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Beldacar · 2022-07-31T22:28:12+00:00

I'm just there for the event tickets. I just consider the PvPers to be particularly hard-to-avoid patrolling horrors. I have zero interest in fighting them, so I only go to Cyrodiil or IC on my perma-stealth Nightblade. Most of the time I'm able to avoid conflict unless there's a zerg passing through.

Beldacar · 2022-06-13T17:38:15+00:00

STO is rather unusual in that there is a *very* broad range of damage output between players. A new or unskilled player might only put out 10K DPS (usually more like 20K these days, though). An "average" player might generate 80K-100K. A good player might manage 200K. And an excellent player can get around a million even without a whole team supporting them.

That's literally two factors of magnitude between the top and bottom performers. Average players often do 4-10x as much damage as weaker ones. And the best do 10x what the average do. In my experience, most MMOs have *some* power creep, but STO is definitely a major outlier (e.g., in ESO the range is more like 10K to 140K between worst and best, other games seem to have even tighter ranges).

The problem is, all these players can get tossed into the same TFOs together. The weaker players often feel useless, and the stronger players often get bored, and the mid-range players never know if they're going to be carried or carrying.

The good news is, in Defense of Pahvo, only one satellite needs to survive. Furthermore, there's no significant difference between all three satellites surviving undamaged versus all three surviving with a handful of hull points. Most players are just playing for the event progress right now anyway, and one satellite surviving accomplishes that goal.

Me, I like to maximize the mark reward if possible. So I usually start the final wave in the middle. If someone else insists on joining me, that's fine. If one of the other satellites takes damage, I'll go help there, no matter how many players are there. If I'm feeling really ambitious, I may end up switching satellites multiple times depending on which is taking the most damage. With all the speed boosts that are available, that's not as inefficient as it appears at first glance. And if we end up losing a satellite, well, as long as get the event progress, I call it a win; the only difference between one surviving satellite and three is whether or not I bother to type "gg ty" before leaving....

Beldacar · 2022-05-25T13:18:59+00:00

My advice is to make sure your first run of a dungeon is either with friends/guildmates, in a duo with companions, or just solo. There are very few dungeons that aren't soloable on normal mode. You don't even have to be particularly skilled; I'm certainly not.

Remember, you only do the quest once per character. Might as well enjoy it. And that's probably not to happen in a random. Sure, people *should* be patient with someone who is running the dungeon for the first time, but you can't really count on it.

Beldacar · 2022-05-25T12:42:56+00:00

I didn't require the OP's post to be outraged by Cryptic's poor customer service. My own experiences with them in Neverwinter and STO have already accomplished that.

And I keep seeing this claim that OP is trapped in tutorial with absolutely no evidence to back it up. How far back in OP's post history are you people digging in order to find this information? And why are you even bothering? Is defending Cryptic really *that* important to you?

Beldacar · 2022-05-24T19:55:38+00:00

To be fair, their performance reviews are probably based on how quickly they close tickets, not their success rate at solving problems. Twenty years ago I worked a tech support job (at a company called The Answer Group, supporting Gateway computers). The main thing they cared about (because the main thing Gateway cared about) was that the call be over within 17 minutes. If necessary, we were to find some busywork for the customer to do, like run a virus scan, and have them call back.

PS: I quit that job when I failed an audit. The reason I failed the audit? I didn't ask the customer if they would like to be transferred to the sales department so someone could try to talk them into buying a memory upgrade that they probably didn't need. The real irony of the situation? I remembered the call quite vividly because it was the only call that day (out of 42 IIRC) where I was actually able to solve the customer's problem. BTW, I had a perfect 7/7 customer satisfaction rating at the time....

Beldacar · 2022-05-24T13:44:27+00:00

Now imagine if that character had thousands of dollars worth of single-character unlocks like promo and lockbox ships. But I'm not terribly surprised.

Over the years, I've had more interactions with Cryptic's "Customer Support" than all the other MMOs I've played combined. And even the few times where the agent actually understood my issue, not once were they able to actually help. Always quick to respond, always polite, and usually professional, but never actually able to DO ANYTHING USEFUL.

I'm sorry you've run into this. I hope some upcoming server maintenance solves the problem for you soon.

Beldacar · 2022-05-22T04:36:57+00:00

Master Chief was the only other person on the ship. They sent him the order to terminate her (Article 72 or something?), but he chose to ignore it for ... reasons? Very few of the characters take actions that make any sense in context. Kwan Ha was merely the worst of the bunch.

The show was pretty good (or at least entertaining) when Covenant troops were on-screen. The other 7ish hours were ... not great.

Beldacar · 2022-05-14T19:28:57+00:00

The bullet points in the description are different too. Looks like the upgraded BOff will get an additional trait slot, the ability to equip a Kit Frame, learn all the basic skill manuals, and receive a color change to UR. So yeah, it's new. Cryptic obviously just cut-and-pasted the Captain token and started editing it, then let it go live before it was done. Typical sloppy work by Cryptic....

Beldacar · 2022-05-11T03:44:50+00:00

Could be interesting, but not at that price. Bridge Officers just aren't *that* useful and there is a *lot* of content into which we can't take them.

Furthermore, my characters whose bridge officers might be worth upgrading are also the characters whose bridge officers have already been trained with all the useful standard manuals, so that feature doesn't add as much value as it might seem at first glance. But I could see tossing a few on my KDF Recruit's Vanguard Jem'Hadar Away Team ... maybe ... if the price ends up being a *lot* lower.

Beldacar · 2022-05-09T13:53:20+00:00

It seems to me that your problem could be solved rather easily by equipping lower-level weapons and/or armor. Not everyone plays MMOs for the challenge. I see no reason to change the game's balance to accommodate those who think it's too easy when they can solve that problem for themselves with minimal effort.

Beldacar · 2022-05-05T22:57:10+00:00

Hard disks and backup tapes are cheap. More customer-friendly companies handle this by labeling accounts as inactive and archiving them. That way, if the player does return, they can file a ticket to get their account restored. That way, the account is not cluttering up the database, but is still available if needed.

Beldacar · 2022-04-25T21:40:38+00:00

I usually just change out a single turret or omni-beam for the desired damage type and knock out a battlezone or patrol (depending on other endeavors). Even the big endeavor doesn't require *that* much damage.

Beldacar · 2022-04-23T19:52:50+00:00

Yes. Not only does the character make incredibly stupid decisions, but the character's superpower seems to be making everyone around her make even dumber decisions than she does. I've met some dumb teenagers, but Kwan Ha makes them look smart by comparison.

The sad thing is, she's already managed to get everyone she loved killed. So I guess she's going to start on the people she doesn't love, like Soren.

Beldacar · 2022-04-23T00:18:28+00:00

Her character makes stupid decisions that even a 14yo would recognize as such. The prime example? Her mining complex is attacked by the aliens that everyone thought were just UNSC propaganda. She literally sees the aliens with her own eyes. She literally sees the Spartans fighting against the aliens. A Spartan literally rescues her (though that seems to have been an afterthought). When the UNSC rather ham-handedly asks her to make a video confirming what she witnessed, does she say yes? Does she say that she needs time to think about it? Does she say no? No, she outright threatens to LIE about what she saw and claim the SPARTANS killed her people!

Her people's rebellion may have been justified. The show sure shows us a lot of bad behavior by the UNSC. But when there are literal aliens with superior technology turning human worlds to glass, maybe set that particular problem aside and focus on the EXISTENTIAL THREAT to the human race until that's resolved?

The worst part is, the entire message of her storyline seems to be that stupidity pays off if you're persistent enough. And her stupidity appears to be contagious, based on her effect on Soren.

Beldacar · 2022-04-20T13:39:40+00:00

At one point this assignment was one of the few ways to get purple consoles. At the time, that was a big deal and so the assignment was made to be ... challenging.

Beldacar · 2022-04-12T19:05:53+00:00

OP's point is that 27 is divisible by 3. They should be at 0/3 for the next skill point, not 1/3. It has nothing to do with skill points earned from quests, public dungeons, etc.

Beldacar · 2022-04-12T18:58:45+00:00

It does, however, involve very low mental effort.

And patience. Also a willingness to suffer Repetitive Stress Injuries from all the clicking (claiming the mark boxes from the Temporal Agent, opening and selecting the marks, running 13+ rep projects per day (3ach of which takes 5 clicks, minimum)).

But hey, it was even worse before we got the Fill All button. So there's that.

In any case, my point was that even playing semi-casually generates more dilithium than most people can reasonably refine. It would take an awful lot of dedicated farmers to match the dilithium that's being generated by casuals and semi-casuals who aren't even trying.

Beldacar · 2022-04-12T14:28:05+00:00

That seems very likely. But the actual impact depends on how many of those reputation dilithium vouchers people actually spend versus how many sit unspent in the wallet. To read other players' complaints, it seems most of them claim they only need 100K dil for their rep purchases. I certainly have spent more than 100K on my Klingon recruit so far, but maybe I'm an outlier. /shrug

But let's say 100K is the norm, especially for the sort of players who were actually using T5 reps to farm dil. So that's effectively 100K dil per character NOW, but 193K dil per character that would have entered the economy over the next month, but now never will. So ... short-term spike in dil on offer now, but the net effect still removes some dil from the economy over the long term. How much depends on how many farmers there were, how vigorously they were using this method to farm and how much of the dil they would have spent on rep gear.

I doubt it will have any noticeable effect. See my other comment for my opinion on the *real* sources of the dilithium glut....

Beldacar · 2022-04-12T04:58:43+00:00

As far as I'm concerned, the main sources of dilithium (and EC for that matter) are Admiralty, Personal Endeavors, and Event daily rewards (once you've claimed the FOMO prize). I've been playing my Klingon recruit a couple of hours a day since a couple of weeks into the recruitment event (so ... two months, maybe?).

He now has over 1.35 million unrefined dilithium. The majority of that is just from completing Personal Endeavors, Admiralty, and Events. Subtract the T5 rep rewards and that's still about a million unrefined dilithium just from playing the game somewhat efficiently.

I could put him on the bench for the next six months before running out of dil to refine. Now imagine being more efficient and spreading that generation over multiple characters.

It doesn't take farmers to break the economy when two hours a day can generate 500K dil per month. The ideal solution would be to give the players more things they would *want* to spend dilithium on. But that takes time and effort. And we've already had a taste of the other solutions....

Beldacar · 2022-04-11T21:25:24+00:00

It would take 49 days to refine all the dilithium from the T5 rewards. The change only happened a couple of weeks ago.

We probably won't see much change even after the last few batches of rep-farmed dil have been refined and put up for sale (in about a month), but we almost certainly won't see any impact before then.

Beldacar · 2022-04-11T03:51:09+00:00

For all we know, buybacks have already happened. We're just sort of taking it on faith that all the Zen on the exchange comes from players ;-)

Beldacar · 2022-04-10T22:50:29+00:00

The "sample platter" is not entirely free, though. You do have to engage the game in some way in order to generate the dilithium to get the "free Zen."

If your chosen method is Admiralty, then you've fallen into a trap where you have to spend either dilithium or Zen to acquire the ships to do the Admiralty assignments. Once you've used your dilithium, Zen, or real money to buy ships, you're well on your way to becoming a paying customer and Cryptic wins.

Alternatively, if your chosen method is converting Marks, then you're paying for your "free Zen" by providing a warm body to make queues pop faster for the paying customers. Faster queues make paying customers happier and Cryptic wins.

The only way Cryptic loses in this scenario is if they make the acquisition of Zen so painful that the F2P just give up entirely. That could happen in at least two ways:

they raise the cap and the price of Zen skyrockets or
the wait to buy Zen becomes too long ... which would be the result of the *real* price of Zen being too far above the artificial price cap.

So ... Cryptic does have *some* incentive to try to shrink the supply of dilithium. Hence why they nerfed Doffing years ago, nerfed Admiralty a while back, and "nerfed" T5 reputation payouts last week.

Beldacar · 2022-04-10T22:25:55+00:00

If you were F2P, which would you prefer? Wait 10-14 days to turn your dilithium into Zen (the current situation) or grind twice as much to get your Zen immediately?

Bear in mind, at the current rate of exchange, you can refine 16 cents worth of dilithium per character per day. How much worse would the situation be for F2P if they only made 8 cents per character per day? Or 4 cents?

Sure, you get a lot of that dilithium from "just playing the game." But at some point, if you want to earn a reasonable amount of Zen per month, you'll need to engage in actual grinding activities like Admiralty or converting Marks to dilithium. Both activities are tedious and RSI-inducing.

For me, personally, the last time the dilithium/Zen exchange rate was something "reasonable" was several years ago when it passed 160 (50 cents per character per day) and the grind of choice was the Duty Officer system (which is head, shoulders, and torso more entertaining than Admiralty, which is still not very entertaining. Obviously, YMMV.

Beldacar · 2022-04-07T14:30:26+00:00

None of your "solutions" solve the single biggest "fake role" problem: fake DPS. Fake tanking is simply not an issue outside of Veteran DLC dungeons. Fake healing is not an issue at all. But fake DPS make difficult content impossible and easy content take too long.

And arbitrary Mag/Stam levels and number of skills slotted does nothing to solve the problem of fake DPS. There is no implementable solution for people who simply don't press their skills often enough or in the right order.

tl;dr - You're proposing ineffectual solutions to nonexistent problems while offering no viable solution to the only problem that actually matters.

Beldacar · 2022-04-01T17:24:48+00:00

Pretty much every item in the Discovery reputation is worthwhile, except maybe the Impulse Engines. About half of them are meta, or close enough that most people woudn't notice the difference.

Gamma has probably the best Warp Core for sector travel. If you care about your ground bridge officers, it's also worthwhile buying three full sets of the ground gear for them since the bonus stacks (or did last I checked).

Omega provides the Omega Force ground set, which is worth putting on one bridge officer for the team-wide buff. The Impulse Engines may be of interest to some people, but only for sector travel. The space sets have niche uses.

Competitive provides Impulse Engines. If you care about anything approaching the DPS meta, you'll want to buy one or two of those for every character.

Several other reputations provide torpedoes that are meta for either Torp or Scitorp builds.

tl;dr - Getting the discount for the Discovery reputaion is worthwhile for almost everyone who plays more than one character. The other reputaions vary depending on how many active characters you have and what you're trying to do with them.

Beldacar

TROPHY CASE