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[HOUSE DIVIDED] "The Centre Cannot Hold" and "Khitomer Discord" Feedback and Discussion

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  • legendarylycan#5411 legendarylycan Member Posts: 37,276 Arc User
    uh yes, because 5m is pennies compared to what bots can actually pull in​​
    Like special weapons from other Star Trek games? Wondering if they can be replicated in STO even a little bit? Check this out: https://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1262277/a-mostly-comprehensive-guide-to-star-trek-videogame-special-weapons-and-their-sto-equivalents

    #LegalizeAwoo

    A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
    An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
    A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
    A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"


    "It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
    "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
    Passion and Serenity are one.
    I gain power by understanding both.
    In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
    I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
    The Force is united within me.
  • ltminnsltminns Member Posts: 12,569 Arc User
    Event Dilitium Rewards are now 25k, not 50k.

    9 Admiralty Assignments not 10.

    I had my Discovery Character up to 2.4 Million Unrefined earlier in the year.
    '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.'
    Lt. Philip J. Minns
  • pottsey5gpottsey5g Member Posts: 4,165 Arc User
    edited July 2020
    That has nothing to do with bots, and bots are generally not running events, they are admiralty farming.

    Not being able to run events on multiple characters was because they made the system more account wide, since most people complained about having to run it on multiple toons to feel like they "optimized" the event.
    That's simply false. Bots run featured TFOs on loop all day long and gather insane amount of rep and dill in no time during events. And if you're a night owl like me running TFO at like 3 or 4 am Eastern time, you'll find that getting two bots that simply fly to A then to B to only fire at enemies getting withing their range is fairly common. Before, when events ran simultaneously on all toons, the script was, run the tfo, switch to next toon, run the tfo, switch to next toon, run the tfo etc... in a loop allowing tons of toons to gather tons of dill and rep. That way, all toon cashed their daily bonuses on all rep and kept gathering more, while the guy operating the bots had tons of toons for daily refining.

    Making the events unique account wide means that the botters only got the 50k dill ore once instead of getting it 10+ times. It's a beginning, but it's not stopping botters.

    Bots running admiralty?? How?? Once you max out your admiralty, you can run 10 concurrent admiralty missions. Given most are around 1h long, and several only take 15 or 30 minutes, that means your whole ship roster (mine was about 100 ships) gets stuck in maintenance after a two hour intense admiralty session, and whatever's left can't run anything. Then what? (And is it even feasible to begin with? No matter what's your ship roster, the admiralty missions can come up with strange requirements and I've never seen a script kid being able to come up with a fluid logic AI script able to manage such parameters, client side.)

    Do you seriously think the people showing screenshots with approximately 5M dill ore acquired all that in a legit way?
    Its not something I tried but scripting Admiralty should be easy. Admiralty feels doable to me if a bot ran a similar process to what I do manually. As long as you don't worry about getting 100% its a really fast process. Just use 1 ship per mission. I tend to find if I just select the bottom ship from the list I have around about a 75% unsuccess rate on average.

    First I only do the Ferengi admiralty only then all you do is scroll to the bottom of the list put 1 ship on mission press start, select next mission and you don't even need to scroll this time just assign 1 ship and it jumps to bottom. Repeat you can have all the slots filled within 2 or 3 mins. Before the changes I did this process for 2 admiralty's and never ran into any ship shortage problems. I do have 2 extra step where I pause if I see 1k dill and add an extra ship to get 100% and I pause to add extra ships on the main 10/10 missions. But a bot can just skip that and go with bulk missions.

    This method is suboptimal for maxing out dill per admiralty mission. But time wise it fly's though admiralty and brings in more then 60k if not 80k+ a week with just 1 or 2 checks a day. If its a bot you may as well do 2 admiralty's or 1 admiralty but checking every hour or two. Its not hard to get a ton of ships with all the low price T5 and under ships and shuttles. No idea if people are botting this but it seems feasible.

    Perhaps I just haven't noticed or its wrong time of day but I haven't seen bots or gold sellers in a long time. Many years ago it use to be daily including chat and mail spam.
  • xyquarzexyquarze Member Posts: 2,114 Arc User
    edited July 2020
    After a couple months of minimal playing time (probably being one of the few people who are not working in an essential position yet have way less time than at the beginning of the year) I came back to those two new missions. Gotta say I am not impressed. These missions would have been very fine in them early days, but the last few years have seen such a sharp increase in quality that they feel out of time for now.

    Not talking about the technical quality here, that is fine, albeit unspectacular. Slight changes in graphics and similar are all to the benefit. Also kudos for allowing some differences for Feds and KDFs and their respective allies in who trusts you in the end or even the minor issue of a slightly different beam in point.

    But both gameplay and story wise, they fall short.

    Gameplay in "Center" starts off fair enough with the ground part. Run around to get a bit of story, enemies beam in, shooty shooty, what's next? Next is four distinct space battles (which I will revisit in my opinion about the story). While I appreciate the slightly differing gameplay with different enemies, the part where you fight J'Ula - and don't know whether you're on an invisible timer or need to drain her health or what will make this progress - is tedious. This lack of feedback of any progress is annoying. Also, having four battles feels artificially stretched.

    Speaking of "annoying", in "Discord" we have the trusted old trope of backtracking the same area. Down the area, up again, down again on the lower level, get back on top level, a bit of up and down before going up. At first it is at least somewhat motivated by the relays (though the closest relay to J'ula's position would be the center one ...) but going left and right downstairs is really just annoying backtracking, suddenly this door is open just because. Even if the area is small, this could have been done better IMO. Also the STO UI is just not meant to enter lock codes.

    Worst was the Ja'rod fight though. He's not particularily strong or bossy, so he will go down quickly. Just he won't, he will stand around untargetable until you got rid of his minions, then slowly jog to the next room, either waiting for you if you're slow or you could easily overtake him instead, getting some new minions beamed in, rinse and repeat. This completely destroys any aspect of urgency or flow of battle and majorly grates me.

    Kudos for the idea of rewards for the "saving civilians" part to get some motivation in, even if ex post, (still wondering why there wasn't an achievement for saving all, but found the "You've done this before" achievement to be funny) but everything around you during that phase is off. Not enough enemies to really hurt you or make it feel like a battle area . Then an overlong timer for the final part just shooting underpowered corrupted elachi with no need to actually do so whatsoever.

    Final space battle was fine though, well paced, good feel of progress. Tracking back myself though: the opening space scene was again sub par. Beam out after damage enemies are bad enough, but so few that this scene just lasts mere seconds just makes it add an unnecessary loading screen.

    And storywise, well ...

    "Center" ground was somewhat motivated which you cannot say about the space part. Battles and enemies are all over the place, even with all of them being connected to the major plot there was for me a total lack of coherency. Klingon rebels, Starfleet ships with viruses around a space station. Elachi coming from a rift. Finally random J'Ula in random place just to commit a war crime. Was waiting for J'Ula inspired Breen attacking Romulus until Tzenkethi reinforcements help you out, then fighting T'Ket over Kobali Prime, and finishing off with a ground battle in Paradise City. Well, not exactly waiting, but it wouldn't have surprised me at all. There were just too many parts thrown together in too quick of a succession to make sense of it during the episode and only revisiting it makes it understandable.

    And then in "Discord" we get the not at all suddenly introduced Alliance chairman, the dea ex machina A'detpa, and of course Sela 2.0 aka J'Ula, having committed various extreme war crimes we need her to fight the common enemy, an overused trope. Also as things have been going so far she seems to be the way more dangerous foe than a renegade chancellor. Oh, I forgot, now he has the "evil ball" McGuffin (which was a bit easy to get, wasn't it?), so J'Ula's not that bad anymore. Also can anyone explain to me how there are enemy ships above this major conference in the beginning without a fleet of (a) KDF security and (b) delegate vessels fighting them?

    The ending however was good, main KDF hates us, our faction hero believes us, others don't. Not really new and original but fitting here and opening up for a better story to come.

    In the end I understand that (a) not every episode can be equally to my liking, and (b) these last few months certainly weren't the ideal conditions to pop out top level content, but I can't say I really liked them. Center gets 3/10, mostly for the annoying space part, Discord 6.5/10 because some gameplay was enjoyable but the storyline wasn't up to the usual standards.

    Edit: some typos and grammar errors fixed. Also two or three minor points.
    Post edited by xyquarze on
    My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
  • pottsey5gpottsey5g Member Posts: 4,165 Arc User
    edited July 2020
    pottsey5g wrote: »
    That has nothing to do with bots, and bots are generally not running events, they are admiralty farming.

    Not being able to run events on multiple characters was because they made the system more account wide, since most people complained about having to run it on multiple toons to feel like they "optimized" the event.
    That's simply false. Bots run featured TFOs on loop all day long and gather insane amount of rep and dill in no time during events. And if you're a night owl like me running TFO at like 3 or 4 am Eastern time, you'll find that getting two bots that simply fly to A then to B to only fire at enemies getting withing their range is fairly common. Before, when events ran simultaneously on all toons, the script was, run the tfo, switch to next toon, run the tfo, switch to next toon, run the tfo etc... in a loop allowing tons of toons to gather tons of dill and rep. That way, all toon cashed their daily bonuses on all rep and kept gathering more, while the guy operating the bots had tons of toons for daily refining.

    Making the events unique account wide means that the botters only got the 50k dill ore once instead of getting it 10+ times. It's a beginning, but it's not stopping botters.

    Bots running admiralty?? How?? Once you max out your admiralty, you can run 10 concurrent admiralty missions. Given most are around 1h long, and several only take 15 or 30 minutes, that means your whole ship roster (mine was about 100 ships) gets stuck in maintenance after a two hour intense admiralty session, and whatever's left can't run anything. Then what? (And is it even feasible to begin with? No matter what's your ship roster, the admiralty missions can come up with strange requirements and I've never seen a script kid being able to come up with a fluid logic AI script able to manage such parameters, client side.)

    Do you seriously think the people showing screenshots with approximately 5M dill ore acquired all that in a legit way?
    Its not something I tried but scripting Admiralty should be easy. Admiralty feels doable to me if a bot ran a similar process to what I do manually. As long as you don't worry about getting 100% its a really fast process. Just use 1 ship per mission. I tend to find if I just select the bottom ship from the list I have around about a 75% unsuccess rate on average.

    First I only do the Ferengi admiralty only then all you do is scroll to the bottom of the list put 1 ship on mission press start, select next mission and you don't even need to scroll this time just assign 1 ship and it jumps to bottom. Repeat you can have all the slots filled within 2 or 3 mins. Before the changes I did this process for 2 admiralty's and never ran into any ship shortage problems. I do have 2 extra step where I pause if I see 1k dill and add an extra ship to get 100% and I pause to add extra ships on the main 10/10 missions. But a bot can just skip that and go with bulk missions.

    This method is suboptimal for maxing out dill per admiralty mission. But time wise it fly's though admiralty and brings in more then 60k if not 80k+ a week with just 1 or 2 checks a day. If its a bot you may as well do 2 admiralty's or 1 admiralty but checking every hour or two. Its not hard to get a ton of ships with all the low price T5 and under ships and shuttles. No idea if people are botting this but it seems feasible.
    Coding something like that would be feasible, but repeating the exact same process would have disastrous outcome. The first couple Ferengi missions would be suboptimal as you mentionned but everything else would be a chain failure.
    Why would it be a chain failure? All you do it pick the bottom ship from the list and put 1 ship in only every time. I do that myself without even looking at the stats and its never been a chain failure. It works surprising well as long as you have a decent pool of ships. Its worked for me fine for years so I don't see why it will be disastrous. Suboptimal yes but it works.

    The goal with this method isn't to get max dill per mission. The goal is to go though the missions as fast as possible to make the main 10/10 story missions trigger more often.

  • frtizoidfrtizoid Member Posts: 11 Arc User
    All, in general these two missions are very good. As has been previously reported, the "Leading by Example" accolade is broken. Hopefully this will be repaired. While doing this repair, for us accolade hunters, perhaps the accolade "Open Rebellion" can be adjusted so that rebel "kills" can be counted for Federation characters. Thanks
  • truewarpertruewarper Member Posts: 928 Arc User
    Just finished both the eps in the last two days, for the daily count. It was nice to see the other side of Klingon life, and homeworld...but, I am sorry the meshing of old no-hair Klins with the current ones.

    I cannot accept...

    The virus potency against 25th century tech...not plausible.

    The second half was a HAIL MARY throw, but it was digestible at best.

    But yes, under the directive of the License holder that owns the IP, this has to exist.

    Sorry to hear, the IDEA well is running a bit dry...a pity that other materials out there cannot be utilized with greater zeal, to give a deeper depth to this beloved gaming IP.

    So...going forward, let the BLOOD WINE FLOW!!!!!

    52611496918_3c42b8bab8.jpg
    Departing from Sol *Earth* by Carlos A Smith,on Flickr
    SPACE---The Last and Great Frontier. A 14th-year journey
    Vna res, una mens, unum cor et anima una. Cetera omnia, somnium est.
  • legendarylycan#5411 legendarylycan Member Posts: 37,276 Arc User
    these are the same people who STILL haven't rediscovered fuses and only just rediscovered seatbelts after the shinzon incident - yeah, they don't have firewalls​​
    Like special weapons from other Star Trek games? Wondering if they can be replicated in STO even a little bit? Check this out: https://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1262277/a-mostly-comprehensive-guide-to-star-trek-videogame-special-weapons-and-their-sto-equivalents

    #LegalizeAwoo

    A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
    An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
    A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
    A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"


    "It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
    "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
    Passion and Serenity are one.
    I gain power by understanding both.
    In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
    I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
    The Force is united within me.
  • sauron90805sauron90805 Member Posts: 28 Arc User
    Its not quite the slog fest the end of the Gamma Quadrant series was and the more recent Discovery missions are, but is near close as I could only bring myself to replay these once on an alt. Wave killing is just tedious to play and kills the pacing of the story being told.
  • feiqafeiqa Member Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    So looking over these missions and the revamp to the Disco missions. And the places where Aakar's initial voice actor did a fine job. Robert O'Reilly seems to phone it in. Later in the Klingon hall and the basement he comes alive with the terrifying depth he is known for.
    J'Ula has been the smart ultra dangerous lead here. With Aakar coming off as her slightly dim right hand man. All actions hers. Now the sudden shift and my thought is that the plot was inverted to give Aakar a bigger role with Robert O'Reilly coming in to do voice work. Absolutely noting against the man. But this feels like the story is jumping tracks to put him in the villain seat.
    The final bit where some how your captain is not permitted to even give a side to the story by people they have fought beside many times because J'mpok ordered them to seems off. Don't get me wrong, I am on the edge of my seat for another episode to explain all this. And a road to redemption can be a good arc. Especially if the other side learns they were wrong.
    But the writing felt less like a twist and more like a train derailing.

    Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
    Network engineers are not ship designers.
    Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,231 Arc User
    But I let it go and said it was just yet another lousy DSC stunt. But now they come up with a virus that can magically infect other computers without having any network access on it?!?

    Only way to fix this would be a bunny-out-of-a-magic-hat along the lines of "That's Iconian tech, because T'Ket gave Mirror Tilly means to hurt the Player before sending her back to Prime universe DSC era Q'onos to meet with Akaar, before replacing J'mpok by a rogue Founder."
    Yeah man, because they totally couldn't have hidden it inside a hail signal or anything. Its not like ships don't automatically pick those up or anything.
    "Hail signal or anything"??
    Assuming
    • those get processed by the main computer core and not a console independent from the main computer core (as consistently shown though the franchise for just about any system)
    • humanity forgot about basic IT security (firewalling and redundancy)
    • it's somehow transmitted without being detected (so far, only the Voth, Hierarchy and Iconian tartifacts have been depicted in the whole franchise as being able to do so, each having techs many century ahead of the Federation, while the Borg almost managed to. So, a pack of temporarily displaced Klingons for the past?)
    your virus would still need to be able to take over fast enough before the chief engineer pulls the plug on the main computer core or bridge locks access to key systems or such. Repeat it for a small sized armada and a starbase.

    That's totally inconsistent with canon Star Trek without pulling a bunny.
    Yeah... lol... in TNG they had ships self destruct after getting a virus...
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
  • ltminnsltminns Member Posts: 12,569 Arc User
    So yeah, take that, you meanie. ;)

    Jeez.
    '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.'
    Lt. Philip J. Minns
This discussion has been closed.