Skirmish Events - Post Mortem
Althea Biermont
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I had posted a thread with my first impressions of Skirmish events, along with what I saw as the pros and cons.
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/5685/skirmish-events-first-impression-pros-and-cons#latest
That was only a few hours into the event. Now that we've gone through a full Skirmish event, I wanted to give a post mortem to give my final impression.
Overall, Skirmish events are a very welcome change. They give us a whole new event type. They provide some relief to some pain points in the game but introduce new pain points.
Drops: This was a win. We got to play they event and keep all of our drops. This is the complete opposite of the dreaded (for me) galaxy event. Better still, those drops include Holo-Emitters! It has definitely helped our alliance in Starbase advancement since people have been able to donate a full 700 Holo-Emmitters each day of the event without handicapping advancement of our crew. This is one of the best things about Skirmishes.
Battle Rewards: The rewards for each skirmish battle were nice. They weren't generous but they weren't lacking. It was a nice balance. This is an area where I would like to see some tweaks.
- With Voyages, credits are not really a road block for most players and the amount of credits received was so minimal (even at the highest amounts) as to make them an extreme disappointment when they popped up (which was most of the time).
- Chroniton and VP drops were at a good level. Pretty rare that you got them but useful for advancing in the event.
- The Intel drops were a disappointment. They were only slightly better than receiving credits. In theory, Intel is a good reward, but the amounts were so minimal that it wasn't useful except in the highest (240) quantity. Most of the time the Intel drop was 30. Once you get to the 1,200 cost runs, you would need to have Intel drop 40 times (at the 30 rate) to even run 1 more skirmish. I got Intel about once every other skirmish so it would take 80ish Skirmishes just to get one extra Skirmish run. I would continue to include Intel drop but would significantly increase the quantities. I would set the lowest to 100 instead of 30.
- Merits were not rewards but I would like to see credits removed from the next Skirmish event and replaced with Merits. With Gauntlet refreshes and the high costs in the faction stores merits are in short supply. I know some players have a lot of merits and that always amazes me because it means they aren't buying in the faction stores and aren't refreshing gauntlets.
Crew Usage - This was a mixed bag. Crew selection could be difficult. The interface for selecting crew could be tweaked and improved. Maybe add a keyword search for crew name or ship ability so you could search for "hull" and see all crew where their ship ability involves hull repair. Clunky UI aside, crew usage was a bright spot in this event. You could use any of your crew, regardless of what they were doing elsewhere (voyages, shuttles, etc.). This is a huge, huge improvement in the game mechanics and hope this follows through into other areas of the game. After all, this is Timelines where your crew really can be in 2 places at the same time!
Overall, with all of the above, Skirmishes have been a big win and a silver lining in the game. But with every silver lining comes a big dark cloud.
With Skirmishes, that big dark cloud was time. More so than any other mechanic in the game, Skirmishes has been a huge time sink. I can't even count the number of hours I put into this event. For all of the great things about Skirmishes, this one bad point almost over-shadows the good. To improve this, I give the option to remove the before/after cut scenes in the battles. Once you started a Skirmish it took way too long waiting for the ships to maneuver by each other before the actual battle began. Then after you defeated your enemy it took way too long for the animations to stop. It was almost maddening. What I would like to see change is allow us to click the screen during either of those opening/closing animations to immediately bypass the animation and continue. Then if someone wanted to watch the before/after animations they could. You could do that when you are doing away missions, tap the screen to bypass the excess animations, so please add that feature to ship battles/pvp/skirmishes.
Thanks for trying something different
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/5685/skirmish-events-first-impression-pros-and-cons#latest
That was only a few hours into the event. Now that we've gone through a full Skirmish event, I wanted to give a post mortem to give my final impression.
Overall, Skirmish events are a very welcome change. They give us a whole new event type. They provide some relief to some pain points in the game but introduce new pain points.
Drops: This was a win. We got to play they event and keep all of our drops. This is the complete opposite of the dreaded (for me) galaxy event. Better still, those drops include Holo-Emitters! It has definitely helped our alliance in Starbase advancement since people have been able to donate a full 700 Holo-Emmitters each day of the event without handicapping advancement of our crew. This is one of the best things about Skirmishes.
Battle Rewards: The rewards for each skirmish battle were nice. They weren't generous but they weren't lacking. It was a nice balance. This is an area where I would like to see some tweaks.
- With Voyages, credits are not really a road block for most players and the amount of credits received was so minimal (even at the highest amounts) as to make them an extreme disappointment when they popped up (which was most of the time).
- Chroniton and VP drops were at a good level. Pretty rare that you got them but useful for advancing in the event.
- The Intel drops were a disappointment. They were only slightly better than receiving credits. In theory, Intel is a good reward, but the amounts were so minimal that it wasn't useful except in the highest (240) quantity. Most of the time the Intel drop was 30. Once you get to the 1,200 cost runs, you would need to have Intel drop 40 times (at the 30 rate) to even run 1 more skirmish. I got Intel about once every other skirmish so it would take 80ish Skirmishes just to get one extra Skirmish run. I would continue to include Intel drop but would significantly increase the quantities. I would set the lowest to 100 instead of 30.
- Merits were not rewards but I would like to see credits removed from the next Skirmish event and replaced with Merits. With Gauntlet refreshes and the high costs in the faction stores merits are in short supply. I know some players have a lot of merits and that always amazes me because it means they aren't buying in the faction stores and aren't refreshing gauntlets.
Crew Usage - This was a mixed bag. Crew selection could be difficult. The interface for selecting crew could be tweaked and improved. Maybe add a keyword search for crew name or ship ability so you could search for "hull" and see all crew where their ship ability involves hull repair. Clunky UI aside, crew usage was a bright spot in this event. You could use any of your crew, regardless of what they were doing elsewhere (voyages, shuttles, etc.). This is a huge, huge improvement in the game mechanics and hope this follows through into other areas of the game. After all, this is Timelines where your crew really can be in 2 places at the same time!
Overall, with all of the above, Skirmishes have been a big win and a silver lining in the game. But with every silver lining comes a big dark cloud.
With Skirmishes, that big dark cloud was time. More so than any other mechanic in the game, Skirmishes has been a huge time sink. I can't even count the number of hours I put into this event. For all of the great things about Skirmishes, this one bad point almost over-shadows the good. To improve this, I give the option to remove the before/after cut scenes in the battles. Once you started a Skirmish it took way too long waiting for the ships to maneuver by each other before the actual battle began. Then after you defeated your enemy it took way too long for the animations to stop. It was almost maddening. What I would like to see change is allow us to click the screen during either of those opening/closing animations to immediately bypass the animation and continue. Then if someone wanted to watch the before/after animations they could. You could do that when you are doing away missions, tap the screen to bypass the excess animations, so please add that feature to ship battles/pvp/skirmishes.
Thanks for trying something different
19
Comments
is at odds with:
More chrons -> More ship battles -> More Intel -> More rounds to play
Personally, I think the Intel cost per mission should continue to increase. At least to 1500, possibly higher. Whenever I was playing with a Kit running, it was actually a challenge to deplete my intel completely.
My biggest gripe was a lack of difficulty in the battles themselves. Being able to execute the same exact strategy for every single battle across both rounds was very uninspired gameplay. This was trained monkey level level strategy. I understand why the various difficulty levels need to exist, but needs to be a level that challenges those of us with fully upgraded ships and crews.
I would like to see an increase in credit amounts, not their removal. Personally I struggle for credits quite a bit and the enorous amount of chrons we got means that I will be building a lot of stuff in the coming weeks and I am going to be a poor, poor boy at the end of it.
In general I think the big issue with the event was that the chron output was way too high. This led to the constant repetition, but also to vastly swollen inventories that can't be good for the game if skirmishes are to become a regular thing.
I also don't see how DB succesfully monetised this event. I didn't spend a penny on the event. Event crew didn't seem terribly important beyond the first one and there wasn't an obvious way to improve your event position spending small numbers of chrons. The event ships seemed particularly pointless, but that's the way it should be I reckon considering the price point of them.
I enjoyed the event, but I reckon it needs a big overhaul, I also reckon it will be as divisive as expeditions in the community because, as it is currently, it's tedious.
PM for details.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
I want events to be maximum 3 days long. Every week is fine and great, just shorter.
Everything else was awesome. I learned and sharpened up a lot at ship battles and it was something of the challenge I was looking for.
Due to technical difficulties accessing accounts and CS back and forth still unresolved, ended up with 50k or so in unused intel and all the stuff that would have come of that.
I'm happy it wasn't a pay-to-win event. That anyone who puts in the time, tedious as it was, can succeed.
~· Fly with the Subspace Eddies! ·~
What DB lost in money, they gained in time-played. This event was ultra-competitive and if you wanted to finish high you spent a lot of hours grinding out skirmishes. Higher average time spent by players in-game must factor into advertising rates, which is a big revenue stream.
It was great for our fleet. Many players reached event finish achievements that never thought they would. Top person in many squads were different then other events. A different type of player seemed to excel at this event compared to others. I think that is a good thing for the game!
That wouldn't help. The problem is skirmishes generated so many chrons that the intel earned from ship missions nearly covered the intel cost to run the skirmish. That meant that you kept playing with no end in sight. If you double the VP, then you would just inflate scores. To reduce the time you need to either tweak the intel/chron->intel ratio so you can run out of intel, or make the VP more variable so rank is determined by skill/crew instead of how many times you can run the same skirmish.
Not really at odds if you can skip the animations.
I'm guessing many players spent dilithium on addition prize pulls at the end of each ship battle. I'm also guessing a significant number of players bought all 5 of the $9.99 chroniton offers like they do for Galaxy events.
I agree with this and would have preferred to see the survival aspect stressed. Why not make the battles harder and harder until they're unbeatable, letting you strategize the right mix of risk/reward?
I would like to add a bit to the Time Sink discussion though, because it's the one part I think definitely needs to be changed. To that end, I have compiled a few statistics from my game:
Approximate Intel spent per hour playing the event: 20,000 (About 17 skirmishes)
Approximate VP for a full skirmish: 6,500
Thus, VP per hour: 110,500
Total VP I earned: 971,700
Approximate hours spent: 8.79
Final rank: 364
Estimated additional VP I had the resources to earn, but didn't because I didn't have enough time: 700,000 (from 20k Intel and 3k Chrons)
Additional hours that would have required: 7
I only eyeballed the intel spent in an hour, though I did check it several times, and seems pretty close to what I actually did. Also, keep in mind, this was because I was able to run the highest difficulty, successfully, with the greatest bonus, without changing my crew, ship, or strategy. I frequently lost track of which battle I was on, because once I found a strategy that worked this well, I used every ship ability I had at the same times, regardless of which particular ship I was facing. This was one of those times I really wish I could have written a script to execute my strategy for me - it would have been simple.
I think the top 1,000 was around 700k VP, right? That means about 7 hours spent. That seems excessive to me for a game like this, but I understand why others may disagree. I really think they need to change how many Chrons you get from battles, or how many Intel you get from Chrons. Still, overall, I think it was a very good first event.
Protecting the Galaxy's Future from itself
Chief Intelligence Officer
I didn't have that experience. In the first phase my chroniton drops were almost non-existant. It improved in the second phase to the point where, at it's max, the chronitons earned were about 50% of the chronitons spent. No where close to breaking even in my experience. Not sure if my RNG was that bad or if your RNG was that good.
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/5746/skirmish-suggestions#latest
The published Chron chance was 11.45% I believe. That's expected value of .458% over a single skirmish. At 75 chrons/drop that 34.35 chrons. Running a supply kit that translates to 458 intel. At 150 chrons you're now getting 916 intel per skirmish. 300 chrons would be more. The average chrons was likely about 100 - 115, so your 50% breakdown may be about right. But that's before we account for daily accruals, voyages, etc...
Whatever the exact numbers, I ended the event with 20k+ intel unspent and that was after I started farming non-space battles because I realized I had no need for the extra intel. The limiting factor for me was time and not intel.
I think are experiences must have been very different. Players may have spent dil on the additional pulls, but I was so overflowing with chrons that I could not imagine buying a chron pack.
Here are the results but first let me say something about the setup:
Difficulty: EPIC
Boost: 4* Young Khan was present in all Battles
Supply Kit: Active all the time
Intel cost: 1200 per set of 5 Battles
Order of Bonus rolls: Only the first one 8)
Number of Bonus rolls: 957
The Bonus rolls were done over both phases. Graphs show chronological progress.
You see we tried to keep everything as constant as possible. We couldn't help the phase change tho.
I tried to calculate a factor of "results given" per "chrons invested" for each reward. Therefore I decided to calculate how many Chrons one bonus roll would cost.
One set of 5 battles costs 1200 Intel.
4 Bonus rolls per set of 5 battles.
-> 300 Intel/Bonus roll
-> 30 Chrons/Bonus roll (supply kit unboosted)
-> 22,5 Chrons/Bonus roll (supply kit boosted)
So one bonus roll costs us 22,5 Chrons. I just assume that you restock on Intel with a supply kit active. I went as far as only doing ship battles where the cost per mission was a multiple of 4 to minimize rounding loss. You can always draw 3/4 without loss.
Next step was the task to write down every bonus drop that occured.
As i said above, the (?) in the bonus roll screen shows which reward type will drop, but not which median amount of this reward. A drop chance of 11,45% for Chrons can mean a 300 Chron drop will occour most of the time with occasional 76 Chron drops or vice versa.
It was my goal to find out what one chron of input is worth in Event VP, Honor, Chrons returned, etc... as i suspected that the chroniton return would be high enough to go out of the event with a plus.
DB table of % for rewards:
Credits: 33,29%
Chronitons: 11,45%
Honor: 14,11%
Intel: 27,43%
Event VP: 13,58%
Time Portal: 0,13%
Our results:
Reward types consist of the following sub-types. (Occurrence and % of total in brackets)
-Credits- (313, 32,74%)
1500 (209, 21,84%)
3000 (90, 9,4%)
6000 (14, 1,46%)
-Chrons- (132, 13,81%)
76 (90, 9,4%)
150 (30, 3,13%)
300 (12, 1,25%)
-Honor- (126, 13,18%)
76 (94, 9,82%)
150 (25, 2,61%)
300 (7, 0,73%)
-Intel- (258, 26,96%)
30 (153, 15,99%)
60 (96, 10,03%)
240 (9, 0,94%)
-VP- (127, 13,27%)
300 (98, 10,24%)
600 (25, 2,61%)
1500 (4, 0,42%)
-Portal- (1, 0,10%)
Single Premium (1, 0,10%)
As you can see in these results we got a bit lucky with the number of Chron drops and got a bit less Honor drops instead.
Now for the total amounts and their reward per battle of 5 (short RPB5). A RPB5 is worth 90 Chrons (4x 22,5; supply kit boosted) and shows what you end up with on average after a set of 5 battles:
Credits:
Total: 667.500
RPB5: 2.789,97
Chrons:
Total: 14.940
RPB5: 62,45
Honor:
Total: 12.994
RPB5: 54,31
Intel:
Total: 12.510
RPB5: 52,29
VP:
Total: 50.400
RPB5: 210,66
Portal:
Total: 1
RPB5: 4,14E10-3
As you can see 90 Chrons will get you 62,45 Chrons back. Additionally 52,29 Intel that i add with a 1:10 ratio.
-> 67,8 Chrons reward vs. 90 Chrons spent
Not to speak about Honor, Credits and Portals (lol).
PLUS you got lots of items through the ship battles that you did to get Intel in the first place.
Definitely a win im my books. If you got the Chrons to spend and time to play ship battle after ship battle...
Thanks again to Larxene for providing data!
Happy to provide more data if necessary.
Personally, I would add a big of a guantlet concept, up the entrance fee to say 2500 intel, but add many more ship battles per ticket, with each battle getting harder and harder so that ideally, you fail some percent of the way. I think that would make it much more fun and a greater test of skill
1-The Intel drops were by far the least valuable. 76 chron drops earned approx 1000 Intel (using a supply kit). So 30 Intel is nothing compared to the approx change chron drop
2-the credit drops weren't bad. You could earn a hundred thousand credits in a couple days.
3-time sink. It was a lot if time for sure, and I think the biggest problem was how easy the battles were. The battles should have been harder, or had bonus rounds that get progressively harder.
4-Rounds should have gotten more expensive, and bonuses from event crew and ships should have been 10x greater. From example: a level 4 reliant should have been better than a max level Borg cube. And a fffe enemy lines sisko should have had like +26 evade, or 1/5 have +12.
5-this was the least pay to win event. It was also the easiest one for newer players to complete in. On a shuttle event, I always finish top 1k with ease. I ended up at 1900 something this time and I played A LOT.
OVERALL A welcome change.
First, a minor disagreement on credits. I think the credits are an important reward, especially since I was using the item drops to level crew. I burned through a ton of them and was happier to see even a small amount of credits than I was Intel. I also think that it's necessary to keep them in as a way to diversify the battle rewards.
Second, on chroniton rewards. This event functioned as a bottomless supply of chronitons, which I loved but comes with two problems: a) reduces the incentive to buy chroniton packs and b) turns it into a time sink. Both are a problem - the first for DB, the second for players who don't want to spend the entire weekend glued to their phone.
Diversifying the rewards pool (adding merits, for example), reducing the chroniton drop (in either frequency or amount) or allowing Intel to continue scaling (certainly it should go to 1500, and perhaps higher) would both reduce the time expenditure needed to compete and introduce more of a pay-to-win component (which I don't like, but see as a necessary evil after the elimination of expeditions).
Third, on rewards generally. The ship battles reward table should be expanded, and not just with the inclusion of merits. Event schematics might be an option (I doubt the schematics packs will continue to sell well, given how unnecessary the event ships were to do well) and it's kind of fun to imagine a third 4* event crew who can only be acquired from the ship battles rewards table. Shuttle boost packs would be a nice add, too.
On balance I enjoyed skirmishes, and would like them to continue.
Positives:
- level existing crew members
- farm equipment/components
- farm holoemitters for starbases
- play on your own schedule
- continue playing other features with full crew compliment (ie: voyages & shuttles)
- honor as a reward
Negatives:
- ship selection was pretty meaningless, even though it was a ship-centric event
- crew selection was pretty meaningless (at least that negated the horribly designed crew selection screen)
- threshold reward table needs to be expanded, given that 700,000 points were needed for top-1000 finish and rewards stopped at 130,000
- way too much time needed to be top-1000, partly because of slowness caused by animations (I was top-500 for first 48 hours, then life got in the way over the weekend, and I scrambled to maintain top-1500 for FF Roga Danar)
- despite excitement of the initial run-through, the event was mind-numbingly repetitive
Overall I liked the skirmish event, and greatly appreciated DB at least trying out a new event format.
I think skirmish is best suited for a hybrid event (ie: faction/skirmish), since it was far more of a time sink than even galaxy events. It got really old doing the same thing for 4 straight days, far more so than faction events or even galaxy events.
I know it's considered a truism by a lot of folks that credits are not a road block for most players anymore — but I think that's an overstatement. They're not really a problem for me now that I've fully equipped every single member of my crew, but I doubt a very large percentage of STT players have done that. On my two alt accounts, credits are very much a bottleneck. However, I do agree that the amount given as Skirmish bonus rewards was laughably low (much like the paltry amounts you get in Gauntlet).
I assume you meant to talk about refreshing Gauntlet lineups, rather than Voyages. For me, Merits aren't a big issue — I do regularly buy stuff in Faction centers and do the occasional Gauntlet opponent refresh, but I have over 10,000 on all 3 accounts. However, I accept that this is not the case for others, so I wouldn't have a problem with seeing more drop in Skirmishes, so long as they didn't completely replace credit drops (which, as stated, really should be much larger).
I don't have a problem with the crew selection, really — though tweaks such as you suggested would be nice, I didn't feel it was much more cumbersome than selecting crew for any other event. And in one important way, it was actually far easier than other events because once selected, the crew was persistent — even though it'll probably never happen, I would love to see this employed for Faction events (that is, the game would remember who you loaded in that shuttle the last time you ran it and auto-populate it, unless one or more of them was unavailable, of course). And speaking of which, as you say, the availability of any crew member you wanted to use was a huge bright spot. That's definitely something that the other events should be altered to bring to bear.
I'm not sure if this was a typo or you intended to say something other than how I interpreted it, but it struck me funny. I could employ a similar statement to describe a movie I saw the other day: "It wasn't good, but on the other hand, it was also not enjoyable."
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
Forgot I was going to mention a thought I had about this... the one positive to the way the battles played out was that — unlike both Galaxies and Expeditions — you could easily do them while watching TV, since you only had to look down at the screen 2 or 3 times during each battle, waiting for the next time you had to react (either to continue the battle or to collect your rewards and move on to the next one). This fact alone made it far less of a pain in the patootie for me than Expedition events (and Galaxies, truth be told), where it's just constant tapping and never really taking your eyes of the screen. So, potentially less eye strain with this, as well. 😵
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
But don't make it harder.
Instead, I have an idea I have not read elsewhere, but might already have been said:
Have 7 or 8 different ships that can be battled and have 5 of them randomly chosen each time through the set.
That would freshen things up a bit.
Overall, I liked the even, though I recieved very very few chroniton drops and figured fairly quickly I didn't want to spend the time to get top 1000.
Edit: just read in the feedback thread that someone else posted a similar idea. I didn't think I was alone.