Odd idea of fair, you want your opponent's effort and preparations be rewarded equally as your carelessness and neglectance. But guess what, even if everything hits a hard reset and all your desires are fulfilled, your opponents will still be more prepared to fight you, and there are no guarantee that the game will be fair at all, rather those who come prepared or spend some effort to it, will know what to abuse or what is op or what the devs did not forsee in order to defeat you.
Eh? A Strange take and somewhat bad-attitude reply.
No, I think PvP where people have characters/ships just for that so they fight using skill and experience not OP consoles. It's a lot easier to balance if everyone chooses from a small list of ships when entering or has a separate PvP hero character/ship. That's how other games handle it.
" Eh? A Strange take and somewhat bad-attitude reply. "
Well, sorry i think sometimes i am too blunt and lack social approach, don't take it personally. Take whatever is useful for you from my comments.
Most people have no interest in PvP. And as we have seen in other PvE things, people don't want to be stuck in things that are not their own because they are "underpowered" compared to the characters/ships they put effort into. Hell we got people complaining about playing as our mirror counterpart because they're not equipped like our normal selves.
I'm afraid in this situation, its a case of there will always be something to complain about, even if it could revive PvP in some way.
What has any of this to do with small changes to Intel abilities and untargetable mechanics?
It's a thread about making changes just for PVP players not the 99% who don't PVP? So the discussion has been about why the answer will probably be (and probably should be) "no".
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
1 minute a week is fine with me
1% of development resources is fine with me too, but even that much doesn't necessarily make sense unless Cryptic thinks that 1% want to spend all of their time and, more important to them money, doing PVP. If they spend 50% of their time on PVE then PVP might only deserve 0.5% of resources from a business point of view.
Cryptic wants to keep paying customers happy enough to stay and bring in new customers. If a week of development time will bring in 100 new PVE customers or 1 new PVP customers which type of work should they do?
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
1 minute a week is fine with me
1% of development resources is fine with me too, but even that much doesn't necessarily make sense unless Cryptic thinks that 1% want to spend all of their time and, more important to them money, doing PVP. If they spend 50% of their time on PVE then PVP might only deserve 0.5% of resources from a business point of view.
Cryptic wants to keep paying customers happy enough to stay and bring in new customers. If a week of development time will bring in 100 new PVE customers or 1 new PVP customers which type of work should they do?
Well first I disagree with your 1%. That is simply not true. There are also many PvP players that simply don't PvP as much anymore due to lack of development. There are also a large number that return when something does change they hope for the better... and in general leave again. Yes there is money in PvP... even if YOU don't like it.
Your argument is also silly as you can make the same argument about everything else. Almost no one cares about ground content... and we got broken Boff upgrade tokens. Role players are a small part of the overall population as well... yet they still manage to make uniforms and fix bugs on RP content. The number of people that run doff missions is small... I hope they never even consider bug fixing that cause it isn't important to me anyway.
The game has PvP cut outs already built in. If Cryptic chooses to spend a few min modifying gear,traits or skills to add a (reduction vs players) modifier. Don't worry it would take almost zero of their time away from creating new and fantastic Crusher content.
Odd idea of fair, you want your opponent's effort and preparations be rewarded equally as your carelessness and neglectance. But guess what, even if everything hits a hard reset and all your desires are fulfilled, your opponents will still be more prepared to fight you, and there are no guarantee that the game will be fair at all, rather those who come prepared or spend some effort to it, will know what to abuse or what is op or what the devs did not forsee in order to defeat you.
Ill agree with you about one thing, the endevour system is becoming ridiculously inflated, and there is nothing new players can do about it, so there you have a point. Maybe if the ratio was 1000 levels max for 5crit chance total max, and you could purchase the first 500 levels for 40 000dill per level to speed up, it will look more reasonable, so a beginner could actually catch up to the rest with good strategy and planning but thanks for pointing this out. The endevour system have become so inflated that at this point its actually damaging.
There's nothing unfair or weird about what he said. With any PVP system that allows you to customize builds and level of gear used can be a factor, such as mk xii purple vs mk xv gold, you can and will have massive differences in power in some instances. Level of gear used can drastically effect the performance level of a ship and limit its potential. The only way to eliminate that is to do one of two things, either level the playing field by using predetermined builds (barf) or scale all gear to max level while in the match. Thus a mk xii white disruptor beam would have the same base performance as a mk xv gold's base performance.
In terms of endeavors yes, I agree that can be a massive power difference. I've wished for a catchup mechanic for awhile but I can also see why they don't one in either. Once again, a scaling option could be utilized here that assumes no endeavor points are taken into account during the match, or it's assumed everyone has maxed endeavors. However this is all ultimately a side debate and not relevant to the original post so I will leave that here.
Yes i don't see why the pvp, pve and rp can't all have something. It doesn't have to be one vs the other or "us" vs "them". I also thing it will take very little to remove the negative experience from PvP:
- Intel team gives stealth vs non-players only
- evade target lock gives untargetable vs non-players only
- temporal surge gives 2 seconds of untargetable as the tooltip say, rather than the full 10seconds which is in practice.
the consoles are not a problem as long as the above is fixed because they cost console slot.
Firstly, if Temporal Surge is giving 10 seconds of untargetable in pvp vs the two seconds it's supposed to give, that's a bug and something not working correctly. If you can provide clear evidence of this occurring I will pass it up the chain for a fix.
As for the rest of this particular block, the problem you're going to have is when you ask for something to be changed for pvp reasons, it will invariably effect pve. I'm glad you've since moved the goalpost to say you want certain effects made to work vs non-players only. However certain items simply can't be altered without major changes to backend stuff. If this game was more balanced in terms of it's pve and pvp player numbers I would say those changes could be warranted, but in this instance you're talking drastic changes that roughly 99% of the playerbase will never see or know about, 95% of we assume there are more pvp folks that simply don't roll in normal circles. For a game like STO you're basically asking them to go back and double the code for player vs non-player interactions in a game that's 99% pve and 1% pvp playerbase. If this was WoW or something like that it would be justified, but not here.
I can give you evidence, but at this point i feel like you are just at arms vs. me and everything i say is to be countered just for the sake of countering me, in that sense no evidence is possible. At this point is how i feel.
It is not my personal opinion that the current state of stealth stacking is bad, many, including Bret for example say cryptic should just give enough perception to players to counter it, this is where my personal opinion kicks in, i am fine with his idea of giving players more perception to make it reasonable, however the part i don't like is that this will be some kind of a "secret" knowledge, only the pvp players are aware of, so lets say when pvp endevour pops up, the 99% who don't care about learning that perception formula and will have no clue why they weren't able to shoot back and this creates a negative experience. In my opinion, even if you are some kind if a newbie that have no intention of pvp whatsoever and just popup for a fight, at the very least you should be able to shoot back. Being able to shoot back is very important, because if you lost, atleast you know you fought back.
A couple of things you need to understand. It is your personal opinion that stealth stacking is bad in pvp and not established fact. Second, you and Bret are entitled to your opinions just like everyone else, and I'm not fond of some of the mechanics in pvp currently either. Bret liking something or disliking something doesn't automatically make it good or bad for the game, it means one guy in the game likes/dislikes something. Likewise you agreeing with Bret doesn't make you automatically correct. You and Bret are NOT the arbiters of what is good/bad in this game nor are you the arbiters of what is fact/fiction. You are two people with two opinions on an internet forum from a sea of players. You are no more important than anyone else simply because one of you has a youtube channel with less than 400 subs at the time of this post. Your opinions are no more important than any other forumite or player in this game.
If you're afraid of certain things being a "secret" among the pvp players, then do some youtube videos and put it out there. Do some entries on reddit and the STO wiki to explain things to people. From there it's up to the individual player whether they take a look at it or not.
If a player chooses to go into a certain game mode, yes there should be balance as much as possible. At the same time, experience and gear is going to be a major factor. If you give a new player a ship loaded down with all mk xv gold gear, and a veteran player that same build, that veteran player is going to fly circles around the new guy because the veteran player has the experience the new person doesn't yet have. Eventually they will get there, but that day isn't today. People can put videos, articles and the like out there all day long to explain things to people, but it's also incumbent on the people to seek that knowledge out and do a little research on their own.
If I go to a national tournament for Magic the Gathering and use a starter deck, I'm going to get trounced because the others have taken the time to perfect their decks and have put more time, effort, and investment into said decks. Where as I'm trying to do the bare minimum yet expecting the same results as them. It doesn't work that way. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with the game if I get trounced in that scenario, it means I didn't put the same time, effort, and investment into as them and because I did only the bare minimum, I got bare minimum results and performance. In that instance the problem is the player, not the game.
First case scenario is intelligence team user, who does not use exitus or lambda cannot be targeted by someone who does not have any additional perception.
In order to see your actual stealth value what you need to do is check your exitus trait, add a zero and this is your value prior to adding exitus, then you subtract the difference between basic cloak and intel team value (4950 - 4680 = 270) in my case i have 5400 cloaking stealth value as you see in the screenshot, this means my intel team value is 5130.
then we add this to the formula: (5000 - 5130) / 50 = -2.6km, this means a pve player or a barbie girl or someone of your friends who doesn't bother to care about perception vs stealth cannot even hope to target a pvp player during the endevour event or some random skirmish.
Next layer of the problem - is you cannot actually target exitus user with a non-intel or non-pilot ship, even if you know what you are doing. In order to be able to target this type of a player you need about 6100 perception so:
(6100 - 5630) / 50 = 9.4km which seems fair. How do you get 1100 perception on a non-intel and non pilot ship ?
Next layer of problem - since everyone uses lambda for detection boost, they also cut the enemy perception by -450, this means that in order to be able to target exitus stacker who uses lambda, you need:
about 6500 perception or (6500 - 6100) / 50 = 8km (seems reasonable)
Please tell me, how do you reasonably stack 1500 additional perception in this game ? Keep in mind every time you select perception source, this is also a big sacrifice to your ship's total capacity.
In other words your problem is that you can't beat the people using stealth mechanics so you want it nerfed so you can beat. You straight up said in your original post any heavy handed solution will do. The problem you have is this is working as intended since the players are taking advantage of multiple abilities and it's not just one specific thing. What you also fail to understand is that different ships will have different strengths and weaknesses in a pvp situation. Again that's not something wrong with the game. Now you're certainly free to say there should be more ways to gain perception in game and that at least is a valid argument. IF/when I pvp against friends, we choose not to use certain mechanics and abilities because we find them to be unfun. I specifically avoid the exitus trait for that reason. However my thinking it's an unfun thing is not valid reason enough to demand it be nerfed, which is what I'm gathering from your complaints here.
As for the numbers themselves, that's people taking advantage of mechanics in the game and doing what the game allows them to do. If the person using Lambda is able to keep that debuff on you and you can't target them because you didn't plan for a way to counter Lambda, that's entirely your fault and not the fault of the game. I'm not going to debate with you further on different sources of perception vs stealth because that wasn't the point of why I brought that up to start with. My point was that it's a game of whoever has the higher stat, the person with perception or the person with the stealth. Whatever is higher will win out and stealth on its own is not the instant "I win" button you've been making it out to be.
Next problem - problem untargetable -
So apparently you can get 7 or 8 seconds of untargetable from evade target lock+ 10seconds (yes ten!) from temporal surge and 5 from the picard manuver, for total about 23 seconds of complete untargetable every 1 minute add a 30seconds of shield immunity and 2x placates, because why not ? In practice however they are not used in this order, untargetable is simply used as a reset button, lets say 3 people focus you down, you hit untargetable and heal up. This means you can escape a team focus down 3 times every 1 minute.
What is the problem ? Evade target lock, temporal surge and intel teams.
Once again if you're getting more than 2 seconds untargetable from Temporal Surge in a pvp situation, that is a bug and something that as I said prior, you are welcome to provide evidence of for a fix. If that's indeed happening, then what you're seeing is in part due to something that's not working correctly and as such isn't as big of an issue as you're making it out to be. It doesn't need to be nerfed, it needs to be fixed. A fix and a nerf are not the same thing.
As for Evade Target Lock, I've had the untargetable effect go as high as 20 seconds on some of my sci builds as have some fleetmates. However it takes very niche builds to do this that I would never take into a pvp situation. While yeah I can do something like that, it makes the build a one trick pony, and the moment that ability wears off, I'm up the creek.
In terms of the abilities I totaled up before, the abilities are going to be on cooldown more than they will be active. That's 37 seconds you can do something with even by your own calculations assuming everything was chained. However we know by the cooldowns of those powers, you can't chain them for the full 23 seconds every minute. You get that one time, then from there it's going to be awhile before you can chain the full 23 seconds back to back purely by the base cooldowns of the abilities themselves. I could repeat the math from above but I see no need as it speaks for itself.
I also know that you can only get one immunity every 30 seconds. Such as if someone uses the damage immunity from Rock and Roll, they'll lock out all other immunities for at least 30 seconds. So if someone is using more than one immunity every 30 seconds, that again is a bug and something I would invite you to provide evidence for. If you can demonstrate this happening I will fire a report up the chain for a fix. Otherwise what ability are you seeing that grants 30 seconds of complete damage immunity, because an ability like that existing is news to me.
As for the placates, those also have a decent cooldown to them as well. As annoying as it all is, you can still beat the other person, you will just have to work for it, which you don't seem to want to do. You want them punished for using something you can't beat and are coming here demanding it be nerfed because you don't like it. Hate me all you want but that's how it reads to me.
What is the problem? The problem I'm seeing is you want abilities nerfed that you don't like and touting your opinions as fact when they're nothing but your opinions. You're free to request changes to mechanics you don't like, but you disliking those mechanics doesn't make you automatically correct. It's the mechanics existing and you being offended by them. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Likewise people are also allowed to come on here and say they disagree with your requests and say why they think Cryptic should ignore it, as several people on here have done.
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
@darkbladejk
Cmon man, you do unjustice to me when you keep misrepresenting what i am communicating here, you keep saying its my personal opinion and i have to deal with it, where i clearly explained that the problems themselves are not my personal problem or opinion, only the solutions i proposed are. Everyone is suffering from these problems and many pvp players actually DO NOT pvp anyone because the said problems IN PARTICULAR are cancer.
If dividing the code between pve and pvp players is very difficult to do, just write a code that cancels your evade target lock or surge or intel team buff the moment you activate your weapons on another player this is very easy coding.
YES! fix the surge! Many can confirm the tooltip is misleading and its full 10 seconds for pvp, batter yet, if you can extend that solution with a copy/paste it into evade target lock and intel team, you have done the pvp community a service!
Now that you mention immunities, Ingenious tanacity doesn't seem to have 30seconds lock, you can activate it every 10 seconds or so, is this intended ?
You seems to agree that endeavours levels are obstacle for new players. I have a friend who can't pvp because he is new to the game and the endeavours are too much of a wall to overcome. Forward this too ?
I am not expecting things to get fixed just because i wrote a comment, but any improvement is welcome.
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
really? you own a company that makes ice cream cones. you can make 100 a day. are you really going to make that liver flavored one which PROBABLY will not sell, resulting in a loss every day? or are you going to make another Rocky road, which WILL sell?
making that liver one is poor business practice, pure and simple. You don't open a high end anything in a neighborhood has an income of 8,000, and you don't open a saves a lot in a place with a 100K income
If i had company, ill look to expand it, it may be 1% today, 10% tomorrow 20% after it, where i work we really struggled with sell certain products so we didn't bother with those but then we hired a merchant dealer specialized for these products in particular, and she is now selling these products so much that sometimes i struggle to physically process all the tasks that come from her.
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
really? you own a company that makes ice cream cones. you can make 100 a day. are you really going to make that liver flavored one which PROBABLY will not sell, resulting in a loss every day? or are you going to make another Rocky road, which WILL sell?
making that liver one is poor business practice, pure and simple. You don't open a high end anything in a neighborhood has an income of 8,000, and you don't open a saves a lot in a place with a 100K income
You have an ice cream shop. You make 3 flavors. The exciting PvP flavor, the fun and silly RP flavor, and the everyone loves is vanilla pve. When you open your customers are pretty evenly split you have 25% loving PvP 25% happy with your RP offering.. and half your customers are just plain Vanillas.
10 years later... well you have let your vannilla bleed all over your exciting flavor and its sort of gross and 25% of your customers have became a few % points. Your RP flavor has also gotten so so amounts of love you have removed the foundry cones they loved, you have removed the new bridges you sprinking in... and their numbers have also greatly diminished.
Now you tell me whos fault is it that 50% of your old business is now a small fraction of the total ?
PvP had plenty of potential to grow. In fact it actually did for the first handful of years. Yes at one time PvP was actually growing. The games first highly effective and loved system overhaul (when they added skills like Hazards... and the standard team skills became cleanses) was created to balance PvP. It also made PvE much better. Then some staff changed at the top... some folks that clearly didn't like PvP either, and due to Cryptic being on the sales block they focused on creep and sales. Delta everyone LOVED it. PvP died.
Still some hung on cause the core game is great... and you know you can still actually have some fun PvP even today although there are some systems that for sure work to make it unfun. Yes not having PvP cut outs on the stacking stealth and target stealth stuff is for sure the largest unfun factor right now. Changing it would not effect PvE at all... for a few reasons. First very few people in PvE actually use any of that stuff. Do PvE players really use Intel team ? Or attack pattern lambda ? Really ? I don't think so. Secondly even if they do want to use it the developers have a system in place where skills can be segmented. the (vs players) cutout is in the code. So they could make changes to those skills and items without getting the exciting PvP ice cream in the vanilla bucket.
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
really? you own a company that makes ice cream cones. you can make 100 a day. are you really going to make that liver flavored one which PROBABLY will not sell, resulting in a loss every day? or are you going to make another Rocky road, which WILL sell?
making that liver one is poor business practice, pure and simple. You don't open a high end anything in a neighborhood has an income of 8,000, and you don't open a saves a lot in a place with a 100K income
You have an ice cream shop. You make 3 flavors. The exciting PvP flavor...
Just because you think liver-flavored ice cream is exciting doesn't make it a fact.
@sirsitsalot I don't think anyone in the thread attempted to silence PVPers, just to explain why we either think the change won't happen or think the change should not happen. There was disagreement over how many people want PVP at all, or whether everyone needs to try it.
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
really? you own a company that makes ice cream cones. you can make 100 a day. are you really going to make that liver flavored one which PROBABLY will not sell, resulting in a loss every day? or are you going to make another Rocky road, which WILL sell?
making that liver one is poor business practice, pure and simple. You don't open a high end anything in a neighborhood has an income of 8,000, and you don't open a saves a lot in a place with a 100K income
You have an ice cream shop. You make 3 flavors. The exciting PvP flavor...
Just because you think liver-flavored ice cream is exciting doesn't make it a fact.
Just because you only like Vanilla. I still think your swell. lol
like icecream ? Trying eat one while someone is constantly throwing sand into your eyes. L2eat icecream champ, your problem.
I recently saw a post from someone in discord who had a 1v1 with another famous pvp player, the rules were the following: "no intel teams, evade or surge" he described the fight as "everlasting and draw", so i thought to myself, such rules would make perfect fight for me, why not ask that person for one ? Thinking that ill have the edge, we went forward, same rules. Did you know what happened ? A draw lol, we zhal'd each other couple of times but after a very long fight it wasn't close to a finish. This is without untargetable and stealth.
Why i am saying this ? Do you understand and these things are only the tip of the iceberg ? Never the less by removing them the fight itself was enjoyable because it felt like we are playing instead of trolling.
Forget 1v1, in a team vs team, if you remove the trolling, it will actually be a good experience.
like icecream ? Trying eat one while someone is constantly throwing sand into your eyes. L2eat icecream champ, your problem.
I recently saw a post from someone in discord who had a 1v1 with another famous pvp player, the rules were the following: "no intel teams, evade or surge" he described the fight as "everlasting and draw", so i thought to myself, such rules would make perfect fight for me, why not ask that person for one ? Thinking that ill have the edge, we went forward, same rules. Did you know what happened ? A draw lol, we zhal'd each other couple of times but after a very long fight it wasn't close to a finish. This is without untargetable and stealth.
Why i am saying this ? Do you understand and these things are only the tip of the iceberg ? Never the less by removing them the fight itself was enjoyable because it felt like we are playing instead of trolling.
Forget 1v1, in a team vs team, if you remove the trolling, it will actually be a good experience.
To be fair even long before we had Zhal trait hull imagers escape consoles ect ect.
1v1s went on for a long time. Ok Draws didn't happen... but I remember way way back year 1 2 3 hanging out at Cracked doing 1v1s all night. 2 Evenly matched PvPers with builds that didn't really exploit something about the others... fights went on for a long time.
5v5 matches however tended to end within 20 min with a small handful of acceptations. A couple very good teams could easily still go 45 min though... and we all know in team games deaths/kills only occur with team work. I played on a small handful of teams capable of calling two targets... and often games would end faster then expected by managing to roll the right order and get a team wipe. (yes the idea of wiping an entire competent team at this point is insane)
Anyway I agree with you that there are lots of things that are issues in PvP... and it is of course not just healing and butt saves, DMG is also a much higher then it used to be. At one time DPS ships where Squishy and Healing ships had no DPS neither of those are really things anymore. Anyway 1v1s are not a great metric... 1v1s have always been much different then actual team play. I remember circling people like Ayatani back in the day over cracked for half an hour before someone missed a buff or something and paid for it. The Stealth stacking is detrimental to team play, how do you team target anymore without just using name keybinds. Not that I disagree with your ponit... I'm not sure "Fixing" stealth stacking fixes the team game either, I do have a feeling though it would have more effect on the team game then solo fights.
A rebalance isn't required for PVP vs PVE. simply target the maps in question
if you enter ker'rat, solar winds or whatever set new values for all abilities, its a fast fix to the issue at hand without it being overly complicated.
Simples
A rebalance isn't required for PVP vs PVE. simply target the maps in question
if you enter ker'rat, solar winds or whatever set new values for all abilities, its a fast fix to the issue at hand without it being overly complicated.
Simples
With code... not so simple. You're still creating a second database of EVERY item and ability in the game, but now adding the complication of tying it to location, which could still break and affect it everywhere.
I'm sorry but when people try and say something is easy when talking Code... I have to disagree because one misplaced digit can bork the whole thing.
Other things have been separated into does X, but Y versus other players. It could be less difficult than adding a costume to the tailor.
Those were coded that way from the beginning. Recoding every old ability in the game isn't just a matter of running a global search-and-replace. And until someone complains, you have no idea which of the old abilities might need to be modified in this way - there are a lot of them.
Other things have been separated into does X, but Y versus other players. It could be less difficult than adding a costume to the tailor.
Those were coded that way from the beginning. Recoding every old ability in the game isn't just a matter of running a global search-and-replace. And until someone complains, you have no idea which of the old abilities might need to be modified in this way - there are a lot of them.
Also, someone will still complain regardless of the changes. Some will say the new PVP version of a powers is too strong, others will say it's too weak. Multiply that by dozens of powers. And if they are re-adjusted, interactions between the new new versions could throw off the balance yet again. It might take weeks of developer time and months of real time as PVPers give feedback.
Other things have been separated into does X, but Y versus other players. It could be less difficult than adding a costume to the tailor.
Those were coded that way from the beginning. Recoding every old ability in the game isn't just a matter of running a global search-and-replace. And until someone complains, you have no idea which of the old abilities might need to be modified in this way - there are a lot of them.
There really are not that many of them. Also many of them already have PvP cut outs added. I don't know how easy it would be to go into the code and change things.
Having said that Cryptic has been updating the specialty skills. They just did Intel... in fact one of their recent changes is part of the problem. A skill that frankly has basically zero use in PvE still became too good and actually annoying PvP. Cryptic as much as they say they don't care about PvP seem to do a lot of things that seem aimed at either selling to PvPers or just plain messing the game up some more.
Other things have been separated into does X, but Y versus other players. It could be less difficult than adding a costume to the tailor.
Those were coded that way from the beginning. Recoding every old ability in the game isn't just a matter of running a global search-and-replace. And until someone complains, you have no idea which of the old abilities might need to be modified in this way - there are a lot of them.
Wouldn't it be funny if the dev time for something like adjusting the 2 or 3 abilities in question to work differently versus other players was actually far less than thought and really was less work than adding an outfit to the tailor ?
Something like this could be potentially be measured in dev-minutes or even dev-seconds as it's something they've recently done for other things.
@darkbladejk
Cmon man, you do unjustice to me when you keep misrepresenting what i am communicating here, you keep saying its my personal opinion and i have to deal with it, where i clearly explained that the problems themselves are not my personal problem or opinion, only the solutions i proposed are. Everyone is suffering from these problems and many pvp players actually DO NOT pvp anyone because the said problems IN PARTICULAR are cancer.
If dividing the code between pve and pvp players is very difficult to do, just write a code that cancels your evade target lock or surge or intel team buff the moment you activate your weapons on another player this is very easy coding.
YES! fix the surge! Many can confirm the tooltip is misleading and its full 10 seconds for pvp, batter yet, if you can extend that solution with a copy/paste it into evade target lock and intel team, you have done the pvp community a service!
Now that you mention immunities, Ingenious tanacity doesn't seem to have 30seconds lock, you can activate it every 10 seconds or so, is this intended ?
You seems to agree that endeavours levels are obstacle for new players. I have a friend who can't pvp because he is new to the game and the endeavours are too much of a wall to overcome. Forward this too ?
I am not expecting things to get fixed just because i wrote a comment, but any improvement is welcome.
You thinking something is a problem doesn't automatically make it a problem. Once again you are not the arbiter of what is good or bad. You having a preference for how things should be in pvp doesn't make you correct, it's pvp existing and you having an opinion. Same goes for the rest of the pvp crowd. None of them are arbiters of what is good or bad either.
Temporal Surge was fixed. As I said previously, get me evidence of something that isn't working correctly and I will forward it up the chain. You not liking how something functions doesn't make it broken. What makes it broken is if the tooltip says a buff lasts for 10 seconds, but you're only getting 5 seconds out of it as one example.
As to immunities, Ingenious Tenacity is NOT an immunity, but is akin to having reverse shield polarity up on that one particular shield facing. Even with reverse shield polarity active, you can still take damage and are not completely immune, it just makes it harder to kill something using that effect. So yes barring a statement from a dev to the contrary that is absolutely working as intended.
For endeavors I said they can make a power difference, I never said they made it impossible. You are the one asserting your friend can't pvp because he is new and doesn't have the endeavor points you and some of the others do. That isn't a bug but working as intended. People who have kept up with endeavors will have more bonuses than people who didn't or haven't worked the system as much. That's by design. If your friend can't pvp because of endeavors this tells me he has more going on than just that. I'm not opposed to them giving people the ability to turn endeavors off on certain maps or scaling everyone to have max endeavors, but beyond that, the current system is working as intended.
Other things have been separated into does X, but Y versus other players. It could be less difficult than adding a costume to the tailor.
Those were coded that way from the beginning. Recoding every old ability in the game isn't just a matter of running a global search-and-replace. And until someone complains, you have no idea which of the old abilities might need to be modified in this way - there are a lot of them.
Wouldn't it be funny if the dev time for something like adjusting the 2 or 3 abilities in question to work differently versus other players was actually far less than thought and really was less work than adding an outfit to the tailor ?
Something like this could be potentially be measured in dev-minutes or even dev-seconds as it's something they've recently done for other things.
As another already pointed out, those abilities were made that way from the start, and still required extra coding to get the separate effects. So whether it's done from the start or long after the fact, it's still extra coding that would need to be done. In order to change all other abilities after the fact now would require them to go back and change a mountain of different items. Can it be done, yes it can. There is always the ability to make such a change. Whether it's cost effective or worthwhile to do so is another debate entirely. They can do practically anything they want, whether it's practical to do so is another thing entirely.
When you're writing an ability that can have more than one effect, such as effect X and effect Y, the code for both effects must be present at all times even if only half of it is being used. When such an ability is activated the game performs a check to determine if the target is a player or NPC and then applies the appropriate effect. That's an extra calculation that's not there with static abilities that don't differentiate. Computers read every line of code put in front of them unless they're instructed to skip lines or not to do so. In this case, the computer still has to be aware of both effects even if it only applies one of them. The more code you add, the larger the database which can potentially slow things down. Again a single one of zero out of place can bring the entire thing crashing down. The more complex the code, the more chances for something to break and go wrong.
Other things have been separated into does X, but Y versus other players. It could be less difficult than adding a costume to the tailor.
Those were coded that way from the beginning. Recoding every old ability in the game isn't just a matter of running a global search-and-replace. And until someone complains, you have no idea which of the old abilities might need to be modified in this way - there are a lot of them.
There really are not that many of them. Also many of them already have PvP cut outs added. I don't know how easy it would be to go into the code and change things.
Having said that Cryptic has been updating the specialty skills. They just did Intel... in fact one of their recent changes is part of the problem. A skill that frankly has basically zero use in PvE still became too good and actually annoying PvP. Cryptic as much as they say they don't care about PvP seem to do a lot of things that seem aimed at either selling to PvPers or just plain messing the game up some more.
The intel changes were done by Bort on his spare time because he wanted to see the intel abilities updated for the modern game as they were vastly outdated and underpowered compared to many of the modern specs and powers, such as miracle worker being just one prime example. If it effected pvp (as it clearly did) then that's a side effect of the changes. Which actually proves my earlier point that changes made for one side of the game will effect the other unless there is a separation between pvp and pve made. Whether that's splitting abilities into effect X and effect Y, or doing a full on pvp server. You can't run the exact same code twice and expect a different result in this instance as that's the literal definition of insanity.
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
Comments
Eh? A Strange take and somewhat bad-attitude reply.
No, I think PvP where people have characters/ships just for that so they fight using skill and experience not OP consoles. It's a lot easier to balance if everyone chooses from a small list of ships when entering or has a separate PvP hero character/ship. That's how other games handle it.
Well, sorry i think sometimes i am too blunt and lack social approach, don't take it personally. Take whatever is useful for you from my comments.
I'm afraid in this situation, its a case of there will always be something to complain about, even if it could revive PvP in some way.
It's a thread about making changes just for PVP players not the 99% who don't PVP? So the discussion has been about why the answer will probably be (and probably should be) "no".
We're all free to ask for anything we want, as long as we do it without violating forum rules. Other posters are free to disagree as long as they too do it without violating the rules. It's General Discussion not General Don't-Respond-If-You Disagree
SO if I get your argument here.... PvPers are only 1% of the paying player base, SO cryptic should not spend even 1 min doing any development geared to that playstyle ?
If that is your argument it is pretty stupid.
1 minute a week is fine with me
1% of development resources is fine with me too, but even that much doesn't necessarily make sense unless Cryptic thinks that 1% want to spend all of their time and, more important to them money, doing PVP. If they spend 50% of their time on PVE then PVP might only deserve 0.5% of resources from a business point of view.
Cryptic wants to keep paying customers happy enough to stay and bring in new customers. If a week of development time will bring in 100 new PVE customers or 1 new PVP customers which type of work should they do?
Well first I disagree with your 1%. That is simply not true. There are also many PvP players that simply don't PvP as much anymore due to lack of development. There are also a large number that return when something does change they hope for the better... and in general leave again. Yes there is money in PvP... even if YOU don't like it.
Your argument is also silly as you can make the same argument about everything else. Almost no one cares about ground content... and we got broken Boff upgrade tokens. Role players are a small part of the overall population as well... yet they still manage to make uniforms and fix bugs on RP content. The number of people that run doff missions is small... I hope they never even consider bug fixing that cause it isn't important to me anyway.
The game has PvP cut outs already built in. If Cryptic chooses to spend a few min modifying gear,traits or skills to add a (reduction vs players) modifier. Don't worry it would take almost zero of their time away from creating new and fantastic Crusher content.
In terms of endeavors yes, I agree that can be a massive power difference. I've wished for a catchup mechanic for awhile but I can also see why they don't one in either. Once again, a scaling option could be utilized here that assumes no endeavor points are taken into account during the match, or it's assumed everyone has maxed endeavors. However this is all ultimately a side debate and not relevant to the original post so I will leave that here.
Firstly, if Temporal Surge is giving 10 seconds of untargetable in pvp vs the two seconds it's supposed to give, that's a bug and something not working correctly. If you can provide clear evidence of this occurring I will pass it up the chain for a fix.
As for the rest of this particular block, the problem you're going to have is when you ask for something to be changed for pvp reasons, it will invariably effect pve. I'm glad you've since moved the goalpost to say you want certain effects made to work vs non-players only. However certain items simply can't be altered without major changes to backend stuff. If this game was more balanced in terms of it's pve and pvp player numbers I would say those changes could be warranted, but in this instance you're talking drastic changes that roughly 99% of the playerbase will never see or know about, 95% of we assume there are more pvp folks that simply don't roll in normal circles. For a game like STO you're basically asking them to go back and double the code for player vs non-player interactions in a game that's 99% pve and 1% pvp playerbase. If this was WoW or something like that it would be justified, but not here.
A couple of things you need to understand. It is your personal opinion that stealth stacking is bad in pvp and not established fact. Second, you and Bret are entitled to your opinions just like everyone else, and I'm not fond of some of the mechanics in pvp currently either. Bret liking something or disliking something doesn't automatically make it good or bad for the game, it means one guy in the game likes/dislikes something. Likewise you agreeing with Bret doesn't make you automatically correct. You and Bret are NOT the arbiters of what is good/bad in this game nor are you the arbiters of what is fact/fiction. You are two people with two opinions on an internet forum from a sea of players. You are no more important than anyone else simply because one of you has a youtube channel with less than 400 subs at the time of this post. Your opinions are no more important than any other forumite or player in this game.
If you're afraid of certain things being a "secret" among the pvp players, then do some youtube videos and put it out there. Do some entries on reddit and the STO wiki to explain things to people. From there it's up to the individual player whether they take a look at it or not.
If a player chooses to go into a certain game mode, yes there should be balance as much as possible. At the same time, experience and gear is going to be a major factor. If you give a new player a ship loaded down with all mk xv gold gear, and a veteran player that same build, that veteran player is going to fly circles around the new guy because the veteran player has the experience the new person doesn't yet have. Eventually they will get there, but that day isn't today. People can put videos, articles and the like out there all day long to explain things to people, but it's also incumbent on the people to seek that knowledge out and do a little research on their own.
If I go to a national tournament for Magic the Gathering and use a starter deck, I'm going to get trounced because the others have taken the time to perfect their decks and have put more time, effort, and investment into said decks. Where as I'm trying to do the bare minimum yet expecting the same results as them. It doesn't work that way. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with the game if I get trounced in that scenario, it means I didn't put the same time, effort, and investment into as them and because I did only the bare minimum, I got bare minimum results and performance. In that instance the problem is the player, not the game.
In other words your problem is that you can't beat the people using stealth mechanics so you want it nerfed so you can beat. You straight up said in your original post any heavy handed solution will do. The problem you have is this is working as intended since the players are taking advantage of multiple abilities and it's not just one specific thing. What you also fail to understand is that different ships will have different strengths and weaknesses in a pvp situation. Again that's not something wrong with the game. Now you're certainly free to say there should be more ways to gain perception in game and that at least is a valid argument. IF/when I pvp against friends, we choose not to use certain mechanics and abilities because we find them to be unfun. I specifically avoid the exitus trait for that reason. However my thinking it's an unfun thing is not valid reason enough to demand it be nerfed, which is what I'm gathering from your complaints here.
As for the numbers themselves, that's people taking advantage of mechanics in the game and doing what the game allows them to do. If the person using Lambda is able to keep that debuff on you and you can't target them because you didn't plan for a way to counter Lambda, that's entirely your fault and not the fault of the game. I'm not going to debate with you further on different sources of perception vs stealth because that wasn't the point of why I brought that up to start with. My point was that it's a game of whoever has the higher stat, the person with perception or the person with the stealth. Whatever is higher will win out and stealth on its own is not the instant "I win" button you've been making it out to be.
Once again if you're getting more than 2 seconds untargetable from Temporal Surge in a pvp situation, that is a bug and something that as I said prior, you are welcome to provide evidence of for a fix. If that's indeed happening, then what you're seeing is in part due to something that's not working correctly and as such isn't as big of an issue as you're making it out to be. It doesn't need to be nerfed, it needs to be fixed. A fix and a nerf are not the same thing.
As for Evade Target Lock, I've had the untargetable effect go as high as 20 seconds on some of my sci builds as have some fleetmates. However it takes very niche builds to do this that I would never take into a pvp situation. While yeah I can do something like that, it makes the build a one trick pony, and the moment that ability wears off, I'm up the creek.
In terms of the abilities I totaled up before, the abilities are going to be on cooldown more than they will be active. That's 37 seconds you can do something with even by your own calculations assuming everything was chained. However we know by the cooldowns of those powers, you can't chain them for the full 23 seconds every minute. You get that one time, then from there it's going to be awhile before you can chain the full 23 seconds back to back purely by the base cooldowns of the abilities themselves. I could repeat the math from above but I see no need as it speaks for itself.
I also know that you can only get one immunity every 30 seconds. Such as if someone uses the damage immunity from Rock and Roll, they'll lock out all other immunities for at least 30 seconds. So if someone is using more than one immunity every 30 seconds, that again is a bug and something I would invite you to provide evidence for. If you can demonstrate this happening I will fire a report up the chain for a fix. Otherwise what ability are you seeing that grants 30 seconds of complete damage immunity, because an ability like that existing is news to me.
As for the placates, those also have a decent cooldown to them as well. As annoying as it all is, you can still beat the other person, you will just have to work for it, which you don't seem to want to do. You want them punished for using something you can't beat and are coming here demanding it be nerfed because you don't like it. Hate me all you want but that's how it reads to me.
What is the problem? The problem I'm seeing is you want abilities nerfed that you don't like and touting your opinions as fact when they're nothing but your opinions. You're free to request changes to mechanics you don't like, but you disliking those mechanics doesn't make you automatically correct. It's the mechanics existing and you being offended by them. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Likewise people are also allowed to come on here and say they disagree with your requests and say why they think Cryptic should ignore it, as several people on here have done.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
Cmon man, you do unjustice to me when you keep misrepresenting what i am communicating here, you keep saying its my personal opinion and i have to deal with it, where i clearly explained that the problems themselves are not my personal problem or opinion, only the solutions i proposed are. Everyone is suffering from these problems and many pvp players actually DO NOT pvp anyone because the said problems IN PARTICULAR are cancer.
If dividing the code between pve and pvp players is very difficult to do, just write a code that cancels your evade target lock or surge or intel team buff the moment you activate your weapons on another player this is very easy coding.
YES! fix the surge! Many can confirm the tooltip is misleading and its full 10 seconds for pvp, batter yet, if you can extend that solution with a copy/paste it into evade target lock and intel team, you have done the pvp community a service!
Now that you mention immunities, Ingenious tanacity doesn't seem to have 30seconds lock, you can activate it every 10 seconds or so, is this intended ?
You seems to agree that endeavours levels are obstacle for new players. I have a friend who can't pvp because he is new to the game and the endeavours are too much of a wall to overcome. Forward this too ?
I am not expecting things to get fixed just because i wrote a comment, but any improvement is welcome.
really? you own a company that makes ice cream cones. you can make 100 a day. are you really going to make that liver flavored one which PROBABLY will not sell, resulting in a loss every day? or are you going to make another Rocky road, which WILL sell?
making that liver one is poor business practice, pure and simple. You don't open a high end anything in a neighborhood has an income of 8,000, and you don't open a saves a lot in a place with a 100K income
If i had company, ill look to expand it, it may be 1% today, 10% tomorrow 20% after it, where i work we really struggled with sell certain products so we didn't bother with those but then we hired a merchant dealer specialized for these products in particular, and she is now selling these products so much that sometimes i struggle to physically process all the tasks that come from her.
You have an ice cream shop. You make 3 flavors. The exciting PvP flavor, the fun and silly RP flavor, and the everyone loves is vanilla pve. When you open your customers are pretty evenly split you have 25% loving PvP 25% happy with your RP offering.. and half your customers are just plain Vanillas.
10 years later... well you have let your vannilla bleed all over your exciting flavor and its sort of gross and 25% of your customers have became a few % points. Your RP flavor has also gotten so so amounts of love you have removed the foundry cones they loved, you have removed the new bridges you sprinking in... and their numbers have also greatly diminished.
Now you tell me whos fault is it that 50% of your old business is now a small fraction of the total ?
PvP had plenty of potential to grow. In fact it actually did for the first handful of years. Yes at one time PvP was actually growing. The games first highly effective and loved system overhaul (when they added skills like Hazards... and the standard team skills became cleanses) was created to balance PvP. It also made PvE much better. Then some staff changed at the top... some folks that clearly didn't like PvP either, and due to Cryptic being on the sales block they focused on creep and sales. Delta everyone LOVED it. PvP died.
Still some hung on cause the core game is great... and you know you can still actually have some fun PvP even today although there are some systems that for sure work to make it unfun. Yes not having PvP cut outs on the stacking stealth and target stealth stuff is for sure the largest unfun factor right now. Changing it would not effect PvE at all... for a few reasons. First very few people in PvE actually use any of that stuff. Do PvE players really use Intel team ? Or attack pattern lambda ? Really ? I don't think so. Secondly even if they do want to use it the developers have a system in place where skills can be segmented. the (vs players) cutout is in the code. So they could make changes to those skills and items without getting the exciting PvP ice cream in the vanilla bucket.
Just because you only like Vanilla. I still think your swell. lol
I recently saw a post from someone in discord who had a 1v1 with another famous pvp player, the rules were the following: "no intel teams, evade or surge" he described the fight as "everlasting and draw", so i thought to myself, such rules would make perfect fight for me, why not ask that person for one ? Thinking that ill have the edge, we went forward, same rules. Did you know what happened ? A draw lol, we zhal'd each other couple of times but after a very long fight it wasn't close to a finish. This is without untargetable and stealth.
Why i am saying this ? Do you understand and these things are only the tip of the iceberg ? Never the less by removing them the fight itself was enjoyable because it felt like we are playing instead of trolling.
Forget 1v1, in a team vs team, if you remove the trolling, it will actually be a good experience.
To be fair even long before we had Zhal trait hull imagers escape consoles ect ect.
1v1s went on for a long time. Ok Draws didn't happen... but I remember way way back year 1 2 3 hanging out at Cracked doing 1v1s all night. 2 Evenly matched PvPers with builds that didn't really exploit something about the others... fights went on for a long time.
5v5 matches however tended to end within 20 min with a small handful of acceptations. A couple very good teams could easily still go 45 min though... and we all know in team games deaths/kills only occur with team work. I played on a small handful of teams capable of calling two targets... and often games would end faster then expected by managing to roll the right order and get a team wipe. (yes the idea of wiping an entire competent team at this point is insane)
Anyway I agree with you that there are lots of things that are issues in PvP... and it is of course not just healing and butt saves, DMG is also a much higher then it used to be. At one time DPS ships where Squishy and Healing ships had no DPS neither of those are really things anymore. Anyway 1v1s are not a great metric... 1v1s have always been much different then actual team play. I remember circling people like Ayatani back in the day over cracked for half an hour before someone missed a buff or something and paid for it. The Stealth stacking is detrimental to team play, how do you team target anymore without just using name keybinds. Not that I disagree with your ponit... I'm not sure "Fixing" stealth stacking fixes the team game either, I do have a feeling though it would have more effect on the team game then solo fights.
A rebalance isn't required for PVP vs PVE. simply target the maps in question
if you enter ker'rat, solar winds or whatever set new values for all abilities, its a fast fix to the issue at hand without it being overly complicated.
Simples
Two guilty parties remain till pvp can be enjoyable again = intel teams + evade target lock
With code... not so simple. You're still creating a second database of EVERY item and ability in the game, but now adding the complication of tying it to location, which could still break and affect it everywhere.
I'm sorry but when people try and say something is easy when talking Code... I have to disagree because one misplaced digit can bork the whole thing.
Also, someone will still complain regardless of the changes. Some will say the new PVP version of a powers is too strong, others will say it's too weak. Multiply that by dozens of powers. And if they are re-adjusted, interactions between the new new versions could throw off the balance yet again. It might take weeks of developer time and months of real time as PVPers give feedback.
There really are not that many of them. Also many of them already have PvP cut outs added. I don't know how easy it would be to go into the code and change things.
Having said that Cryptic has been updating the specialty skills. They just did Intel... in fact one of their recent changes is part of the problem. A skill that frankly has basically zero use in PvE still became too good and actually annoying PvP. Cryptic as much as they say they don't care about PvP seem to do a lot of things that seem aimed at either selling to PvPers or just plain messing the game up some more.
Wouldn't it be funny if the dev time for something like adjusting the 2 or 3 abilities in question to work differently versus other players was actually far less than thought and really was less work than adding an outfit to the tailor ?
Something like this could be potentially be measured in dev-minutes or even dev-seconds as it's something they've recently done for other things.
You thinking something is a problem doesn't automatically make it a problem. Once again you are not the arbiter of what is good or bad. You having a preference for how things should be in pvp doesn't make you correct, it's pvp existing and you having an opinion. Same goes for the rest of the pvp crowd. None of them are arbiters of what is good or bad either.
Temporal Surge was fixed. As I said previously, get me evidence of something that isn't working correctly and I will forward it up the chain. You not liking how something functions doesn't make it broken. What makes it broken is if the tooltip says a buff lasts for 10 seconds, but you're only getting 5 seconds out of it as one example.
As to immunities, Ingenious Tenacity is NOT an immunity, but is akin to having reverse shield polarity up on that one particular shield facing. Even with reverse shield polarity active, you can still take damage and are not completely immune, it just makes it harder to kill something using that effect. So yes barring a statement from a dev to the contrary that is absolutely working as intended.
For endeavors I said they can make a power difference, I never said they made it impossible. You are the one asserting your friend can't pvp because he is new and doesn't have the endeavor points you and some of the others do. That isn't a bug but working as intended. People who have kept up with endeavors will have more bonuses than people who didn't or haven't worked the system as much. That's by design. If your friend can't pvp because of endeavors this tells me he has more going on than just that. I'm not opposed to them giving people the ability to turn endeavors off on certain maps or scaling everyone to have max endeavors, but beyond that, the current system is working as intended.
As another already pointed out, those abilities were made that way from the start, and still required extra coding to get the separate effects. So whether it's done from the start or long after the fact, it's still extra coding that would need to be done. In order to change all other abilities after the fact now would require them to go back and change a mountain of different items. Can it be done, yes it can. There is always the ability to make such a change. Whether it's cost effective or worthwhile to do so is another debate entirely. They can do practically anything they want, whether it's practical to do so is another thing entirely.
When you're writing an ability that can have more than one effect, such as effect X and effect Y, the code for both effects must be present at all times even if only half of it is being used. When such an ability is activated the game performs a check to determine if the target is a player or NPC and then applies the appropriate effect. That's an extra calculation that's not there with static abilities that don't differentiate. Computers read every line of code put in front of them unless they're instructed to skip lines or not to do so. In this case, the computer still has to be aware of both effects even if it only applies one of them. The more code you add, the larger the database which can potentially slow things down. Again a single one of zero out of place can bring the entire thing crashing down. The more complex the code, the more chances for something to break and go wrong.
The intel changes were done by Bort on his spare time because he wanted to see the intel abilities updated for the modern game as they were vastly outdated and underpowered compared to many of the modern specs and powers, such as miracle worker being just one prime example. If it effected pvp (as it clearly did) then that's a side effect of the changes. Which actually proves my earlier point that changes made for one side of the game will effect the other unless there is a separation between pvp and pve made. Whether that's splitting abilities into effect X and effect Y, or doing a full on pvp server. You can't run the exact same code twice and expect a different result in this instance as that's the literal definition of insanity.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator