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Let me guess it's still screwed?
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Pretty much. The main difference with this is that Spencer talks about the forbidden topics of bot farming dilithium and people using VPNs to fake their location to lower income parts of the world where Zen is being sold at a fraction of the price of high income countries like the US. A lot of discussion boards consider these topics taboo and may censor you for even broaching the subject, since they are violations of the Terms of Service for the game.
It has become a more open topic in the last few weeks because Cryptic pulled out the ban-hammer on people that were AFK bot farming runs of "Defense of Starbase One", which can be AFKed even on Elite. Apparently Cryptic's internal bot detection game is pretty dismal.
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I ran SB1 solo for a while, but I can't remember why. I think it was an Event or something. But never to the level that is shown in the video. I would be #15 or so. I wouldn't 100% AFK it, I would run the first phase then run and hide. I never even thought there was anything wrong with doing it. It was a mechanism that was allowed by the game, so why not do it? But since then, I think I've run it solo maybe 2-5 times. It's been years. I don't even remember why I did those 2 - 5 runs. It probably had something to do with completing an Endeavor. It's just not worth my time to run TFOs for the rewards.
Now with the last Event, Bug Hunt was one of the TFOs to complete the daily requirement. I ran it solo every day, but I had to actually complete it. So that's what I did. It wasn't difficult (on Normal), and I blew about thirty minutes per run. But I could do it on my schedule, I knew what I had to take with me, and I knew what I had to do. Then there's the bonus of not having to deal with n00b PUGgers.
Soloing a TFO is not the issue, time-gating a soloable TFO is.
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I currently have one main toon, and that toon has about 1.4 million refined DIL and about 75k unrefined DIL. I'm no whale. I'm also no farmer. I run one toon at a time, the other five are just bank slots. 😁
I don't know how Cryptic fixes this without locking the DILex or limiting the amount of DIL that can be sold/bought per player per day. I could dump my 1.4M DIL on the market today and eventually get my 2,800 Zen. But what if I could only buy/sell 100k DIL at a time? Or buy/sell only 100 Zen at a time? What would that do to the market?
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I think a lot of people had that same thought Taku and I find it hard to argue with it, in that if it's something you can do in the game that while "not being the right way" to do it, is still doable without hacking the game or using some kind of exploit that the game shouldn't do under normal play then why not do it if the game, as part of the core gameplay lets you?
The problem is that even if they did something like that, people will eventually find a new way around it. We have the 8,500 DIL dailty refine amount for that very reason if I remember correctly, it's been a long time since they did that so I might be wrong but I vaguely think that was part of the reason they reduced it, and yet here were are today and it's the same problem.
They've let it grow into this for so long it's very hard to fix it. Without like you said either locking the DILex or limiting what can be brought/sold per day. Even if they went completely Scorched Earth on it and reset the market and everybody's DIL back to 0 so everybody started from scratch, if they don't fix what caused the exploits etc to happen in the first place, all that will happen is it starting all over again.
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The first thing Cryptic has to do is to actively go after the Bot Farms ban those accounts creating EC and Dil and get that out of the System.
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Agreed. Everyone complains that we need a dilithium sink, but as Spencer highlights the bigger problem is an oversupply of dilithium in the first place. These bot farmers are able to concurrently run multiple copies of the game on a single machine and generate massive amounts of dilithium and/or EC without even needing to be in front of the monitor. Assuming the farmer Spencer interviewed was legit, they were generating 11.5 million refined dilithium a day on average, which means if I'm doing the math right they were refining the maximum amount of daily dilithium on somewhere between 1250 to 1450 captains depending on if they were bothering to do the fleet holding and LTS refiners too. There is just no way a non-bot player could even come remotely close to matching something like that (that's more than 2 entire player fleets can generate in one day if every player hit the refine cap!), which badly skews the in-game economies.
It is also probably having a notable impact on server availability and performance for players too, which translates to real-world costs for Cryptic to beef up and optimize the servers instead of investing in staffing for the dev team or giving us sales or more non-gamble box stuff.
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Problem is this is a free to play game, one account banned they can easily create a new one...along with Cryptic's record with fixing things, just hard to have much if any faith
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If the game creates an environment in which endless events push players towards finding the easiest way to get the final reward then they’ve only got themselves to blame when people go afk in missions.
The game is a grind; no other way to put it. And the constant events and time gates makes people get fed up with it all; they just want the reward for the minimal effort because tbh you’re not actually getting much entertainment from the n’th play through of (insert generic event mission here).
If they made getting rewards actually engaging rather than just “turn up and click a button to die of boredom for 20 days” they might see more players participating actively.
Bot farms are a whole other issue though and tbh it’s their own fault for not dealing with that short of thing years ago.
The economy is still knackered though; lol.
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Here's another issue. . .
Is there anything in-game that I actually want to buy with Zen, or am I just after gamblebox keys? Everything worth having seems to be either encased in an outrageously priced Zen bundle or tied up in a lockbox. My 1.4M DIL won't put a dent in a Legendary bundle, and won't get me enough keys to get the Big Item (whatever it may be) from the lockboxes. There's simply nothing worth BUYING.
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Well at least not until they all end up in a Mudd's Market bundle then you just have to wait for the sale....only to see them nerf whatever ship and console it came with a little while down the line.
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I kind of find myself of two minds when it comes to Spencer's response video here. On the one hand, I think there are some well reasoned counter-arguments being presented here, and Spencer does acknowledge that as the Community Manager, Kael is not the guy doing the leg work behind the scenes and given the sensitivity of the topic he's likely been "encouraged" to keep the chatter on the topic to a minimum unless and/or until a formal plan is in place to respond if deemed necessary (e.g., removing AFK'ing from SB1, revisions to the TOS, etc.).
The part I find myself questioning though is Spencer's reaction to Kael's "metrics" comment. As someone that quite regularly gets involved in design consulting for metrics, KPIs, dashboards, and the like for my company, "metrics" are quite often hailed as the pulse of any business, spawning adages such as "what isn't measured isn't managed". Metrics drive behaviors in business, whether it is high level revenues vs. expenditures, widgets and scrap produced counting for manufacturing ventures, headcounts, hiring and terminations in HR, or any number of other numbers out there. As your business grows more middle management layers of bureaucracy, metrics and how to tweak them up or down tends to become more and more the focus of that mid-level bureaucracy. Thus, part of me is willing to give Kael the benefit of the doubt that his offhand comment may have not had anything to do with the bot piece specifically and just reflects the realities of life in the corporate machine. I'm not saying that it isn't related to the bot response and any coaching Kael may have received from higher up in the Cryptic corporate ladder around the topic, but it felt like Spencer may have overemphasized that particular part of his response on what may be somewhat more uncertain logical reasoning.
I also would note that since metrics do tend to drive management behaviors in business, it may be an opportunity for Cryptic to step back and reevaluate whether their metrics are the ones they need to drive the appropriate directions for their business, but that's a whole other can of worms and not worth ranting about here.
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Let's just say if any other company says their metrics show this and that I tend to believe them, but with Cryptic no chance and every time they mention their metrics I could explode.
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