Seriously. This is not a rant, i know that reaching this point its what it is. But im curious is everybody ok with it?
I was in the dyson battlezone. One instance. I spend there almost one hour. Trex just spawned one guy went, one shot with some purple thing and trex dead. I didnt even get a chance to shot not even ONCE. I change instances, same, i shot twice, one guy spawn some blue glowing things and trex dead in 1 second. I didnt get credit for either. After one hour, not dyson marks, no dilithium bonus.
Its pretty sad at this point and im ok with it since its what it is, but what sadden me the most is that everybody seem ok with it in the chat. Nobody complains, ok, its what it is.
Space more of the same, some tfos are just spawn there trying to do some damage and forget about it since there are always two or three guys flying around at hyperspeed killing eveyrthing in the blink on an eye. I always try to do enough damage to avoid afk penalty but it is just boring and honestly very sad.
Again, i know it is what it is and at this point im not asking for fixes (there are fixes but everybody knows they are never going to take place) im just asking out of curiosity, everybody is ok with all this?
Sadly i dont enjoy the game not even a fraction of what i enjoyed ten years ago. I go to a battlezone expecting to contribute or a tfo and sometimes it is just impossible. Dyson battlezone ground as i said before is a joke sometimes.
What people think? again, not trying to do flaming or trolling or whatever, just trying to get people opinions.
Another thing. The jellyfish. Come on, pure joke. Undine battlezone, that thing stays without moving in defense mode (or whatever is called) in the center of the singularity and nobody do anything at all. Just there watching. How is that the jellyfish doesnt have a time limit or something to prevent use it without non stop all the time? its basically ruining many battlezones as well. Everybody is ok with this too?
The game is great when you can fight your way in battlezones and whatnot, i love it, but when any of the above happens, it saddens me a lot i used to enjoy this game years back when the powercreep was very little and there were not "cheap" powers or things like the jellyfish.
It's been noted, but currently the game is in transition to DECA, so it'll be at least another 6 months before someone else higher up may look at the situation. There is no apparent 'will' to cap power creep, but they do attempt to keep things 'balanced' (not sure what the standards are measured against though) and the last time they buffed NPC's there was absolute outrage from certain players about HP sponges being 'too hard'. Elite TFO's came in but the majority of players are still running things according to 'path of least resistance' because the 'payout vs time' is better.
We had the Jellyfish conversation a couple of weeks ago in G.D. and word from higher up is they're not going to change anything in that regard. Had someone that actually built a killer Jelly earlier today and was vaping everything in SB1-Borg version which finished the NPC's so fast the 4th escaping barely got out of dock before the TFO ended. It has it's benefit, but yeah, it's annoying...
So, yeah, we have to live with it.....for now.
"You don't want to patrol!? You don't want to escort!? You don't want to defend the Federation's Starbases!? Then why are you flying my Starships!? If you were a Klingon you'd be killed on the spot, but lucky for you.....you WERE in Starfleet. Let's see how New Zealand Penal Colony suits you." Adm A. Necheyev.
Powercreep is fine for some things. Finishing an event TFO in the shortest possible time is OK with me if I'm going to be repeating it 14-20 times. Non-event TFOs you can always move to Advanced or Elite if normal is boring. Solo it's up to you to decide how much creep you want.
For Dyson, denying everyone except the creeper any rewards including endeavor completion is player-hostile anti-fun, and really should be addressed.
I was in the dyson battlezone. One instance. I spend there almost one hour. Trex just spawned one guy went, one shot with some purple thing and trex dead. I didnt even get a chance to shot not even ONCE. I change instances, same, i shot twice, one guy spawn some blue glowing things and trex dead in 1 second. I didnt get credit for either. After one hour, not dyson marks, no dilithium bonus.
I think what some players are doing is buffing their attack (the blue glowing things) with tactical kit and captain abilities that boost damage. When everything is timed right this can be very potent. Making ability actuation easier while on the ground can help with this.
Space more of the same, some tfos are just spawn there trying to do some damage and forget about it since there are always two or three guys flying around at hyperspeed killing eveyrthing in the blink on an eye.
The hyperspeed part involves using an emergency conn officer doff to allow emergency power to engines to reset the cooldown for evasive manuevers. This, along with Competitive reputation engines, allows for quite a bit of mobility and not having to wait for red alert to end to move about a map. There's also deuterium surplus. As well, there's small things that can be done to move a little bit faster all the time such as setting ships power levels to something like this..
They're using more power to engines all the time, with less power to shields and auxiliary. This is a screenshot of my ship's power while parked over ESD.
As to the killing everything in the blink of an eye, I believe this might be related to making the actuation of bridge officer abilities easier. If this can be accomplished, it doesn't take much to actuate emergency power to weapons PLUS attack pattern beta PLUS a beam or cannon firing mode PLUS photonic officer.
The nature of the math in-game really favours having multiple buffs engaged at the same time and as often as possible and as soon as players figure out an easy way to accomplish this the results can be simply amazing. Also, it's something that's completely free aside from the time to set things up.
Another thing. The jellyfish. Come on, pure joke. Undine battlezone, that thing stays without moving in defense mode (or whatever is called) in the center of the singularity and nobody do anything at all. Just there watching. How is that the jellyfish doesnt have a time limit or something to prevent use it without non stop all the time? its basically ruining many battlezones as well.
I agree that the jellies can be a bit of a pain. The bright side is that the silly things are only useful in a small handful of TFO's where doing very little is all that's required.
Here's a screenshot from the previous event..
There doesn't seem to be much that's left uncovered on this map.
It's always going to be tough to balance things for everybody when there's such a wide variance in players performance.
Hopefully players who are capable of a fair bit of performance will take it easy on others and limit themselves a bit if they aren't on an advanced or elite map.
Just trying to explain how a few of the things you mentioned are accomplished
Couldnt be easier to just cap the overall damage to specific values? i know this will outrage powercreepers (they spent a lot of money to reach the king state.... lol) but i dont think that course of action will be hard to accomplish. And it will make the game way more balanced that any thing the devs could try at this point.
Spending a lot of money to reach the king state is a bit of a misperception, in my opinion.
It's perfectly possible to excel in advanced and some elite content with builds that include traits off of 2-3 Zen store ships in combination with all the usual free mission and reputation gear.. using a free ship unlocked via an event.
Is STO pay to win? I don't think so. It's more like pay to do incrementally better providing the basics are taken care of.
The things I mentioned in my last post are the largest multipliers in the game and they are completely free.
Ever thought maybe those people enjoy getting that last 0.0001% of performance out of their ships and honestly any accusations of "pay to win" has answer one simple question "win what exactly?" the DPS charts are 100% player driven and unofficial Cryptic has nothing to do with them so there's nothing official to win really.
Anyway damage caps if not done for limits of programming are pretty much the worse way of dealing with power creep, yes there's ways but damage caps are not it. You never want to create a situation where people think their investment into the game could easily be made invalid and pointless, games are free to play after all not free to develop.
One way to describe power creep is I not only do more damage with hangar pets today but I do around 300% more damage with pets only then my entire ship did years ago and pets are considered one of the weakest builds.
I have to agree with most of whats being said here. Edit was i deleted the whole post. My opinon isnt going to matter. It is mostly in social zones and event tfos. I suppose they have to figure out how to allow op players to run elite event tfo's and social zones.
I rather like it when there's a jellyfish or two in a TFO. That soothing pink glow does minor damage to enemy ships in its field, and heals me. What's not to like? (It's especially handy in Iupiter Irratus when a jelly sets up right at Jupiter Station, helping to keep the Terran hacker ships from stealing data while the rest of us concentrate making sure the turret generators stay on our side.)
Well, in my opinion, there is nothing that can be done. You see odd ball ships is what was in lockboxes originally. This changed soon it became must have consoles, bridge officer abilities, and captain skills. They went nuts on this, and this is where they make there money.
Option a they go through all the stuff that has been released and rebalance it. This to me is not practical or even remotely realistic.
Option b clear the board. To be frank I mean remove all specialized ground weapons and space consoles from the game. Put the game back to original ground weapon types and original game consoles. People are too jumpy, to put it politely, for this to ever stand with the player base.
In the end I dont see any fix to power creep. Possible band aid approach might work to fix some of this. Namely for example, the voth ground battle zone. The only thing I can think of is release a boss t rex every 2 minutes between kills, to kick the campers in the well you know. Then they would have to drastically soup those things up. Essentially band aid approach.
The worse thing the devs could do is leave the extreme low drop rate items, that are overpowering alone. Otherwise this game will become about who's got the most RL money.
Dyson has been an issue for a long time now.
Its a zone that auto level balances anyway. Hopefully deca will fix it properly. The way to fix it imo is to adjust the auto balance properly. A handful of things like the summer blue orbs are just way to over powered at that level. They just need to ramp up the de scaling of dmg.
The other option is to just triple the dino hit points... the issue with that of course being if a zone really does have on level players around its going to be frustrating.
I won't disagree with the ground and battle-zones issues. Unfortunately they were designed when people did far lower DPS on average, but nerfing players isn't the way to fix the issue. Especially without irking off a good chunk of the player-base who have invested large amounts of time and money into the game. Perhaps the zones need a difficulty level as well? Though from what I've seen it doesn't seem to stop high DPS'ers going to lower level difficulties and vice-versa with low DPS'ers going into elites.
I haven't bothered trying to get a Rex in years. Simply because its pointless to try unless you camp and get lucky enough to kill one right off the bat before someone else does. That's not good game-play for anyone, and it really does need to be addressed. How to fix it is the problem, and I'm willing to bet that it will never be addressed unfortunately. But the developers are more than welcome to prove me wrong on this anytime they feel like it.
The Cindarian... oh what a debatable ship she is. First off, the ship is honestly not a good ship, unless you use the mechanics built into it. Take away the current mechanic or nerf it, and it becomes a pointless ship to use. It's slow and cumbersome. And honestly may as well not even have weapon slots on it, unless you are one of those people who like a challenge build-wise. Build it to do DPS without the mechanic, it suffers when using the mechanic, and vice-versa. It's also not a ship anyone can just hop into and vaporize everything in sight with the mechanic. You have to build it right and use it right in order for it to do that. The people you see vaporizing have spent time and money for it to do that. And unlike what some seem to think, you can't just park it and walk away from the keyboard. You have to actually activate things for it to shine and not be destroyed. It's also plagued with it only being effective on a very limited selection of TFO's. I personally didn't do the event to get it because I hated the idea of the ship being a park and do nothing else ship. I did end up buying it later on and found out that it's a fun ship for certain maps, but not something I would use in randoms.
A suggestion (yes, just a suggestion, I'm not going to tell you how to have fun) for the high DPS crowd concerning event TFO's... Trust me, I know you want to get the event over asap, but why not try something to help stop the insta-vape-everything-around when doing them. And help the newer or cantankerous people from missing out on event rewards and fun. Like using a shuttle or T1-T4 ship, or an alt that's not geared to the teeth. It can be more fun that just vaping everything in sight. But unfortunately I'm aware that a few have fun doing that, not sure if it's an ego thing or troll thing or both. Another option is running the TFO solo and challenging yourself parse wise. I can't remember the last time an event didn't have at least 1 TFO that was solo-able on normal for an advanced player.
For me the biggest issue aside the Rex's, is events being normal difficulty only. I'm begging and pleading, please return event TFO's to being able to be done with any difficulty. Please. Please.
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,671Community Moderator
Ok... I think this thread's run its course. It may have started as "not a rant", but its devolved into Rant territory and we're not gonna let it spiral any further. I hereby close this thread for Rant.
Thank you all for keeping it as civil as possible.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
Comments
It's been noted, but currently the game is in transition to DECA, so it'll be at least another 6 months before someone else higher up may look at the situation. There is no apparent 'will' to cap power creep, but they do attempt to keep things 'balanced' (not sure what the standards are measured against though) and the last time they buffed NPC's there was absolute outrage from certain players about HP sponges being 'too hard'. Elite TFO's came in but the majority of players are still running things according to 'path of least resistance' because the 'payout vs time' is better.
We had the Jellyfish conversation a couple of weeks ago in G.D. and word from higher up is they're not going to change anything in that regard. Had someone that actually built a killer Jelly earlier today and was vaping everything in SB1-Borg version which finished the NPC's so fast the 4th escaping barely got out of dock before the TFO ended. It has it's benefit, but yeah, it's annoying...
So, yeah, we have to live with it.....for now.
For Dyson, denying everyone except the creeper any rewards including endeavor completion is player-hostile anti-fun, and really should be addressed.
I think what some players are doing is buffing their attack (the blue glowing things) with tactical kit and captain abilities that boost damage. When everything is timed right this can be very potent. Making ability actuation easier while on the ground can help with this.
The hyperspeed part involves using an emergency conn officer doff to allow emergency power to engines to reset the cooldown for evasive manuevers. This, along with Competitive reputation engines, allows for quite a bit of mobility and not having to wait for red alert to end to move about a map. There's also deuterium surplus. As well, there's small things that can be done to move a little bit faster all the time such as setting ships power levels to something like this..
They're using more power to engines all the time, with less power to shields and auxiliary. This is a screenshot of my ship's power while parked over ESD.
As to the killing everything in the blink of an eye, I believe this might be related to making the actuation of bridge officer abilities easier. If this can be accomplished, it doesn't take much to actuate emergency power to weapons PLUS attack pattern beta PLUS a beam or cannon firing mode PLUS photonic officer.
The nature of the math in-game really favours having multiple buffs engaged at the same time and as often as possible and as soon as players figure out an easy way to accomplish this the results can be simply amazing. Also, it's something that's completely free aside from the time to set things up.
I agree that the jellies can be a bit of a pain. The bright side is that the silly things are only useful in a small handful of TFO's where doing very little is all that's required.
Here's a screenshot from the previous event..
There doesn't seem to be much that's left uncovered on this map.
It's always going to be tough to balance things for everybody when there's such a wide variance in players performance.
Hopefully players who are capable of a fair bit of performance will take it easy on others and limit themselves a bit if they aren't on an advanced or elite map.
Just trying to explain how a few of the things you mentioned are accomplished
Spending a lot of money to reach the king state is a bit of a misperception, in my opinion.
It's perfectly possible to excel in advanced and some elite content with builds that include traits off of 2-3 Zen store ships in combination with all the usual free mission and reputation gear.. using a free ship unlocked via an event.
Is STO pay to win? I don't think so. It's more like pay to do incrementally better providing the basics are taken care of.
The things I mentioned in my last post are the largest multipliers in the game and they are completely free.
Anyway damage caps if not done for limits of programming are pretty much the worse way of dealing with power creep, yes there's ways but damage caps are not it. You never want to create a situation where people think their investment into the game could easily be made invalid and pointless, games are free to play after all not free to develop.
Option a they go through all the stuff that has been released and rebalance it. This to me is not practical or even remotely realistic.
Option b clear the board. To be frank I mean remove all specialized ground weapons and space consoles from the game. Put the game back to original ground weapon types and original game consoles. People are too jumpy, to put it politely, for this to ever stand with the player base.
In the end I dont see any fix to power creep. Possible band aid approach might work to fix some of this. Namely for example, the voth ground battle zone. The only thing I can think of is release a boss t rex every 2 minutes between kills, to kick the campers in the well you know. Then they would have to drastically soup those things up. Essentially band aid approach.
The worse thing the devs could do is leave the extreme low drop rate items, that are overpowering alone. Otherwise this game will become about who's got the most RL money.
Just some thoughts.
Anyway, the final frontier in STO is PvP, this is where challenge happen and builds get tested for real.
Its a zone that auto level balances anyway. Hopefully deca will fix it properly. The way to fix it imo is to adjust the auto balance properly. A handful of things like the summer blue orbs are just way to over powered at that level. They just need to ramp up the de scaling of dmg.
The other option is to just triple the dino hit points... the issue with that of course being if a zone really does have on level players around its going to be frustrating.
I log into sto to play the game, have fun....not so I can watch battleships blow up in 2 seconds
I haven't bothered trying to get a Rex in years. Simply because its pointless to try unless you camp and get lucky enough to kill one right off the bat before someone else does. That's not good game-play for anyone, and it really does need to be addressed. How to fix it is the problem, and I'm willing to bet that it will never be addressed unfortunately. But the developers are more than welcome to prove me wrong on this anytime they feel like it.
The Cindarian... oh what a debatable ship she is. First off, the ship is honestly not a good ship, unless you use the mechanics built into it. Take away the current mechanic or nerf it, and it becomes a pointless ship to use. It's slow and cumbersome. And honestly may as well not even have weapon slots on it, unless you are one of those people who like a challenge build-wise. Build it to do DPS without the mechanic, it suffers when using the mechanic, and vice-versa. It's also not a ship anyone can just hop into and vaporize everything in sight with the mechanic. You have to build it right and use it right in order for it to do that. The people you see vaporizing have spent time and money for it to do that. And unlike what some seem to think, you can't just park it and walk away from the keyboard. You have to actually activate things for it to shine and not be destroyed. It's also plagued with it only being effective on a very limited selection of TFO's. I personally didn't do the event to get it because I hated the idea of the ship being a park and do nothing else ship. I did end up buying it later on and found out that it's a fun ship for certain maps, but not something I would use in randoms.
A suggestion (yes, just a suggestion, I'm not going to tell you how to have fun) for the high DPS crowd concerning event TFO's... Trust me, I know you want to get the event over asap, but why not try something to help stop the insta-vape-everything-around when doing them. And help the newer or cantankerous people from missing out on event rewards and fun. Like using a shuttle or T1-T4 ship, or an alt that's not geared to the teeth. It can be more fun that just vaping everything in sight. But unfortunately I'm aware that a few have fun doing that, not sure if it's an ego thing or troll thing or both. Another option is running the TFO solo and challenging yourself parse wise. I can't remember the last time an event didn't have at least 1 TFO that was solo-able on normal for an advanced player.
For me the biggest issue aside the Rex's, is events being normal difficulty only. I'm begging and pleading, please return event TFO's to being able to be done with any difficulty. Please. Please.
Please.
Thank you all for keeping it as civil as possible.
/thread
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode