Star Trek Online Discussion Thread (now free to play!)

[junxon]

anyone know what happened to the foundry?

[Timelord_Victorious]

In what way?

[junxon]

it doesn't seem to exist. or is it just me?

[Timelord_Victorious]

They turned Foundry Play on with the last patch after the season update. You can play missions again.

The Editor is still disabled for maintenance reasons.

[sbk1234]

Have I heard correctly that they're planning to reallow those nice little short missions for the daily? Or am I just nuts? The two, I know, are not mutually exclusive.

[matthunter]

Timelord_Victorious wrote:

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They turned Foundry Play on with the last patch after the season update. You can play missions again.

The Editor is still disabled for maintenance reasons.

There's a pretty major bug since the update which either prevents NPCs from spawning or despawns them if you move too far away. I've tried a number of Foundry missions now only to be unable to complete them due to a missing NPC contact. Beaming out and resuming sometimes works, but not always. This can also happen quite some time into the mission, which is frustrating.

[Hartzilla2007]

matthunter wrote:

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There's a pretty major bug since the update which either prevents NPCs from spawning or despawns them if you move too far away. I've tried a number of Foundry missions now only to be unable to complete them due to a missing NPC contact. Beaming out and resuming sometimes works, but not always. This can also happen quite some time into the mission, which is frustrating.

something tells me the devs are probably screaming at the foundry right now seeing as the whole point of taking it down was to prevent stuff like this.

[matthunter]

Two Borg Red Alerts today. I think I'm getting the hang of them - not a word spoken in chat, but I didn't die once and we finished the V'Ger knockoffs in under a minute. I don't like varying my build for a given situation, so I half-expect folk to yell at me for not healing, but my Grav Well seems good at keeping the Regeneration Probes tied up while escorts blow them to pieces. Debuffing is my game.

Also hit T2 Romulan rep. This time a bit unclear on where to trigger the cutscene - unlike "Hidden Camera", this one is inside the new daily you unlock instead of being needed to unlock it. Not as interesting as the previous one, but they seem to be going somewhere with it, anyway. Kinda wish Omega Force had a similar backstory element, just seems like th Borg are being Borg rather than having an actual plan... WHY did they assimilate Donatra? And why leave her in her old ship (albeit with Borg upgrades) when a Tac Cube or Unimatrix ship would be more potent? How come they haven't figured out where the Preserver Archive is and are still mucking about on Defera?

[Xhiandra]

Scout101 wrote:

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As for the New Romulus stuff? Kinda symptomatic of Cryptic's overall issue: visually, it's very nice. They've created a nice little adventure planet setting. But they didn't create any adventures to HAVE on the planet. Scan 5 of x, encourage Y number of workers to stop being lazy shits, go over there and click "f" 5 times. It's just grindy little mini-games, but no reason behind it, or much fun in it. They like to play with the systems, but have abandoned the gameplay portion, the reason to DO the things. It's just another new currency, grindfests to collect it 10 marks at a time, and then a massive sink to drop them in. Despite an obvious amount of work that went into it, I just don't see the point. Ran around for a couple hours there, and pretty much already had enough.

They did the same thing with Bajor. Created a great map, beautiful scenery. And then just put a couple tiny grind games in there and abandoned it. When was the last time you were there? They spend all this time on it, and it's wasted because they can't figure out how to make them ENGAGING. Just nice scenery or 'click f 5 times' missions.

They also can't seem to just TWEAK anything. They go in for wholesale changes to the entire system. If they weren't happy with DIL rates, could have tried adjusting things, more here, little less there, see what happens. Instead, they nuke the most popular ones (to the point where the backlash already has them reversing course), attach the big rewards to garbage missions that no one plays anymore (not because of the rewards, but because they are boring, awful missions), nuke several currencies (again), create whole new ones (screwing everyone yet again on the conversion rates), etc. Can't even make sense of half of what they changed. Even little stuff, like visual items like the PVE queue screen. Awful, muddled mess. What was wrong with that one? Or knowing roughly how many people were in the queue, whether it was worth signing up in the first place.

True.
I came back to the game a few days ago.
What made me come back? New stuff to do.
What greeted me? A completely new system to learn (got the gist of it now), new stuff to buy and new stuff to wait on.
Wait 20 hours, to be precise.

Cryptic is really lucky this game is riding on a popular franchise, had it been an original MMO, they'd have lost huge chunks of the playerbase long ago and closed shop before season 6. Maybe before season 5.
They're lucky most of the playerbase consists of trekkies for whom this is their first MMO; they don't know any better.


Instead of the reputation system, Season 7 should just have introduced new endgame events, be they new STFs or a completely different system.
Make them hard, so players will be challenged and won't get bored with it even when they win a few times.
Don't make existing gear harder to obtain (doubleslap in the face of the playerbase - Omega/MACO/KHG/Borg now require a lot more time investment to obtain and the conversion rates screwed everyone!), introduce new gear sets instead!
Make the new sets better than Omega/MACO/KHG/Borg, to reward the high difficulty and create a gear progression.

That would've been a lot easier to do than the reputation system+New Romulus and it would've been better for all players, new and old.


Oh, and not only have they killed Dilithium farming, they also killed my old EC farming avenues: STFs and Starbase 24.

- STFs: I didn't hoard the drops when I no longer needed them on a char, I sold them:
1 EDC=20k EC (NPCing Borg pieces: 5 EDCs=1 piece-> 100k resale value)
1 Rare Salvage=45k EC (IIRC - NPCing the Mk X equipment)
1 Proto Salvage=50k EC (IIRC - NPCing the Mk XII equipment)
1 Rare Deflector/Engine/Shields=50k EC (NPCing Mk XI MACO/OMEGA/KHG)
1 Proto Deflector/Engine/Shields=55k EC (NPCing Mk XII MACO/OMEGA/KHG)
Add the random drops to NPC and the exceedingly rare occurence of a good drop (Mk XII purple weapons) during the run and you had a decent moneymaker.

- Starbase 24: pre-S7, it didn't give dilithium, but it didn't have a timer either.
I could run 4-5 back-to-back if I wanted, often taking first place -> if the reward was a console, good EC on the exchange. If it was a Deflector/Engine/Shields, weak EC at a NPC but you can try again; if it was a Weapon, it depended.


Now, it seems the best way to generate EC is to take advantage of people: buy Major Regens/Hypos/Shield Charges/various Provisions at a NPC, sell for 10x the cost or more on the Exchange.

[TheRoyalFamily]

Xhiandra wrote:

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Now, it seems the best way to generate EC is to take advantage of people: buy Major Regens/Hypos/Shield Charges/various Provisions at a NPC, sell for 10x the cost or more on the Exchange.

People still buy that stuff? I could see that happening in the first few days, but you'd think people would learn which NPC's to buy that crap from pretty quick. I know some folks get out of the habit of talking to NPC's, and before there was absolutely no reason to buy anything from them, but that's just ridiculous.

In S6 you could make loads of EC selling doffs on the exchange, but the prices imploded at S7. On the one hand there was a lot less need for certain doffs for fleet projects, but on the other hand Cryptic made it a lot harder to get them (for cheap, at least). Plus, the large amounts of identically-priced doffs on the exchange makes me wonder if there isn't some sort of manipulation going on there...

[syberghost]

TheRoyalFamily wrote:

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Plus, the large amounts of identically-priced doffs on the exchange makes me wonder if there isn't some sort of manipulation going on there...

There is, but it's by players. They brag about it on the forums.

[Hartzilla2007]

Xhiandra wrote:

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Omega/MACO/KHG/Borg now require a lot more time investment

At least you can invest time into it now instead of relying on luck to get a piece of gear.

And before someone tries the increase drop rate argument, it's ONE item that only ONE person in a FIVE person group can get, so unless there is one or more drops I doubt it would work.

Oh, and not only have they killed Dilithium farming,

This has be debunked. Your getting dilithium for all the dilithium dailies, the STFs, and the Fleet actions, not to mention doff assignments, exchanging neural processors, and at some point reputation xp assignments, and exchanging marks.

And lets be honest unless your grinding for zen (which of course they expect you to pay for since they have to make money off this thing) its mostly going towards gear thats somewhat better than what you can get for ECs, I mean hell I just sold some master keys I got with my 500 zen a month and just flat out bought Mk XI purple gear on the exchange.

[Ayelbourne]

Xhiandra wrote:

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Instead of the reputation system, Season 7 should just have introduced new endgame events, be they new STFs or a completely different system.

It did. There's a new ground STF and a new space STF. Also, there is a new ground fleet action and some new events.

[Scout101]

Think they meant a whole new series, with new gear, etc. Not just a single mission, dropped into a yet-again revamped attempt to make us forget we've been playing them for 2 years now.

Wish they'd thought it out enough to not kill the current ones, at least, while not giving us a new set. Literally can't get a team together for a ground mission since they tossed us the lastest cock-up. No benefit to doing them, they take longer, no unique rewards, etc. So it's just ISE once an hour and move on...

[intrinsical]

It's pretty clear that Cryptic really dropped the ball this time and delivered the rush job that is called Season 7. There are so many obvious bugs, a significant portion of them could have been caught if they've been put it up for testing on Tribble. The worst is the addition of the new personal reputation system and reward changes without careful thought on the impact to the playerbase, in-game economy, nor adequate data mining when deciding project costs.

I know this is not how Cryptic view it, but from my perspective the end result is that the entire end-game is now segmented into 4 largely separate activity groups, forcing players to divide their time advancing 4 different aspects of their character.

STFs - For collecting Omega Marks and advancing Omega Force Reputation
Tau Dewa & S7 Fleet Actions - For collecting Romulan Marks and advancing New Romulus Reputation
S6 Fleet Actions - For Fleet Marks and advancing Fleet Starbase & Embassy
Old Fleet Actions, Dailies, Kerrat - For gathering sufficient dilithium and energy credits to fund Omega Force, New Romulus & Fleet Reputation Projects.