DB well done on your second best expedition event (though hybrid)
WaldoMag
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I must complement DB on what I thought was four well designed missions. The problem of the one epic MED node and the same on elite is minor to me.
You thought out well designed missions using the traits and skills of the bonus event crew. Must say it was very smart of you to make the first mission success level on epic lower then, all but the same mission on, elite.
I say second best. The best expedition event you have ever done is still the three phase expedition only event. I hope you bring that one back incorporating the mods that you have done on this one, as well as, the Crit giving the vp reward.
I also believe no extra ticket rewards is a plus. Though giving in mail is a minus. Please do not give us extra tickets period. Extra tickets make this a grind and ruin the event. If one wants to score higher by purchasing an extra ticket for 20 dil. they will. But they do this on their own terms.
Thank you DB.
Edit: Merry men was the first and only 3 phase expedition event. It was nearly the last event of 2016. It did not have some of the new features, tickets lasting as long as you want and if you Crit you get reward. It still had the most positive feedback of all expedition events. The phases brought in more of the missions. You started phase one with just one mission. The next day, phase two, brought in a second. The third day, phase three, I cannot remember how many it was one or two or even three and this phase went on for one more day. The only improvement that it had was the memory from ticket to ticket. If you completed a lower level in previous ticket you could start with the next higher level of mission.
Could you imagine having to do the original format now. That is every ticket you have to complete the lower level before doing the next higher level. This original format of expedition made it the most hated event type.
You thought out well designed missions using the traits and skills of the bonus event crew. Must say it was very smart of you to make the first mission success level on epic lower then, all but the same mission on, elite.
I say second best. The best expedition event you have ever done is still the three phase expedition only event. I hope you bring that one back incorporating the mods that you have done on this one, as well as, the Crit giving the vp reward.
I also believe no extra ticket rewards is a plus. Though giving in mail is a minus. Please do not give us extra tickets period. Extra tickets make this a grind and ruin the event. If one wants to score higher by purchasing an extra ticket for 20 dil. they will. But they do this on their own terms.
Thank you DB.
Edit: Merry men was the first and only 3 phase expedition event. It was nearly the last event of 2016. It did not have some of the new features, tickets lasting as long as you want and if you Crit you get reward. It still had the most positive feedback of all expedition events. The phases brought in more of the missions. You started phase one with just one mission. The next day, phase two, brought in a second. The third day, phase three, I cannot remember how many it was one or two or even three and this phase went on for one more day. The only improvement that it had was the memory from ticket to ticket. If you completed a lower level in previous ticket you could start with the next higher level of mission.
Could you imagine having to do the original format now. That is every ticket you have to complete the lower level before doing the next higher level. This original format of expedition made it the most hated event type.
4
Comments
Regarding event tickets, that didn't bother me. But what did was going thru into Christmas Day. At least it wasn't all through Christmas Day and into Boxing day. For the love of Santa, please do NOT ever run events into major holidays like that again!
It left me wondering if I was doing the 2nd half of the event right or not because the reward from the epic mission was so low after I hit all the nodes already.
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I couldn't agree strongly enough with the above.
I finished the event with a solo rank in the 1700s and quite possibly could have easily finished somewhere below 1500 and claimed another achievement but the sheer boredom of the repetition of expeditions just wore me down.
I for one sincerely hope to never see another expedition either as a full event or as part of an event, anytime in the near future.
Basically grinding tickets to the last character isn't usually worthwhile unless you have no other tickets in the wings. Due to having the 6 sorry tickets this time and 2 sorry tickets from last time, I never did anything other than grabbed the starred nodes on all difficulties and started the ticket over.
In past events when I've run out of tickets I've ground out VPs on Epic.
Frankly, all our events are monotonous, You send out shuttles every 3 hours, or you make the same recipes over and over and over....
What I like about Expeditions is that they are really just non-warpable away missions. You actually (though repeatedly) are actually playing the core game. Due to a deep bench I even did different combinations of crew for the non-crit nodes just to see who fit and who didn't.
For folks who only are here to collect crew, its painful. For folks who can dig the core game for what it is, it at least starts fun before you repeat it too many times.
The extra tickets made this one rough, but it got a lot of folks to the Defiant. I'd rather have just a standard half-expedition next hybrid with no extra tickets/days/etc, so you're only doing 9 tickets max unless you buy more.
I could get 46k with a ticket. I tried grinding out a bunch of epic missions after clearing nodes it just is not worth it unless you do not want to or cannot buy a extra ticket. Even then 100vp at a time just is not going to be of much use. Basically get the most with the crew you have.
There are tricks, such as, keeping extra copies of crew unfused and leveling one a little and possibly more. Once you figure how useful they can be, you may determine to fuse them all or some together. Since first ticket, have to do low success nodes to high success nodes, the extra copies can help to do the low level reserving your main for high level nodes.
For me had a 4FFE Mirror Picard, FFFE Mirror Uhura, and only after the first pass did I decide to fuse all extra copies of Uhura. She was 3F level 60 did not build last two items. I used her to clear elite mission 2 SEC nodes only one node was guaranteed to be crit the other she rarely failed to Crit but did happen. Then the 4th mission DIP node guaranteed Crit if only tired twice. After that she did all the lower DIP and SEC nodes. (1st mission elite and all normal)
One other trick is determining how to use full bonus crew to clear nodes that are not their main skills. Usually this can only be done on the lowest success nodes. For me this got me an extra 1125 per a ticket. Did not require any extra passes. But had to figure out the route for my crew to Crit. For me this was my FFFE Uhura that was why my 60 level Uhura did the above mentioned nodes. By the way all this got me was an extra 15750 VP total. Again not really that much, unlikely to move up a rank reward.
I know people under time constraints in previous expedition events mentioned just doing epic missions or both epic and elite then stopping.
Though I wish that all events were only 3 days instead of 4. (and if hybrid, then should it be 2 days of faction or 2 days of galaxy/expedition?) With adjusted rank rewards to better reflect and reward current participation efforts.
+ more reruns, so players have more opportunity to fuse existing crew, and so that DB has more time in advance to do QA to avoid preventable issues.
~· Fly with the Subspace Eddies! ·~
They gave the extra threshold rewards with 1 day and 3 extra tickets in mind. If it were not for the 6 sorry tickets, I would not have been able to get the schematics. As tests go, if DB ever has to extend an event by 1 day, I think the threshold was great. Get your crew and equipment in normal time. Bonus time gives honor, credits, and the push for limited time schematics.
But, for the love of Khan, make the extra day a shuttle event. I don't want 3 days of mindless clicking while I ignore my family, and REALLY don't want to be wasting chrono building equipment for 3 days.
Grinding every ticket down to the last character is kinda a waste.
I never ran missions for anything other than the crit nodes. Once I was done all of them, I'd cancel the ticket. If it was the last ticket of the day, I'd leave it running if I had the urge to re-run the epic for 100 VP a pass. I never did. I just figured out who was the best to run the paths, recorded the key characters (because my memory **tsk tsk**), and then burned through the tickets as I had time.
Maybe fewer tickets (2 instead of 3) would help these events retain players.
I keep hearing this about duplicate crew, but personally I saw no need for them. Uhura cleared every DIP/SEC star in the event, an extra uhura would have had nothing to do. Picard at 3/5 cleared every CMD and all but 1 epic sci star. At 4/5 I bet he would have cleared that SCI node too. I had to use Phlox and Tuskeegee Mayweather for MED and ENG, but an extra Uhura wouldn't have helped there. As long as you run missions backwards Picard/Uhura fatigued into the lower level missions.
We are three weeks into a mega event. I’m sure there are tens of thousands of casual players that thought nothing of the bugs and timer issues (if they even noticed them) or the extra tickets. For those of us choosing to invest additional time (and money) into the game, though, that have gone the extra mile in the preceeding weeks to buy, level and build crew, studied faction transmissions, made spreadsheets and optimised our efforts inside and outside of the game, it’s a kick in the teeth. It unbalances the game and puts all that effort to waste. And then DB further unbalance the event by electing to add hours of additional effort the day before the one time of the year a huge number of the players will be unable to rearrange their plans.
I agree with OP, the missions themselves were indeed well balanced and aligned with event and bonus crew. But the issues described above put all of that to waste.
. Wife and I enjoyed it very much..
Stayed completive but things didn't look so great waking up Christmas morning.
I was down 600 spots to where I needed to be, wife was down 400.. but we managed to blast through on the last 3 hours and finished eating in 40 places of each either in the 550/600 range.
Was a lot of fun.
So long as time is a friend, the grind is what makes it exciting. My actual actions are what in large part decides my fate. Not RnG.. or at least significantly reduced RNG.
I built my crew up the way I did for doing these events so when they were slowed.. it's really stung.
Hope to see more of them.
The adrenaline rush at the end, fighting to the last second is great.
Agreed with thought about 2x 3 tickets instead of 1x6 .. That would have made the opps, sorry a lot better to deal with instead of having to blast through 9 tickets in a day.
Agreed. I had to coach up the newbies in my fleet how the tickets worked. How many players are there that just ground the crew down from 1 ticket all weekend because the button is labeled "cancel ticket" and not "refresh crew and nodes". The end of the 1-hour ticket time limit was a plus, but we've had the new format long enough that these graphical holdovers should have been addressed.
Despite the issues it was still a fun event.
You are right on. DB Does nothing to explain the rules of how tickets are given out and lost. There are more people who are not on forum playing the game. How many of them just learned they lost any tickets below 3 tickets at the end of each day. How many learned that each day three more tickets were given out. How many learned that they did not get three more tickets at the end of the day if they had three or more.
Example, what if on day one I collected the six extra tickets from in game message. Now, I go through out all event days with three or more tickets. I never learn the end of each day three more were given out.
Each ticket earned me 1125 VP more because of second Uhura.
Why because I used the second Uhura to clear all Elite and Normal DIP and SEC except for missin 3 SEC node which Picard did.
That allowed my FFFE Uhura to do all ENG and MED nodes with success below 100. Was it worth it I would say this is really where you come in and say no. You need crew spots. My total gain, for 14 tickets was 15750 probably gained 1250 on first ticket. So total of 17000 extra. Not going to move any one up a spot in rewards unless very close to the level to start with. It was just due to the half off crew slots and the dil offers, I had the crew slots. So I did it. Normally those extra would have been visiting space as soon as they were received.
I have trouble congratulating a game people pay to play, for ending an Event 24 hours EARLY
Scott
can we PLEASE get some sort of way to list bonus crew FIRST in the crew roster??
Example: say i want to use Mirror Uhura to clear as many DIP and SEC nodes as possible, and i use her on the very top value mission once...so i scroll down past my top 5 or 10 DIP to find her.
then she fatigues, and i have to scroll past my top 15 or 20 to find her...
...and after more fatigue, she is EVEN HARDER to find...but still more valuable than using any of the other mirror crew on the lower-skill nodes that she can still hit!
It's great that we finally did get another expedition, and i hope we keep getting more of them in the future - but please DB let there be some way to flag or like or heart the bonus crew so we don't have to go digging for them every time!
By the end of my tickets I was skipping or leaving normal half unfinished, often including the borked Gone to Ground med node. I still pulled a 649 rank and Christmas didn't even let me open my last ticket or finish the one before it. I seriously don't understand anybody grinding for 100vp per mission.
I would like to see more expedition events, wanted to make a topic on it, but maybe we can put some ideas together here. We really need a way to smooth expeditions up so they're less tedious for the players and easier for DB to make similar amounts of money as other events.
The first clear fix is crew sorting. The constantly changing position of crew took extra time and made the crew selection irritating.
Second is animation speedups. We really need at least a toggle to send the animations to plaid speed.
What other things can we do to make it better?
(there were issue's, but plenty of topics for those)
I agree with the crew sorting, it was really a pain to have to keep searching thru to find the bonus crew.
If speeding up the game is idea, instead of changing the animations, maybe a new interface. A screen similar to an away team mission. Select you three crew. Drag them to the nodes you want them to run. Have an option to run individually or run all. Run all completes all the nodes and lowering the stamina as it goes. If you fail a node a long the way it pauses and prompts you to continue, change crew or cancel the mission at that point.
I think the imbalance between faction and expedition needs to be addressed. For me, 175K faction and 748K expedition is way out of balance. Now getting three tickets more than we would have gotten during a normal THU noon thru MON noon faction / expedition event was part of the problem, but it would have still been way out of balance. Another way of looking at it is 86 shuttles vs. 15 tickets for that imbalance. They need to lower the value crits across the board to adjust it.
The main problem I have with expedition at this point is the monotony. After the first two or three tickets to unlock the nodes and figure what crew to use where its just repeat the same the same steps over and over on every ticket. It's still far better than the old system where you could crush the total needed to clear a node but not crit so you had to run the whole mission multiple times, that was frustrating and boring. Now its down to only being boring. Unfortunately, outside of some type of randomization determining what missions you get each time thru (plus a lot more missions to choose from), it would be difficult to avoid hitting a pattern of what crew to use.
Thanks, that explains it. It's not that Uhura could clear more SEC/DIP nodes, it's that saving her let you use her to clear ENG/MED nodes too. I was able to juggle and use Picard on the first mission for ENG/MED, but you're right, if you got through the rest of normal with Uhura for ENG/MED that would have provided a little boost.
Yes, thank you DB for making an expedition event! After playing for 3 months it was my first time playing this event type and it is by far my favorite!
I am sorry that some other user said he/she would never want to see an expedition event anytime soon again...but I much preferred this format to Galaxy and even Faction. It was much more fun and strategic.
Granted, it did not go off without a hitch, and a time-consuming event like Expedition maybe should have been the first half of the hybrid (with the less time consuming Faction half being the half that overlapped with Christmas)... or just run on a non-holiday week. So it could be better..but still it was great. Thank you!
The first 2 runs on the first day take the longest.
1. First Run: Do every mission once at 3 stars (if possible) to unlock them all. This is the longest run
2. Second Run: Start with the hardest mission that you unlocked (hopefully the last mission (4th in this case) of the 3rd level of the event. Select your crew carefully. Use event crew only on the nodes that need a critical. Use non-event crew for all other nodes. This means you might have to run through a mission 3-4 times (but most likely 2-3) to not waste event crew on non-critical nodes. Write down exactly which crew you used for each run. This will be the second longest run but could take longer than the first run because you are taking time to write them all down.
3. Move on to the next hardest node and repeat.
4. Once you have worked backwards you should finish on the easiest (first) mission on the easiest level of missions. Now you have a complete list to follow for all rest of your tickets for all the days of the event. You can quickly get though your tickets that way.
To give an example of what to write down, this was my list for level 3 missions
3-4-1: Kotar, Mirror Crusher, Mirror Picard (3 indicates 3rd level of missions, 4 indicates 4th mission on the level and the 1 indicates the first run)
3-4-2: Zhian Odo, Torchbearer, Mirror Uhura
It only took 2 runs to clear all the nodes. Kotar, Odo and Torchbearer were used on all non-crit nodes (and crit nodes after cleared). The first run Mirror Picard and Crusher were able to clear all but one crit. The second run just needed Uhura to clear the final crit.
3-3-1: Borg Queen, Mirror Mayweather, Mirror Picard
3-3-2: T'Kuvma, 1701 Sisko, Mirror Phlox
Again, the second run only needed a single crit node. I used Phlox for the 375 points instead of Beverly for 500 because I didn't want to waste the main event crew for 125 points. Had the node correctly paid out 2000 instead of 500 for main event crew I would have used Mirror Beverly.
3-2-1: Mirror PIcard, Cadet Tilly, Mirror Crusher
This was a great one because it could be cleared in a single run
3-1-1: Zek, Mirror Uhura, Mirror Mayweather
3-1-2: Zek, Tilly, Mirror Crusher
That was my list for the all 4 missions on the 3rd level. So for all remaining tickets and all remaining days, I just looked at the list so didn't have to think about who to select at all.