Incline Official codex Star Trek Online topic :salute:

[Lazing Dirk]

I probably did less damage in the entire battle than a single shot by any of these guys

Edit: I got an AFK penalty because most of the enemies got wiped before I could even reach them, so I got 1 mark and no dilithium???

 

[Blaine]

Yeah, the power creep is so extreme that solid-gold hyperadmirals obliterate everything in sight within moments, yet a T5 with a full set of rare/very rare XIIs takes fifteen years to kill a minor add.

Truly exquisite game balance, I must say. Even the derpiest WoW clones at least allow under-geared people to participate in pubbie queues and do something.

It's like Norfleet said: You aren't even allowed to play yet.

 

[Norfleet]

Edit: I got an AFK penalty because most of the enemies got wiped before I could even reach them, so I got 1 mark and no dilithium???

Don't chase enemies. You'll never get there because everyone else is flying ships that go 3x faster than you, and instakill everything they look at in these easymode queues, so you're just going to arrive after the battle is over.

Yeah, the power creep is so extreme that solid-gold hyperadmirals obliterate everything in sight within moments, yet a T5 with a full set of rare/very rare XIIs takes fifteen years to kill a minor add.

Exactly, so don't even bother trying. Just accept your status as AFK and figure out how to maximize your payout from doing nothing. Remember, just because you didn't do jack shit, doesn't mean you can't get paid the same as those people with the expensive ships! Embrace the Steelmax Lifestyle.

Truly exquisite game balance, I must say. Even the derpiest WoW clones at least allow under-geared people to participate in pubbie queues and do something.

It's like Norfleet said: You aren't even allowed to play yet.

The thing is, those queues are the EASYMODE queues. The people you're seeing obliterate those queues are actually grossly undergeared and incapable of tackling the actual HARD content, because the reward/difficulty curve is actually totally out of whack, so they'd rather farm Easymode. The kind of damage you're seeing them do? That's maybe 20% or so of what they NEED to be doing in order to beat Hard.

What you have isn't that the powercreep is outlandish, it's actually far below where it needs to be to make endgame content realistically completable. What you're actually seeing is max-level players going into the newbie zones and killing everything because the reward system is out of whack.

 

[Bliblablubb]

Well, the guy in his log is flying an (Andorran) asscort using kemocite assplosions, so at least he tried to buy his way up to being a pro. On the other hand he is most likely an Andorran using phasers. I guess that evens it out.

 

[Norfleet]

Just looking at the entries in the log reveals that he is low energy and weak, a total scrublord. Just look at those weapons. Beams AND a cannon? Using only CRF1? No beam skill? Total scrub.

 

[Bliblablubb]

I bet you fiddy credits this "Blu" is a female Andorran in a skimpy outfit, flying some Kumari variant and sticking to blue colored Andorran phasers. Since there are no blue phaser omnis, he uses the Andorran turrets.

Style over efficiency.

But yeah, no beam skill is really unprofessional, it's not that escorts are lacking tac slots...

At least Crypric thanks him for spending a lot of money just to run a blue theme.

 

[eklektyk]

looking at those dmg numbers i guess my farmpylons with thrown-in trash disposable equipment would do more dmg than this "guy"

some enemies do constant 300k dmg spam ...

at least get to within 50k dps range scrub ...

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

papa pidgey, cough some dough, i want a change and am looking for the sturdiest kdf ship. style over matter, that's how i have fun, but also my builds are crap, so in the end i have no fun at all for your enjoyment.

meanwhile i spent all my phoenix upgrade stuffies on the brandly new bought damage locator consoles and some universals. and i still suck. so stuff it papa pidgey, let me have it my way u_u

 

[Blaine]

To be fair, I think Cryptic expected people to work together using all three career paths to defeat those Elite enemies, but from the looks of things they fucked up the class design/balance in addition to the difficulty curve.

Speaking of which, I searched for Advanced and Elite versions of the Red Alerts via the difficulty drop-down and found none. They didn't seem to be listed in the queue window at all. What gives?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

they don't exist.

 

[eklektyk]

red alerts are basicly world events

"random" mission that you in old days had to "hunt" on map and now is hooked to auto group selector

normal/advanced/elite queues come with expansions/major updates and usualy are forced to get "new and shiny" curencies for new rep grinds and utilities

 

[Blaine]

red alerts are basicly world events

"random" mission that you in old days had to "hunt" on map and now is hooked to auto group selector

normal/advanced/elite queues come with expansions/major updates and usualy are forced to get "new and shiny" curencies for new rep grinds and utilities

Yeah, I remember encountering one first while flying through sector space.

 

[Norfleet]

Speaking of which, I searched for Advanced and Elite versions of the Red Alerts via the difficulty drop-down and found none. They didn't seem to be listed in the queue window at all. What gives?

There aren't any. They probably wouldn't serve a purpose, and so people are forced to slum the Easymode versions.

To be fair, I think Cryptic expected people to work together using all three career paths to defeat those Elite enemies

A fundamentally unreasonable expectation if you expect the content to be playable by the public. The vast majority of people in the game don't have minions they can expect to call on, nor are they willing or capable of driving several characters at once.

 

[Bliblablubb]

Expecting player to work together in an MMO... aren't you precious. The average pugling in a queue is not even capable of reading.

I played the Gammard queues a few times to aquire the marks you don't get from sexually harrassing the borg queen's penisboat. Several of them require you kill a capital ship by simply collecting meteorites and press the "fire seeker missle" button.
Yeah, too complicated for the average pugling.

At least 70% of all my teammates will just fly around trying to kill everything (being useless) or circle the capital ship wondering why it doesn't take dmg (being more useless). Must be buggy amirite?

 

[Blaine]

Back in my day, you either worked together with others or you didn't accomplish jack shit.

WoW "solved" that annoying problem once and for all.

 

[Bliblablubb]

And WoW made helluvalot benjamins by doing so. Everyone wants to have a piece of that cake. Well, Bioware lost helluvalot benjamins by making SWTOR that way, but that's a different story.

You can pretty much "play" STO without ever having to interact with other players, making the shock even bigger when you queue and the mission involves more than the usual "fly to point A and fire everything, repeat for all points until reward appears" system.

 

[Blaine]

Funnily enough, the genre that finally killed WoW was derived from one of Blizzard's old games, and in fact does require players to work together in order to accomplish anything... or so I gather. I'm not really into dotas.

Shortly before WoW v1.0 was released, I specifically remember looking forward to it and thinking that it was about time we no longer had to sit around camping bosses for days/weeks or grinding one tough mob at a time in coordinated, self-made leveling groups. I was playing Final Fantasy XI at the time. This was also long before F2P, or at least long before most Western MMO players would tolerate the idea of cash shops. The only one I think I'd heard of at that time was Lineage.

The whole genre's past its prime now and slipping into obscurity. Realistically, it's probably for the best; they're a huge fucking waste of time, are a catalyst for addictive behaviors, and there are better ways to be social.

 

[Norfleet]

Back in my day, you either worked together with others or you didn't accomplish jack shit.

The memory of your day is very different from the memory of my day, then. I remember the old days of MUDs, where I would multiclient an entire team because it was impossible to get anything done otherwise as others were entirely useless. I remember when i would effectively have to singlehandedly kill an entire enemy team by myself simply because everyone else was either Missing or Entirely Useless. The simple math dictates the relative impossibility of assembling a sizeable group of players.

Imagine a group of 5 people. Let's run some numbers

First, let's imagine 5 of those people are like me: Utterly no life insomniacs with nothing much to do: 90% uptime. Since for the action to occur, all 5 members must be up, we get 0.9^5 = 59% uptime. This doesnt' seem too bad, a group that can mobilize for action nearly 60% of the time is good for maybe 14hours a day. Now let's move down the list.

Case 2: Lifeless turbo-nerds. 67% uptime. Total uptime: 0.67^5 = 13%. They can put together maybe a 3 hour run. Not terrible, but it's clearly getting pretty hard to pull shit together.

Case 3: Work Hard, Play Hard: 8 hours of work, 8 hours in game, 8 hours dead. 33% uptime. Total uptime: 0.33^5 = 0.3% Yeah, it quickly drops off a cliff. If your group consists of people with jobs, bu are otherwise dedicated to the game, they have a less than 6 minute attention span as a 5-man unit. If it takes longer than 6 minutes, it isn't happening.

I don't think I need to do the math for groups of people less dedicated to the craft with even lower uptimes, since they'll have uptimes measured in fractions of seconds.

The whole genre's past its prime now and slipping into obscurity. Realistically, it's probably for the best; they're a huge fucking waste of time, are a catalyst for addictive behaviors, and there are better ways to be social.

Nah, I see these things going in cycles. Remember when the age of 4X was in decline, and there hadn't been anything new since Civ, and then in recent years, we suddenly get a flood of the damn things? The people who want to play these things aren't going anywhere, and if the market shifts too far away from them, eventually someone will put out something that does a good job catering to this niche and there will be a sudden resurgence.

 

[Blaine]

Maybe, but just remember that there was a time when MMORPGs and 4X games didn't exist at all. Cycles can and do begin and end.

You still waiting for MUDs to make a resurgence? I've played them too, and I don't see it happening in my lifetime. Now technically they're non-graphical MMO/RPGs, but the point still stands.

 

[Norfleet]

Maybe, but just remember that there was a time when MMORPGs and 4X games didn't exist at all.

Sure, but if we ignore things that didn't exist before the infrastructure to even make them existed, the "MMORPG" has always existed ever since it was possible for them to exist at all: MUDs are the "proto-MMORPG". And when you think about it, the MUD/MMORPG is basically the networked computerized implementation of the Single Player RPG, both of which first existed in non-networked computer-form, and then non-computer, tabletop form, and the offline RPG probably predates the modern designation thereof. And the 4X totally predates the existence of computers. We were playing these games back when it was done with wooden tokens and maps and computers weren't a thing.

You still waiting for MUDs to make a resurgence? I've played them too, and I don't see it happening in my lifetime. Now technically they're non-graphical MMO/RPGs, but the point still stands.

Fixating on the presentation format is missing the point, though. The MMORPG *IS* the continuation of the MUD. The only real leap was "we added graphics". Every single core system that exists in MMORPGs was part of MUDs. The only change is that they're bigger, and have YE GRAPHICS. Under the hood, stripped of all that? They're the same. They are, in fact, so same that it would be possible to create a text-mode ASCII client for an MMO...something that has been done before.

So no, I'm not expecting an ASCII resurgence, but I also view the MMORPG as basically the continuation of the genre.

 

[Blaine]

These days, I'd reckon many MUDs as being a whole lot "bigger" than your average graphical MMORPG (in terms of rooms, mobs, and objects, that is), and they tend to play a lot differently, too.

In any event, one thing that's occurred in the transition from tabletop RPGs to computer RPGs and the offshoot into MMORPGs into the modern era is that everything pertaining to any iteration of RPGs has declined considerably. So while a new wave of MMORPGs may appear when we're in our 50s, you're not going to want to play any of them.

 

[Norfleet]

You mean when YOU'RE in your 50s. By the time that happens, I won't be ABLE to play any of them because I will be DEAD. So that's not a concern I really have.

But you have to ask yourself: What is an MMORPG, really? It's a computar environment in which an public open pool of players possess persistent characters that interact in a shared space. So it's not an "MMO" if the pool of players is private (an invite-only game), the pool is closed (players cannot join the game after it has started, as such match-based "MOBA"s or other match-based games), or there is no persistence of character (public open FPSes, MOBAs again). Do you think that the class of game where players maintain persistent characters in a shared open public space is going to evaporate anytime soon? I don't think so. Even if the current thing people regard as the line of "MMORPGs" extinguishes, we're simply going to see them creep back into existence into related genres, like how an RPG's roots are just a small wargame with character stats on the units.

The concept is going nowhere, it's just a cycle of what things are considered "in style" at the moment going in and out of favor. MUDs, for instance, used to have permanent death. Permanent death and full looting faded out of favor even before MMORPGs, and sort of faded out completely when the pay-to-play MMORPG came into being, but the concept always keeps getting kicked around and sooner or later someone will make a successful modern game based on the idea of it, because the niche for impact hasn't really been filled.

 

[Blaine]

The unruly Gorn have conferred now that we've got a more-or-less complete picture of what getting up to speed in STO will ultimately entail. Our conclusions could perhaps be summed up thusly: "Are you pullin' me fookin' plonker, mate?"

I've included a transcript of our conversation for your amusement: https://pastebin.com/XWrUyDtV

It's been interesting to poke in for a look around, and we appreciated the advice and banter, but we aren't up for six months of not-playing a game several hours each day.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

So who got the winning bet on "How long will Blaine play this stupid game?"

 

[eklektyk]

no one was makin any bets since final outcome of this little experiment was never in doubt