When Delta Rising came out, they said that when they changed the old Elite to Advanced, nothing would change on that difficulty. Problem was... it did. It was suddenly a lot harder for those who just the previous day were able to do it just fine with the same build. And it got easier to Troll people because of the fail conditions.
They increased the difficulty based on the top tier DPS capability, which caused the Fires of Delta Rising on the forums. I remember the Fires...
Took a while for them to fix the sudden difficulty jump that caught everyone by surprise. Hell I still remember my first playthrough of Takedown. God that fight lasted FOREVER because everything was an HP sponge!
How exactly do you know what "most of the playerbase" does or does not benefit from? Do you happen to have access to any hard data from Cryptic to support this? If so, please do share.
So you're calling someone out for "speaking for the community" when you're kinda doing the same yourself. And the big problem with all of this "need for elite content" is that... its already there for the most part. You're just not getting RANDOM people queuing for it. Its mostly premade groups going in.
What I'm pointing out is that only adding more difficulty levels in itself isn't progress because it will only lead to a never ending cycle of either needing to add more of those, or nerfing things to bring people back to the existing difficulties.
This simply is not true and there is literally decades of MMO content progression throughout the various titles across the market that disputes this.
You know as well as I do that this is exactly what happened with Delta Rising for example.
The old Elite missions were suddenly called Advanced, yet more difficult to complete for most people. They didn't like that, so the Devs needed to spend time tweaking all sorts of stuff (effectiveness of weapons at Mk 12, 13 and 14, effectiveness of Borg shield drains, their speed boosts and so on), players needed to be given all sorts of ways to improve, requiring a lot of spending only to be able to complete the content that until a few weeks earlier, they already could finish.
You may not realize it, but you are actually emphasizing the exact opposite of what you are trying to claim here. Your example shows how the game indeed did progress and added higher levels of difficulty. Cryptic did this to advance the game, and their not having the new difficulty balanced perfectly immediately out of the gate only shows there was some fine tuning that needed to be done. They did not drop everything back to pre-DR levels of difficulty.
Part of MMO design is that people fundamentally want to feel like they accomplished something. In order to do that, there needs to be a challenge. Allowing for power creep without adequate content designed around and for it negates that challenge and is antithetical to progress.
That is what introducing more difficult content will only do in the longer term. More power creep - because you can't justify creating things that no one is able to play or complete - with the Devs eventually realising they need to combat the excessive power which in turn will mostly have consequences for the average player - because those dealing 600k DPS will still be able to finish their missions, while those who were just good enough for a certain difficulty level, will no longer be.
Well no, perhaps not everyone will be able to play at higher difficulty but there more certainly are people who would be able to. You are grossly exaggerating and distorting what was suggested as well. I did not suggest the game should have mandatory story or patrol content that requires ludicrous levels of DPS. I suggested more elite content that is optional, meaning no one is forced into it.
Your solution isn't a solution, it's merely dealing with the consequences of power creep while at the same time serving as a driver for even more of it.
Well no, my suggestion provides an outlet to use that higher level gear and skills to have a sense of accomplishment and challenge. Your "do nothing" idea is just that - nothing and does nothing to solve any issue at all.
And for the record: no one is expecting players to gimp themselves. What I'm saying is that I'm all fine with players striving to reach hundreds of thousands of DPS when only a fraction of that is needed - but that's no reason to set the cycle described above in motion, thereby hitting everyone eventually and wasting developer time and resources that could also be used to do things that most of the playerbase would actually benefit from.
How exactly do you know what "most of the playerbase" does or does not benefit from? Do you happen to have access to any hard data from Cryptic to support this? If so, please do share.
I would also suggest it may be easier and take less development time to create elite versions of existing content than it would to create all new content. Assets already exist, so nothing new needs to be created.
Also, you haven't responded to another point I made earlier:
Elite content already exists. But no one plays it, at least not the public queues - which is likely because those playing elite content want things to be a bit predictable, they want their team mates to be reliable.
Which again is perfectly understandable. But it shows that there is a challenge for them, but they're not interested in it.
This is not even remotely true. There are people who do queue for Elite level content, so saying "no one plays it" is not true at all. We have seen various posts on the subject over the years. At least I have. I would not want to guess whether more people PUG queue for normal, advanced or elite TFOs. I simply do not know. I am quite positive you have no idea either, so no idea where you are getting your "facts" from.
More people may not queue for elite content because the rewards are not sufficient enough to justify the extra effort. We do not know what the precise reasons are.
I never said I favour a 'do nothing' approach. In fact, I hinted at several ways to keep things interesting for everyone. Adding actual new content, players could choose not to deal hundreds of thousands of DPS, Cryptic in some way limiting DPS excessives and so on.
As for the 'most of the playerbase' question: I think it's fairly obvious that the overall majority would not benefit from adding elite content and everything it might set in motion. No, I don't have hard data but 1) this is only logical to assume, 2) you can get a fairly good impression by joining some PUGs and 3) as mentioned before: no one PUGs the current elite content so that by itself is an indication that many players (namely, those PUGging) wouldn't play new elite content.
And how do I know that no one is PUGging it? Because I only play with PUGs and I often queue for elite. But the missions never launch. With the exception maybe of Rhiho Station, but that's not a real Elite mission anyway because anyone can complete it and fail conditions aren't real fail conditions there.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
I still believe that the only way for Valoreah to get what they want, they would need to force their fellow players into playing as their Terran Inquisitors.
I used to enjoy Korfez until it got bugged by the player level increase causing the AI difficulty to upscale further, wish they could lower the difficulty or at least add an advanced version of the queue.
I'm not opposed to more elite content, but simply because the content exists doesn't mean people will stop playing advanced who are overgeared for it. There are times when I simply need the marks for something or want to do something for fun and don't want to bother with elite. If they were to introduce new elite content, they should NOT do random elite TFOs because to be perfectly blunt, most of the people in this game simply are not ready for it.
If you really want to see improvements in this game what needs to happen first is an actual progression path for people. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people who come into an advanced thinking they're doing the most damage in the run and acting like they're doing the most damage in a run, yet in reality are doing maybe 3k dps if that. I don't expect everyone to min/max every last one and zero from their ships, but if a TFO requires everyone on the team be doing a minimum of 20k DPS in order for the run to succeed, I expect them to be doing that 20k at the minimum. If not they have no business in that TFO. If you have random elite TFOs I can tell you right now what would happen, people would go in thinking they're at a level of ability they're nowhere near, get absolutely trounced, then whine that it's too hard and it needs nerfed because it's "absolutely not their build or anything they're doing."
As to part of the Delta Rising fires, people are forgetting a couple of things that contributed to the sudden difficulty increase. At best the highest level of gear you could obtain back then was mk xii very rare gear at level 50. You could get to mk xii ultra rare if you were using fleet equipment, but not everyone was. When Delta Rising hit we got the new crafting system we have now. This also introduced the ability to upgrade our weapons and gear that simply wasn't there before. Now you're going up to level 60, and the highest grade of gear went to mk xiv epic/gold. That's a HUGE increase in terms of overall power at once. As for the individual events, they weren't super hard, they were just tedious because they had too much HP straight out of the gate and the scaling was bad. Part of it was the gear, part of it was the scaling.
"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
They increased the difficulty based on the top tier DPS capability, which caused the Fires of Delta Rising on the forums. I remember the Fires...
Took a while for them to fix the sudden difficulty jump that caught everyone by surprise. Hell I still remember my first playthrough of Takedown. God that fight lasted FOREVER because everything was an HP sponge!
So you're calling someone out for "speaking for the community" when you're kinda doing the same yourself. And the big problem with all of this "need for elite content" is that... its already there for the most part. You're just not getting RANDOM people queuing for it. Its mostly premade groups going in.
I never said I favour a 'do nothing' approach. In fact, I hinted at several ways to keep things interesting for everyone. Adding actual new content, players could choose not to deal hundreds of thousands of DPS, Cryptic in some way limiting DPS excessives and so on.
As for the 'most of the playerbase' question: I think it's fairly obvious that the overall majority would not benefit from adding elite content and everything it might set in motion. No, I don't have hard data but 1) this is only logical to assume, 2) you can get a fairly good impression by joining some PUGs and 3) as mentioned before: no one PUGs the current elite content so that by itself is an indication that many players (namely, those PUGging) wouldn't play new elite content.
And how do I know that no one is PUGging it? Because I only play with PUGs and I often queue for elite. But the missions never launch. With the exception maybe of Rhiho Station, but that's not a real Elite mission anyway because anyone can complete it and fail conditions aren't real fail conditions there.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
If you really want to see improvements in this game what needs to happen first is an actual progression path for people. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people who come into an advanced thinking they're doing the most damage in the run and acting like they're doing the most damage in a run, yet in reality are doing maybe 3k dps if that. I don't expect everyone to min/max every last one and zero from their ships, but if a TFO requires everyone on the team be doing a minimum of 20k DPS in order for the run to succeed, I expect them to be doing that 20k at the minimum. If not they have no business in that TFO. If you have random elite TFOs I can tell you right now what would happen, people would go in thinking they're at a level of ability they're nowhere near, get absolutely trounced, then whine that it's too hard and it needs nerfed because it's "absolutely not their build or anything they're doing."
As to part of the Delta Rising fires, people are forgetting a couple of things that contributed to the sudden difficulty increase. At best the highest level of gear you could obtain back then was mk xii very rare gear at level 50. You could get to mk xii ultra rare if you were using fleet equipment, but not everyone was. When Delta Rising hit we got the new crafting system we have now. This also introduced the ability to upgrade our weapons and gear that simply wasn't there before. Now you're going up to level 60, and the highest grade of gear went to mk xiv epic/gold. That's a HUGE increase in terms of overall power at once. As for the individual events, they weren't super hard, they were just tedious because they had too much HP straight out of the gate and the scaling was bad. Part of it was the gear, part of it was the scaling.
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