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Proposal: modify ship-stations
villainvile
Member Posts: 64 Arc User
Do you sometimes find yourself finding a ship and it's perfect for you? Actually ...
Except for the fact that the stations might not be quite right.
I would be happy if you could have the opportunity to rebuild the stations.
For example: the T6 Science Spearhed.
It has a universal ensign and a Lieutenant Universal / Temporal. You could then sacrifice the Ensign to upgrade the Ltd/Tmp to LtdCmdr/Tmp.
So, the idea is to change the rankings (Ensing, Liteutenant, Lieutenant-Commander, Commander), not careers or specialization!
Except for the fact that the stations might not be quite right.
I would be happy if you could have the opportunity to rebuild the stations.
For example: the T6 Science Spearhed.
It has a universal ensign and a Lieutenant Universal / Temporal. You could then sacrifice the Ensign to upgrade the Ltd/Tmp to LtdCmdr/Tmp.
So, the idea is to change the rankings (Ensing, Liteutenant, Lieutenant-Commander, Commander), not careers or specialization!
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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It's always been my opinion that boff seating should have been determined by gear, like a bridge module or something, but that would've really only been feasible for them to implement in the early days of development before the game went live, at this point what we have is how it's gonna be until the game eventually shuts down.
So, why we should'nt get Ship Station Modify Tokens?
Because it would utterly defeat the purpose of selling/having different ships, as nice an idea as it would be.
From a coding perspective it would be a nightmare as you're basically having to program the ability for every ship to use every possible combination of seating there could be. In other words if there were 100 different seating combinations as a hypothetical, you would essentially be creating 100 different ships in the back end coding all using the same base model skin. It's cool to theorize "hey what if we did (thing)" from time to time but some stuff would just be too overpowered or would destroy the balance of the game, and not just from a mechanics standpoint, but from a gameplay standpoint as well.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
I'll be honest, that sounds awesome! Ignoring monetization, being able to have space barbie to the max and having the setup I want at the same time sounds pretty nice to me. Want the Galaxy but not it's current specs and layout? Go for it! Sure, it makes having multiple ships that you don't like the looks of (as much) redundant, but player side, that sounds pretty good to me, and I'm a (light) ship collector. Going for pretties, not specs here.
Granted, likely true, and besides monetization the likely reason we won't get something so nice.
Like other tokens, it's only an one-time thing (and you can't redo it - does the modified seating suck? discard the ship and get a new one for next try).
In one version you can get an upgrade to a station free.
In another version you must downgrade a station to upgrade another.
The game engine and database is what needs to support infinite customization to allow this. So no, it's a nice idea but it's too late in STO's lifetime. It requires too much change and it breaks the business model that pays for the game.
I could be wrong since I'm not a developer, but I'm pretty sure the normal version of a ship and its T6X counterpart are completely different ship classes in the database, and the token simply changes what ship you are using from the T6 version to the T6X version. If that is the case then you are never actually modifying the ship, only transforming it into a different one, so to make seating customizable every ship would need to have a duplicate created for every potential seating arrangement. This would mean having potentially hundreds of database entries for each ship, which would be a nightmare to build.
My earlier idea of having a separate piece of equipment determine the seating rather than the ship itself would be more workable, but even that would be a ton of work and is never going to happen even if the devs liked the idea.
In order to have more options, you'd need more entries in the database for that configuration.
So... lets take, say... the Assault Cruiser. The venerable Sovy. In this case we'll use the Intel Assault Cruiser. Pretty much everyone knows the BOff layout, and does have a fleet variant.
So... now that we have that established, we can say there are 4 entries for Intel Assault Cruser.
Now... lets say you want to swap the Commander Engie to a Commander Tac. You just DOUBLED the number of entries in the database for the Intel Assault Cruiser. And each BOff station you want to change will double the number of entries for the Intel Assault Cruiser. And that's just changing one SINGLE BOff station. So you just took those four entries... and multiplied them exponentially because its not got to have a reference for each one in that modified state from the baseline. And there would have to be entries for Engie, Tac, and Sci possibilities. So you are essentially making at the very least 3 times the number of entries for ONE SHIP than what already exists. You bloated the database that much just by changing A SINGLE BOFF STATION. Imagine the numbers if you do that with all the BOff stations. Then multiply that by the number of ships we have in game.
The only way to get around this would be to make the BOff stations Universal, but then we come into the problem of why bother making new ships if we can Godroll exsiting ones to min/max perfection?
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
That part is easy: space barbie! I've always hated that ship models are directly tied to stats and seating, I choose my ships for looks and don't pay much attention to seating other than getting annoyed when I can't use things like BO3, FAW3, EPtW3, or Photonic Officer 2. I accepted a long time ago though that this will never change.
Space Barbie would work perfectly for many of us, but there are also many players who care much more about stats and/or who only have 1-2 ship skins they really care about. They'd buy 1 ship and just swap boffs when they want variety.
if I did the math right, and I'm not sure since I hurt my brain doing it, a universal ens seat(including the specializations) has something like 4,233,600 combinations, not including powers from events. that just ONE ensign seat.
I don't think "universal" would require a separate ship type entry in the database for each of the three departments (eng, sci, tac), but changing a fixed seat to universal or a changing the specialty of a seat probably would.
My bugged Vengeance didn't shrink when I applied a T6-X token to it (tested on Tribble first OfC), and I've not heard of any of the accidental gear deletion problems they had like with T5-U, so I'm guessing it's not actually a replacement ship for T6-X unlike T5-U.
While replacing seating isn't something they've ever shown (on purpose or bugged), they have shown that adding seating is possible. Both via a bug where your shuttle's BOff slot(s) became usable on your regular ship, and via a Tribble test item that was certain Spec abilities tied to a Device you could add to your ship.
The idea is to change rankings (Ensing, Liteutenant, Lieutenant-Commander, Commander), not careers or specialization!
The ability to make any kind of change would function the same way under the hood, it doesn't matter if it's career or rank, though the numbers wouldn't get as crazy if you were just upgrading rank.
Using Rattler's earlier Intel Sovereign, the ability to upgrade the rank of a single station would result in for additional Intel Sovereigns being added to the database per quality (T6, T6X, FT6, FT6X), for a total of twenty different Intel Sovereigns in the database. Unless I miscounted the wiki shows that there are 379 T6 and Fleet T6 ships in the game, so just limiting this capability to those ships would take the database from 379 T6s to 3,790, and if you allow T5U and T5UX ships to do it then that number gets even worse.
If its the scaling bug with the supersized Vengeance... I believe you'd have to visit the Ship Tailor to fix that.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
Yes, which is why I'm never visiting the tailor
It might just swap the backend, not the skin-level part of the ship, in order to avoid disturbing any customizations. That would probably not disturb the bug since it seems to be in the front-end part, not the backend.
Hmm... There are the Science Destroyers that swap between having Commander Science and Commander Tactical (with the other becoming Lt. Commander,) but I don't know how that works on the backend. Way long time ago, there were various bugs that seemed to indicate that all your BOffs abilities were there but just dummied out so you couldn't activate them. Biggest of the bugs got caught on Tribble very quickly, where your ship cold have 5 Commander stations at the same time. So, maybe?
I'd certianly pay a few hundred Zen or a few hundred-thousand Dilithium to be able to move some BOff ranks around, particularly being able to pull down a Lt. to Ensign to elevate a Lt. to Lt. Commander. I could probably salvage a fun build out of the Jupiter with a couple of moves like that. I'd also like to steal a rank from the Lt. Tac on my T5-U Jem Dread Carrier and move it to the Universal Lt. to make room for Photonic Officer 2. However, most of the balance issues remain from the previous arguments, as well as monetization issues of not potentially buying an entire ship for BOff reasons.
In order for those ships to "switch" seats around like that, they have to first code the ship to have both of those seats as they are. Meaning the ship has a for example a Commander Tac and Commander Sci on the same ship. However depending on what mode you're in, you only get access to one commander rank power or the other. Under the hood it would basically amount to an unremovable status effect that blocks one or the other commander rank power out, with the ability to switch which status effect you have. You're not actually changing seats per say, you're just telling the game which one of the two powers to lock out.
In order for the OP's suggestion to be possible, they would basically need to program an entry for every possible combination they could swap to. This means they would need to dramatically increase the database entries for each ship increasing the amount of work needed for each ship.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
At this point there's really no 1 ship to rule them all, each ship (at least each T6) can be made to be viable and there's no "must have" ship or build.
Removal of variations or choice must be made with great care by developers, sometimes if there was no true choice then it's sometimes preferable to remove the illusion of choice, however in this case I see so benefit from removing the ability to choose here.
No.
It's a token, that you can use only once on a ship.
Like the T6X Token. Or do you have more then one or two universal slots?
Like a ltcom tac seat can have a specialist from any specialization or like intel/pilot.