were all these escorts and cruisers doing while I was fulfilling over half the things that needed to be done in an Intrepid class science vessel????
Isn't it well-known that cruiser captains are the worst?
I mean, players have been wondering for years where the hell the Enterprise-E was during the entire Dominion War.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
Just a bunch of selfish players and dim wits doing the old AFK ploy. That is why I don't do TFOs anymore
Don't blame the players.
It's the devs who seem only capable (with a few exceptions such as the Pahvo ground mission) of creating time-gated nonsense nowadays. Or perhaps they're only willing to create such content because they've always failed to keep some semblance of balance in this game, yet they do want players to spend a certain amount of time shooting stuff.
Maybe if anything the players did, would actually matter, you'd see more active involvement in the mission.
It's great that the queue has a diversity of objectives. However, the time gates ruin what could have been a very interesting mission. Cryptic needs to dump the time gates or accept that players will go AFK. They are stimulating this behaviour.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
And of course you cannot seriously complain that players refuse to be treated as robots, being told to do the same stuff 14 times over - or spend much longer in an episode they've both already played after day 2.
It would be nice if we could stop blaming players for acting like actual humans. Few people enjoy doing the same task over and over again. Perhaps even fewer people enjoy being involved in things when nothing they do, matters.
It's not the players, it's the game design that needs to be adjusted. You cannot and should not try to reprogram actual human beings into doing things just because someone at Cryptic thinks they should behave the way they want to.
I'm actually quite happy to see AFK'ers nowadays. It shows that players' human impulses are winning instead of the craziness of some leading Dev who thinks these people should be manipulated into acting like robots.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
There is no punishment for AFKing so people will do it. Many even are proud of it (and say so in chat) and insult people who actually play the TFOs or events. IMO those people need to be perma-banned.
There is no punishment for AFKing so people will do it. Many even are proud of it (and say so in chat) and insult people who actually play the TFOs or events. IMO those people need to be perma-banned.
Good idea.
Let's ban all the AFK'ers. And let's go even further: why not ban everyone who doesn't participate in all the events? They should feel ashamed for not wanting to do the same pointless stuff with fixed outcomes over and over again!
Ban them all! Added benefit: maybe the Devs will finally learn something.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
i noticed, as probably many here have, or not...that if a person stays at each station, keeps it afloat, and the others fly around and assist, you get higher bonus marks.
did one the other day where we all took a position, and the other two did just that, flew around and assisted. staying close to the assigned positions so we never lost a station, and pulled out a lot of bonus marks.
yep. I try to tell them I'm a megawell, and I'll be hitting the asteroids hard in the final phase. not that they listen...
if I were in a cruiser I'd be telling the megawells go get the transports and hit the asteroids. I just wish the haulers would fratricide, but they seem immune to the blasts and warp core breaches.
as far as the patrols go, has anyone noticed j'ulas ship dropping transport warheads that hit for 40+k on NORMAL? I got to close and half the damn ship went away. and shortly died thereafter. while waiting for a respawn there it was, transport warhead, 42K damage. when I slotted it I might have done 4-5k...
I'll add a good one which happened to me recently.
There I was in the Defense of Starbase One (Discovery content) - Advanced.
Roaming from spawnpoint to spawnpoint and raining CSV over the enemies.
Suddenly, a guy in a Vorcha sends privately: "Mind your f*k1ng targets." or something similar.
Then cloaks and sits afk to the end of the run just to be carried.
Opinions?
Opinions? That guy has a small tribble and he's angry at the world. Seriously, people like that are a disgrace to the KDF.
As a Science enthusiast, I love working with CSV types. It's the perfect combination. I bunch 'em up with GW III and you hose 'em down. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Goose to Maverick: I'll hook'em and you fry em.. but he will have to be happy with what the gravimetric torps leave behind
I don't know where the three patrols are glitching for someone else, I've been doing all three since day one and have finished them no problems. They're faster and easier than that darn mission that makes you public enemy number one.
And more fun too. But then I suck at ground too. I was surprised I saved everyone when the rift was chasing us.
Now a LTS and loving it.
Just because you spend money on this game, it does not entitle you to be a jerk if things don't go your way.
I have come to the conclusion that I have a memory like Etch-A-Sketch. I shake my head and forget everything.
It's the devs who seem only capable (with a few exceptions such as the Pahvo ground mission) of creating time-gated nonsense nowadays.
The Pahvo ground TFO is time gated also. There is no way to accelerate the speed at which the crystals are purified. Meaning it will, even if you have a team running all three lanes at once, take a set minimum amount of time to complete that stage.
I also find complaints about "time gates" to be odd given that every MMO I've ever plaid has time gates on its dungeons/raids/team content. Pretty much any activity you can do is time gated because it always takes time to hack computers, transport people down to the surface, for ships to fly to a rally point, for enemies to organize evac ships, for a crystalline entity to build a charge to release a big destruction wave, to take a dump, etc. etc.
The only thing in any game that isn't time gated is something that has no objectives outside of "kill everything", aka, is only just a DPS slog, with no other objectives beyond starting with a full map of enemies, and killing them all ASAP.
That is not quite the same thing as timegating. Most often timegates are the timeouts between phases where the only thing happening is a countdown timer until the next phase starts. It can also be used for the infinite spawn type scenario though, where no matter how many mobs you kill they all get replaced until a certain number of minutes have passed then they all vanish.
Protecting someone or something until some McGuffin action is done is technically not a timegate even though it is timed, it is a variant of the escort quest with overtones of king of the hill.
What people complain about most are the twiddle your thumbs and wait timers like the ones in the current event TFO. It would be less tedious if they would do a sidebar voiceover during those times instead of a big intrusive popup window and have low-intensity enemy action during the wait instead of nothing at all. They have more than enough time to play every single optional voiceover as it is, they could just do a single longer voiceover with all the information in it without the big window and buttons.
It's the devs who seem only capable (with a few exceptions such as the Pahvo ground mission) of creating time-gated nonsense nowadays.
The Pahvo ground TFO is time gated also. There is no way to accelerate the speed at which the crystals are purified. Meaning it will, even if you have a team running all three lanes at once, take a set minimum amount of time to complete that stage.
I also find complaints about "time gates" to be odd given that every MMO I've ever plaid has time gates on its dungeons/raids/team content. Pretty much any activity you can do is time gated because it always takes time to hack computers, transport people down to the surface, for ships to fly to a rally point, for enemies to organize evac ships, for a crystalline entity to build a charge to release a big destruction wave, to take a dump, etc. etc.
The only thing in any game that isn't time gated is something that has no objectives outside of "kill everything", aka, is only just a DPS slog, with no other objectives beyond starting with a full map of enemies, and killing them all ASAP.
The difference in Pahvo is that it actually matters what players do. If you kill the enemies quickly and none of the placed crystals get destroyed, you'll complete it faster. Compare that to, for example, Starbase One or most of the patrols where new enemies will just endlessly spawn simply to keep you in the mission for a certain amount of time.
It doesn't matter how good you are at doing what the mission tells you to do. You will remain there for as long as the Devs want it, and only because they want it. Nothing the player does, matters.
As for finding the complaints odd: not everything needs to be timegated. If you think it does, it merely shows how seriously infected the game has become with this example of bad game design.
Good game design allows the player's choices and actions to have some meaning. It's the interactive component, the bit of agency that draws players towards computer games. Otherwise they might as well watch a movie or listen to music.
And that very basic understanding of what a game is supposed to be and do, how much the actions of the player should matter, becomes even more important if you expect players to play something multiple times.
Regarding that last paragraph: no. That statement is once again just proof of what I wrote above; apparently it has even become impossible for some people to imagine content that is not just a pure DPS fest but which isn't time gated either. It's kind of ridiculous to suggest that it needs to be either one or the other.
Besides, as just noted: it's not only the time gate itself that is the problem. It's the fact that missions are time gated and that nothing the player does, has any effect whatsoever on what happens in the mission. Usually it's just 'sit there, wait and kill wave after wave'. Which, btw, also has a tendency to make those missions into a pure DPS fest, if players don't go AFK. It's just that the amount of DPS no longer matters and thus it no longer matters how good people are at playing the game.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
One of my runs today I ended up on my own at gamma for the last bit and it was untouched by the miners, the pair at alpha somehow let it die and beta was down by a third.
I tend to lurk around one of the stations and move to another station if it becomes vacant or sweeping transports under alpha/beta.
First phase is just tedious due to the trickle of infiltrators and nothing else so it's no real surprise that folk tab out or go make a coffee. There's zero threat or challenge during this phase at all, just fly in park over head and only kill the infiltrators.
Phase 2 needs better marking for transports that are waiting to be captured or some sort of audio cue to say there's one sitting neglected. I think a better way of doing this bit would have been to copy the tractor beam thing from one of the other disco TFO's. Tractoring to a defense station where they then go under way at a much better pace that they currently do. All 20 can be done with just two players who then ideally fall back to between gamma and the asteroids to blitz the miners.
Last phase seems to be a little easier if the stations defenses aren't nuked by the player going in to capture it in the overly longwinded phase 1. I also think that this could have been done better, instead of having any downtime at all by having martok or other friendly klink say somethings wrong with the virus, its spreading and then moments after the transports are gone the miners kick into gear and start their phase. Thumbtwiddle timer may have been reduced from the idiotic 80 secs or so in todays patch but it wasn't needed at all.
Another problem is that people seem to stack up an alpha and beta, and if the person defending gamma gets blasted by the haulers exploding they have to go though the thickest bunch of enemy ships to get back, which means gamma is usually gone before they can slog back at combat speed.
Well, not sure how well that reduced 'Briefing' for the Final Phase worked out after the Patch today. It was shorter but they may have mucked up the previous Phase in doing do. It took about 15 minutes before it would end. Pretty much waited and waited after everything was dealt with. The map was clear, the Stations were full up charged, the Transport Counter was at 19/20, nothing in sight and every so often we'd get a couple of new spawns until it finally ended.
Saving 30 seconds in the Final Breifing is not a good trade-off against an additional 10 minutes during that one Phase.
'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.'
Don't get me wrong, I vastly prefer the newer TFOs to the older ones design wise, but damn if the way people act in these TFOs doesn't make me understand why, not only Cryptic, but many other games, design philosophy for years was just "run down a hallway and DPS the enemy to victory" in regards to things like dungeons, raids, TFOs, whatever you want to call them.
Yeah, this TFO has really highlighted why they've been pushed towards that design philosophy. How can you do anything interesting when players can't even work out how to 4 things with 5 players?
I'll add a good one which happened to me recently.
There I was in the Defense of Starbase One (Discovery content) - Advanced.
Roaming from spawnpoint to spawnpoint and raining CSV over the enemies.
Suddenly, a guy in a Vorcha sends privately: "Mind your f*k1ng targets." or something similar.
Then cloaks and sits afk to the end of the run just to be carried.
Opinions?
Opinions? That guy has a small tribble and he's angry at the world. Seriously, people like that are a disgrace to the KDF.
As a Science enthusiast, I love working with CSV types. It's the perfect combination. I bunch 'em up with GW III and you hose 'em down. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
You have no idea what a breath of fresh air this response was.
And never, ever, underestimate that gravity well. We hose them down. Your anomalies do a TON OF DAMAGE. So keep on being a science enthusiast!
Gravity Kills seems to attract the rage quitters. Even before Mr Klingon has finished his briefing someone quits. These rage quitters are worse than the AFkers. Even more annoying is when players rage quit a pvp match after losing around, like War Ghoul frequently does.
Long ago I played games which were called Mud(s) basically its a mmorpg but all in scrolling text as you play it. Anyways one of the reasons why most of these games didn't have the afk problem is because every region of the games I played carried risk and reward factors where people who are afking or botting are risking gear if they die in said areas. Where players could loot in these areas I wouldn't expect that but I have a perfect way I think we can get support for this game in the form of profits that Cryptic and PWE need to maintain things and its such a brilliant idea but I have to let the person behind this great idea speak.
It is I, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, coming to you with good news and bad news but it will be all good news for you once you see what I have to offer. Of course I do understand your orders were to capture me alive so during your time where you seemed to be frozen and unresponsive I liberated your things err... I mean things that are now of my possession and available to be reclaimed at a special price! So as of when this is read and rapidly put into being the new afk penalty you will have a chance to purchase items back that seemingly fell off a transporter pad when you were frozen in time or lets say we get to the truth of the matter you tried sleeping on the job and it hasn't panned out too well for you. So for 19,000 zen starting today your large hypo that you seemed to only have one of is for sale at this very very VERY agreeable price unless you happen to get a deal of a LIFETIME!
Yeah I'm not as good as the people at Cryptic writing those but I mean its the perfect place to remind people that afking is bad when the assumption to all playable content that there is a person just like you who is playing, Then just like when people don't show up for work the load begins to make things not so fun when people have to pick up your slack. Plus also it would be a cool lockbox thing the AFK lockbox provided by emergency jettisoned goods that Harcourt Fenton Mudd had to get rid of in his brash attempt at escaping authorities. So then you open it up and see what that poor soul lost when that person decided to afk.
Another problem is that people seem to stack up an alpha and beta, and if the person defending gamma gets blasted by the haulers exploding they have to go though the thickest bunch of enemy ships to get back, which means gamma is usually gone before they can slog back at combat speed.
Cryptic do seem to place respawn points and never bother playtesting to work out the practicality of them. There are several space things where an untimely death has you respawn into enemies and taking a ton of damage you can't avoid due to the warp in animation having none of the basic damage protection found in other games. Kamikaze maru can have you die during that arrival if the ships on the glass cannon side.
With their love of slapping timers on everything its a wonder that the phase 2 transports don't have something for them. As I said in my earlier post the game should pop some cue in either as audio or fluff chatter to say that there's one lurking since players tend to have been sat getting bored so take longer to suss somethings not quite right because there's zero threat in any of the spawns until the haulers turn up.
Comments
I have done the patrols every day except the first one which was the one and only time I did the terrible queue.
I don't doubt you had a glitch and that's unfortunate, but it's a far more rare occurrence then the AFK'ers in the Queue. The Patrols are by far the fastest way to get your daily progress. The issue you had might have been fixed.. but even if not, there are 3 patrols to choose from so just do the other 2.
Easy.
It is definitely a good TFO for a Science build with a potent GW III. Mine isn't record-setting, but it does reach a 12km radius when I use Quantum Singularity Manipulation, and 10.5 km without. It's all about how you choose to balance EPG and CtrlX.
It's also worth noting that VCIS III* in the Lt Cmdr slot pairs well with GW III in the Cmdr slot. Using those two together is fun if you have good high EPG, and a PEP torpedo is like a Maraschino cherry on top; EPG boosts the plasma burn. The transports go pop pop pop like popcorn.
*(Very Cold In Space, buy the manuals from the Winter Event store)
There I was in the Defense of Starbase One (Discovery content) - Advanced.
Roaming from spawnpoint to spawnpoint and raining CSV over the enemies.
Suddenly, a guy in a Vorcha sends privately: "Mind your f*k1ng targets." or something similar.
Then cloaks and sits afk to the end of the run just to be carried.
Opinions?
I tried 2 of the 3, both of them got stuck after a certain point. I don't feel like bothering with #3 since most of the prior patrols have had similar issues and still glitch out 9/10 of the time for me when I've retried them after they were "fixed". I don't have time to "beta test" and see if they've actually been fixed. Real life has taken a lot of my free time away.
So since I want to actually finish this event, I run the queue and guarantee I finish, since I've never seen the queue fail even when most of the prisoners escape or all 3 stations get destroyed. Or I can risk getting stuck on the patrols, running out of free time and making no progress.
So as broken, unfun and annoying as the queue is, it is at least completable in the time I have each day. I will though give the patrols another chance this weekend when I might have extra time.
Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.
Opinions? That guy has a small tribble and he's angry at the world. Seriously, people like that are a disgrace to the KDF.
As a Science enthusiast, I love working with CSV types. It's the perfect combination. I bunch 'em up with GW III and you hose 'em down. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Isn't it well-known that cruiser captains are the worst?
I mean, players have been wondering for years where the hell the Enterprise-E was during the entire Dominion War.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
Don't blame the players.
It's the devs who seem only capable (with a few exceptions such as the Pahvo ground mission) of creating time-gated nonsense nowadays. Or perhaps they're only willing to create such content because they've always failed to keep some semblance of balance in this game, yet they do want players to spend a certain amount of time shooting stuff.
Maybe if anything the players did, would actually matter, you'd see more active involvement in the mission.
It's great that the queue has a diversity of objectives. However, the time gates ruin what could have been a very interesting mission. Cryptic needs to dump the time gates or accept that players will go AFK. They are stimulating this behaviour.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
It would be nice if we could stop blaming players for acting like actual humans. Few people enjoy doing the same task over and over again. Perhaps even fewer people enjoy being involved in things when nothing they do, matters.
It's not the players, it's the game design that needs to be adjusted. You cannot and should not try to reprogram actual human beings into doing things just because someone at Cryptic thinks they should behave the way they want to.
I'm actually quite happy to see AFK'ers nowadays. It shows that players' human impulses are winning instead of the craziness of some leading Dev who thinks these people should be manipulated into acting like robots.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
Good idea.
Let's ban all the AFK'ers. And let's go even further: why not ban everyone who doesn't participate in all the events? They should feel ashamed for not wanting to do the same pointless stuff with fixed outcomes over and over again!
Ban them all! Added benefit: maybe the Devs will finally learn something.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
yep. I try to tell them I'm a megawell, and I'll be hitting the asteroids hard in the final phase. not that they listen...
if I were in a cruiser I'd be telling the megawells go get the transports and hit the asteroids. I just wish the haulers would fratricide, but they seem immune to the blasts and warp core breaches.
as far as the patrols go, has anyone noticed j'ulas ship dropping transport warheads that hit for 40+k on NORMAL? I got to close and half the damn ship went away. and shortly died thereafter. while waiting for a respawn there it was, transport warhead, 42K damage. when I slotted it I might have done 4-5k...
Goose to Maverick: I'll hook'em and you fry em.. but he will have to be happy with what the gravimetric torps leave behind
AFKers get a right click/ignore from me. There was a rumour that would stop you grouping with them again. I've no idea if that's true, I hope it is.
And more fun too. But then I suck at ground too. I was surprised I saved everyone when the rift was chasing us.
That is not quite the same thing as timegating. Most often timegates are the timeouts between phases where the only thing happening is a countdown timer until the next phase starts. It can also be used for the infinite spawn type scenario though, where no matter how many mobs you kill they all get replaced until a certain number of minutes have passed then they all vanish.
Protecting someone or something until some McGuffin action is done is technically not a timegate even though it is timed, it is a variant of the escort quest with overtones of king of the hill.
What people complain about most are the twiddle your thumbs and wait timers like the ones in the current event TFO. It would be less tedious if they would do a sidebar voiceover during those times instead of a big intrusive popup window and have low-intensity enemy action during the wait instead of nothing at all. They have more than enough time to play every single optional voiceover as it is, they could just do a single longer voiceover with all the information in it without the big window and buttons.
The difference in Pahvo is that it actually matters what players do. If you kill the enemies quickly and none of the placed crystals get destroyed, you'll complete it faster. Compare that to, for example, Starbase One or most of the patrols where new enemies will just endlessly spawn simply to keep you in the mission for a certain amount of time.
It doesn't matter how good you are at doing what the mission tells you to do. You will remain there for as long as the Devs want it, and only because they want it. Nothing the player does, matters.
As for finding the complaints odd: not everything needs to be timegated. If you think it does, it merely shows how seriously infected the game has become with this example of bad game design.
Good game design allows the player's choices and actions to have some meaning. It's the interactive component, the bit of agency that draws players towards computer games. Otherwise they might as well watch a movie or listen to music.
And that very basic understanding of what a game is supposed to be and do, how much the actions of the player should matter, becomes even more important if you expect players to play something multiple times.
Regarding that last paragraph: no. That statement is once again just proof of what I wrote above; apparently it has even become impossible for some people to imagine content that is not just a pure DPS fest but which isn't time gated either. It's kind of ridiculous to suggest that it needs to be either one or the other.
Besides, as just noted: it's not only the time gate itself that is the problem. It's the fact that missions are time gated and that nothing the player does, has any effect whatsoever on what happens in the mission. Usually it's just 'sit there, wait and kill wave after wave'. Which, btw, also has a tendency to make those missions into a pure DPS fest, if players don't go AFK. It's just that the amount of DPS no longer matters and thus it no longer matters how good people are at playing the game.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
I tend to lurk around one of the stations and move to another station if it becomes vacant or sweeping transports under alpha/beta.
First phase is just tedious due to the trickle of infiltrators and nothing else so it's no real surprise that folk tab out or go make a coffee. There's zero threat or challenge during this phase at all, just fly in park over head and only kill the infiltrators.
Phase 2 needs better marking for transports that are waiting to be captured or some sort of audio cue to say there's one sitting neglected. I think a better way of doing this bit would have been to copy the tractor beam thing from one of the other disco TFO's. Tractoring to a defense station where they then go under way at a much better pace that they currently do. All 20 can be done with just two players who then ideally fall back to between gamma and the asteroids to blitz the miners.
Last phase seems to be a little easier if the stations defenses aren't nuked by the player going in to capture it in the overly longwinded phase 1. I also think that this could have been done better, instead of having any downtime at all by having martok or other friendly klink say somethings wrong with the virus, its spreading and then moments after the transports are gone the miners kick into gear and start their phase. Thumbtwiddle timer may have been reduced from the idiotic 80 secs or so in todays patch but it wasn't needed at all.
Saving 30 seconds in the Final Breifing is not a good trade-off against an additional 10 minutes during that one Phase.
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.'
Yeah, this TFO has really highlighted why they've been pushed towards that design philosophy. How can you do anything interesting when players can't even work out how to 4 things with 5 players?
You have no idea what a breath of fresh air this response was.
And never, ever, underestimate that gravity well. We hose them down. Your anomalies do a TON OF DAMAGE. So keep on being a science enthusiast!
It is I, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, coming to you with good news and bad news but it will be all good news for you once you see what I have to offer. Of course I do understand your orders were to capture me alive so during your time where you seemed to be frozen and unresponsive I liberated your things err... I mean things that are now of my possession and available to be reclaimed at a special price! So as of when this is read and rapidly put into being the new afk penalty you will have a chance to purchase items back that seemingly fell off a transporter pad when you were frozen in time or lets say we get to the truth of the matter you tried sleeping on the job and it hasn't panned out too well for you. So for 19,000 zen starting today your large hypo that you seemed to only have one of is for sale at this very very VERY agreeable price unless you happen to get a deal of a LIFETIME!
Yeah I'm not as good as the people at Cryptic writing those but I mean its the perfect place to remind people that afking is bad when the assumption to all playable content that there is a person just like you who is playing, Then just like when people don't show up for work the load begins to make things not so fun when people have to pick up your slack. Plus also it would be a cool lockbox thing the AFK lockbox provided by emergency jettisoned goods that Harcourt Fenton Mudd had to get rid of in his brash attempt at escaping authorities. So then you open it up and see what that poor soul lost when that person decided to afk.
Cryptic do seem to place respawn points and never bother playtesting to work out the practicality of them. There are several space things where an untimely death has you respawn into enemies and taking a ton of damage you can't avoid due to the warp in animation having none of the basic damage protection found in other games. Kamikaze maru can have you die during that arrival if the ships on the glass cannon side.
With their love of slapping timers on everything its a wonder that the phase 2 transports don't have something for them. As I said in my earlier post the game should pop some cue in either as audio or fluff chatter to say that there's one lurking since players tend to have been sat getting bored so take longer to suss somethings not quite right because there's zero threat in any of the spawns until the haulers turn up.