Would this be asking too much??
Castell-Neath
✭✭✭
in The Bridge
Following another sub par premium portal pull I was thinking that with over 700 crew now i the game, is it time to revamp the portals slightly??
A vast majority of new crew are all 4 star or above, meaning the 3 card and below pool grows ever more shallow while the 4 star crew and above contiunes to get deeper and deeper...causing a real disconnect when it comes to what i would dub a "premium pull".
My thought / suggestion, is that premium pulls should now be 4 star and above crew only, in order to refelct this problem. I dont know how much of a headache this would be for the devs to do, and with the sheer volume of 4 star plus cards its not actually taking anything away from the game either in terms of gameplay.
My buggest bug bear at the moment is earning a premium pull / paying for one for a majority of useless / ff and frozen 3 star cards to appear. If i know i was getting at least 3 or 4 premium crew, as well as schems and beholds i would be far more likely to buy more, as the 4 star card "jam" of 2/3 stars out of 4 star crew, along with the 1 and 2 star out of 5 star crew is whats really causing me frustration at the moments.
I suppose its a case if making "premium" premium again
Just wondered what people thought on this??
A vast majority of new crew are all 4 star or above, meaning the 3 card and below pool grows ever more shallow while the 4 star crew and above contiunes to get deeper and deeper...causing a real disconnect when it comes to what i would dub a "premium pull".
My thought / suggestion, is that premium pulls should now be 4 star and above crew only, in order to refelct this problem. I dont know how much of a headache this would be for the devs to do, and with the sheer volume of 4 star plus cards its not actually taking anything away from the game either in terms of gameplay.
My buggest bug bear at the moment is earning a premium pull / paying for one for a majority of useless / ff and frozen 3 star cards to appear. If i know i was getting at least 3 or 4 premium crew, as well as schems and beholds i would be far more likely to buy more, as the 4 star card "jam" of 2/3 stars out of 4 star crew, along with the 1 and 2 star out of 5 star crew is whats really causing me frustration at the moments.
I suppose its a case if making "premium" premium again
Just wondered what people thought on this??
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Comments
I see 2 options: revise the single premium pull, or create a second premium-er pull
If the premium pulls were to become 2 different types of pulls:
#1 Mid-tier pull - same as current premium pack --> at least 1 x 4*/5* crew (straight drop or behold), rest a mix of 3* crew and ship schematics
#2 Upper-tier pull --> at least 1 x 5* crew (straight drop or behold), rest a mix of 4* crew and 5* ship schematics (or at least 1 additional guaranteed 4* crew, then a mix of 3* crew and schematics)
I personally think #2 should become the new standard premium pack (addresses the honor debt and glut of 1/5 crew crisis), while #1 could either become a more expensive credit pack than the current 90k pack or replace the current 725 merit pack.
Really, really not looking for an argument on this, and im not being confrontational...so please dont take my question on this the wrong way. I know yoyr a level headed, informed poster on here, so could you explain:
How would it break the economy of the game??
650 dilithium...3 crew all 4 or above???
A relatively minor change could be to revise the premium packs to include 1 guaranteed 5* crew & 1 guaranteed 4* crew (straight drops or beholds), then continue on as is for the other 8 drops.
That would only add a second guaranteed drop, which I think would just be a rebalancing of the value proposition of the in-game economy, in response to 3 years of constant crew additions.
That's MINOR ?!?
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In response to 3 years of crew additions, in a way that is equal for all players? Yes, I do think it would be a relatively minor change, compared to other options that have been discussed in different threads, like introducing various tiered packs, year packs, etc...
Since the game first started and the premium packs were introduced, the value of 4* crew, the rare-ness of 5* crew, and the sheer volume of crew (when targeting a particular 4*/5* crew), have all drastically changed. The overall value of premium packs to anybody who has been playing for a period of time (regardless of $ spent), is far less today than it was several years ago. This point is emphasized by the addition of 10x premium packs to event reward structures and campaigns.
Adding a 2nd guaranteed drop to these packs, while guaranteeing at least 1 x 5* crew, would seem to be a fair way to rebalance the premium value in these premium packs.
It would double the amount of honor from a 10x pull at a minimum. It would exacerbate the chasm between spenders and f2p every time there's a 10 for $10 deal. Which would also help spenders fill in collections with SR's faster. I think others have started you down this line of thought now too.
Your heart is in the right place, but smaller steps and consideration of the spender vs f2p balance is essential, imo.
Maybe a second SR in a 10x pull, or a guaranteed "decrepit legendary" from the first year of the game, or combining single pulls into a 10x pull would be a smaller step in the direction that you want to go.
and you think this only alters the economy of the game in a minor fashion?
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Proud Former Officer of The Gluten Empire
Retired 12-14-20. So long, and thanks for all the cat pics!
I tend to agree with @Prime LorQa [10F] that the OP's idea could break the existing game economy. It could devalue previous purchases to the point that some who have spent a lot of $/honor/time would feel their earlier efforts were wasted. I would probably be among those who would be significantly outraged to have my previous efforts so strongly undermined/devalued. The OP's proposal is, in my opinion, an overcorrection.
However, there are some smaller ways, that would be in the spirit of the original post, to modify premium portal pulls to make them feel roughly as "premium" as they did during the first year of the game. Here are a few suggestions (some of which could be implemented together, some of which might better remain separate from others):
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VIP Level: 12
Unique Crew Immortalized: 525
Collections Completed: Vulcan, Ferengi, Borg, Romulan, Cardassian, Uncommon, Rare, Veteran, Common, Engineered, Physician, Innovator, Inspiring, Diplomat, Jury Rigger, Gauntlet Legends
That's a fair perspective. Maybe they could start by at least significantly increasing the % drop rate of 5* crew. There's definitely a big gray area between the current 1.27% 5* drop-rate and guaranteeing a 5* crew in every pack. The point is that once you've been playing for awhile, even the premium packs aren't all that valuable, given how diluted the pool is (gets even worse once you have most/all 4* crew immortalized, which was made easier by the addition of voyage rewards).
Increasing the 5* drop rate to 10% would better align the value of packs with the special $10 offer for a 5* crew (like First Officer Riker this week), based on the probability of getting 1 x 5* crew in every 10 packs. I'd push for an even higher drop rate, but going from 1.27% to 10% would be a good start (and would give DB an opportunity to evaluate the impact on their income).
I would find this as a more reasonable starting off point
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If all of these suggestions were implemented, that would be the perfect solution in my opinion.
Thanks for the explaination. You raise a goid few points there i had not considered with the honour influx and the spending issue.
Hm...i am thinking platinum pull now, even if its 650 for 2 crew......x1 5 and 4 star crew each
It is 1.27% per card not per pack already. That equals a 12% chance per 10-pack.
Anyway I support most ideas here but SRs in the place of rares is too much to ask for, yes. If at all then only as reward packs but not as purchases.
What you're asking for exists. It's the 6500 Dil portal offered for every special pack. Except you're now asking for that to be the 650 standard.
As others have suggested, you can tweak the drop rate slightly or spilt the crew into packs based on years. That addresses most of your issues without drastically changing the pack value.
Agree this is over all a pretty good solution set. Primarily, I would think minor changes to begold/behold drop rate could be made incrementally over time to arrive at a more desirable end result without messing up the game dynamics all at once.
I don't think you want to deal with a swarm of random 5s.
The fairest way to increase gold crew acquisition rates is stretching extra stars on event rewards all the way down to 1000 maybe or a double digit increase of the average honour income. I don't know if something should be done about premium packs, by design they're here for early game progression. For a narrower selection, you have the eerily expensive event and Tuesday packs, that's DB's solution to the ever increasing pool of gold crew and I see no reason they stop doing that until people stop buying them.
I like the idea of a a 2 card platinum pull instead i think which just drops 1 4 star and 1 5 star card
You kicked the hornet's nest much harder than I thought with that initial post, lol. What are you thinking for cost of these platinum pulls? I'm on the fence, but I'm leaning toward more than 650 dilithium.
A nice round number....850??
Seems reasonable. Maybe with the occasional 5 for $10 deal? Hmm... Maybe... DB has been relatively stingy with handing out legendaries. As mentioned above, the going rate seems to be 6,500 for one guaranteed plus some honor. With that in mind, maybe 5k dilithium isn't out of line. Hmm... It's a touchy thing, game economy. Gave me a lot of respect for devs when I started seeing these things for the first time.
Technically it's 6500*n on average, n being the number of gold crew in the pack. That being said, I don't think the devs would be strictly opposed to a less expensive fully random 5*, but with a 1.27% chance to get a legendary behold out of a x10 pack, we're already in that ballpark so that's kind of redundant and I'm really not comfortable with requests of added confusion and complexity. This is something we should be really wary of as I see people lauding Tuesday packs and calling the dabo a bad deal with the latter being typically much cheaper and more reliable. In practice, confusion is already in full effect. Do we need more?
However, building upon existing systems is fine and there could be a weekend offer with the honour hall legendary beholds. In practice, they're more or less what most of you are looking for. That's probably something DB would do if enough people asked for it.
I was referring to deals like the current Badda Bang pack for 6,500 which guarantees a legendary. That legendary comes from a pool of three and (effectively) comes with some honor from SR's that get airlocked.
But you make a good point... It's basically a layer that's similar to an existing pack, though from a significantly larger pool.
I mean in other games common characters are, well, common, there’s a bunch of them, while epic/legendary characters are much less numerous (in one game I played there were only 6 epic heroes while 40+ common). But what we have in STT is exactly the opposite, and a lot of issues and dissatisfaction are rooted in this “reverse” kind of logic.
It surely is harder to get certain crews now than it was two or three years ago simply because there are many more 4* and 5* crew available now than there were back then. Yet the price is the same. And we still get many of the same 3* crews that were there two and three years ago because they have not added many since then. So I do agree with you that they need to revamp the packs or something.
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So long and thanks for all the fish.