I personally loved it. The best strategy is to focus on 2 missions and rotate them until you get to 5k VP and then you can complete the event very quickly. It's very quick, easy, it uses stat boosts which have been mostly useless until now and you don't have to wait unlike Voyage or Shuttle events. Very similar to Skirmish in that you can clear the thresholds in a couple hours except it doesnt give you back chrons but this is perfectly fine by me. For me this is the best type of event as I don't have a lot of time to play and I can't check my phone every 2-3 hours. Good job devs.
How does this work. The missions rewards jump up and down, One time they are 1k VP, I complete and the next one is 500 VP. Again there is no reason I can see for this.
There are no instructions about how this event actually works, and I should not have to watch a YouTube video to see how to play this game.
I personally loved it. The best strategy is to focus on 2 missions and rotate them until you get to 5k VP and then you can complete the event very quickly. It's very quick, easy, it uses stat boosts which have been mostly useless until now and you don't have to wait unlike Voyage or Shuttle events. Very similar to Skirmish in that you can clear the thresholds in a couple hours except it doesnt give you back chrons but this is perfectly fine by me. For me this is the best type of event as I don't have a lot of time to play and I can't check my phone every 2-3 hours. Good job devs.
How does this work. The missions rewards jump up and down, One time they are 1k VP, I complete and the next one is 500 VP. Again there is no reason I can see for this.
There are no instructions about how this event actually works, and I should not have to watch a YouTube video to see how to play this game.
Each individual mission is on its own VP ladder, as far as I can tell, topping out at 5000. But it's independent of which faction you're doing it with (unlike galaxy). To be honest, I don't really see the point of this having different factions at all - it's just an extra click to get to the actual screen where I have to do stuff. Are people that enthused about faction winner bonuses? They were only added to galaxies relatively recently anyway, as I recall.
Also, I very strongly second the "where are the community rewards?" (much better than a faction winner bonus IMO) and "wow, this is pay to win" sentiments earlier in the thread.
Really noticed this before I went to bed, but there is no method to advance the plot while you sleep. Seems like you are penalized for actually going to bed at night.
For shuttle and voyage events, one could extend a shuttle mission to 9 hours for double rewards or auto-complete voyage encounters to at least progress -- if one chooses. The other events do not have a time consideration and are just tap, tap, tap.
But here, you set your characters on a mission and in about an hour or so, they have finished. The rest of your sleep time is wasted and there is no way to "catch up", besides spending chronotons.
Had to break my lurking streak in the hope that someone give this consideration.
Review: Awful. No offense to the dev team, but a little bit at the design team.
Context: Been playing for 9 years. Mildly casual, but only missed a few days in that whole time
Negative Comments:
Spending chrons without getting creds and mats is a sin. The only way I see this event getting worse is swapping chron spending with dil.
it's just a shuttle mission in playstyle. Core play is less crew management and time management (shuttle boosts, real-world phone alerts, etc). So yeah, this would better replace Faction instead of Galaxy, but the problem TP has is Galaxy player interaction (pre-farming mats, automating tools against ToS, 'boring' players with grinding, etc). I'm stuck thinking of a rework to this current beta to replace that experience.
Zero strategy. Locked down characters. Variable timers.
I played it a bit and could not stomach it. I begrudgingly participate in Voyage events because it's too close to gauntlet and it's RNG hell. The last failure this big was expedition events and this beats it by a country mile. This is the first event type that will break the "refuse to even start" barrier, and once that hits, I'm throwing Voyage in that bucket too. And I just know that will start the snowball-down-the-hill that leads to game abandonment.
I'm not even looking at reward tiers. I'm not going to make the first one. I don't buy chrons and I don't hit voyage every 2 hours to max my chron earnings, so I'm not dipping into obsession for a comfort collection and occasional strategy game.
Improvement suggestions:
Use event points gained instead from spending chrons on away team missions. This would be the companion to Skirmish events where Space Battle gives you the "fuel" to play the event type. It would blast playability wide open and retain credit and material gains to build characters. Added effect of eliminating the mat hoarding pre-galaxy event, something they pinpointed as a want.
Possibly hard to implement, I don't know the codebase: remove crew lock-down for use in at least continuum, standard voyage, and other late-game play. If unable to implement, it is preferable to not lock them at all, but I think it's still important to lock them within the event so you can not apply the SAME crew to multiple specialist missions, for strategy's sake.
I would probably want some use of replicator rations (or better yet, any materials) involved. I don't use them much in game unless I'm in a pinch because I have a credits problem with Crew Retrieval, and it takes FOREVER to craft them one at a time with my massive piles of unused materials/components that aren't commonly used. This would probably translate best as the separate "speed-up" currency, as rations in early game are more highly valued, and you wouldn't want to deter players not starting specialist missions. Combining this with the first suggestion would extend late-game players' mission start count (event points) to compete for higher tier rewards. As for defeating automation scripts, this doesn't deter the desire as it promotes grinding, BUT makes it harder if the excess materials are used directly (instead of just replicator rations), as the materials in a player's inventory are specific to them in quantity and value. I may have 3,000 2-star database components, but the crew another player has might have seen that number drop to 20 just from building the crew components. There is no real pre-gaming other than spending chrons on ANY missions ( or building rations, depending on implementation) to build up generic inventory, of which the spoils will be split into working toward crew building and gathering trash for the event. Side effect: motivating players to clean their damn inventory of unused mats.
Strategy-wise, I can only think to add a complication layer focused on attempting diplomacy. So for three factions, attempt to keep your victory points within a balanced threshold (15-20 percent, maybe) of the three in order to "promote peace and cooperation" A player can then strategize event crew and mission attention by juggling favor to no side, with the promise of enhanced reward values. And one could tempt unbalance in the distribution and promise specific faction rewards if you forsake another (I would anticipate the 4* crew reward changes would be harder to implement than skewing honor/dil/cred/merit values, but definitely have greater impact). Though I would implement this in a two-faction trial before opening to 3 or 4-way. This could have global player base implications on the overall "faction winner" and possibly change the high-tier crew rewards (difficult to implement, but does shake a bee's nest of inter-player engagement on forums, chat, social media, and reddit...imaging the playerbase getting involved to coach and make sure the newer players we focus for a higher-evaluated crew reward (not all 5* are created equal) ), or simply spread the mid-week shuttle boost to multiple factions. Given development resources, this can be a tiered approach, by executing the reward strategy in phases while the playerbase gets something to chew on. I know I'd be more likely to stick around if I got this and the promise that it's gonna go up a notch
I will just add, there is a purpose to having multiple factions. You can do all 3 of them. Seems like every one is stuck on thinking they should only do one.
You could have 15 missions running at a time. But from above it is mentioned that it is better to concentrate on one or two and get those to 5000 reward. So that would mean doing that for each faction.
Eidt: I think actually doing alll 15 and just check in every 3 hours would probably work. So we could be talking about a faction event, except I t costs chronitons to send .
I forgot there is probably 8(or 7?? not sure) so you can only run the missions you have not done. Then you might as well just complete them in one faction. However, this means you can have missions running that are not available in your current faction.
Edit: looks like all the missions are the same in each faction. So, yes multiple factions are pointlesss. When you complete the missions the other factions are completed too, and the new list of missions is the same for all 3.
Though if the winning faction gets shuttle bonus, then there is a point to multiple factions.
Really noticed this before I went to bed, but there is no method to advance the plot while you sleep. Seems like you are penalized for actually going to bed at night.
For shuttle and voyage events, one could extend a shuttle mission to 9 hours for double rewards or auto-complete voyage encounters to at least progress -- if one chooses. The other events do not have a time consideration and are just tap, tap, tap.
But here, you set your characters on a mission and in about an hour or so, they have finished. The rest of your sleep time is wasted and there is no way to "catch up", besides spending chronotons.
The mission times can get very long (I think possibly it starts from 24 hours and then slices that down depending on skills/bonuses/boosts) so it is possible (though fiddly) to find crew lower down your roster whose mission times match your sleep schedule. This would leave all your best crew refreshed when you woke up, which isn't a huge benefit admittedly.
I would like it much better if they made the shuttle mission "double rewards but an extra 6 hours" boosts work on these so I could use good crew overnight.
The mission times can get very long (I think possibly it starts from 24 hours and then slices that down depending on skills/bonuses/boosts)
For the record, I was very wrong about this! I pulled some credit packs to get some level 1 1*s and they would take longer to complete the mission than is available in a four day event (let alone a two day beta or indeed event phase).
I can't upload my screenshots (the upgraded forum doesn't seem to like my mobile) but the longest times I got were 135h01m for Lt. Jadzia Dax on both Clouded Vision and Geometric Perfection, followed by 130h39m for Ensign Ogawa on Brittle Crystal and 122h04m for Will Riker on Gateways of Discovery.
We're trying to squeeze 5 Bajoran days into 4 Earth ones here.
How does this work. The missions rewards jump up and down, One time they are 1k VP, I complete and the next one is 500 VP. Again there is no reason I can see for this.
There are no instructions about how this event actually works, and I should not have to watch a YouTube video to see how to play this game.
As with all events there's the rules and there's optimisation. Same way we have optimisation for Shuttle Events (open all faction missions, do 4, open another 4, do 'em a couple times then go back to the 1 min shuttles and do them to get to 3.5k-4kVP shuttles in about 30 minutes) every event has its optimisation strategy. That is purely players input and you don't need to watch YT videos. Same way you could farm 10s of 1000s of chronitons during faction winner shuttles by tanking your reputation with all factions, if you really have the time and desire, you could go massively ahead in this game. As for the strategy for this event, it is NOT shuttles nor should it be treated as such. Choose a mission A (preferably that has Diplomacy or Security) do it, then choose mission B (again, preferably Diplo or SEC), do it, then go back to Mission A and continue the cycle. That's the whole strategy, you get to 5k VP quickly and only do these 2 missions. You can farm about 10k VP in like 10-15 seconds if you have the chrons. Do not waste your crew on missions which give like 100VP - total waste of time.
Reporting a Beta problem
I now have a mission that I can't clear out. When I click "Completed" I get an error message. So now I'm down to 4 simultaneous missions instead of 5.
UPDATE: closing and restarting the game cleared the issue
Reporting a Beta problem
I now have a mission that I can't clear out. When I click "Completed" I get an error message. So now I'm down to 4 simultaneous missions instead of 5.
UPDATE: closing and restarting the game cleared the issue
Had that earlier.
But I didn't realise there are five missions as only three are displayed.
Really noticed this before I went to bed, but there is no method to advance the plot while you sleep. Seems like you are penalized for actually going to bed at night.
Only thing I've thought of for the overnight shift is to drop down the roster and select crew that takes 7-8 hours to complete a task. That will at least allow the cooldown timers on the rest of your crew to reset naturally.
Torres. 225 hours, so she's in the khazi for the next nine days.
So anyone just starting out is either locked out or won’t get very far with this event. At least with galaxies there a chance you’ll get something helpful like the community reward premium portal pull.
The bonus traits are a multiplier to the skill. In the picture below, the two Data, Rianna and The Queen all have similar times, 2:33 - 2:40.
Rianna has half the Engineering that the others have, so two traits double the Engineering skill. I haven't full checked, but I guess one trait is 50% extra.
The traits don't affect the main mission bonus.
The only crew of these to get the main mission bonus is Data V, who is Fed, but Rianna is still tagged as bonus crew.
It still does not explain how the bonus chance is calculated, most Feds seem to be 20%, the three big bonus crew are 40%, but there a few odd values, like the 25% in my post above.
Edit. And I have just found a 337 hour (2 week) mission.
I think this would be a great addition to the rotation of midweek events for something new. As a replacement to a galaxy event, it leaves a lot to be desired and enjoyed.
Generally, I really dislike Galaxy events; its a lot of grind, and an expenditure of resources when you know that there are people willing to grind (or bot) harder... I almost never take galaxy events past the 130K point to get the new crew-member and gear.
Good points: I like the idea; the interface is simple; encouraging people to mine their roster is good. The ramp up of VPs helps with engagement.
Bad points: having to do stuff every hour is bad. Having shuttles come back at different times is irritating. It would be nice to have a voyage extender of some kind for overnight and/or those times when I can't fire up the game every hour.
Suggested Improvement: lack of any visual clue (on the top level screen) that a mission has completed could be handled.
So here are my comments, the specialist event is more about babysitting the game and logging in every hour or so to resend the missions. Galaxy events you play when you have time and you d not have to babysit. Unless you can line the specialist event timing with voyages every 2 hours or shuttles every 3 hours you can keep the specialist events out of the rotation.
I have to correct myself. I was wrong. The event is brilliant. It took me less than 25 minutes to threshold. When it's Galaxy I need at least 40 minutes. And since I have more acc, I'll save a lot of time. Thanks TP.
I have to correct myself. I was wrong. The event is brilliant. It took me less than 25 minutes to threshold. When it's Galaxy I need at least 40 minutes. And since I have more acc, I'll save a lot of time. Thanks TP.
Bear in mind that the top threshold in the beta was 250k but a standard weekend event goes to 350k. So if you were going 10k/minute that's not far off your existing galaxy pace.
I do think the play style you're describing is what the devs intend in terms of this being a galaxy replacement. You're meant to spam chrons at it and then leave it. The fact that when you leave it you have a bunch of different timers running is eliciting a Pavlovian response from veterans of going hard in faction events but really only low level/self-imposed challenge accounts will need to babysit this event type.
I did the survey as well. It’s interesting that Expeditions was listed as an event type to be ranked despite it being said they weren’t having them anymore.
Since it’s been so long (years?) since the last Expedition I’d wonder how many current players would even know what they are or have enough experience with that event to even give it a proper ranking.
When factoring strategy Expeditions vs Specialist events, IMO I’d choose Expeditions.
[*] I would probably want some use of replicator rations (or better yet, any materials) involved. I don't use them much in game unless I'm in a pinch because I have a credits problem with Crew Retrieval, and it takes FOREVER to craft them one at a time with my massive piles of unused materials/components that aren't commonly used. This would probably translate best as the separate "speed-up" currency, as rations in early game are more highly valued, and you wouldn't want to deter players not starting specialist missions. Combining this with the first suggestion would extend late-game players' mission start count (event points) to compete for higher tier rewards. As for defeating automation scripts, this doesn't deter the desire as it promotes grinding, BUT makes it harder if the excess materials are used directly (instead of just replicator rations), as the materials in a player's inventory are specific to them in quantity and value. I may have 3,000 2-star database components, but the crew another player has might have seen that number drop to 20 just from building the crew components. There is no real pre-gaming other than spending chrons on ANY missions ( or building rations, depending on implementation) to build up generic inventory, of which the spoils will be split into working toward crew building and gathering trash for the event. Side effect: motivating players to clean their damn inventory of unused mats.
[/list]
I would like to see a replicator compent used as well. However, it would be truly useful to allow a player to load the replicator generator with as many of an item as a player wants to enter and let the mechanics convert as many as possible of the inputed items into tokens and return the remainder to inventory. As it stands now it's not worth my effort to convert all my excess inventory to rations. It's easier to just let them dissapear into the ether when they hit the hard cap.
"Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig" Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, R.A. Heinlein
I noticed that some Captains had examples of selecting crew (albeit 1* and 2* ones) that could take a extreme amount of time to complete. I did not take that into consideration with my initial comments.
I have enough 5* characters that met one or both of the traits, so that the longest time to complete a mission was 1:30. I wasn't spending chronos to complete them -- only to start -- so by the time my fourth batch of missions was complete, the first set was rested.
For players with plenty of crew, this did not seem like a challenging event with any strategy. Pick the top five to go and wait an hour. For newer players, they would have a challenging time to compete. Especially if they need to spend extra chronotons to keep up. Something that few starting players have in excess.
I noticed that some Captains had examples of selecting crew (albeit 1* and 2* ones) that could take a extreme amount of time to complete.
For newer players, they would have a challenging time to compete. Especially if they need to spend extra chronitons to keep up. Something that few starting players have in excess.
I think that is the point for some. even 2/4* crew with traits were going to take days to complete. If you don't have a decent amount of crew to compete it is no different than any other event. Same goes for gauntlet and a few other things.
Comments
How does this work. The missions rewards jump up and down, One time they are 1k VP, I complete and the next one is 500 VP. Again there is no reason I can see for this.
There are no instructions about how this event actually works, and I should not have to watch a YouTube video to see how to play this game.
Each individual mission is on its own VP ladder, as far as I can tell, topping out at 5000. But it's independent of which faction you're doing it with (unlike galaxy). To be honest, I don't really see the point of this having different factions at all - it's just an extra click to get to the actual screen where I have to do stuff. Are people that enthused about faction winner bonuses? They were only added to galaxies relatively recently anyway, as I recall.
Also, I very strongly second the "where are the community rewards?" (much better than a faction winner bonus IMO) and "wow, this is pay to win" sentiments earlier in the thread.
For shuttle and voyage events, one could extend a shuttle mission to 9 hours for double rewards or auto-complete voyage encounters to at least progress -- if one chooses. The other events do not have a time consideration and are just tap, tap, tap.
But here, you set your characters on a mission and in about an hour or so, they have finished. The rest of your sleep time is wasted and there is no way to "catch up", besides spending chronotons.
Review: Awful. No offense to the dev team, but a little bit at the design team.
Context: Been playing for 9 years. Mildly casual, but only missed a few days in that whole time
Negative Comments:
Improvement suggestions:
So, basically they made a horrible version of Faction Events.
All my Shuttles get back at the same time in a Faction Event.....
You could have 15 missions running at a time. But from above it is mentioned that it is better to concentrate on one or two and get those to 5000 reward. So that would mean doing that for each faction.
Eidt: I think actually doing alll 15 and just check in every 3 hours would probably work. So we could be talking about a faction event, except I t costs chronitons to send .
I forgot there is probably 8(or 7?? not sure) so you can only run the missions you have not done. Then you might as well just complete them in one faction. However, this means you can have missions running that are not available in your current faction.
Edit: looks like all the missions are the same in each faction. So, yes multiple factions are pointlesss. When you complete the missions the other factions are completed too, and the new list of missions is the same for all 3.
Though if the winning faction gets shuttle bonus, then there is a point to multiple factions.
The mission times can get very long (I think possibly it starts from 24 hours and then slices that down depending on skills/bonuses/boosts) so it is possible (though fiddly) to find crew lower down your roster whose mission times match your sleep schedule. This would leave all your best crew refreshed when you woke up, which isn't a huge benefit admittedly.
I would like it much better if they made the shuttle mission "double rewards but an extra 6 hours" boosts work on these so I could use good crew overnight.
For the record, I was very wrong about this! I pulled some credit packs to get some level 1 1*s and they would take longer to complete the mission than is available in a four day event (let alone a two day beta or indeed event phase).
I can't upload my screenshots (the upgraded forum doesn't seem to like my mobile) but the longest times I got were 135h01m for Lt. Jadzia Dax on both Clouded Vision and Geometric Perfection, followed by 130h39m for Ensign Ogawa on Brittle Crystal and 122h04m for Will Riker on Gateways of Discovery.
We're trying to squeeze 5 Bajoran days into 4 Earth ones here.
As with all events there's the rules and there's optimisation. Same way we have optimisation for Shuttle Events (open all faction missions, do 4, open another 4, do 'em a couple times then go back to the 1 min shuttles and do them to get to 3.5k-4kVP shuttles in about 30 minutes) every event has its optimisation strategy. That is purely players input and you don't need to watch YT videos. Same way you could farm 10s of 1000s of chronitons during faction winner shuttles by tanking your reputation with all factions, if you really have the time and desire, you could go massively ahead in this game. As for the strategy for this event, it is NOT shuttles nor should it be treated as such. Choose a mission A (preferably that has Diplomacy or Security) do it, then choose mission B (again, preferably Diplo or SEC), do it, then go back to Mission A and continue the cycle. That's the whole strategy, you get to 5k VP quickly and only do these 2 missions. You can farm about 10k VP in like 10-15 seconds if you have the chrons. Do not waste your crew on missions which give like 100VP - total waste of time.
This is an awful mechanics.
It will cost a lot of chrons to clear, so a simple mistake could cost you the event.
I now have a mission that I can't clear out. When I click "Completed" I get an error message. So now I'm down to 4 simultaneous missions instead of 5.
UPDATE: closing and restarting the game cleared the issue
Had that earlier.
But I didn't realise there are five missions as only three are displayed.
Full rewards, so wasn't a chron dump.
Only thing I've thought of for the overnight shift is to drop down the roster and select crew that takes 7-8 hours to complete a task. That will at least allow the cooldown timers on the rest of your crew to reset naturally.
So anyone just starting out is either locked out or won’t get very far with this event. At least with galaxies there a chance you’ll get something helpful like the community reward premium portal pull.
The bonus traits are a multiplier to the skill. In the picture below, the two Data, Rianna and The Queen all have similar times, 2:33 - 2:40.
Rianna has half the Engineering that the others have, so two traits double the Engineering skill. I haven't full checked, but I guess one trait is 50% extra.
The traits don't affect the main mission bonus.
The only crew of these to get the main mission bonus is Data V, who is Fed, but Rianna is still tagged as bonus crew.
It still does not explain how the bonus chance is calculated, most Feds seem to be 20%, the three big bonus crew are 40%, but there a few odd values, like the 25% in my post above.
Edit. And I have just found a 337 hour (2 week) mission.
Generally, I really dislike Galaxy events; its a lot of grind, and an expenditure of resources when you know that there are people willing to grind (or bot) harder... I almost never take galaxy events past the 130K point to get the new crew-member and gear.
Good points: I like the idea; the interface is simple; encouraging people to mine their roster is good. The ramp up of VPs helps with engagement.
Bad points: having to do stuff every hour is bad. Having shuttles come back at different times is irritating. It would be nice to have a voyage extender of some kind for overnight and/or those times when I can't fire up the game every hour.
Suggested Improvement: lack of any visual clue (on the top level screen) that a mission has completed could be handled.
Bear in mind that the top threshold in the beta was 250k but a standard weekend event goes to 350k. So if you were going 10k/minute that's not far off your existing galaxy pace.
I do think the play style you're describing is what the devs intend in terms of this being a galaxy replacement. You're meant to spam chrons at it and then leave it. The fact that when you leave it you have a bunch of different timers running is eliciting a Pavlovian response from veterans of going hard in faction events but really only low level/self-imposed challenge accounts will need to babysit this event type.
Since it’s been so long (years?) since the last Expedition I’d wonder how many current players would even know what they are or have enough experience with that event to even give it a proper ranking.
When factoring strategy Expeditions vs Specialist events, IMO I’d choose Expeditions.
If you took the initial survey, you may want to do it again.
I have enough 5* characters that met one or both of the traits, so that the longest time to complete a mission was 1:30. I wasn't spending chronos to complete them -- only to start -- so by the time my fourth batch of missions was complete, the first set was rested.
For players with plenty of crew, this did not seem like a challenging event with any strategy. Pick the top five to go and wait an hour. For newer players, they would have a challenging time to compete. Especially if they need to spend extra chronotons to keep up. Something that few starting players have in excess.