Re-Boxing service

taishojojo · February 2021

I haven't seen this but to fair the terms are generic that searching is difficult.

Has any thought been given to a cstore/lobi/mudd service of re-boxing a ship?
There are plenty of people with ships they'd rather have on another captain (opened it accidentally, you flew it and thought "this'd be better on...."

I'm ok with making it account-only. removing the trait from the captain (if they got to T5 with it)... etc...
Id pay to re-box a ship so I could give it or move it to one of my other captains.

davefenestrator · February 2021

This has been suggested a few times before over the years, but it's been awhile and search is awful.

It's a good idea, and as long as the trait gets stripped away Cryptic doesn't lose the sales from people buying multiple copies of a ship for the trait. They also get the money from the boxing service.

The problem is that the developers only have so much time, and Cryptic has to keep the basic game running and add new content. This might be in the "maybe if we ever have time" group of nice ideas.

foppotee · February 2021

I like the premise but would fear the execution of such a mechanic being implemented.

This could be extremely useful too given the recent game altering of the "command any ship" & how it effected consoles & traits too.

tom61sto · February 2021

During the livestream that Kael outright stated that making lockbox ships you already have into account-wide unlocks is not on the table, he floated the reboxing idea and was curious if players would be interested, though I don't think anything has come up in the time since then.

I'd personally much prefer a 'copy' of a given ship with being able to both keep and have another for another toon on the account, though I'd expect that to be expensive.

crossmr · February 2021

tom61sto wrote: »

During the livestream that Kael outright stated that making lockbox ships you already have into account-wide unlocks is not on the table, he floated the reboxing idea and was curious if players would be interested, though I don't think anything has come up in the time since then.

I'd personally much prefer a 'copy' of a given ship with being able to both keep and have another for another toon on the account, though I'd expect that to be expensive.

I don't really understand that. I can't imagine they're selling the same lockbox ship to the same account more than once. Given the price of them, I don't really think anyone would be buying the same ship for 2 different toons. if my choice is either a totally new ship or a copy of a ship I already have, I'm going for the totally new ship.

I expect they'd make way more money charging 500 or 1000 zen to make any lock box ship an account unlock than they would from selling 2 copies of the same ship to someone.

tom61sto · February 2021

crossmr wrote: »

tom61sto wrote: »

During the livestream that Kael outright stated that making lockbox ships you already have into account-wide unlocks is not on the table, he floated the reboxing idea and was curious if players would be interested, though I don't think anything has come up in the time since then.

I'd personally much prefer a 'copy' of a given ship with being able to both keep and have another for another toon on the account, though I'd expect that to be expensive.

I don't really understand that. I can't imagine they're selling the same lockbox ship to the same account more than once. Given the price of them, I don't really think anyone would be buying the same ship for 2 different toons. if my choice is either a totally new ship or a copy of a ship I already have, I'm going for the totally new ship.

I expect they'd make way more money charging 500 or 1000 zen to make any lock box ship an account unlock than they would from selling 2 copies of the same ship to someone.

Kael didn't state the exact reason, but did say that the reason wasn't what most people thought. The money from selling multiple ships for different chars per a given whale player was often floated as being a reason prior to this statement (not directly before, but in general,) so possibly not the reason. As for people buying multiple of the same ship for multiple toons never happening, one of the posts by Kael on these forums years ago that account-wide unlocks might happen lead to a meltdown post from a random whale player that had already bought multiples of the same ships about how'd they never buy things again if it came to pass. It's probably pretty rare, but so are whales. Other possibilities for not having it come to pass is technical limitations like figuring out how to give out the ship unlock (though, you'd think it wouldn't be too hard with the Admiralty auto-claim being implemented,) or CBS actually forbidding too many alien ships being flown than would make since for a faction like the Federation (though, given the stuff in Mudds, that'd be odd).

I can't find the video itself, but I found a summary on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/k2edgo/ten_forward_weekly_112520/ Though, that says 'business' reason, which I didn't get the impression of that being positively the thing at issue when I watched it months ago. Even if it was 'business' issue, a technical issue is still a business issue as the time that it would take to overcome is still an expense, and CBS yanking the license would as well (which I have seen done, though that was to a lackluster ST themed card game that was slow developing).

edrickvellorin · February 2021

One potential problem I can see with the idea of making lockbox ships account wide, is that if they did it, people would want them to do it for every lockbox ship that people have gotten over the years, and that could be a huge amount of work. It's also possible that doing it for ships that already exist just isn't possible without major under the hood changes. And of course, it's possible that CBS just doesn't want that to happen.

I think the most likely way we'd get lockbox/promo/lobi type ships account wide would be a new release of it through Mudd's Market or as a Legendary ship. And some people apparently may want to get certain lockbox ships on multiple characters in order to get the console and/or trait. (Like the Atlas, especially since you can't buy new ship equipment packs for other faction chars now.)

Reboxing I can imagine would have some technical issues to sort through, but would in theory be easier then making lockbox ships that already exist account wide.

theanothername · February 2021

Does not make them any more interesting than they are now at least for me. I went about half a fistful of times out of my way to get some of these. Until they become account wide its not really worth my money/time invest in almost all cases.

crossmr · February 2021

edrickvellorin wrote: »

One potential problem I can see with the idea of making lockbox ships account wide, is that if they did it, people would want them to do it for every lockbox ship that people have gotten over the years, and that could be a huge amount of work.

Despite all the bugs in this game I can't imagine the devs are that incompetent it should be trivial for them to implement something like that. There is no issue there since all these ships would basically work off the same code. Despite them all being different, they'd typically have a parent class and the ships we actually play are derived from those parent classes. making changes to things like that generally requires little more than making a change to the parent class and the changes are automatically applied to everything else.

I would agree to a nominal fee to unlock the ships, like I said. it would be like an upgrade token or something else. people could buy it or buy packs of it, maybe make it account bound, and then they could go to the shipyard and apply that upgrade to the ship, and then bam, it would be account unlock.

They already have the infrastructure in place for this. remember that many of the lobi store ships were previously account unlock ships because they were part of an event or something. So adding the account wide Bajoran interceptor flag (or however they do it) is as simply as saying "the account completed that event" even though they really didn't.

As for people buying multiple of the same ship for multiple toons never happening, one of the posts by Kael on these forums years ago that account-wide unlocks might happen lead to a meltdown post from a random whale player that had already bought multiples of the same ships about how'd they never buy things again if it came to pass. It's probably pretty rare, but so are whales.

Well yes, those are the obvious exception, but unless you have tons of whales each spending over $10k/month on stuff I don't think you can really allow them to dictate how the game runs. Volume has to account for something. I'm sitting here with some lock boxes and what not, and honestly I'm not opening them because I generally focus on account wide stuff. It's a rare thing to get so I'm not sure that I want to sell it because I doubt I'd ever pull one again. But at the same time I don't really want to open it on any specific toon because it's hard to choose what I want and who I want to give it to. At the very least if I could get all the bells and whistles account wide (mastery, console, any other bonuses) that would be progress.

ranvage · February 2021

How about account rebox tokens? Same as T6X, but it boxes up the ship, can only be done once per ship, and since it's PW, it costs 6000 zen. Once you reopen it on another toon, it can't be boxed up again. But the previous toon keeps all the benefits, i.e. trait, pets, console etc.

I know it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing and will let you get second life out of some ships.

tom61sto · February 2021

ranvage wrote: »

How about account rebox tokens? Same as T6X, but it boxes up the ship, can only be done once per ship, and since it's PW, it costs 6000 zen. Once you reopen it on another toon, it can't be boxed up again. But the previous toon keeps all the benefits, i.e. trait, pets, console etc.

I know it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing and will let you get second life out of some ships.

6K Zen for me personally would be too high for Lobi ships, but I might possibly consider that on lockbox ships. For that price, it probably should be repeatable, IMO. 800Mil EC then 6k Zen per toon for DPRM would add up quickly, for both them and us.

taishojojo · February 2021

Im not suggesting making the ships account unlock. I just want the ability to move it to another captain. I have at least oneship I bought for a captain and opened it accidentally. There are a couple of ships I bought and after flying em thought theyd be better on another captain.

jonsills · February 2021

keepcalmchiveon wrote: »

this cant be that hard really...

Yes, it can.

My go-to example for this is when, a few years back, Champions Online brought vehicles into their world - and this somehow disabled all Chat across both CO and STO for weeks. The two systems aren't even vaguely connected logically, but still it happened.

And you think changing a mechanism that's been in the game since the introduction of lockboxes "can't be that hard"?

darkbladejk · February 2021

This comes up from time to time and falls into the category of account wide lockbox/promo ships as outline in the FCT list. I get that folks want to be able to move certain ships off certain toons they either rarely use or not longer use at all, but the devs have already given their stance on this sort of stuff for the time being. Perhaps down the road we will see different options to make various ships account unlock via precedent set by Mudd's Market or another mechanism, but now is not that time. I'll jump for joy myself if they gave us something like this so I can move some ships around, but as others have pointed out, there are severe technical hurdles that must be overcome as well. While I understand the sentiment behind asking for stuff like this, please refer to FCT list before making a duplicate of posts like this one. /closed

Re-Boxing service

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