Well, so much for STO.

[Logan Darklighter]

Check out the following graphic. I want to know from anyone still playing STO - is this accurate?
Because Jesus Haploid Christ...
I'd been away for awhile (couple of months) and was holding off on playing until all the various bugs would be worked out and patches for stuff breaking would be done. It always happens that way and I didn't want to get frustrated. 
But now I think I'm just not going to be coming back, period. Goodbye STO. It was fun while it lasted.

[ECSNorway]

Wow. talk about "we want hardcore gamerz only!".

Glad I never got into it.
Still considering SWTORO, though.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Baseload]

I'm gonna be happy with my Rift. Not so crazy....

[OpMegs]

This is based on the assumption you want max level gear.

Now, to explain that in detail, let me provide my general playstyle. I'd consider myself a casual player. Before the update, I would play Elite (the old Elite, now Advanced) STFs for drops and gear. My main, Sara, was at pretty much the tip of the gearing iceberg, short of Fleet Gear which is an insane investment for very little benefit unless you must have the best of the best gear. But unless you're running at higher difficulties, it's not required for the old end game.

With the new endgame, you have Normal (Casual), Advanced (Some gear), and Elite (Top Gear, lots of coordination). These roughly break down to being able to do the easier CoX task forces (Positron, Sister Psyche, any of the "beat through missions and tank and spank the last boss" ones, really), the harder CoX task forces (Imperious pre-Incarnates, Lady Grey) and the top tier Task Forces and Trials (Apex, Tin Mage, Minds of Mayhem. Stuff with mechanics that require attention and coordination or you'll wipe).

With the various patches that've begun debuffing the enemy HP totals and such in PVE, the game is slowly coming back to where it was after a brief jump where the devs seemed to think their new T6 ships would utterly break the game. But the simple fact of the matter is that I only have 1 mission reward Mk XIII piece of gear on Sara, and she's up to level 54 already. I'm kinda waiting for them to balance out the grind, as the story mission rewards of XP are deliberately designed to give you "break periods" of doing other repeatable content to level up before you can do the next storyline. The grind was a bit boring, so I went back to TOR to wait for them to fix it up. But the game hasn't changed that much. I'm just waiting for them to figure out how to rebalance around their new level cap, which is always a wait and see process.

Mechanics wise? I bought the Delta pack, so I've got T6 ships, but I've also played with T5-U ships, and the difference isn't too terribly much unless you want to use the new Intel specialties. The critical thing that graphic doesn't tell you? Unless you have a pathological need to have max gear on everything? Getting it is pointless. Get Mk XII gear, the top tier before the level cap increase? You'll be fine for story content, and Advanced STFs are only required if you absolutely must have the latest Reputation Gear set. Which is only necessary if you want to do the higher difficulty content like Advanced with the bonus objectives, or the Hardest of the Hard Elite difficulty.

Yeah, the realization that you had to grind gear to get the gear to do the grind to get the gear that lets you do the new grind... if you're just looking for story content? Then those graphs don't mean anything. You can get through the story content with Mk XII gear or whatever Mk XIII drops you get from story rewards and drops. The grind to Mk XIV everything? That's a time and effort sink. I don't play STO just to have the dick waving cred of having all purple gear of the highest quality (especially since Ultraviolet and Epic just got introduced on top of that). If I like a new ship, I'll buy it. Otherwise? I'm not in a hurry.

STO didn't ruin the game for anyone other than the 100% completionists who must have the best gear because it's the best gear. Everyone else just got slowed down a little.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."

[Acyl]

OpMegs wrote:

---

This is based on the assumption you want max level gear.
...
STO didn't ruin the game for anyone other than the 100% completionists who must have the best gear because it's the best gear. Everyone else just got slowed down a little.

If we're analysing data, the thing is... understand the current STO system, you need to think in Terrence Knight (tk) units.
Let's assume that one Terrence Knight's investment in a single character, in an MMO, is about 100 times more than an average player (who is therefore 0.01tk, or 1 Centi-TK, or 1ctk), and approximately 1000 times more than a casual player (0.001tk, or 1 Mili-TK, 1 mtk). 
The new cost/time investment for someone to max out all the new stuff in STO is 1tk, or kinda like what Terrence Knight did back in City of Heroes for his single main character - building a character with all the Incarnate stuff and tons of purple enhancements. Most people aren't going to go that far. Because frankly speaking, there's no need to, other than:

a) PvP, and
b) POWER OVERWHELMING

For any regular player's purposes, stuff you can acquire easily via the rep system, off the exchange, and maybe a few upgrades here and there will be enough. You don't need to max out a single character, because content is really calibrated to 0.01tk, or 1ctk at most.

Incidentally, I'm not picking this comparison simply because it's a familiar one to us, as former CoX players. I'm picking it because the Delta Rising revamp and new endgame has a lot of former City of Heroes developers working on it - including Positron, because I assume the "Matt Miller" who's done some dev posts for Cryptic is the same guy. 

More on this later.

Now, I suspect the reason STO players are up in arms is because, until now, all the highest endgame stuff in STO was extremely low-hanging fruit. Ridiculously easy to acquire even by casual MMO standards. 

So the casual players are upset because, well, they can't get all the top tier shinies anymore - without realising that, well, objectively they probably don't need those top tier shinies anyway. 

It's like in City of Heroes. Think of the new higher-mark gear as IOs, and old Mk XI or XII gear as SOs. You can get by with SOs. You don't need the better stuff, and the normal game isn't really balanced with that in mind, unless you deliberately choose to ramp up the difficulty.

There is, however, a particular subset of player that is likely legitimately upset - the altoholic. Because an altoholic's investment in the game is potentially equal to 1tk, but rather than it being investment in a single tk unit, it is investment in several dozen (plus or minus) different alt characters - up to around 100ctk = 1tk.

The thing is, attempting to bring each and every one of those characters up to the value of 1tk  - now that is a Herculean investment.

But the reality is that many altoholics who understand the situation have, simply, just...cut down the number of characters they actively level. Let's go back to City of Heroes. Most of us had a ton of Level 50 characters. But how many of those 50s had Incarnate unlocks, with IOs?

And were you really bothered if you couldn't get all those unlocks on all your characters?

Hell, besides the hypothetical 1tk, how many of us actually maxed out any of our characters? I had three characters fully IO'd when CoX went down, but two of them only had the basic Incarnate tier stuff. Only on one character did I have higher-tier Incarnate unlocks, and even then, I wasn't completely maxed out on options, just the one option for each.

Ultimately, the present STO system is intended to make it as hard as possible to max out a character. Because you're not supposed to. It's meant to provide a bunch of achievable levels of power for people to veeerrrrry sloooowly acquire over the long, long term.

Now, whether you like that or not, that's a different thing. Many people legitimately dislike aspects of this system, and that's fair. But you need to understand the design intention here. It's calibrated for tk, not ctk or mtk, possibly because it's also got Positron's hand in this (henceforth 1 posi, under this standard system of measurements).

(Apologies to Terrence. Nah, I lie. I'm not sorry. You're awesome, 1tk. About 100 x more awesome than me on this scale.)
-- Acyl

[Matrix Dragon]

I have nothing useful to add. I just love the concept of Terr as a unit of measurement.

[Acyl]

It's not a very precise measurement. It has lots of deviations when plotted on a line graph.
-- Acyl

[Matrix Dragon]

Acyl wrote:

---

It's not a very precise measurement. It has lots of deviations when plotted on a line graph.

Did you try and use it for maps again?

[Ebony]

Matrix Dragon wrote:

---

Acyl wrote:

---

It's not a very precise measurement. It has lots of deviations when plotted on a line graph.

Did you try and use it for maps again?

Yeah, the Knight Projection isn't the best cartographic model. I mean it's better than the Hibiki Projection, but that's not saying much.
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

[Bob Schroeck]

Acyl wrote:

---

It's not a very precise measurement. It has lots of deviations when plotted on a line graph.

Well, you're only working with one point of data after all...
And regarding L50s?  All my L50s when COH died were incarnates, with or working toward unlocking everything.  Then again, I didn't have many -- three, I think.  And I tended to play Evangelia almost exclusively.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Terrenceknight]

..Ankh just pointed me to this thread over steam and the first thing I want to say is, I'm far too amused I'm now a unit of measurement (Don't try to use it to measure distance, you'll end up warping spacetime) and found your analysis to be quite hysterical. I will admit it took me a very long time to Tweak Terrence to the point where I was quite satisfied with how he worked in missions, mainly because I didn't use mids for him and just kinda went by how things felt during gameplay..ignore the fact I had multiple T4 incarnate powers of each category simply because I liked being able to swap them to deal with any situation. Admittedly I loved that versatility that came with being able to swap incarnate powers which was why I kept throwing myself at trials despite how much my social anxiety made me stress to run em.

Now on the other hand unlike what it seems for STO it was actually getting really fast (in comparison) to gear up subsequent characters in purples and T4 incarnate abilities once I had Terr done to my likeing, I could get most of my IO'ing done in a couple days depending on the AH and the fat stack of Merits/Hero merits I had laying around from running tips so often with folks and one could rack up incarnate powers fast if you seriously went at trials for a week if that. So from my own personal experience once you had a character at cap and tricked out it was -much- easier to bring others up to that level..sadly I can't say I have nearly enough experience with STO to say anythin else.

[Logan Darklighter]

Thanks guys. That helps put my mind at ease. I'm not a huge number crunching kind of guy, so I saw the above graphic and kinda went a little panicky. 
At this point I'm really only going to be gearing up 2 Captains for advanced gear, possibly not even top end. (MAYBE a third - since my two "mains" are both tactical and I have a lvl 50 Science Captain and it would be nice to have an option to run as Science in Task Forces occasionally.)
The Terrence Knight unit of measurement is both hilarious and usefully informative. So epic win on that, Acyl. ^_^
-Logan
--------------------
"Risk! Risk is our business!That's what this starship is all about, That's why we're aboard her!--------------------

[Acyl]

When I saw the infographic, it was like a divine revelation, I knew exactly what I had to do.

The TK himself (bureau which administers the SI tk unit?) does raise a good point that where STO's setup differs is that...it's less easy to transfer gains from one maxed out alt to another, which I noted in my initial post.

Less easy, though. Not...no transference whatsoever, since you can shift over dilithium with some juggling tricks with the Dil/Zen exchange and certainly can shift over energy creds, crafting and upgrade mats, so on. There is a certain amount of that.

STO is built to give an individual character great build diversity though: you can run different ships and different modular ground kits, with loudouts saved per ship - automatically stripping and reslotting the same gear from a common pool. The thinking is likely that people don't need so many alts - which is, admittedly, true unless you are a concept RPer or light RPer.
-- Acyl

[Star Ranger4]

To be honest, I dont think I ever got even my prime fully unlocked, certainly I would agree with the casual gamer being at about 1% of the grinding that is Der TK. Plus near the end I was more playing Kim Esetic or Garavornette anyway.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children