PSA: Don't Cash in Honor on Citations to Hold. The Inventory Cap May Eat Them.
I've been holding off on sharing this experience for about two weeks in the hopes that DB could figure something out, but as they have not been able to - and since a lot of folks just got a big honor windfall recently - I figured I should share with everyone something that I've been telling my friends and fleetmates.
Don't cash in your honor on citations to hold. Why? Let me tell you -- as I recently had to tell CS -- about the inventory cap.
If you go to the game menu and click on inventory, you'll see a number in the top left that shows xxx/1000. That counts the number of unique items that you are holding. It's not just components or equipment - it includes everything under this category. That goes for your trainers, your transmissions, voyage tokens, starbase components, and, as I recently learned the hard way, your citations.
It used to be that if you went over 1,000, the game was rendered darn near unplayable. That was fixed. Now, if you go over 1,000 unique items, the game will start to randomly delete things. It doesn't matter if you are over by 1 or 100. If you are over, things will be deleted. Dabo, building characters, gauntlet, and clearing thresholds will all add bloat to your item cap. The only way to remove this bloat is to replicate with it.
It's long been my theory that the most recent item used is the first one to get deleted. I lost all of my 1* terran emblems during Mirror month due to the item cap. I've lost transmissions and science experiments and other precious things due to the item cap. Each time, I've filed a ticket and support has been able to work with me.
I pull a lot of packs. Recently, after the new additions to the premium portal, I pulled about 400. I cashed that honor into 5* citations to make my first to max efforts faster. I usually keep 3-4 gold citations on hand for this purpose.
Last weekend, I looked at my stash of cites, realized that I was close to getting a 5th, and figured I would use one to immortalize a character. I did that and then realized that the "upgrade" button was no longer pulsing as it should be. I looked for my citations and all were gone. I then went to my inventory and saw that it was just over 1,000. Knowing about the cap, I immediately filed a ticket. Surely they could track my honor and know what just happened, right?
Wrong.
The first CS rep understood probably 1 word in my ticket. I then escalated and I had to explain the item cap to a supervisor, who was unfamiliar with a game mechanism that has been plaguing people since day 1. He then clearly didn't understand what I was trying to say as he removed 1,000 of a single item and asked if that fixed things.
He then told me that his thinking was that the citations had been used and were not missing and that he would be unable to help me. So, that means his thinking is that I'm trying to cheat the game and I'm a liar. DB has stolen my money, and I got called a liar for the pleasure.
If you don't know me... Hi, I'm SilverRose. I'm the admiral of Exouds. I'm a day 1 player of this game. I have the second-most first to max credits of any player, including the recent 10k dil Sulu. I also have, as of this writing, 3,465,900 VIP points. I have no reason to con CS or ask for things that I am not due. I just want what I paid for, and I guess that is too much to ask from them.
So don't cash in your honor on citations and be vigilant about your inventory cap. And, if do you happen to lose something because of this shoddy game architecture, I sincerely hope that CS will choose to believe you, because they clearly have no ability to track things on the back end.
Don't cash in your honor on citations to hold. Why? Let me tell you -- as I recently had to tell CS -- about the inventory cap.
If you go to the game menu and click on inventory, you'll see a number in the top left that shows xxx/1000. That counts the number of unique items that you are holding. It's not just components or equipment - it includes everything under this category. That goes for your trainers, your transmissions, voyage tokens, starbase components, and, as I recently learned the hard way, your citations.
It used to be that if you went over 1,000, the game was rendered darn near unplayable. That was fixed. Now, if you go over 1,000 unique items, the game will start to randomly delete things. It doesn't matter if you are over by 1 or 100. If you are over, things will be deleted. Dabo, building characters, gauntlet, and clearing thresholds will all add bloat to your item cap. The only way to remove this bloat is to replicate with it.
It's long been my theory that the most recent item used is the first one to get deleted. I lost all of my 1* terran emblems during Mirror month due to the item cap. I've lost transmissions and science experiments and other precious things due to the item cap. Each time, I've filed a ticket and support has been able to work with me.
I pull a lot of packs. Recently, after the new additions to the premium portal, I pulled about 400. I cashed that honor into 5* citations to make my first to max efforts faster. I usually keep 3-4 gold citations on hand for this purpose.
Last weekend, I looked at my stash of cites, realized that I was close to getting a 5th, and figured I would use one to immortalize a character. I did that and then realized that the "upgrade" button was no longer pulsing as it should be. I looked for my citations and all were gone. I then went to my inventory and saw that it was just over 1,000. Knowing about the cap, I immediately filed a ticket. Surely they could track my honor and know what just happened, right?
Wrong.
The first CS rep understood probably 1 word in my ticket. I then escalated and I had to explain the item cap to a supervisor, who was unfamiliar with a game mechanism that has been plaguing people since day 1. He then clearly didn't understand what I was trying to say as he removed 1,000 of a single item and asked if that fixed things.
He then told me that his thinking was that the citations had been used and were not missing and that he would be unable to help me. So, that means his thinking is that I'm trying to cheat the game and I'm a liar. DB has stolen my money, and I got called a liar for the pleasure.
If you don't know me... Hi, I'm SilverRose. I'm the admiral of Exouds. I'm a day 1 player of this game. I have the second-most first to max credits of any player, including the recent 10k dil Sulu. I also have, as of this writing, 3,465,900 VIP points. I have no reason to con CS or ask for things that I am not due. I just want what I paid for, and I guess that is too much to ask from them.
So don't cash in your honor on citations and be vigilant about your inventory cap. And, if do you happen to lose something because of this shoddy game architecture, I sincerely hope that CS will choose to believe you, because they clearly have no ability to track things on the back end.
Proud Former Admiral of eXodus
Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
54
Comments
I hope this post pushes DB to make it right with you. And to finally fix this issue once and for all.
Check out our website to find out more:
https://wiki.tenforwardloungers.com/
The replicator mechanism for clearing unwanted items is tedious and terrible. Also the inventory screen in general. More filters and proper item sorting would help, but its UI is fundamentally bad.
We are constantly getting a glut of items that we don't need, and it wouldn't really be an issue if we weren't punished for holding them. But, we are punished for it -- because the game will start eating anything and everything at random if you go over. The fact that this has been an issue since launch that hasn't been remedied yet is absolutely asinine.
This recent CS experience may be what I need to motivate me to remove my credit card from my iTunes account. It's something I've done a few times in the past after particularly bad experiences (cough Musketeer La Forge cough), but I don't know how much more grace I can extend to DB at this point. They keep asking us to give them the benefit at the doubt -- even as recently as last week. At what point is that goodwill extinguished?
Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
Agree on the UI, took me basically an hour last night to replicate off 0/1 star outfits and 1/2 star ship schematics to get from 943 down to 902. Would be nice if the inventory and replicator screens used the same sorting mechanism.
You could spend the STT money on something nice instead.
So at this point the issue list is:
1) Ignoring the AND shuttle issue and refusing to confirm if it has been fixed
2) The failure to provide adequate compensation or fix for Polywater Yar
3) Poor communication about Skirmish event mechanics (would it kill them to just explain the bonuses and how things work clearly with examples)
4) Insisting on changing Skirmish functionality WITHOUT fixing the UI for crew selection, when they could just include traits that fit the bonus crew for every skirmish until they fix the UI
5) No effective captcha/anti-macro functionality
6) Terrible replicator UI (at a bare minimum we need to be able to see the description of what the items are that are being added, since so many items have similar/identical images)
7) Inconsistent/uninformed CS replies
8) Being told to not worry about items 1-4 and stop asking about them.
Does this sum it up?
The inventory cap is just one of many. There's also the stuck voyages that we have to use a 3rd party tool to possibly fix, and the Federation event shuttle bug that they've known about since April and haven't taken any steps to fix at all - and while knowing about it, they keep shoving Fed as a faction into a lot of shuttle events.
Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
Terribly frustrating and annoying especially as when it first was reported DB said they would fix it in the next build.
On the OP though. I would PM @Shan, shes always good to us even just feeding stuff back up to the powers that be.
Jim
I will also bring up again the inventory management pains.
Gaming money DB has not gotten from me since issues started multiplying last month:
-$70 for Destiny 2: Forsaken and Year 2 game pass
-around $175 on ST Online (I really wanted the Vengeance-class intel dreadnought, among others)
-$55 for crowdfunding the development of Starflight 3
-$3 for The Witcher 2 (GOG offered a discount)
Would I have spent all of this here instead? No, but instead of loading up on ships in STO I might have splurged for Elizabeth Dehner. Not even Commodore Decker could probably pry money out of my hands unless there are some major, fundamental changes here...oh well, I now don’t have to feel bad about getting Red Dead Redemption 2 and Fallout 76 later this year.
If you leave crew with equipment slots open, you get a lot less chaff from Dabo/Gauntlet. In particular, I try to always have a 0* (Sci Experiment), 1* (Social Program), 2* (Whiskey), and 3* (Champagne or Science Report) open since those are some of the better ones to get for free.
I really wish they would just remove the cap. Don't keep creating new items if they can't be held. Every new crew results in multiple new items. Just stop making them crew specific. Instead of Scotty's Security Uniform 4* and Worf's Security Uniform 4* and Reed's Security Uniform, just make it Security Uniform 4* so it only takes one inventory slot with a quantity of 3 instead of 3 if you had all 3 with a quantity of 1.
Mostly, I can think of three other things that are designed badly but they are advantageous so don't add them
As a programmer myself, I've known how I would have handled this since Day One. I NEVER would have coded in crew-specific items. Instead, I would have created items like this:
[Insert current character's name]'s Tricorder
So that the name displayed would match the character on which it was currently being shown, so there would be far fewer unique items, and we'd never see "Kes' Tricorder" on Kang or whatever.
This is just another one of the long list of inexplicable programming decisions I've been unable to wrap my head around since I started playing.
Actually, that's not how they calculated the voyage honor refund. The refund was based on 18,000 honor per star you had on a voyage exclusive crew above 1/4.
Seriously. So if you got another due to a bug or them being featured in packs, you got 18k honor for that too.
That can’t be the way they did it. I got refunded for 5 out of the 6. I had all 6 FF. I did not get refunded for Colonel Worf. He’s the only one that I FF with drops. If they did it the way you suggested I would’ve gotten another 72,000 honor.
I got exactly 6*54k and while most of the extra stars were from citations a few were from packs or the guinan dilemma achievement.
What's the Federation shuttle bug? I don't know about this?
Check out our website to find out more:
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Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
Basically, for whatever reason, Federation shuttles have become stuck for many players during events causing their shared crew, purchased event crew, and even entire shuttles to become stuck (to where you cannot claim any and also cannot send any so you are totally dead in the water during an event). Sometimes it will still let you send some, but not all, or let you send all -- but of another faction.
It has happened to me personally, and I'm aware of a number of other players for whom the same has happened. We've all had to file tickets to get our shuttles unstuck, so DB is absolutely aware of this. The first reports of this bug date back to April.
As I mentioned, it appears to only happens with Federation. So why they keep putting Fed into faction events is beyond me. But I refuse to send any outside of the quickstart shuttles now after having it happen recently.
Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
Anyone of those items would have taken a *tsk tsk* ton of fuel and credits to replicate but it takes 7 of them to make a 3* item? And the sad part is, otherwise they'll never do anything but take space in my inventory since ALL those crew are FE.
You should only have gotten 54k maximum per crew.
I don't know if they accounted for Guinan's star in the achievements. So somewhere from 306-324k for all 6 of them. How much did you get?