Change Cadet Challenges
deathpunch
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in Make It So!
How about being able to warp through them, and change up the gear. It’s time consuming and the same thing over and over and over and...
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Cadet Challenges are the only times I actually play Away Missions, nowadays, unless I finally have a crew for the last nodes I'm missing, or there's an Expedition. Both happen very rarely.
I'm quite happy to do the Cadet Challenges to do my four or five Away Missions of the day... but the repetitivity is a bit staggering. If DB was to give us more Cadet Challenges (which doesn't seem likely) I'd be happier.
Changing the gear... it depends? There's loads of items that I can't personally get enough of, I have no desire for DB to change those.
So here are my suggestions.
Regarding Ex Astris Scientia:
Increase he chroniton reward for each difficulty so it better matches the game’s current state. When I started out, in April 2016, this challenge was in essence the best way to get enough chronitons to actually play the game without paying lots of €/$. Now, I understand that DB needs people who buy ingame currency to sustain the game, but it wouldn’t hurt much if they gave the challenge a gentle lift. Currently you get 15/20/25 chronitons for each success, but with voyages and more and more super rare crew appearing weekly, the value of chronitons has diminished.
Therefore I suggest to change the chroniton amounts to at least 20/30/40 for the various difficulty settings.
Regarding United Federation:
This one is actually fine, training programs have not been an issue for me, but there should always be a way to obtain them, so no problems here.
Regarding A Certain Formality:
This one really bugs me. It’s the only challenge I regularly complete on Elite rather than Epic simply because the payoff is much bigger. For the Elite reward I get a 10x Standard boost, so 10 items with 3* or above. With the Epic reward I get 3x Premium boost, so only 3 items with 3* or above. Why should I play the Epic challenge if the reward is smaller?
The solution is simple: change the Epic reward to a 10x Premium Boost, at least for the fifth, most difficult mission. It’d be the same like the Sunday challenge, where the final mission on Epic grants a 4* replicator Ration while the other epic missions Grant only 3* rations.
Regarding Adv. United Federation:
Oh my. The most pointless of all the challenges, this one gives (drumroll please) credits. Wonderful, stupid, useless Federation credits. See, I get that there has to be a non-premium (i.e. bought for real money) currency, i totally get that. The thing is though, obtaining credits is absolutely no problem at all if you simply do your daily missions. Depending on your investment in events you don’t even need them to buy boosters for the daily challenge. The only thing that really requires credits is the construction of items, and since I am currently sitting on 33 Million credits, I’d say I’ve taken care of the money issues.
Since there is no point in acquiring more credits, I suggest DB change the reward from credits to honour. Honour (or honor, depending on your continent) is admittedly a very powerful and valuable currency, surpassing credits and merits by far, and in my opinion it even beats dilithium in terms of usefulness. Since it’s difficult to acquire, and rightly so, I would suggest the following rewards for each difficulty:
- 100 Honour on Normal, that’d give you an Uncommon Honorable Citation (2*) once a week, if you complete at least 5 challenges.
- 250 Honour on Elite. That’d be 1.750 for all six tickets (if you don’t buy additional), so either one 5* replicator ration or training program.
- 750 Honour for Epic (at least for the final and thus most difficult mission), that’d be one Rare Honorable Citation (3*) per week. Maybe 500 for the other missions then.
Theze changes would make the cadet challenges way more useful and keep them up to date with the way the game now is, instead of being relics of a time long gone.
And as far as warping goes, I'm pretty sure cadet challenges were added in the first place so that people actually kept green and blue crew in their rosters. I didn't play at the time, but the chat from when they were added pointed to that.
-Monty Python, The Meaning of Life
I like the Saturday challenges but the Sunday ones are also rather pointless as I don't need Rep rations since voyages.
Maybe change Sundays to Honour (like 15,20,25 per mission on EPIC) and Tuesdays to Credits (Since I am usually out by Wednesday) then that would be perfect.
Give Thursdays EPIC missions a boost to have more pulls than the Elite difficulty and your onto a winner.
Jim
2) I'm getting a lot of mileage out of the credits, so please no.
3) If you meant Replicator Rations on United Federation then cool beans.
As for the credits: they are only worth anything to advanced players who replicate a ton. I am advanced enough that I'm not new anymore, but I've never had a credit issue. Unless a brand new player is way over-pulling the 90K pulls, they would never lack money.
Rations are nice for very new players, but even with the lessening of drops in voyages, the voyages drop enough that rations from cadet missions are unneeded.
Honor, even in small amounts, would be nice.
My purpose for the cadet missions is not the extra rewards, but the hard-to-get items.
The thing with Rep Rations is, voyages included, only people of VIP status get to use it more than once a day, so the fact that it costs credits is negligible because that is basically covered with the used-to-build-items purpose. In essence replicating is a way of fast building a needed item.
Sure, new players need the credits more than seasoned veterans or the whales who keep the game alive through dilithium purchases, but after a while you simply get to a point where you won’t need the standard boosts at all, or for the odd green character you haven’t upgraded to 2* yet. Plus green boosts are constantly awarded in events and monthly rewards, at one point I had 60 or so lying around which I only opened once a day for the daily, and I so regularly received new one so that that ~60 were constantly available (until one day I had every green and grey character immortalised and thought, alright, let’s get this over with).
@DavideBooks yes, the harder to acquire items are an important part of the challenges. I just would like to see their intended purpose (i.e. the challenge rewards) be returned to a point where you say “Yes, it’s X-Day, so today’s challenge reward is (insert coveted reward here)!”
Giving a little amount of honour for one of the weekend challenges somewhere in the triple digits seems fair to me, given that you can only get it once per week. And since the Honour Hall is actually one of the best ideas the game came up with in a while (I still would like to see ship battle based events!), coupled with the Merits-to-Honour conversion that is the merit triple booster, it makes for a good goal to obtain honour, especially for those of us who’ve been playing a long time.
I'm down with not having Rep rations on the Adv cadet challenge, is what I meant to say....
I'm not a whale (though I've heard some F2Ps call anyone who ever gets anything other than a monthly card a whale) and I'm not new, but I'm also someone who ad warps a lot and who is constantly leveling crew, and replicating sometimes large equip now and again is a thing. I'm at 500k creds right now and that's high for me this late in the week. I've gone down to zero 2 weeks out of the last 5. (And in all 5 weeks I replicated 2 4* and 1 5* item, the rest that were replicated were primarily 2 or 0)
You also need creds to build not just replicate.. .and if you get lucky on ad-warps plus some component replications it can get expensive to level up a significant number of characters a month.
Regarding the rep rations through voyages, I wanted to add, voyages drop credits as well, so obtaining more money really is a non-issue for me. I always have enough of it to do what I want to do.
I use Merits very often in the faction shops, I'm always in danger of running out of them. And I use them also to buy faction transmissions of course.
I'm at 235 Immortals. I have over 200 Slots with a lot of unleveled crew.
I have all 2* Cept Burnham and all but 9 3* Immortalized and if I can stop getting distracted leveling event bonus crew I will probably spearhead leveling them off in a month or so.
Currently I have 50 non FE 4* crew that are FF.
Before we went into GalaxyAPalooza (3 in a row.. really? even if 2 were hybrids...), I was immortalizing ~20-25 a month. Course that was pre voyage nerf so may not be at that level once we're back to having a few full faction events, or a galaxy that I only threshold and out. (Was spending monthly card dil for a one extention run when I got favorable skills for the Voyage) (My peak was September when I immortalized 30 crew in one month, mostly 4s but a mix of a couple 3s the new 2s and managed to get last stars on 2 5s)
Anyway, the thing with the challenges I think most would agree on is that they would have to be rebalanced in some way to fit the current state of the game.
@ErisTheVorta I have ~23k Merits lying around and don’t really need them other than buying an item here and there and of course faction missions. But then again I don’t buy those in bulk, mostly until I have around 50 or so of the faction I currently need an item from (yes I’m looking at you, Holoprogram).
Before the introduction of the merit boosters I had around 80k merits and nothing to spend them on.
Its off topic if you want to disregard the implications of some of your suggestions, and the potential that some statements of fact are actually just what your gameplay experience is but is not universal.
That's the thing some bumping up of things may very well be a good thing, however what can be gleaned from most of this is that we're all playing things a lil differently and are at different places with different resources. (and I know I'm not alone in using credits, look around there's several threads of folks talking about credit crunches)
That should lead down the path of thinking that maybe subbing things in for a 'rebalance' for ones gameplay may just have a negative effect on someone elses. That should lead to caution even in suggestions and further analysis would be a good thing.
Seeing that mine and my girlfriend‘s gameplay experience differs so greatly from yours, I‘d like to know more about your approach to Timelines. My girlfriend and I have been playing from April ‘15 almost every single day and both bought the odd monthly card, bringing us to VIP 3/5 respectively, and we regularly participate in the events, usually ranking somewhere between the 1000-5000 (pre-starbases) range, depending on real life stuff like work and such, and how invested we are in a particular event and its featured characters.
Mostly what we did since the introduction of the Cryo Vault was gather every grey, green and blue character and immortalise them, which we basically finished both a couple of months back, except for new characters of that rarity like Tales IV Spock and the like, which get immortalised asap.
We also both think that the introduction of Star bases greatly shifted the balance in events, since we both struggle to even achieve a top 10k spot since their introduction, and we believe it’s down to the big active fleets being greatly favoured with fully developed bases, compared to small fleets or singleplayers.
How do you play when you have such a big need for Merits and credits, two resources we both think are basically throwaway currencies?
I did have another idea though that might help satisfy multiple types of players at once: since, aside from shuttles and/or events, purple and gold crew are just sitting there occupying crew space, why not introduce, like, Superduper Advanced Cadet Challenges (although maybe a different name would be a good idea 😅)? Those could run alongside the once every already have and award either more of the same rewards we already get or different stuff altogether. Plus it would make the super-rares a lot less an end in themselves.
I started later than you (October '16).
It seems you started in the early open beta, as the production start of Timelines was January '16.
I rank usually top 1000 in most events, though I rank a bit lower form time to time. Due to my deep crew I do better in faction and expedition than galaxy. (If I'm gonna fail to succeed its going to be that I've either not stocked enough chrons or don't have the right event/bonus crew on a galaxy -- chrons being used to level crew as well make that a hard value judgement)
I'm double digit VIP, I started as F2P for the first several months, then went monthly card. The remaining VIP was gained via specific special offers like the 10x10. I believe I've bought the 25$ event character deal 2 times (may have been 3) in the past 15 months. I've done a few double ups over the years for 5s that I really liked/wanted to use, like Klingon Bride Jadzia. (who thanks to citations was one of my first Immortal 5s.) I always add a star to a mega event character (BQ/Kortar/etc) so that my squad can benefit. (What can I say, I really like my squad mates.)
When leveling characters I'm usually chasing events which is how I do so well in factions. If its a Dax event for instance, I'm filling several shuttles with just her. This leads to more 5's in the inventory.
As I stated before, I have around 50 4* FF characters that aren't FE. I've also got ~30 or so 5* that aren't FE and aren't FF. The event crew pile up after the event, but then I end up targeting them for leveling when they are bonus for another event if applicable. So there's LOTS to level.
I think if you search the forums, you'll see I'm not alone and there have been several threads on the discussion of credits being a crunch for folks. I know in my fleet, there are more than a few folks who are spending DIL for another run of credits on Sat.
Merits go to the Faction store, though I usually play gauntlet enough to not take them down to zero...but I know others have not had that same experience. Biggest dips are when its a faction event where the bonus crew needs items from another faction. (Klingon Mega was the largest instance of this)
I'm in a fleet that, well it normally is relatively full (there's I think 2 open slots right now but that's a recent development). Starbase isn't fully maxed but we're getting the 20/30/50 chrons a day so steady progression. We did hit the holowall several times. It is a necessity these days to consolidate fleets especially for faction events.
The thing with fleets is, it was a real impact on how the game and events play out, despite DB’s claims that they want to keep both single and coop players entertained. Problem is though that if your fleet is small or composed of people who are more offline than on, it causes more damage than the othe way around. We have currently 22 people in our fleet, but only maybe 6 or 7 are active daily. We never ever hit even the 20 chronitons bonus, and usually only nearly make the first tier of space battles and away missions. Shuttle missions also regularly hit 44 or 48, 50 usually only comes up on the first day of faction events.
I see that with a higher VIP level there seems to be a different weight assigned to the currencies, which honestly amazes me. I was sincerely certain that people with higher VIP levels would surely have close to, if not above, billions of credits just gathering dust since they’re, to me that is, so, soooo useless.
My question is, what exactly are you doing that you have such a massive need for credits? Sure, items construction is a thing, but hardly so expensive as to warrant spending real cash for extra runs on the superfluous challenge on Saturday?
Item crafting for 5* items even without replicating is expensive... and when you have 5* characters that in many cases have multiple 5* items it gets pricey. When you hit top 1000 you start collecting these 5s.....
Check out the crew cost site:
http://ssr.izausomecreations.com/crewcost.html
As I stated earlier, I immortalize 20-30 crew a month, or did pre-voyage nerf.. we're gonna see how much less chrons will impact this. And that number does not count the backlog of 5*'s from other events I try to get FE. And considering when we have events like this and next week with all 3 new crew, I've got to keep up at least 12-15 per month just to not lose ground on slots. (Not counting the new 2x and 3x that were released this week.) That also does not take into consideration galaxy community reward pulls, or occasional 10x10 offers.
I replicate occasionally 0-2* items (in the mega I splurged and replicated 2 4x and 1 5x item).
Maybe the greatest thing I'm doing 'wrong' is doing well in events.
I like the idea of honor-based challanges though. Just don't replace my Saturday credit challanges unless you introduce a way to buy credits with honor. I'm down with replacing the Wednesday challenge...chronos are still valuable, but with voyages they are much more abundant...but I know not everyone will like that.
Perhaps if honor was a resource that was part of a varied and balanced two-week cadet challange schedule?
Instead of wednesday (don't you go take my chronitons, they're my most valuable resource!) I'd rather do away with the training programs on tuesday. I know they're valuable to new players, but even on short voyages it should be possible to obtain enough of those.
Plus I'm more interested in the players who've been there months on end and might be going into their second year soon.
I'm getting back to my idea with the challenge for super rares. Since the challenges for rare characters I'm waiting for them to give us something for super rares and/or legendaries. So far no luck. But that'd be a way, especially if it's a challenge for legendaries, to gain honour without everyone farming it, which'd make buying special booster packs or offers obsolete — which obviously is what keeps the game alive.