Swapping dil to dil vouchers is another easy to setup stopgap measure being put in that will make a smaller impact than the unlocking of phoenix or shift of whichever admiralty went from dil to voucher. Reducing the rewards might have been a better move because with this there's even less incentive to level a rep that you don't want a trait or gear from.
Levelling fewer reps means less encouragement to engage in gameplay that gives mark rewards and that will lead to folk logging in for 5-15 minutes a day to do whatever daily if they can be bothered because there's very little else in the game worth engaging with more than once as the poorly written episodes drip into the game.
The game needs a PROPER sink that people can spend their dilithium on. Cosmetics being the most obvious, warp trails, shields etc that could even be changed and themed to match a gamblebox for some better advertising than the server spam that console players still can't avoid.
The people Bort meant to hurt, are not going to be affected by this, one iota. Reps, for me, were a long time ago, and, more importantly, are a one-time deal (hence, no good as a sink). The man was supposed to create real Dilithium sinks -- aka, ways to sink your Dilithium into something useful, and not to just turn it into a blatent nerf.
So the game still wasn't grindy enough? Had to punish all of us for the actions of a few, and take away my main source of dilithium to feed into my fleet projects? Gosh, thanks a heap for that.
So how much time have got to squeeze the last bit of dills out of reputation for my alts? Is there even any point in trying if they aren't almost done?
Well we all know the market tanked, stopped working when they brought those silly vanity shields up for sale for a few days or one day (as if it matters) that is when the dil->zen no longer had numbers. Days before the vanity shields it was around 300 -> 1 dil to zen. We all thought it was a mistake in the programming, maybe it still is, who knows. The problems with devs having player accounts that are f2p and work accounts, is that they will spend most of their time on the work accounts where they can activate things like god mode or access to all ships, items, kits, mods, weapons, armor and so on.
So sure they can play with us lowest on the depth chart f2p, but they know they can go back to their work accounts to have access to what they want. We have no idea if they can exchange things between these accounts being that they are the devs or if they get the dil easy on the f2p to test features.
The problem is that those of us who are still bringing up recruits from the Klingon, Delta and whatever else. I know I haven't had the time to work on their reputation. I have the main toons to work on daily progress events that are just grind and old tfo or even longer new tfo 5-20 times depending on the eventually length. We all know we have more than 1 account (meaning sign-ins) so it can take a while. However getting the dil from all the tier 5 reputations is how that new character can buy into things to get partially even with the main toons on the same account. They won't be able to get all the things the long time toons have. Now they won't be able to get <blank> because all they can use that dil for is strictly rep gear and for some silly reason the stores for the reputations was "not included at this time might be for the future" (paraphrase) well you better make that future happen soon or when you get it coded all you will here is just the background sounds and empty ques as majority of players have finally become sick of changes that are meant to be good for all of us when they are meant to the benefit of Cryptic.
You shut down to enhance the reward/bonus feature where you for example signed in 3 times to Star Trek Online and you gave points that once a person hit a point level they could get zen. You made an update and then nothing. Why, because you weren't getting people to play and spend money on all your games. One MMO, maybe 2 is usually the max most can handle these days. So this was quietly killed off, with a promise of returning all new and interesting, must of been the same code the foundry was based on when it was killed off.
You made that silly change to Win10 during an event. Since the change I have had more disconnects with your servers than win 7 (no I AM NOT ASKING FOR WIN 7 BACK I JUST felt doing it during an event was a horrible idea, wait till that event, what the Omega/anniversary. Nope lets change things right in the last week of the event. I am sorry to say I have not seen anything that has made me say, wow what a difference. I have a 3070ti from EVGA and I haven't noticed anything great. Instead you have too many special effects that it can be impossible to find an enemy ship. You have enemy ships appear as ghost, at least the jupiter with platforms (or the last of the 3 items) they will appear as hole, with a target over their head and then vanish. Borg ships that leave no pieces around like it use to, instead they fizzle away like they were just made of acid and then the last thing you see is like 1 layer of the ship brown and then it is all gone.
Now upon all of these and many more issues you decided lets mess with the main way people get dil. Whatever you did on Neverwinter Online that made its dil (astral diamonds) unable to change over to zen/cryptic must have been the same here as I know many players said don't worry about being able to get anything with your astral diamonds (Dil) even though the game use to say you can use in game currency to buy things in the zen store with the exchange. What you needed to do was instead of tying the dil to one way to spend, simply counter by raising the prices on items that require dil, so that reputation pers. shield, instead of 9,000, it would become 13,000 (yes I would hate that as well but you would not ruin it for those who might have created new toons on an active account, and you have now managed to make any new player either turn over cash to you or find themselves unable to get anything.). The fighter squadrons elite are over 30K, which is about the rewards for a tier 5 completion.
So you really have tossed the server around like a very heavy hot potato (no this is no sick reference to anything) that just gets tossed on the ground and the other person has to pick it up within so many seconds or they get stuck having to use their f2p toon that week. This was or is pushing things to the last straw in what was a huge haystack. Now there are just straws here and there and now you want to pick those up to. Oh well lets see how long before gearbox takes over the management and makes things unbearable. I mean no offense to gearbox but they aren't a well known quantity in the MMO world and so we have no idea if they will make things worse.
As most agree the suddenness of the change with no warning but what, 1 day maybe 1 1/2 days. So nice surprise kick to the gut on this one.
I feel that the Vanity Shields should simply be unlockable visual skins that are applied to a specific ship instead of a physical item that you have to keep slotted. If anything, Vanity Shields should be "consumed" when right-clicking and selecting "Use," and the visual appearance is added to a toggle or drop-down Vanity Shield visuals menu under the Visuals tab on your readied ship; I feel this would be a better system than the one we already have where we have to manually swap out Vanity Shields to cycle through visual appearances, meanwhile those same Vanity Shields just take up space in our inventories.
But I think I'm digressing from the main topic of this thread...
While I don't disagree they need to rethink and change or add some sinks.
Again we also have to accept the facts at some point. People are buying 3-5 thousand dollars worth of dill every day for something. This is why I don't buy the all the sinks suck... all the fleets are done, arguments.
As much as most players like you and myself have a hard time seeing what people are spending it on.... its being spent. Perhaps its just that we been here to long and we are done upgrading gear, upgrading fleets. Clearly someone is finding a use for all those rocks.
It will be interesting to see what they change from here out. I think this change that has people upset was required. What they change next to "sink" more dill, its going to be interesting. I can't think of what they can actually do that would be meaningful that doesn't involve actual development, which doesn't seem to be what they have been doing. There looking for quick fixes so we'll see what comes next I guess.
Very large assumption legitimate players are buying dilithium. For all anyone knows, these are goldfarmers hoarding it.
Makes sense... seems logical.
More likely actual Ferengi from the 25th century have come back in time to old Earth. You see they know in 200 years fake purple rocks will be exchangeable for real pure latinum.
So the game still wasn't grindy enough? Had to punish all of us for the actions of a few, and take away my main source of dilithium to feed into my fleet projects? Gosh, thanks a heap for that.
So how much time have got to squeeze the last bit of dills out of reputation for my alts? Is there even any point in trying if they aren't almost done?
So if I'm reading this post right....
People are saying the game has sinks.... however we had a nice way around them claiming T5 rep rewards.
The way around them isn't the problem... but the game needs sinks ?
I am so confused. People have been admitting they used this to pay for expensive packs... others are saying hey I was using this to bypass Crytpics sinks.
Then others are saying we need more sinks... even though people are right out saying this is how I was skipping the sinks.
All the sinks Crytpic could dream up are useless if people have an easy way to avoid them.
Yes fleet projects are intended to be paid for with time sunk into the game... or $. This isn't a charity. Also have a feeling a lot of people where leveling fleets with only a couple members or something... fleets where never intended to leveled by 1 or 2 people. (not saying hanover2 is working a one man fleet... just pointing out fleets are supposed to be leveled by lots of people so the big sink numbers are not supposed to be borne by a couple people farming 300k in dill a day or something)
Well we all know the market tanked, stopped working when they brought those silly vanity shields up for sale for a few days or one day (as if it matters) that is when the dil->zen no longer had numbers. Days before the vanity shields it was around 300 -> 1 dil to zen. We all thought it was a mistake in the programming, maybe it still is, who knows. The problems with devs having player accounts that are f2p and work accounts, is that they will spend most of their time on the work accounts where they can activate things like god mode or access to all ships, items, kits, mods, weapons, armor and so on.
So sure they can play with us lowest on the depth chart f2p, but they know they can go back to their work accounts to have access to what they want. We have no idea if they can exchange things between these accounts being that they are the devs or if they get the dil easy on the f2p to test features.
The problem is that those of us who are still bringing up recruits from the Klingon, Delta and whatever else. I know I haven't had the time to work on their reputation. I have the main toons to work on daily progress events that are just grind and old tfo or even longer new tfo 5-20 times depending on the eventually length. We all know we have more than 1 account (meaning sign-ins) so it can take a while. However getting the dil from all the tier 5 reputations is how that new character can buy into things to get partially even with the main toons on the same account. They won't be able to get all the things the long time toons have. Now they won't be able to get <blank> because all they can use that dil for is strictly rep gear and for some silly reason the stores for the reputations was "not included at this time might be for the future" (paraphrase) well you better make that future happen soon or when you get it coded all you will here is just the background sounds and empty ques as majority of players have finally become sick of changes that are meant to be good for all of us when they are meant to the benefit of Cryptic.
You shut down to enhance the reward/bonus feature where you for example signed in 3 times to Star Trek Online and you gave points that once a person hit a point level they could get zen. You made an update and then nothing. Why, because you weren't getting people to play and spend money on all your games. One MMO, maybe 2 is usually the max most can handle these days. So this was quietly killed off, with a promise of returning all new and interesting, must of been the same code the foundry was based on when it was killed off.
You made that silly change to Win10 during an event. Since the change I have had more disconnects with your servers than win 7 (no I AM NOT ASKING FOR WIN 7 BACK I JUST felt doing it during an event was a horrible idea, wait till that event, what the Omega/anniversary. Nope lets change things right in the last week of the event. I am sorry to say I have not seen anything that has made me say, wow what a difference. I have a 3070ti from EVGA and I haven't noticed anything great. Instead you have too many special effects that it can be impossible to find an enemy ship. You have enemy ships appear as ghost, at least the jupiter with platforms (or the last of the 3 items) they will appear as hole, with a target over their head and then vanish. Borg ships that leave no pieces around like it use to, instead they fizzle away like they were just made of acid and then the last thing you see is like 1 layer of the ship brown and then it is all gone.
Now upon all of these and many more issues you decided lets mess with the main way people get dil. Whatever you did on Neverwinter Online that made its dil (astral diamonds) unable to change over to zen/cryptic must have been the same here as I know many players said don't worry about being able to get anything with your astral diamonds (Dil) even though the game use to say you can use in game currency to buy things in the zen store with the exchange. What you needed to do was instead of tying the dil to one way to spend, simply counter by raising the prices on items that require dil, so that reputation pers. shield, instead of 9,000, it would become 13,000 (yes I would hate that as well but you would not ruin it for those who might have created new toons on an active account, and you have now managed to make any new player either turn over cash to you or find themselves unable to get anything.). The fighter squadrons elite are over 30K, which is about the rewards for a tier 5 completion.
So you really have tossed the server around like a very heavy hot potato (no this is no sick reference to anything) that just gets tossed on the ground and the other person has to pick it up within so many seconds or they get stuck having to use their f2p toon that week. This was or is pushing things to the last straw in what was a huge haystack. Now there are just straws here and there and now you want to pick those up to. Oh well lets see how long before gearbox takes over the management and makes things unbearable. I mean no offense to gearbox but they aren't a well known quantity in the MMO world and so we have no idea if they will make things worse.
As most agree the suddenness of the change with no warning but what, 1 day maybe 1 1/2 days. So nice surprise kick to the gut on this one.
I feel that the Vanity Shields should simply be unlockable visual skins that are applied to a specific ship instead of a physical item that you have to keep slotted. If anything, Vanity Shields should be "consumed" when right-clicking and selecting "Use," and the visual appearance is added to a toggle or drop-down Vanity Shield visuals menu under the Visuals tab on your readied ship; I feel this would be a better system than the one we already have where we have to manually swap out Vanity Shields to cycle through visual appearances, meanwhile those same Vanity Shields just take up space in our inventories.
But I think I'm digressing from the main topic of this thread...
This is a wonderfull idea. I've thought of something similar, because it reminds me of GTA V online custom shop, where you had to spend huge amounts of ingame currency, to mod your car - massive sink. This game could use something similar and one-time use, consumable vanity shields would be very popular.
Shield should be bound to a single ship, untill replaced or the ship gets dry docked/dismissed - then it's gone and you need to buy it again, if you wish the same look back.
Well we all know the market tanked, stopped working when they brought those silly vanity shields up for sale for a few days or one day (as if it matters) that is when the dil->zen no longer had numbers. Days before the vanity shields it was around 300 -> 1 dil to zen. We all thought it was a mistake in the programming, maybe it still is, who knows. The problems with devs having player accounts that are f2p and work accounts, is that they will spend most of their time on the work accounts where they can activate things like god mode or access to all ships, items, kits, mods, weapons, armor and so on.
So sure they can play with us lowest on the depth chart f2p, but they know they can go back to their work accounts to have access to what they want. We have no idea if they can exchange things between these accounts being that they are the devs or if they get the dil easy on the f2p to test features.
The problem is that those of us who are still bringing up recruits from the Klingon, Delta and whatever else. I know I haven't had the time to work on their reputation. I have the main toons to work on daily progress events that are just grind and old tfo or even longer new tfo 5-20 times depending on the eventually length. We all know we have more than 1 account (meaning sign-ins) so it can take a while. However getting the dil from all the tier 5 reputations is how that new character can buy into things to get partially even with the main toons on the same account. They won't be able to get all the things the long time toons have. Now they won't be able to get <blank> because all they can use that dil for is strictly rep gear and for some silly reason the stores for the reputations was "not included at this time might be for the future" (paraphrase) well you better make that future happen soon or when you get it coded all you will here is just the background sounds and empty ques as majority of players have finally become sick of changes that are meant to be good for all of us when they are meant to the benefit of Cryptic.
You shut down to enhance the reward/bonus feature where you for example signed in 3 times to Star Trek Online and you gave points that once a person hit a point level they could get zen. You made an update and then nothing. Why, because you weren't getting people to play and spend money on all your games. One MMO, maybe 2 is usually the max most can handle these days. So this was quietly killed off, with a promise of returning all new and interesting, must of been the same code the foundry was based on when it was killed off.
You made that silly change to Win10 during an event. Since the change I have had more disconnects with your servers than win 7 (no I AM NOT ASKING FOR WIN 7 BACK I JUST felt doing it during an event was a horrible idea, wait till that event, what the Omega/anniversary. Nope lets change things right in the last week of the event. I am sorry to say I have not seen anything that has made me say, wow what a difference. I have a 3070ti from EVGA and I haven't noticed anything great. Instead you have too many special effects that it can be impossible to find an enemy ship. You have enemy ships appear as ghost, at least the jupiter with platforms (or the last of the 3 items) they will appear as hole, with a target over their head and then vanish. Borg ships that leave no pieces around like it use to, instead they fizzle away like they were just made of acid and then the last thing you see is like 1 layer of the ship brown and then it is all gone.
Now upon all of these and many more issues you decided lets mess with the main way people get dil. Whatever you did on Neverwinter Online that made its dil (astral diamonds) unable to change over to zen/cryptic must have been the same here as I know many players said don't worry about being able to get anything with your astral diamonds (Dil) even though the game use to say you can use in game currency to buy things in the zen store with the exchange. What you needed to do was instead of tying the dil to one way to spend, simply counter by raising the prices on items that require dil, so that reputation pers. shield, instead of 9,000, it would become 13,000 (yes I would hate that as well but you would not ruin it for those who might have created new toons on an active account, and you have now managed to make any new player either turn over cash to you or find themselves unable to get anything.). The fighter squadrons elite are over 30K, which is about the rewards for a tier 5 completion.
So you really have tossed the server around like a very heavy hot potato (no this is no sick reference to anything) that just gets tossed on the ground and the other person has to pick it up within so many seconds or they get stuck having to use their f2p toon that week. This was or is pushing things to the last straw in what was a huge haystack. Now there are just straws here and there and now you want to pick those up to. Oh well lets see how long before gearbox takes over the management and makes things unbearable. I mean no offense to gearbox but they aren't a well known quantity in the MMO world and so we have no idea if they will make things worse.
As most agree the suddenness of the change with no warning but what, 1 day maybe 1 1/2 days. So nice surprise kick to the gut on this one.
I feel that the Vanity Shields should simply be unlockable visual skins that are applied to a specific ship instead of a physical item that you have to keep slotted. If anything, Vanity Shields should be "consumed" when right-clicking and selecting "Use," and the visual appearance is added to a toggle or drop-down Vanity Shield visuals menu under the Visuals tab on your readied ship; I feel this would be a better system than the one we already have where we have to manually swap out Vanity Shields to cycle through visual appearances, meanwhile those same Vanity Shields just take up space in our inventories.
But I think I'm digressing from the main topic of this thread...
This is a wonderfull idea. I've thought of something similar, because it reminds me of GTA V online custom shop, where you had to spend huge amounts of ingame currency, to mod your car - massive sink. This game could use something similar and one-time use, consumable vanity shields would be very popular.
Shield should be bound to a single ship, untill replaced or the ship gets dry docked/dismissed - then it's gone and you need to buy it again, if you wish the same look back.
No, I must respectfully say that is a horrible idea, much more complicated and less user friendly system than we have now, its NEVER going to be the kind of sink we need or want. I've also played GTA online, and HATED that system with a passion (and don't even get me started with the kilometers long list of problems that game has :P) It's a punish the poor, and not even phase the rich kind of system. I was glad when they even removed EC cost from costume or ship name edits, all it did was serve to be a nuisance, especially on fresh alts if you were new or didn't have account bank yet
I can see the different perspectives for and against this move. I personally don't have a beef about this decision. I usually used the Tier 5 rewards for getting rep gear. I don't remember putting it into fleets or putting it into the dilithium-zen exchange. In fact it has been a long time since I have used that exchange to convert my dil into zen. The last time was when Peanut Labs surveys were a thing. With all that said if it doesn't work they can roll it back like they did with the Personal Endeavor Reroll Tokens decision that they were only acquirable through paying dilithium instead of that being an option besides getting them through doing Personal Endeavors.
Good points everyone. But it all comes down to one thing -- you can either buy zen with real money or trade dilithium for it. Since Cryptic wants more purchases of zen with money, they will continue to reduce the means to earn dilithium. It is unfortunate that they chose to reduce dilithium by removing rewards instead of enticing players to buy new gear with it. The phoenix box is over due for new ships and gear and there are other things that players would willingly spend dilithium on (as mentioned by other posters), if offered. Instead, it is less effort/more profitable to remove something. One thing they should consider is the carrot and the stick. How much will players put up with before they go play something else?
When you use the dil exchange, you buy zen from other players not from Cryptic. That means those other players needed to buy zen.
Cryptic doesn't hate you using the dil exchange, they still get to sell zen to someone else. The reasons they have to bring the exchange down below 500 are things like encouraging free-to-players to stick around long enough to spend some zen of their own, and to be there to pad out TFOs for the paying customers to play with.
The exchange at 500 is a supply and demand problem: too much dil supply compared to the demand for dil.
This can be fixed by reducing supply (farming nerfs), by increasing demands (sinks), or both. This nerf is part of an "or both" set of fixes.
Good points everyone. But it all comes down to one thing -- you can either buy zen with real money or trade dilithium for it. Since Cryptic wants more purchases of zen with money, they will continue to reduce the means to earn dilithium. It is unfortunate that they chose to reduce dilithium by removing rewards instead of enticing players to buy new gear with it. The phoenix box is over due for new ships and gear and there are other things that players would willingly spend dilithium on (as mentioned by other posters), if offered. Instead, it is less effort/more profitable to remove something. One thing they should consider is the carrot and the stick. How much will players put up with before they go play something else?
When you use the dil exchange, you buy zen from other players not from Cryptic. That means those other players needed to buy zen.
Cryptic doesn't hate you using the dil exchange, they still get to sell zen to someone else. The reasons they have to bring the exchange down below 500 are things like encouraging free-to-players to stick around long enough to spend some zen of their own, and to be there to pad out TFOs for the paying customers to play with.
The exchange at 500 is a supply and demand problem: too much dil supply compared to the demand for dil.
This can be fixed by reducing supply (farming nerfs), by increasing demands (sinks), or both. This nerf is part of an "or both" set of fixes.
Just keep in mind there is a cap on how much sinks can do.
The problem with sinks is players. In general games have 3 types of players...
1 - Whales that spend on everything including to speed grinds... these people are purple rock buyers.
2 - People that are happy to buy content/items and things they can't grind for... but who will still grind rather then speed it with $
3 - People that either can't or won't spend money... or perhaps will spend 20 bucks now and then maybe.
The problem with everyone asking for more sinks more sinks more sinks. That first group of players is unique... it doesn't grow fast. Whales don't grow on trees. Expecting people in group 2 to all of a sudden become whales isn't realistic.
So sinks can only go so far... sinks may help drain some Dill from people that would other wise offer it for sale, but more sinks won't magically grow the whale class. So if Cryptic in their best month made X amount of $ on zen people are trading... that isn't likely to grow simply cause Cryptic changes some sink mechanics.
Oversupply is the biggest issue STO has.... this change helps with that. Frankly though if this doesn't start eating into the backlogs over the next few months. The best move forward after that is to look at more nerfs on the supply end. Tweaking some sinks might help... a few temporary sinks may short term help. Long term the issue is supply. Whales are going to spend pretty much the same amount give or take every month... so really supply is the only real effective way to keep the exchange from backing up.
Good points everyone. But it all comes down to one thing -- you can either buy zen with real money or trade dilithium for it. Since Cryptic wants more purchases of zen with money, they will continue to reduce the means to earn dilithium. It is unfortunate that they chose to reduce dilithium by removing rewards instead of enticing players to buy new gear with it. The phoenix box is over due for new ships and gear and there are other things that players would willingly spend dilithium on (as mentioned by other posters), if offered. Instead, it is less effort/more profitable to remove something. One thing they should consider is the carrot and the stick. How much will players put up with before they go play something else?
When you use the dil exchange, you buy zen from other players not from Cryptic. That means those other players needed to buy zen.
Cryptic doesn't hate you using the dil exchange, they still get to sell zen to someone else. The reasons they have to bring the exchange down below 500 are things like encouraging free-to-players to stick around long enough to spend some zen of their own, and to be there to pad out TFOs for the paying customers to play with.
The exchange at 500 is a supply and demand problem: too much dil supply compared to the demand for dil.
This can be fixed by reducing supply (farming nerfs), by increasing demands (sinks), or both. This nerf is part of an "or both" set of fixes.
The carrot before the stick would have been nice.
Also, you would think your point on encouraging free-to-players to stick around would be blindingly obvious, but no lets completely remove one of the most useful sources of dilithium from the new/casual FTP group, one which that group actually has put effort into achieving rather than using the means available to established players to 'minimize' the effort required, and restrict their choice in how the replacement can be used when other means could have been found to make the abuse of the system more difficult / less attractive.
This 'fix' feels like the exact opposite of encouragement for new/casual players to stick around.
I'm not sure if I like these changes but I don't hate the changes neither.
They said during the livestream part of the reason of the change was to have it used as intended but it had been that way for YEARS so I don't believe Cryptic completely for that reason.
I think this would've been a good/better change IF the voucher amount could be used in the Repuation Dilithium Store as well!!!
Otherwise it feels like Cryptic making a Draconian restrictive change in taking away an option punishing the many for targeting a few.
But Cryptic will squeeze & restrict as they like & say whatever they want to feel justified about it & we'll decide to live, play, & spend accordingly with it. This certainly devalues Cryptic's buy-out feature of the T5 Reputation tiers though lol.
I'm not sure if I like these changes but I don't hate the changes neither.
They said during the livestream part of the reason of the change was to have it used as intended but it had been that way for YEARS so I don't believe Cryptic completely for that reason.
I think this would've been a good/better change IF the voucher amount could be used in the Repuation Dilithium Store as well!!!
Otherwise it feels like Cryptic making a Draconian restrictive change in taking away an option punishing the many for targeting a few.
But Cryptic will squeeze & restrict as they like & say whatever they want to feel justified about it & we'll decide to live, play, & spend accordingly with it. This certainly devalues Cryptic's buy-out feature of the T5 Reputation tiers though lol.
Never underestimate Cryptics obliviousness.
Heck I wouldn't even doubt that with the change in ownership... someone from the new company actually had some people play the game a bit to get a better understanding. It may be them that said... SO this massive payout at T5. lol
Can I use these Reputation Dilithium Vouchers on any Reputation?
Yes. Vouchers unlocked from reaching Tier 5 on any Reputation can be used to purchase Reputation Equipment from any Reputation.
I just discovered this does not apply to Reputation store items, because I purchased Split Beam Rifle and my regular Dil went down by 7,500 and my 40,000 Rep Dil stayed at 40,000.
:: sigh ::
this is very disappointing.
Can I use these Reputation Dilithium Vouchers on any Reputation?
Yes. Vouchers unlocked from reaching Tier 5 on any Reputation can be used to purchase Reputation Equipment from any Reputation.
I just discovered this does not apply to Reputation store items, because I purchased Split Beam Rifle and my regular Dil went down by 7,500 and my 40,000 Rep Dil stayed at 40,000.
:: sigh ::
this is very disappointing.
Yes, along with making the change to T5 to nerf farming they also need to change the reputation store to use reputation dil. That change should have been made when they first added rep dil.
That would reduce some of the saltiness from players who point out that they don't buy enough of the gear sets to use up the T5 dil. With this fix we could get beams, cannons, ground gear, belium/pax consoles.
As i've read somewhere, there is some technical limitation that prevents changing the currency of the pricing in rep store. I don't know if they could just REPLACE the dil price with rep dil price - but that would be a problem again, due to finate amount of rep dil. A solution for that, as i've mentioned before (and got boo-ed at because of it lol) is to program a NPC or something, that would exchange regular dil into reputation dil, so you can use it in store and for projects. I don't see any other solution for people, who have to much rep dil.
If it was to be used as intended then they'd need to have content that required the specific rep gear.
Outside borg ground sets refrequency thing (negated by sniper, tommy gun or any melee) and the fight at the end of breaking the wall chain on koblai P where the delta ground sets gimmick comes into play I can't think of any other specific instances where rep gear is more than just a choice of buffs or weapon style.
The snowballing of the exchange began when they bombarded the cash shop with back to back to back ships which I originally put down to blind greedonomics but having seen the deal with gearbox it might have been a shortsighted attempt to try and prove that the game has some kind of financial viability by leveraging "popular" shinies for a short term bump in income. If it was that then they're going to have to continue to leverage those shinies in the future and the dilex will remain stagnant until a proper sink arrives that folk want to engage with assuming the nerfs haven't pushed them beyond the limit of their love for trek, which is likely the only reason a lot of people play.
What about the option "pay dilithium to auto-finish a mission" and get the mission rewards for the specific mission upon payment?
(Caveat being that it has to be a mission you haven't previously done yet)
Wait, no, nevermind...
This sort of sink would be targetted at the people that have a huge sum of dilithium, but those kinds of people with that amount of dil would in all probability have already finished all of the missions (with the exception of the Terran Gambit arc) ages ago.
Well...what about putting lock-box ships on the Phoenix Prize Token menu?
Well...what about putting lock-box ships on the Phoenix Prize Token menu?
Or crazy idea... go back to putting event ships (and items) in the Phoenix packs. I mean they don't even have to stop with the distasteful mudd store unlcoks. Phoenix was always a single ship no account unlock. Just keep that, and add a mudd store account unlock option. Mudds didn't mean they had to put Phoenix out to pasture. It was pure greed trying to get every last dollar I guess.
I never understood why they stopped putting them in the Phoenix boxes. I get they want to sell them directly in mudds but there was no reason they couldn't do both things. The mudd pack with the account unlock would still have value... but Phoenix has lost most of its luster as the event items and ships in the Phoenix all get more and more out of date. Seeing as they also make money when people buy Dill from other players the choice is odd.
What about the option "pay dilithium to auto-finish a mission" and get the mission rewards for the specific mission upon payment?
(Caveat being that it has to be a mission you haven't previously done yet)
Wait, no, nevermind...
This sort of sink would be targetted at the people that have a huge sum of dilithium, but those kinds of people with that amount of dil would in all probability have already finished all of the missions (with the exception of the Terran Gambit arc) ages ago.
Well...what about putting lock-box ships on the Phoenix Prize Token menu?
Lockbox will never happen, but auto-finishing episodes to get the rest of a gear set is something that we have asked for several times in the past.
Having to run the same episode 2-4 times on each character to get all the pieces of a space or ground set can be really annoying. I'd happily shift dil to a new character to avoid that.
The reason they don't do both is they know most players don't want all the ships on every character, outside of admiralty cards anyway.
So most will gamble on the near zero chance on epic tokens and keep the ship.
They also know the "wait for a sale" mentality that's pervasive through the playerbase.
So they try and trap players from both sides into the mudd bundles, the whales likely buy them at full whack while the destitute peasants wait for the 75% sale......and then dump all their dil into the exchange to buy them.
So the game still wasn't grindy enough? Had to punish all of us for the actions of a few, and take away my main source of dilithium to feed into my fleet projects? Gosh, thanks a heap for that.
So how much time have got to squeeze the last bit of dills out of reputation for my alts? Is there even any point in trying if they aren't almost done?
So if I'm reading this post right....
People are saying the game has sinks.... however we had a nice way around them claiming T5 rep rewards.
The way around them isn't the problem... but the game needs sinks ?
I am so confused. People have been admitting they used this to pay for expensive packs... others are saying hey I was using this to bypass Crytpics sinks.
Then others are saying we need more sinks... even though people are right out saying this is how I was skipping the sinks.
All the sinks Crytpic could dream up are useless if people have an easy way to avoid them.
Yes fleet projects are intended to be paid for with time sunk into the game... or $. This isn't a charity. Also have a feeling a lot of people where leveling fleets with only a couple members or something... fleets where never intended to leveled by 1 or 2 people. (not saying hanover2 is working a one man fleet... just pointing out fleets are supposed to be leveled by lots of people so the big sink numbers are not supposed to be borne by a couple people farming 300k in dill a day or something)
You had it right. I am the only remaining active member of my sad little fleet. Everyone else I know bailed on this grind-fest a long time ago, and I've personally invested too much to abandon it. I've also been playing this game since it was released, so I think any question of "time played" is long since answered.
So the game still wasn't grindy enough? Had to punish all of us for the actions of a few, and take away my main source of dilithium to feed into my fleet projects? Gosh, thanks a heap for that.
So how much time have got to squeeze the last bit of dills out of reputation for my alts? Is there even any point in trying if they aren't almost done?
So if I'm reading this post right....
People are saying the game has sinks.... however we had a nice way around them claiming T5 rep rewards.
The way around them isn't the problem... but the game needs sinks ?
I am so confused. People have been admitting they used this to pay for expensive packs... others are saying hey I was using this to bypass Crytpics sinks.
Then others are saying we need more sinks... even though people are right out saying this is how I was skipping the sinks.
All the sinks Crytpic could dream up are useless if people have an easy way to avoid them.
Yes fleet projects are intended to be paid for with time sunk into the game... or $. This isn't a charity. Also have a feeling a lot of people where leveling fleets with only a couple members or something... fleets where never intended to leveled by 1 or 2 people. (not saying hanover2 is working a one man fleet... just pointing out fleets are supposed to be leveled by lots of people so the big sink numbers are not supposed to be borne by a couple people farming 300k in dill a day or something)
You had it right. I am the only remaining active member of my sad little fleet. Everyone else I know bailed on this grind-fest a long time ago, and I've personally invested too much to abandon it. I've also been playing this game since it was released, so I think any question of "time played" is long since answered.
I hear you... I hated the holdings when they first came in.
Back in the day... as a early PVP player we had 100s of PvP fleets in game. When holdings hit... most evaporated. Players consolidated, and others just left.
At one point the main fleet I was in got sort of small so we merged with another fleet that was only a little bigger. No complaints about the group of folks I play with. Just ya also miss a lot of people that left... and although some are still around they have all merged into to other fleets. Cause ya pvper especially are not big PvE grinders.
I hear you as well on the all ready have too much sunk sentiment. We didn't deleted that old fleet we merged and I kept a couple toons there for ages now in case some old friends came back at some point. That fleet has a bunch of stuff half done, and now and then I'll complete a couple projects.
Holdings are a good sink if your just looking at the cost in terms of resources... and many fleets have paid the price. It did really cost the game in terms of community though imo. No doubt for things like PVP anyway. I miss being able to do tournaments and the like... and having it be realistic for 5 or 6 players to decide to fly a brand new Fleet tag. lol
If a companies policy has promoted the "wait for a sale" mindset then maybe that's a sign that the asking price could be reduced.
But cryptic did pounce on that theme and promote the concept through the overblown prices in the mug's markup section so highly unlikely to see any change in prices that isn't skyward.
i think more dil sinks start hurt game. Its not that intresting if price come down but imagin if 8000 dil cost 1 zen i happy to buy but never sell if dil price come down like 100dil per zen sorry i not gonna buy dil anymore i conna start then sell dil if 100dil per zen its that what everyone waits. But last patch i did see again they sell 4mil zen worth dil it did go up again. Its takes 4 months if really dil start go down. If dil farmed from reputations if any. Back in days there wasent issue because grinders farmers didnt existed on mmos farmers get keys for free that way not player itself. Idk who smart enought not sell dil for 500k 1000zen its not efficient but farmers need zen at any cost for free. But if price come down farmers get even more zen if they hold it and wait price drop imagin 200 dil for 1 zen how much zen you can make.
I really start sell dil if price come down if its ever happen and buy dil so long if its very high. I see only 1 thin that cryptic have to remove dil exchange because its not work as intended avarge player not get even 500k dil with many toons and get 1000 zen for that is not really worth it its ok for grinders i think everyone can spend 10 buxx to get 500k dil now its better value then grind.
But buying dil now is not really support game in any way most that dil is exploited there maybe they disable dil exchange for months that nobody can make new sale offers and buy option still its should come down.
Its should leave in some pont with no new zen for selling dil if exchange is disabled. Farmers cant put new offers in. Thy supply conna halt not get payd in time.
This is possibly the worst change that could have been made. So freaking short sided and it is all about profits $$$ - PWE wasn't getting enoigh so had to find someway to get the players to give moar $$$ to PWE. There is only so much blood you can suck - and pissing off almost your entire playerbase is not the way to suck more blood.
Comments
Levelling fewer reps means less encouragement to engage in gameplay that gives mark rewards and that will lead to folk logging in for 5-15 minutes a day to do whatever daily if they can be bothered because there's very little else in the game worth engaging with more than once as the poorly written episodes drip into the game.
The game needs a PROPER sink that people can spend their dilithium on. Cosmetics being the most obvious, warp trails, shields etc that could even be changed and themed to match a gamblebox for some better advertising than the server spam that console players still can't avoid.
So how much time have got to squeeze the last bit of dills out of reputation for my alts? Is there even any point in trying if they aren't almost done?
I feel that the Vanity Shields should simply be unlockable visual skins that are applied to a specific ship instead of a physical item that you have to keep slotted. If anything, Vanity Shields should be "consumed" when right-clicking and selecting "Use," and the visual appearance is added to a toggle or drop-down Vanity Shield visuals menu under the Visuals tab on your readied ship; I feel this would be a better system than the one we already have where we have to manually swap out Vanity Shields to cycle through visual appearances, meanwhile those same Vanity Shields just take up space in our inventories.
But I think I'm digressing from the main topic of this thread...
Makes sense... seems logical.
More likely actual Ferengi from the 25th century have come back in time to old Earth. You see they know in 200 years fake purple rocks will be exchangeable for real pure latinum.
So if I'm reading this post right....
People are saying the game has sinks.... however we had a nice way around them claiming T5 rep rewards.
The way around them isn't the problem... but the game needs sinks ?
I am so confused. People have been admitting they used this to pay for expensive packs... others are saying hey I was using this to bypass Crytpics sinks.
Then others are saying we need more sinks... even though people are right out saying this is how I was skipping the sinks.
All the sinks Crytpic could dream up are useless if people have an easy way to avoid them.
Yes fleet projects are intended to be paid for with time sunk into the game... or $. This isn't a charity. Also have a feeling a lot of people where leveling fleets with only a couple members or something... fleets where never intended to leveled by 1 or 2 people. (not saying hanover2 is working a one man fleet... just pointing out fleets are supposed to be leveled by lots of people so the big sink numbers are not supposed to be borne by a couple people farming 300k in dill a day or something)
This is a wonderfull idea. I've thought of something similar, because it reminds me of GTA V online custom shop, where you had to spend huge amounts of ingame currency, to mod your car - massive sink. This game could use something similar and one-time use, consumable vanity shields would be very popular.
Shield should be bound to a single ship, untill replaced or the ship gets dry docked/dismissed - then it's gone and you need to buy it again, if you wish the same look back.
No, I must respectfully say that is a horrible idea, much more complicated and less user friendly system than we have now, its NEVER going to be the kind of sink we need or want. I've also played GTA online, and HATED that system with a passion (and don't even get me started with the kilometers long list of problems that game has :P) It's a punish the poor, and not even phase the rich kind of system. I was glad when they even removed EC cost from costume or ship name edits, all it did was serve to be a nuisance, especially on fresh alts if you were new or didn't have account bank yet
When you use the dil exchange, you buy zen from other players not from Cryptic. That means those other players needed to buy zen.
Cryptic doesn't hate you using the dil exchange, they still get to sell zen to someone else. The reasons they have to bring the exchange down below 500 are things like encouraging free-to-players to stick around long enough to spend some zen of their own, and to be there to pad out TFOs for the paying customers to play with.
The exchange at 500 is a supply and demand problem: too much dil supply compared to the demand for dil.
This can be fixed by reducing supply (farming nerfs), by increasing demands (sinks), or both. This nerf is part of an "or both" set of fixes.
Just keep in mind there is a cap on how much sinks can do.
The problem with sinks is players. In general games have 3 types of players...
1 - Whales that spend on everything including to speed grinds... these people are purple rock buyers.
2 - People that are happy to buy content/items and things they can't grind for... but who will still grind rather then speed it with $
3 - People that either can't or won't spend money... or perhaps will spend 20 bucks now and then maybe.
The problem with everyone asking for more sinks more sinks more sinks. That first group of players is unique... it doesn't grow fast. Whales don't grow on trees. Expecting people in group 2 to all of a sudden become whales isn't realistic.
So sinks can only go so far... sinks may help drain some Dill from people that would other wise offer it for sale, but more sinks won't magically grow the whale class. So if Cryptic in their best month made X amount of $ on zen people are trading... that isn't likely to grow simply cause Cryptic changes some sink mechanics.
Oversupply is the biggest issue STO has.... this change helps with that. Frankly though if this doesn't start eating into the backlogs over the next few months. The best move forward after that is to look at more nerfs on the supply end. Tweaking some sinks might help... a few temporary sinks may short term help. Long term the issue is supply. Whales are going to spend pretty much the same amount give or take every month... so really supply is the only real effective way to keep the exchange from backing up.
The carrot before the stick would have been nice.
Also, you would think your point on encouraging free-to-players to stick around would be blindingly obvious, but no lets completely remove one of the most useful sources of dilithium from the new/casual FTP group, one which that group actually has put effort into achieving rather than using the means available to established players to 'minimize' the effort required, and restrict their choice in how the replacement can be used when other means could have been found to make the abuse of the system more difficult / less attractive.
This 'fix' feels like the exact opposite of encouragement for new/casual players to stick around.
They said during the livestream part of the reason of the change was to have it used as intended but it had been that way for YEARS so I don't believe Cryptic completely for that reason.
I think this would've been a good/better change IF the voucher amount could be used in the Repuation Dilithium Store as well!!!
Otherwise it feels like Cryptic making a Draconian restrictive change in taking away an option punishing the many for targeting a few.
But Cryptic will squeeze & restrict as they like & say whatever they want to feel justified about it & we'll decide to live, play, & spend accordingly with it. This certainly devalues Cryptic's buy-out feature of the T5 Reputation tiers though lol.
Never underestimate Cryptics obliviousness.
Heck I wouldn't even doubt that with the change in ownership... someone from the new company actually had some people play the game a bit to get a better understanding. It may be them that said... SO this massive payout at T5. lol
I just discovered this does not apply to Reputation store items, because I purchased Split Beam Rifle and my regular Dil went down by 7,500 and my 40,000 Rep Dil stayed at 40,000.
:: sigh ::
this is very disappointing.
Yes, along with making the change to T5 to nerf farming they also need to change the reputation store to use reputation dil. That change should have been made when they first added rep dil.
That would reduce some of the saltiness from players who point out that they don't buy enough of the gear sets to use up the T5 dil. With this fix we could get beams, cannons, ground gear, belium/pax consoles.
Outside borg ground sets refrequency thing (negated by sniper, tommy gun or any melee) and the fight at the end of breaking the wall chain on koblai P where the delta ground sets gimmick comes into play I can't think of any other specific instances where rep gear is more than just a choice of buffs or weapon style.
The snowballing of the exchange began when they bombarded the cash shop with back to back to back ships which I originally put down to blind greedonomics but having seen the deal with gearbox it might have been a shortsighted attempt to try and prove that the game has some kind of financial viability by leveraging "popular" shinies for a short term bump in income. If it was that then they're going to have to continue to leverage those shinies in the future and the dilex will remain stagnant until a proper sink arrives that folk want to engage with assuming the nerfs haven't pushed them beyond the limit of their love for trek, which is likely the only reason a lot of people play.
(Caveat being that it has to be a mission you haven't previously done yet)
Wait, no, nevermind...
This sort of sink would be targetted at the people that have a huge sum of dilithium, but those kinds of people with that amount of dil would in all probability have already finished all of the missions (with the exception of the Terran Gambit arc) ages ago.
Well...what about putting lock-box ships on the Phoenix Prize Token menu?
Or crazy idea... go back to putting event ships (and items) in the Phoenix packs. I mean they don't even have to stop with the distasteful mudd store unlcoks. Phoenix was always a single ship no account unlock. Just keep that, and add a mudd store account unlock option. Mudds didn't mean they had to put Phoenix out to pasture. It was pure greed trying to get every last dollar I guess.
I never understood why they stopped putting them in the Phoenix boxes. I get they want to sell them directly in mudds but there was no reason they couldn't do both things. The mudd pack with the account unlock would still have value... but Phoenix has lost most of its luster as the event items and ships in the Phoenix all get more and more out of date. Seeing as they also make money when people buy Dill from other players the choice is odd.
Lockbox will never happen, but auto-finishing episodes to get the rest of a gear set is something that we have asked for several times in the past.
Having to run the same episode 2-4 times on each character to get all the pieces of a space or ground set can be really annoying. I'd happily shift dil to a new character to avoid that.
So most will gamble on the near zero chance on epic tokens and keep the ship.
They also know the "wait for a sale" mentality that's pervasive through the playerbase.
So they try and trap players from both sides into the mudd bundles, the whales likely buy them at full whack while the destitute peasants wait for the 75% sale......and then dump all their dil into the exchange to buy them.
You had it right. I am the only remaining active member of my sad little fleet. Everyone else I know bailed on this grind-fest a long time ago, and I've personally invested too much to abandon it. I've also been playing this game since it was released, so I think any question of "time played" is long since answered.
I hear you... I hated the holdings when they first came in.
Back in the day... as a early PVP player we had 100s of PvP fleets in game. When holdings hit... most evaporated. Players consolidated, and others just left.
At one point the main fleet I was in got sort of small so we merged with another fleet that was only a little bigger. No complaints about the group of folks I play with. Just ya also miss a lot of people that left... and although some are still around they have all merged into to other fleets. Cause ya pvper especially are not big PvE grinders.
I hear you as well on the all ready have too much sunk sentiment. We didn't deleted that old fleet we merged and I kept a couple toons there for ages now in case some old friends came back at some point. That fleet has a bunch of stuff half done, and now and then I'll complete a couple projects.
Holdings are a good sink if your just looking at the cost in terms of resources... and many fleets have paid the price. It did really cost the game in terms of community though imo. No doubt for things like PVP anyway. I miss being able to do tournaments and the like... and having it be realistic for 5 or 6 players to decide to fly a brand new Fleet tag. lol
But cryptic did pounce on that theme and promote the concept through the overblown prices in the mug's markup section so highly unlikely to see any change in prices that isn't skyward.
I really start sell dil if price come down if its ever happen and buy dil so long if its very high. I see only 1 thin that cryptic have to remove dil exchange because its not work as intended avarge player not get even 500k dil with many toons and get 1000 zen for that is not really worth it its ok for grinders i think everyone can spend 10 buxx to get 500k dil now its better value then grind.
But buying dil now is not really support game in any way most that dil is exploited there maybe they disable dil exchange for months that nobody can make new sale offers and buy option still its should come down.
Its should leave in some pont with no new zen for selling dil if exchange is disabled. Farmers cant put new offers in. Thy supply conna halt not get payd in time.