A couple things of interest from the patch notes for tomorrow:
Addressed an issue that caused certain ships in "Storming the Spire" TFO to move at high speeds even in combat.
Any Infinity Promo or Infinity Lock Box T6 Ship
This ship will be a once per account unlock, for a single ship only.
Contents only include premium starships that were released before 12/31/20. Starships released after this date will not be included as options.
For people talking about grinding, I have to say, if you don't want a grind, why play an MMO? I mean, every MMO I've ever played was big on grinding. That said, since they did the new event system, they have often given us multiple options on how to get progress in an event. For example doing 1 TFO, 1 story mission, or 2 patrols out of a list of specific patrols, so you don't have to do the exact same thing every day. And once you complete an individual event's progress, you don't have to keep going. You can take a break for the rest of that event if you're not worried about collecting the bonus dil. I personally like the option to get progress by doing patrols, since I can use them to work on starship mastery at the same time. (And one of the patrols I did a lot for this event isn't always exactly the same either, the enemies are randomly chosen, and some have even have been quietly updated with new ships that have come out. (Like the Gok'tad for the Fek'lhri)
Grinding is a big part of a mmo...but so is evolving...sto has been stagnant for years.
Adding content is important...new dungeons and raids with new gear and new reputations is part of any mmo...that is gone from sto
Fixing bugs is a important part of a mmo, it took them over a year just to fix rubber banding issues that were negatively affecting all players
Fact of the matter sto keeps getting more and more like a gacha game every day...
Gacha games rely on gambling for ever scaling power creep
Short to medium events typically offer rewards that are gimmicks or inferior for most players
Campaigns typically offer decent rewards
Often rerun events just to keep people busy
Offer shortcuts for almost everything if you open your wallet
But at least gachas develop content that is more than just busy work, they add new systems and ever challenging events...new mechanics. The devs don't innovate, they just look for ways to keep you busy or open your wallet
That's an interesting statistic but I think your time numbers are a little high, by somewhere between 20 - 33%. Summer event is under 15 minutes for the race including login, acquire, race, collect if you leave a character parked at Risa. Anniversary 11 was closer to 20 minutes including login if you did the Starbase One TFO like I did. Most event TFOs have been around 15 minutes at most so with login closer to 20 minutes than 30.
If you do other things like admiralty or doffing then the time increases, but that shouldn't count for the event load calculations.
Looking at the times again yes mine are a bit high. So will adopt your suggested times of 15 minutes each for Summer and Winter events, and 20 minutes each for the Anniversary Event and the 2021 Event Campaign.
This leaves the annualized event play time at 6.5 minutes per day or 45 mins/week or 3 hrs/month. The daily login load remains at one login every 2.8 days for all events.
The former seems reasonable while the latter seems to stare at me a bit more.
Perhaps it's better framed as needing to log in just over a third of the time in 2021 to go for the grand prize of all events completed, while acknowledging that during event times this rises to 50% for 3 of the events and to 66% for each of this year's 5 event campaign.
Nice work on this. The frequency of daily logins needed to get all the ships really stands out when you look at combined events for the year.
That's a lot of grind!
On the other hand, if we do grind like that we get 3 x T6 account-wide event ships plus the meta-event promo/lock/lobi/2xT6 prize. If you figure at least $150 for the meta-prize (Exchange price for the promo ship) + $90 for the event ships that's a generous reward for the grind. Also add a bit more for the 4-5 other event shinies like the sword.
I either missed an announcement or this is a plain typo and should be "character"?
Or does that meant that if opening the character bound box you pick a ship that comes in a account bound box which contains a character bound ship?
edit: But even that makes no sense; the wording in the actual live game does not really leaves any wiggle room for interpretation. *confused*
It means the box is account bound (so, you can move it from character to character, but not sell it) but when you actually open it, the ship is single character.
I either missed an announcement or this is a plain typo and should be "character"?
Or does that meant that if opening the character bound box you pick a ship that comes in a account bound box which contains a character bound ship?
edit: But even that makes no sense; the wording in the actual live game does not really leaves any wiggle room for interpretation. *confused*
It means the box is account bound (so, you can move it from character to character, but not sell it) but when you actually open it, the ship is single character.
I think you're correct.
I still would've preferred Cryptic to allow the ships to be tradable/buyable/sellable to let the STO economy go wild, but I think Cryptic did good here having the "Promo ship" prize be account-wide like this for the player & offers the least chance of a player opening-up the ship on the wrong character desired.
I either missed an announcement or this is a plain typo and should be "character"?
Or does that meant that if opening the character bound box you pick a ship that comes in a account bound box which contains a character bound ship?
edit: But even that makes no sense; the wording in the actual live game does not really leaves any wiggle room for interpretation. *confused*
It means the box is account bound (so, you can move it from character to character, but not sell it) but when you actually open it, the ship is single character.
Thanks. That makes it a bit more interesting then.
Comments
Grinding is a big part of a mmo...but so is evolving...sto has been stagnant for years.
Adding content is important...new dungeons and raids with new gear and new reputations is part of any mmo...that is gone from sto
Fixing bugs is a important part of a mmo, it took them over a year just to fix rubber banding issues that were negatively affecting all players
Fact of the matter sto keeps getting more and more like a gacha game every day...
Gacha games rely on gambling for ever scaling power creep
Short to medium events typically offer rewards that are gimmicks or inferior for most players
Campaigns typically offer decent rewards
Often rerun events just to keep people busy
Offer shortcuts for almost everything if you open your wallet
But at least gachas develop content that is more than just busy work, they add new systems and ever challenging events...new mechanics. The devs don't innovate, they just look for ways to keep you busy or open your wallet
Nice work on this. The frequency of daily logins needed to get all the ships really stands out when you look at combined events for the year.
That's a lot of grind!
On the other hand, if we do grind like that we get 3 x T6 account-wide event ships plus the meta-event promo/lock/lobi/2xT6 prize. If you figure at least $150 for the meta-prize (Exchange price for the promo ship) + $90 for the event ships that's a generous reward for the grind. Also add a bit more for the 4-5 other event shinies like the sword.
Or does that meant that if opening the character bound box you pick a ship that comes in a account bound box which contains a character bound ship?
edit: But even that makes no sense; the wording in the actual live game does not really leaves any wiggle room for interpretation. *confused*
It means the box is account bound (so, you can move it from character to character, but not sell it) but when you actually open it, the ship is single character.
I think you're correct.
I still would've preferred Cryptic to allow the ships to be tradable/buyable/sellable to let the STO economy go wild, but I think Cryptic did good here having the "Promo ship" prize be account-wide like this for the player & offers the least chance of a player opening-up the ship on the wrong character desired.
Thanks. That makes it a bit more interesting then.