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DancingShade posted:This is a great time for everyone to scout out other MMOs we can collectively Looks like it's back to LOTRO for me.
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Mar 4, 2015 16:33
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DonDoodles posted:Looks like it's back to LOTRO for me. How is LOTRO? Never played it, considering picking it up.
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Mar 4, 2015 17:29
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gently caress that news, I'm having fun running around playing Space  Navy Mans.Maybe I'll change my mind when/if I get to all this endgame bullshit but running around as Mary Sue Riker (romulan characteridea spotted  ) at low levels is still fun. 
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Mar 4, 2015 18:22
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SirPhoebos posted:As someone that started playing after things went bad, what did DR do to the game that has all of you lamenting its impending demise? It started right before DR, when they released the upgrade system, and the announcement that upgrading would be the only way we could get Mk XIV gear. An in-depth look at the upgrade system shows that it's a massive EC and Dil sink, and relies on a bunch of psychological tricks to hide the actual costs of upgrading. Merely upgrading everything to Mk XIV was more expensive than buying all new Mk XII gear (the previous top of the line), and upgrading rarity was insane - costing literally millions of dil to get everything to epic quality. Then DR was released, with higher max level and more importantly, higher level ships. They did release a method to upgrade older ships to make them almost as good as the new T6 ships, but the upgrades cost money. And the new T6 ships now cost $30 instead of $25 for the old T5 ships. And for the first time, there weren't enough story missions to level up. Previously, if you did nothing but story missions, you'd hit level 50 long before running out of story missions to play. But levelling from 50-60 through the new DR story missions left huge gaps, and the story missions were level-gated so you had to grind up your levels to continue the story. DR also did some bad things to the STFs. Rewards were lowered across the board, and for any difficulty higher than normal the old optional objectives were made required objectives, without any thought about what that would, or even updating the in-mission text in many cases. This completely destroyed the queue population almost overnight. Previously you could almost always finish a queue, no matter how bad your team was. It might take forever, but you could finish it. Now, having a couple of bad players on your team meant failing the queue, getting the loser's prize of 10 marks, and still getting the 1 hour time-out before you could try again. Oh, and several of the 'optional' objectives had been bugged for awhile, so now that they were mandatory it was possible to get in an STF which was completely un-winnable no matter how good your team was. At first the level grinding wasn't too bad. This game is so bad at explaining how to properly build/fly a ship that it's not uncommon for a decent player to do 10-20 times as much dps as a random pubbie. So grinding up the in-between levels wasn't so bad at first - a handful of runs through the Argala patrol on elite (or other patrols which were quick) would get you a level. This is when the first post-DR nerf hammer came out. Because people quickly realized that doing a single patrol over and over would let them level pretty quickly. And then players found an unintended interaction between old patrols in the Tau Dewa sector (which no one in their right mind had played in years), the new improved XP for elite difficulty, and a scaling issue where if the team leader was really low level the enemies would also be low level but give high level XP. This meant that if you grouped right, you could grind the Japori patrol to level up extremely quickly. As in, people hit max level + max specialization in a few days, and then started grinding more spec levels which gave dil. Cryptic freaked out. They removed all the dil rewards for gaining spec levels after max, and made a nasty post calling people who levelled too fast exploiters, saying they levelled 17x faster than they should have (this is why you still see people joke about doing something 17x faster). Then they removed a whole bunch of levels/spec points from people. but they didn't just hit a handful of people who were using the japori group with a low level trick - they hit tons of people. All the people who had gained a bunch of levels in the few days that DR had been out - i.e. all their biggest players/fans. They also nerfed Tau Dewa patrols into the ground - at this point only patrols in the new Delta quadrant gave decent XP. They also heavily nerfed the amount of XP given at higher difficulty levels, nerfed it so hard in fact that it's now more efficient to play at normal difficulty. The forums exploded, with complaint threads being created faster than the mods could delete them. So they put a cool-down timer on forums posting (one post every 5 minutes), and eventually relented and gave everyone their levels/spec points back, but by this point a lot of the damage had been done, and the average forum-goers were pretty unhappy with Cryptic. A few weeks later came the big XP nerf. When DR came out they did a funny thing with XP - the XP you received from missions changed once you hit level 50. A story mission which gave 3,000 XP at level 49 might only give 900 XP if you ran it at level 51. They did this to slow down levelling, but it was weird and a few people had noticed and complained about it. So cryptic magnanimously decided to 'fix' it. They more than tripled the amount of XP needed to get each level after 50, but made mission rewards give the same amount of XP no matter what level you were when you ran them. Their announcement post used a bunch of math to prove that levelling speed would be unchanged, and that this was merely a cosmetic change to make things look more consistent. The problem is that there are three main ways of gaining XP in the game - story missions, doff jobs, and killing mobs. They increased the amount of XP needed to level, and increased the amount of XP from story missions, but they didn't touch the XP given from doffing/killing mobs. Since the majority of XP at end-game tends to come from doffing/killing mobs, this made gaining levels much slower than before. There were a lot of minor missteps they made along the way as well. They 'increased' the queue rewards to encourage people to play them, but the increased amounts were still lower than the amounts from before DR. This led to many chocolate rations jokes on the official forums by pubbies who had read 1984 once. When players complained that the queues were empty, Cryptic devs claimed that the queues were working fine, and that the in-game display which showed no one playing them was simply a display bug, not a consequence of no one playing them because they were worthless. The cryptic lead gave an interview where he claimed that DR was the best expansion ever and that the players loved it, which quickly lead to most of the STO forums regulars creating sigs to mock that statement. This in turn led to another Cryptic dev having a minor breakdown on the forums because the sigs hurt his feelings so much. They discovered that some people would afk in the voth ground zone and get rewards without actually helping complete objectives. So they fixed that, but somehow their fix meant that everyone got less rewards even if they didn't afk the zone. And every single change was announced as a change that would make things better for the players, when they actually made things worse. It's been a constant grind down, one by one removing every single method players had for speeding up their progress. For the last couple of months, the only place in the game which allowed you to gain levels/spec points at a decent speed was a couple of patrols in the delta quadrant. Now those patrols are on a half-hour time gate, so no more grinding them.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:29
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g0del posted:They also heavily nerfed the amount of XP given at higher difficulty levels, nerfed it so hard in fact that it's now more efficient to play at normal difficulty. . . . Then what's the point of playing at higher difficulties? The increase in dropped loot quality has always been minor from what I remember reading. So that leaves, what, farming injuries for accolades? 
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Mar 4, 2015 18:40
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WarLocke posted:. . . Then what's the point of playing at higher difficulties? The increase in dropped loot quality has always been minor from what I remember reading. So that leaves, what, farming injuries for accolades?
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Mar 4, 2015 18:50
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g0del posted:The cryptic lead gave an interview where he claimed that DR was the best expansion ever and that the players loved it, which quickly lead to most of the STO forums regulars creating sigs to mock that statement. This in turn led to another Cryptic dev having a minor breakdown on the forums because the sigs hurt his feelings so much. I think I remember one entertaining one with a Cardassian saying that the occupation of Bajor was the best expansion ever and the Bajorans loved it.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:55
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You left out the latest thing where they "improved" patrols by adding the 30 minute cooldown timer that everyone had been asking for.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:57
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Wow, that sounds loving terrible. Looks like I'll be searching for a new MMO to waste time on.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:58
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Valatar posted:You left out the latest thing where they "improved" patrols by adding the 30 minute cooldown timer that everyone had been asking for. 
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Mar 4, 2015 19:17
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Here's a random question I don't think I've ever seen a definitive answer to: For the Warp Core Efficiency skill (bonus power when a system is below 75) is it calculated by the actual setting or by the total power you have in that system? As in, if you're in an Escort and you set Weapons to 25 (for dumb reason), the innate +15 Weapons Power brings you to 40. So does the Warp Core Efficiency scale from the setting (25) or the current (40)?
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Mar 4, 2015 19:24
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WarLocke posted:Here's a random question I don't think I've ever seen a definitive answer to: For the Warp Core Efficiency skill (bonus power when a system is below 75) is it calculated by the actual setting or by the total power you have in that system? Based on the setting.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:30
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FuturePastNow posted:Based on the setting. So no reason to not level the skill if only for engine and shield power (since you will be at 100 Weapons all the time)?
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Mar 4, 2015 19:38
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I've played STO for more than two years now and didn't actually enjoy "playing" it for more than a couple weeks. The draw is the pubbies, and becoming space rich. It's always been a terrible game. It's some lovely game with pictures of Star Trek stuff. I don't understand people who think it is dead or ruined, it's no worse than ever. The pubbies are still here, you can still be space rich, I fail to see how the fundamentals have changed at all. If anything, the game becoming shittier than it was just filters out the reasonable pubbies and further concentrates the broken, psycho, hilarious ones. Witness Vulcan. And we just got a big shot in the arm on Vulcan, the name Dental is back in the public eye and means what it's supposed to. If the game is going to burn down, shouldn't we be out there rubbing poo poo in these people's faces while they burn? hakimashou fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 19:57
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Kobali Spock agrees with this line of thinking.
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Mar 4, 2015 20:08
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Yeah, this is a pretty great summary. Really, the thing to keep in mind is that during the run of Legacy of Romulus the game was very, very casual and accomodating, and then when Delta Rising started dropping it suddenly... wasn't. And since STO attracted a large population of roleplayers, ultra-casuals, kids, and so on, it went over even worse than blatant player-screwing measures would have in other games. It literally took away the only reason a lot of people played. The upgrade system is really the perfect example. It would have been easy to make it completely transparent and fair and still made them money. Put the cost of upgrading a tier/quality up front before you spent anything, and only require the use of one item to enable instead of needing to feed dozens (or hundreds...) into it. Instead the total costs are heavily obfuscated (required ten tech items at 1000 dil a pop looks "cheaper" than the actual 10,000 dil cost, and gets the "bonus" of hitting people with sunk costs if they only get halfway through) and the multiple levels of randomization involved (there's no guarantee of what item mod you'll get on a quality upgrade, and there's no guarantee of how much goddamn dilithium you'll need to feed into it to get the quality upgrade) make it cost-prohibitive to actually try for the "best" gear. It's literally millions of dilithium and billions of credits. It's exploitative and even people who don't pay attention to game design can still "feel" it being confusing and unfair. And it's a drat shame since there's a lot of elements that would have been well received (being able to make old or niche items competitive again, being able to improve fun toy items, etc.) if the system wasn't a player-screwing clusterfuck. And that was just the tip of the iceberg; basically every decision made in Delta Rising involves the developers groggishly doubling down on dumb horrible decisions and driving players off. WarLocke posted:So no reason to not level the skill if only for engine and shield power (since you will be at 100 Weapons all the time)?
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Mar 4, 2015 20:11
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Valatar posted:You left out the latest thing where they "improved" patrols by adding the 30 minute cooldown timer that everyone had been asking for. Yeah but it's okay because they also nerfed the xp rewards so there's no point in doing the patrols anymore anyways therefor the timer is a complete non-issue.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:16
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hakimashou posted:I've played STO for more than two years now and didn't actually enjoy "playing" it for more than a couple weeks. The draw is the pubbies, and becoming space rich. I cannot deny the spirit of this post, and I am ashamed that I thought to bail. Preechr - same horrible pubbies, except into elves not vulcans. Not sure about the RP community, and population seems to be spiraling downwards, but I find the game itself more fun.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:25
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The RP server in FF14 literally has weekly date auctions. Pay ingame money to have a catgirl roleplay a date with you for an hour. Just saying.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:43
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Lagomorphic posted:Yeah but it's okay because they also nerfed the xp rewards so there's no point in doing the patrols anymore anyways therefor the timer is a complete non-issue. Also,  http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/9079723-tier-6-jem%27hadar-strike-ship-stats
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Mar 4, 2015 22:07
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A new godship Bugship for a new generation isn't it?
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Mar 4, 2015 22:14
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Asimo posted:Also, NOTE: The above stats and systems are subject to change
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Mar 4, 2015 22:47
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Asimo posted:The list of remaining ways you can actually level to 60: The most  gamble box ship yet.The warning which was prophesized in the wiki is coming to pass. Bonus points to Cryptic/PWE because the very existence of this ship completely devalues any lockbox prizes in future. 
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Mar 4, 2015 23:28
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Yeah but pretty much all ships have already been devalued by the complete lack of worthwhile content. That's what is ultimately killing this loving game. Even if you jump through all the required hoops to get back to endgame ready there's gently caress all worth doing anymore.
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Mar 4, 2015 23:41
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Everything costs twice as much and you're still just shooting the same brog. At the end of the day, what was Cryptic expecting. Edit: Of course what I love even more about this is that the r&d box ships are like, the most amoral money grab ever and I'm glad if one of these cynical "sales" is what sinks this game
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Mar 5, 2015 00:23
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Actually you're not even shooting brogs because pubbies don't bother queueing while there's failure chances.  There's a reason basically every queue except CCA is dead, and even ISA mostly has people in it out of force of inertia (CSA is a lot easier and faster these days).Berke Negri posted:Edit: Of course what I love even more about this is that the r&d box ships are like, the most amoral money grab ever and I'm glad if one of these cynical "sales" is what sinks this game even before the fact it's literally a straight upgrade to an old one.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:49
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All of this talk of the wiki pages has made me realize I have forgotten my password. Someone want to help a nerd out? Username is MoronAtLarge.
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Mar 5, 2015 01:31
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The only queues I play anymore are some of the ground Elites, which aren't bad with a good team and have the added bonus of not punishing me for playing an Engineer. The insta-fail objectives are so stupid, and would be such an easy thing for them to revert. 
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Mar 5, 2015 02:01
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Well, Arc just gave me a popup message. I think it's suggesting the next group of pubbies to target.
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Mar 5, 2015 02:18
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FuturePastNow posted:The insta-fail objectives are so stupid, and would be such an easy thing for them to revert. Well I mean besides all the many, many other things that killed Wildstar.
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Mar 5, 2015 02:20
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Tunicate posted:Well, Arc just gave me a popup message. I think it's suggesting the next group of pubbies to target. Don't bother, it's a grindy Korean cash shop shitshow, even worse than STO in the latter department.
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Mar 5, 2015 02:30
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Which will happen first: STO dies, or Cryptic releases a ship that uses money as fuel (bonus points if Ferengi)?
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Mar 5, 2015 02:45
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AfroSquirrel posted:Which will happen first: STO dies, or Cryptic releases a ship that uses money as fuel (bonus points if Ferengi)? With current endgame content an abandoned wasteland I think its safe to say it already died but the corpse is still warm because the fundie/trekkie mother refuses to allow the doctors to switch off the life support machine that goes "ping".
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Mar 5, 2015 02:58
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Lorak posted:I think I remember one entertaining one with a Cardassian saying that the occupation of Bajor was the best expansion ever and the Bajorans loved it. well of course the bajorans loved it, because deep down they knew dukat was right. man, i skip out on the game for a few years and it improves, then blows up in spectacular fashion.
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Mar 5, 2015 03:38
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This entire page of posts have been kind of unsettling . Like, jesus gently caress, is this game complete trash now or what? I mean I knew it was loving bad, but the way people are talking about STO now makes it seem like it's a complete train wreck. edit: ~typos~ Blackdog420 fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 05:20
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It's p. much a complete train-wreck. We're just waiting for the fires to burn out now.
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Mar 5, 2015 05:23
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Blackdog420 posted:This entire page of posts have been kind of unsettling . Like, jesus gently caress, is this game complete trash now or what? I mean I knew it was loving bad, but the way people are talking about STO now makes it seem like it's a complete train wreck. The problem is it was good for a while. Punchin' dinos
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Mar 5, 2015 05:55
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Yeah, pretty much. If the game stayed as horrible as it was at launch then nobody would have noticed or cared. A massive backslide after a year of decent content and design on the other hand is just aggravating and depressing.
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Mar 5, 2015 05:58
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Filthy Lucre posted:All of this talk of the wiki pages has made me realize I have forgotten my password. Someone want to help a nerd out? All sorted, your account has been deleted. Let me know your new account name and I'll authorise it.
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Mar 5, 2015 06:06
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Asimo posted:Yeah, pretty much. If the game stayed as horrible as it was at launch then nobody would have noticed or cared. A massive backslide after a year of decent content and design on the other hand is just aggravating and depressing. Considering what a flop this was at launch, yeah, I never would have thought it'd make five years. For them to start fixing things then suddenly start veering off course and crashing after like, a year and a half of good work is just sad.
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Mar 5, 2015 06:09
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