test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Suggestion to bring back gamma recruit, delta recruit, and temporal operative
smi3th
Member Posts: 211 Arc User
I know there are a number of people out there who missed the chance to make characters with these attributes, as did I, and are hoping the events will run again allowing people to make those characters on certain dates. So far Cryptic has been pretty silent about this.
This is a shame, because any motivation for people to make alts also makes Cryptic/PWE money. Specifically, people have to buy the character slots and then buy the slots they want for that character. Eventually if they develop the character they will need to buy lockbox keys so they can acquire lobi crystals. And the more characters you have, the better value a Zen ship seems, because it unlocks account-wide. More characters means more money for Cryptic.
If Cryptic is determined not to hold those events again, why not place the chance to get these characters into Phoenix boxes? Isn't that the whole point of those boxes, to catch up on content you missed? Maybe a very rare prize pack could allow you to purchase one of these "recruit events" for your account only for a period of say, 24 hours, or until another such event is activated from another prize pack. So any character made by you in that time would get to be such a recruit.
At the same time this also means that people would have to burn dilithium to find these boxes, and anything that makes dilithium more valuable is good right now, since the Zen exchange is pretty close to maximum.
Thoughts, anyone?
This is a shame, because any motivation for people to make alts also makes Cryptic/PWE money. Specifically, people have to buy the character slots and then buy the slots they want for that character. Eventually if they develop the character they will need to buy lockbox keys so they can acquire lobi crystals. And the more characters you have, the better value a Zen ship seems, because it unlocks account-wide. More characters means more money for Cryptic.
If Cryptic is determined not to hold those events again, why not place the chance to get these characters into Phoenix boxes? Isn't that the whole point of those boxes, to catch up on content you missed? Maybe a very rare prize pack could allow you to purchase one of these "recruit events" for your account only for a period of say, 24 hours, or until another such event is activated from another prize pack. So any character made by you in that time would get to be such a recruit.
At the same time this also means that people would have to burn dilithium to find these boxes, and anything that makes dilithium more valuable is good right now, since the Zen exchange is pretty close to maximum.
Thoughts, anyone?
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Cryptic has not been silent on this. It is actively discussed when brought up. The problem is that, especially with Temporal Agents, is some of the mission have been removed for an update (yes, they will 'eventually' return). The second issue with Temporal is it is only Fed, and some players complain so. Delta has been rerun before.
And finally, it has been touted that there WILL be a Recruit Event run soon, and the rumour has it, that it'll be a KDF event starting around the Anniversary.
I've been waiting for access to the temporal operative rewards for a long time now since I wasn't playing when it was active...they keep saying they will "look into it" but nothing ever comes of it
This is basically the point.
The Delta event was originally in 2015, and they did it again in 2018. That's not very often.
The Temporal event was in 2016 and hasn't been run since.
The Gamma event was in 2018 and again in 2019. Plausible that they might do it again soon, but not this year surely.
These events are pretty infrequent and thus easy to miss. Even if it is intended that they come up again, it may be simpler to just allow players to buy their way in with a phoenix pack.
Problem is these days all they care about is making us run the treadmill over and over again while making things to monetize, I don't think they're concerned with giving players something they want for free, and to make them purchasable would take time away from their monetization development.
As the OP pointed out the events are intrinsically monetized already because more characters means more gear is needed, etc.
The thing is, recruitment events help prop up declining player concurrency and the last few years have been STO's best so they don't need that at the moment, and/or incentivize the long term hard core players who are getting bored with their current (and often only) character but don't want to grind though leveling again to take the plunge, but that is not as much of a problem anymore since the game moved away from episodes being the main leveling/equipping path to events being that path.
That leaves the other main reason to run them, trying to channel people into new content that they think might not be popular enough otherwise. Those were:
Delta recruit was introducing the new quadrant with its complicated and often tedious long episodes which made the best use of the very limited map area but were not as friendly to the casual gamers with limited playtime that were then starting to flood gaming circles. The recruitment was most likely a nudge to get people to jump in and try the new content in an effort to get the rewards from the recruitment device.
With AoY it was probably an effort to get over the TOS-contempt bump that has been around for decades. Cryptic was probably covering their bets since there was no way to know for sure what the mix of "Trekkie" to "Trekker" was in the playerbase.
Gamma recruit was introducing STO's entry into the endgame-only character fad that cropped up a few years ago following the success of Tera's Reaper class and the others in other games. The problem was that the most obvious choice for that was the Jem'Hadar meat droids (which would also help sell the Dominion ships better than the totally unsupported Cardassian ones were doing), so they made a subfaction without the work or expense of making an actual Dominion faction/demifaction to justify the race. Then, as an enticement created the Gamma recruit event to try and drum up interest in what would have otherwise been a very hard sell to the playerbase.
While a lot of people don't like "NuTrek" (as it is often referred to), it does not seem to be hurting sales or concurrency so Cryptic might not think it is worth diverting time and resources from other projects into making another recruitment event or even getting one of the old ones into a runnable condition despite the fact that so many people are asking for them (though there is supposed to be one for YotK according to rumor).
I have talked with a couple vocal people about their hate on "NuTrek" and they have justified a reason as to why STO seems to be declining, and that is because they introduced "NuTrek" into it. They go so far as to say that when Age of Discovery hit, there was an exodus of players who didn't want to play the game anymore because they were putting specfically Discovery stuff into the game and spending so much time on Discovery. Furthermore, they echo chamber an excuse that they were FORCED to include Discovery into the game or else they'd lose the license if they didn't.
I of course believe Kael when he says that no one forced Discovery, but rather that they were given the opportunity to include Discovery into the game.
no, red will whine because it's not "exclusive"