QuoteDisplay MoreAs part of the recent Delta Rising expansion released for Star Trek Online, PvE queues underwent a major overhaul to follow a new difficulty schema – providing for interesting challenges as players advanced to the new maximum rank of Fleet Admiral. Unfortunately, our first attempts at updating difficulty have not been universally successful and as a result we will be working towards bringing the challenge of these queues in line with where we think they should be.
The key change in difficulty to the PvE queues was the addition of failure conditions for Advanced and Elite difficulties. Since the release of Delta Rising, we’ve been monitoring several key metrics regarding player experiences in STO, including player success rates for each queue. Adding failure conditions to queues was meant to add a challenge to them and so no advanced or elite queues should have a 100% success rate. At the same time, however, we don’t expect any queue to have a success rate that is so low that players who are appropriately geared will never experience a successful run.
We have already started making adjustments to content throughout STO in order to tune difficulty. Most recently there was an update to the modifiers applied to critter health and damage output for advance difficulty (not just for queues but also for solo content played with the difficulty slider set to this value). There are more, similar changes planned that will continue to tune these critter modifiers. Additionally, PvE queues will be evaluated on a per queue basis and potentially have their mission requirements, critter spawns or other aspects updated to help tune their specific difficulties.
This will be an ongoing process – one that we hope we can resolve quickly but we think it is much more important to have our changes be the right ones. We will continue to communicate with the players about all these updates as they occur.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
