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More than anything else we need EV suit character slots for captains and bridge officers
imelchori42
Member Posts: 80 Arc User
and please for the love of god dont make it a zen store item.
just add this function to the game please. it would also be nice if you think about removing the EC cap, and giving every account 10 account bank slots to start with.
its like some of the most basic features of any game have to be purchased extra here.
i dont mind that extra inventory, bank, and account bank slots have to be bought extra, but the account bank itself shouldnt be a premium item.
this game isnt short on premium content like extra races, ships, uniforms, slot expansions, pets and whatever you can name. does it really need to put stuff like the first 10 account bank slots behind an mtx currency wall?
just add this function to the game please. it would also be nice if you think about removing the EC cap, and giving every account 10 account bank slots to start with.
its like some of the most basic features of any game have to be purchased extra here.
i dont mind that extra inventory, bank, and account bank slots have to be bought extra, but the account bank itself shouldnt be a premium item.
this game isnt short on premium content like extra races, ships, uniforms, slot expansions, pets and whatever you can name. does it really need to put stuff like the first 10 account bank slots behind an mtx currency wall?
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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EV suit slot is a "would be nice" feature but I could list many other things I'd rather have first.
All story content and endgame raids are free to play without any limits. Cryptic/PWE asks for money for the convenience features that you listed to pay for the service, staff, and the voice actors.
i wouldnt call an account bank and the ec cap convenience features.
especially the ec cap might have been a convenience feature 5 years ago, but from the talk of people in this game, inflation spikes are a thing and its clearly reached the point where you cant buy half the important stuff of the exchange because the costs exceed the standart ec cap by a lot.
the cap itself seems honestly kindof arbitrary. its like a problem that was deliberately created to sell you a solution.
as far as EV suits go, its a standart inventory item that has been made different from regular armor, but is still required for a lot of features in this game and for you to just always have it on your character.
plus, it cant be that hard to add an extra EV suit slot and have a quick swap feature like for primary and secondary weapons. how hard can that really be? it should just be a matter of some slight adjustment to the inventory screen and copy/pasting existing code.
as far as paying development of this game goes, theyre introducing tons of stuff already that people can throw their zen at.
Very few episodes require you to switch to an EV suit. Manually switching once every 10-20 story episodes is a very minor annoyance
STO has a small team. It might only take a day each for UI, coding, QA but there are only 5 work days in a week and there are many bugs to fix and "easy" features that players want them to add. They need to set priorities.
Your opinion isn't right or wrong, but I don't think you need either to play the game. Pure free to play players need to accept limitations that real money spenders do not have.
that seems over engineered. i mean if they can get it to work, then great.
but if not, i would be happy enough with an inventory slot for that thing, and a button/hotkey next to it to swap them out like you can swap the weapons.
the game right now is designed in a way, where you have to put it on manually anyway and doesnt require you to enter any instance with the item already equipped. so what youre talking about is an additional qol feature, but if they cant get it to work then in the meantime just having the slot/swap feature would be helpful enough.
real money spenders have a ton of features to chose from. go into the zen store and look at what else there is.
ships, ship interiors, slot expansions, bridge officers, uniforms, pets, races, you name it. i heared the next update has 25 new ships, so plenty of chances to go wild with your money.
there is tons of stuff if you want to put money into the game that ftp players dont have access to.
so once again, why do basic game functions have to be locked behind a pay wall too. and an account bank and access to all of the stuff on the exchange is a basic game function and not just convenience.
i havent seen an mmo so far where these features were considered luxurity.
SWTOR at least for the first 5(?) years of F2P. For SWTOR you had to pay for:
- story and raid content
- the right to play raids more than x times a week
- the right to equip some loot drops
- the right to unify costume piece colors, which also required paid dye packs to set
- inventory slots of all kinds
- credit cap just like STO
...and probably others that I'm forgetting.
i mean, yea the game is managed by EA. the company who puts mtx and progression walls into full priced games, generally known for not giving a TRIBBLE about their players, and views videogames merely as a platform to squeeze as much money as possible out of people instead of a form of entertainment.
EA is always pushing the limits of with how much they can get away with.
not exactly the best comparison.
dont get me wrong. i dont think cryptic is really greedy with how theyre giving out stuff now and then and generally handle the game. especially with the zen exchange existing (though thats being apparantly phased out now).
but i think especially the EC cap is a relic from a time where the 15 million cap really was already enough, and inflation wasnt so bad that it was more than just a convenience thing.
i heared lock box keys used to be 1 million ec on the exchange, and after i started a few month ago, they were already at 9 million and are now above 10 million.
so that should give you an idea of how much a 15 million ec cap became worth much less than what it used to be and how difficult it is today to access some of the stuff with the ec cap still in place.
and yea, i could probably find a game run by EA or a phone game, thats much worse in how it exploits its players.
but i could also point at games that have become massive by literally only selling cosmetics, and not game features with real money.
This, exactly. Thank you for sparing me the need to type it all
and yet none of that invalidates that inflation made the ec cap into an actual problem when it used to be a convenience feature to get rid of it.
its not even just the ec.
from what i gathered, zen through the exchange used to be much cheaper.
so at some point in the past, those systems might have still been reasonably accessable for ftp players and new players who would rather put their money into actual cool stuff like ships, races, and uniforms instead of mundane things like expansion slots.
and this is really the core of the issue. if i put money into this game, i want to get cool stuff out of it like ships, races, and cosmetic components, and not just to make it not a pain in the TRIBBLE to play.
but since the zen shortage became a thing, you need to gather 500k dilithium as a new player now to afford an account bank with 10 slots.
make it 750k for the ec cap increase on top of that...
there might be more basic stuff that you need. this is all at a stage where you also still need dilithium for basic gear upgrades and everything in the game, and dont have millions of it hanging around.
and no one knows for how long the zen exchange will still be a thing at the current rate things are going.
let me ask you a question. for how long have you been playing this game? because id encourage you to make a new account and just check out for yourself how really TRIBBLE it is to play without these systems, and how bad the grind is to get to them without putting in a lot of money into this game for all the things that you just deem to be conveniences.
maybe you dont think of it so bad, because it used to be a lot easier to get these things when you got them, or to play with the same restrictions before you got rid of them.
but the economy of this game has changed, and things that might have not been so bad a few years ago are pretty bad now because of it.
Starting a new game doesn't begin with high end, unnecessary commodities from the exchange. That's unrealistic in any game. That there would be any parity between a new player's experience and someone who has had an account for a decade is a flawed expectation.
In spite of that I know 3 new players who arrived in fleet within the last couple weeks. They aren't worried about having the 2b ec ship and have plenty of resources from within game and from the fleet to have an enjoyable first experience with STO.
its literally in my first sentence.
we really need an ev suit slot, since it makes sense to carry it around anyway.
but just as a character update and not yet another expansion token from the zen store. the discussion may have been focusing on the zen store services from there on out, but it was originally just supposed to be a side comment.
(Counting the title I see 1.5 sentences about wanting the feature, everything else about zen.)
"segue" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/segue
"Segway" was that silly two wheel thing that was such a craze for a year before being promptly forgotten. The one the guy rode in Mall Cop
But yeah, I agree
then you completely missed the point.
my argument was, that paying zen for things like an account bank, and the ec cap increase feels like them creating a problem to which they now can sell you a solution.
i dont think it was intentional. its just a result of the changing economy in this game that things like the ec cap became a problem due to inflation, when in the past being able so have more than 15 million ec might have been a convenience feature.
but if im to spend money on this game, i want to spend it for actual cool stuff like cosmetics and ships, and not to make the game less of a pain in the TRIBBLE to play because of arbitrary restrictions that make parts of it inaccessable.
im also not comparing the state of a new beginner account with the state of a 10 years old account some some people said.
im comparing the situation of someone starting out in the game years ago, to someone starting out in the game today.
when the ec prices in the game range up to 1 million for something like a lockbox key, then a new player might not have run into any issues with the ec cap to trade on the exchange a few years ago.
this is NOT about lockbox keys specifically. im just chosing this as an example because its one of the few things ive seen people talk about, and hence one of the only things i can judge how much the ec prices have inflated without having played myself more than a few month.
EVERYTHING got more expensive. go and take a look around. ive heared friends who took a break from the game talk about how i can buy common duty officers from the exchange for 10k or less ec.
most of them are up in a price range between 30k and 100k atm. if youre lucky you get them for 20k.
after inflation, more and more content in the exchange becomes unaccessable due to the prices exceeding the standart ec cap.
if the prices increased like that, then playing with a 15 million ec cap today is comparable to playing with a 8 million ec cap a few years ago.
a new player a few years ago might have had an easier time to get rid of the restrictions too, since the dilithium costs in the zen exchange were apparantly half of what theyre today. so not only was the cap itself much less of a problem, but you could just pay half of the dilithium youd have to pay today to get rid of it if you wanted, and use your money to buy things that are actually fun.
youre all seem to judge the situation from a perspective of someone who had to deal with these restrictions before inflation made them into a problem.
As for the EC cap and account bank slots, you do not need either of them to succeed and do well in this game. At this point in game there are only 9 ships out of all of them I don't have because I don't care to own them. I have gold equipment on every single one of my 29 toons with at least one full space and ground build on each of them. I am also a lifetime member after having started to play consistently since late 2013. Everything I have now, a free to play person coming into this game today or tomorrow could eventually have themselves, minus the lifetime ships and a few odd event items. In fact several of the forumites have just as much as I do if not more in many areas. You don't need the account bank or EC cap removal to do well in this game. Can they help, certainly, but they are by no means required.
I agree with you that inflation is a problem, especially with the dilithium exchange. However that does not preclude new players from being able to earn items through grinding. Right now a single zen ship at 3,000 zen would take one toon about 188 days of dilithium refinement to earn said ship. This assumes one toon refining 8k dilithium per day. That number is reduced dramatically with more toons on the account. Assuming one has created at least one of each recruitment character, plus a standard character, that's 4 characters on the account they can use to generate dilithium. That would be 4 toons generating 32k dilithium per day for the account. That zen ship would take 47 days of refinement to earn. However again you do NOT need any of the zen store ships to succeed in game either. Plus they give away multiple t6 ships per year which are very good ships for a free reward. In fact the Regenerative Integrity Field is considered a must have by most tanks who have access to it and that came from the Kobali Samsar, which was an event ship.
You also don't need promo ships, lobi anything, lockbox ships, or what have you of the "premium" items to succeed in this game. You've never needed them to be able to do content. Are you going to top the charts without some of them, no you won't, but you will be able to get through 95% of the content in this game no problem with just the free stuff you can earn. I also remember thinking 30k EC was alot but it's really not. You can put together great budget builds on ships in this game for under 2m EC and less than 56k dilithium that will let you clear most content with little issue. 56k dilithium is one week of dilithium refining for a single toon. In fact I can put one together if you would like for demonstration purposes. You also don't even need doffs equipped to clear most content in this game either.
STO is one of the only true free to play games out there. I'm a founder in SWTOR and believe me you don't want their model coming to STO. In STO you are only limited by your willingness to grind or open your wallet. If you don't want to pay the cash, then you will have to grind. We can debate how much folks should have to pay or grind, but that's a different can of worms. Personally I don't see what's unreasonable about dropping $15 one time to get a row of account bank slots and get the EC cap removed. That's 4 times less than what you'll pay for a new game today. For that matter you'll pay more than $15 on average for 2 people at a fast food place. STO is only as expensive as you make it out to be.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
this isnt a problem of income vs. inflation.
this is a problem of there being a hard cap on how much ec you can own at a time.
as income and prices keep inflating, the ec cap is going to cause items not be accessable over the exchange anymore. an item that might have cost 10 million ec a year or two ago might now exceed 15 to 40 million ec.
this means without an ec cap increase the same item is now impossible to trade for players over the exchange.
as ec prices and income keep increasing, this barrier is going to be more and more of a problem, and what used to be convenience drifts into the area of being mandatory.
plus, if im to spend 50 bucks on this game then i dont want to waste any money to have to spend on basic services like that. im interested in actual fun additions to my account like new ships, uniforms, or playing new races.
this isnt a problem of income vs. inflation.
this is a problem how how much ec you can own at a time vs. inflation.
as both, income and costs keep increasing items will become locked out of range on the exchange without an ec cap increase. an item on the exchange that you might have traded for 10 million ec a year or two ago might now be traded for 20 million to 40 million ec.
this means without an ec cap increase the same item will become impossible to trade over the exchange.
THIS is what im talking about. as long as the upwards trend exists, this is going to happen more and more and more, and a service that might have been a matter of convenience in the past becomes eventually neccessary to get basic stuff.
and you achieved all this in the past few month with the increased prices, or did you mostly accumulate all this stuff years ago befoere the current inflation?
this is what i mean when im saying, youre all talking from the perspective of people who played with these restrictions while they were still a matter of convenience, and not a progression wall due to inflation.
the few month while i was playing alone (i started around april), the prices for common duty officers that i occationally bought for my fleet on the exchange went up from 20 k ec on average to 25 minimum, and 400k maximum. they went up to 30k ec on average now.
im looking at older guides to this games, and there are recommended items in these builds like certain traits that cost 40 million on the exchange now, because they used to cost 5 to 10 million back then these guides were made.
this means even with increased ec income, its literally impossible now to buy these items over the exchange without getting an ec cap increase.
i can only repeat, that if youd adjust the ec cap to the inflation, then it would have been like playing with a 8 million or less (maybe like 5 million) ec cap a couple of years ago.
that means a lot of the stuff youre talking about that you got over the years, you couldnt have got back then. at least not without using zen for a cap increase.
Someone who wants expensive things without spending real world money can grind dil to buy the ec cap unlock.
if u want the fancy one u pay...
P.S. would also make sense if that Red Angel suit would also be a EV suit.
With that said, everything you're naming is a want and not a need. If you're wanting an item that's 40m ec or more, that's a want not a need. You can create basic cohesive builds on a budget of less than 2m ec and less than a week of dilithium refinement. You're not going to top any charts, but you will be able to clear 95% of the content in game without issue. The only things that will give you issues are a very select few elites. You don't need any of the expensive doffs, traits, or anything like that to succeed. In fact I've tanked elite content in a budget Aquarius build just to prove that point. The EC cap and account bank are NOT required to succeed in this game.
If you're going to insist otherwise then I have to ask, what "progression" are you trying to do where you think you need these items to succeed? What are you trying to do that you're hitting a "progression wall"? Having gold gear and all the latest gadgets means nothing if one doesn't know how to use them or is using them improperly. As for those older guides, there is typically a substitution that can be made for a less expensive item. Barring something like the lifetime ships, you can get anything you want in this game if you're willing to put in the grind.
What are you trying to do that you're hitting these walls you mention? Because honestly your responses are coming off to me as wanting the "premium" items without wanting to pay the "premium" price or do the necessary grind for them.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator