Currently, my rating of this game on the app store is 1 star. This is not because I think the overall game is bad, but because there are certain extremely major problems within it that need to be addressed, and it is horrible to not let new players know they’re going to be joining an extremely addictive game that has major problems down the line for their play.
Contents
The Grind Times
The grind times. The amount of time I spend in game is quite literally unhealthy, and the fact that I have to debate whether to complete things in a mobile game or go out and meet friends or see a concert or family or even read a book should never happen. Rev just did a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/c/RevDeuce
Currently the grind times of all the dailies are insane. There are ways to alleviate this, and here are some ideas:
- Make it so the Klingon/Rom/Fed hostile dailies can be completed by killing Dominion in addition to the appropriate faction types. All three are fighting the Dominion now as well so it works in the storyline as well.
- Offer guaranteed weekly away teams missions or weekly events with the majority of the old resources we need for refines, such as Borg nanoprobes, Eclipse security codes and Augment decoded data (and maybe corrupted data, does anybody actually mine it??).
- Reduce Normal Lat, 2*-3* ore, crystal, gas, and isogen refinery costs. This also has the added bonus of helping newer players to catch up with the bigger ones, which means more people feel included.
- Add more, cheap warp research OR just cut the warp speed to all systems significantly. Half this game is flying from one place to another, which basically has people sitting around for minutes literally doing nothing but waiting for timers to count down.
Officer Sourcing
At this point, many people have all the original Romulan, Klingon and Fed officer shards maxed. They are also easy to max for anyone with just a few hundred faction credits a day. Remove them from the Ultra/Premium Chests. Same with the Rogue officers, they are very easy to max within the Rogue store, there is no reason to have them in the Ultras. Eclipse is slower and most aren’t maxed for most players, but could also be removed since the majority are pretty much garbage. These are all just diluting the chest.
In any case, more officers that people actually need shards for should be added to the chest, and also more to the transporter pattern recruits.
Finally, the new Fed/Rom/Klingon chests just plain cost too many credits to be a viable source of shards, on top of being far too diluted with the crews we already have.
Balancing New Content
Adding new officers to the game as unbalancing as the Strike Team crew and the Cardassian crew and not offering sourcing to all is hugely problematic. Spenders already had a huge advantage in ship and ops size, giving them unbeatable crews in addition to that just adds to the problem. Either make the game paid or don’t, but don’t advertise “play free” and then make it a requirement to spend money to be able to play at a somewhat competitive level of those who spend. Spending money should lead to increased speed of development, it should not break the full balance of the game. There is quite literally no other Battleship crew that can beat ST crew in a battleship vs. battleship situation, same with Cardassian on Interceptor. Even going against the triangle you lose with nearly every crew.
So either offer ways for everyone to get these crews, or make them more balanced with previous crews.
Spend SLB Consistency/Transparency
If you’re going to have SLBs based on spending, let us know when they will be and then don’t lie to us and cancel them. Having saved for the O’Brien spend, I ended up with a couple months of resources when the SLB was canceled. Then, the next month, no spend SLB for new officers. As free to play or small spenders, most of us count on these SLBs to source the new sets of officers, so cannot spend outside them if we want to remain competitive. Also, as this has just cut our resource value for this month by a significant amount as now everyone who saves will be spending two months instead of one month’s worth of resources on the next SLB, it just makes people angry and frustrated.
In addition, Eco’s lack of vocality in the talk with Ultimate Djz to contradict him on what was happening with the Cardassians (i.e. Kobayashi Maru style spend event) the led a lot of players to believe that everyone would have a path to the shards, then nothing was said in the coming days and so people were understandbly surprised and angry when they found out there was zero free path to these officers. Transparancy.
When an arc is released, let us know what SLBs will be in the next few months (don’t need dates, just need to know what’s coming what month). Is having 160,000 ultra recruits saved useful in the next four months or am I crippling my officer development for no reason? The lack of transparancy is frustrating for players, since it just slows our development and sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn’t. Saving every recruit token, uncommon+ resource, speedup, away teams speedup, ship xp, officer xp, and away teams xp should either be rewarded on a consistent basis or not at all. Not leveling up your officers for months on end again just slows you down with no real gain for Scopely or the players themselves.
Honestly, just have one event for each resource type every month with non-garbage rewards and most people would be happy. Doubly so if it’s Kobayashi Maru style, and people can spend as much as they’ve managed to save.
Armadas
This has been better lately. Also, having solo armada directives counting has made it easier. Good stuff. 🙂
I understand that Scopely likes selling packs. But the amount of armada events in a month is just ridiculous. Simply cut it down, or cut the requirements.
Also, sneakily changing from 75k to 80k to win an event this month as well as taking out the points for defeating one means you can no longer win with 2 rares and an epic, which has been the basis for the whole time I’ve been playing. If you want to continue with that system, you need to offer rare/epic solo armadas to players at every level. At lower levels, there is no sourcing for them, with them being too high level in any case, even if we had a route to the directives.
Buggy New Content
Please make a beta server/actually test new content, so when it’s released it actually works as intended. The amount of events that are messed up is, frankly, embarassingly high.
Scopely Greed
Seriously, just cut it back about 78%. In the past, the SLBs were not the ideal way for free to play and lower spenders to get new officers, but they did give them a route. The last two months have given no route to free to play players to get the new officers (don’t even start that you have 0.5% random chance to unlock, one in a thousand is total garbage), whereas in the past you could save and pick and choose which officers you wanted to blow your hard fought, saved resources to actually place in those SLBs. If you want to got to a system where it’s a forever resource spend and possible for all to unlock, players would celebrate, but back to the old SLB system at least gave everyone a chance to try for an officer.
We’re now looking at solo armadas, where suddenly instead of being able to focus on one ship and try to advance at the same time, we’re being told we have to have three relatively good ships for our level. The only real possibility is to sit at a level forever or spend for the extra ships.
In general, the amount of content that is pushing people towards paying from month to month has steadily been increasing. Your advertisements say play free all over them. Stop the BS and keep that promise.
Well Said, BHD8
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