Dilithium weekend debacle and cryptics reply

Quote from salamiinferno

First of all, I would like to apologize on behalf of the Star Trek Online team for the incorrect information posted in the Dilithium Weekend blog and the confusion that followed. Even though the in-game calendar text for the event is correct, we should have made doubly sure that the text in the blog was also correct. We have indeed adjusted the Dilithium Weekend. Unfortunately, the blog did not have the updated event information. I’m going to take it a moment to fully explain these changes and hopefully help everyone understand why these changes were made.

Our goal for the Dilithium Weekend is to provide the community of Star Trek Online with the opportunity to earn Dilithium at a significantly increased rate on any Dilithium earned through play for the duration of the weekend. As the event had been run over the last couple of years, we noticed a trend that fell out of line with the goal of players getting bonus Dilithium on anything they’ve earned through play over that weekend. While the earn rates for Dilithium remained fairly constant for any type of content that provided it as a reward, the earn rate for Dilithium that was collected using the mark conversion projects during the event skyrocketed. When we allowed mark conversion projects to gain a bonus during the Dilithium event, the vast majority of people were only using mark conversion projects during the event. By not offering a bonus on these projects, we are making mark conversion projects valid and valuable all the time, not only during the few Dilithium Weekends we run every year. We are committed to making sure that Dilithium is more available in game, and to that end we are currently working to introduce Dilithium rewards to episode and patrol play by the end of this month.

With that being said, it is understandably frustrating to expect one sort of bonus only to receive another. In order to make up for this error in communication, I will be converting the Dilithium Weekend we are running this weekend into a Dilithium Week. Everyone that logs into Star Trek Online can now earn Dilithium at an improved rate from the time you read this post through February 12th 2015 at 10 a.m. Again, I apologize for the lack of proper information in the blog and I look forward to seeing you in game and earning bonus Dilithium for an entire week.

Stephen Ricossa
Executive Producer

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my comment to him:

Quote from swatop;22137631

ok... fine
let me tell you why i think your comment is not true

You said that the rates at which players earn dilithium remained the same over all that time. How is that possible after you practically have nerfed all the rewards in this game?
How is that possible after you guys have increased the difficulty scales of the PVEs... putting fail conditions on them... and making them so incredible hard that many players can no longer win them?
The dilithium rewards did not stay stable.
If I want to earn dilithium via PVE (just like i used to do long time ago) I have to have an uber expensive ship with expensive upgraded weapons and then i need much luck in order to find a team that is able to do this PVE.
The dilithium rewards for playing regular content dropped massively for MANY players in the game. Players also need much more time to get their rewards these days due to ridiculous difficulty scales where NPCs have millions of HP.

Next to that do "stable" rewards not mean there are good rewards at all.
Fact is over the past months the dilithium costs throughout the entire game exploded.
Players required to upgrade their ships.... player required to upgrade their ship equipment... players require to upgrade their weapons... and pretty much everytime a player want to try a new weapon this weapon has to be upgraded again to be any effective in combat.
Just alone the upgrades consume millions of dilithium for just one single char (here i am not even taking into account that most players have multiple chars -> which they meanwhile abbandon because they can not cover the costs anymore).
With every new character... with every new item that a player want to "try" the upgrade costs raise.... and we are not talking about just a few thousand dil.
We are really talking about millions of dilithium that players additionally have to earn in order to be competative in this game.
And you tell us something about stable rewards?

How stable are these rewards if players can not earn them because they dont do enough dps to play adv. or elite missions any longer?`
How stable are the rewards when people which can not win adv. and elite matches are also locked out from earning the larger amounts of reputation marks and the elite reputation marks?

Players earn less than they used to and at the same time all the costs in this game increased massivle.
And now you take away one of the very few remaining ways to earn good amounts of dilithium.

You want to add dilithium to story missions?
ok go ahead... but be sure that this will absolutely not change anything on the ingame earn rates you were talking about.
Fact is that players have only a limited amount of time to play... either they earn their dilithium on PVEs or they earn the dilithium on story missions.
The amount of time the players spend in the game wont change. Questionable is if you can offer rewards high enough to allow players earning more dilithium in this limited amount of time.
(most likely not)

But to stick with the current mess... it was a very bad move to remove the dilithium rewards for the above reasons. But worse was actually the way how you did it.
You could have long ago announced such plans so players would have grinded for this event. You could have played with open cards. You could have said... "hey guys... we will do a dil bonus even in a few weeks but we will have to change the rewards a bit".
Or you could have let the players do this event just like all the dil bonus events before and after that announced the changes for future events of this kind.
But doing such a sneaking change right when the event started is so.... disgusting.
Really it is disgusting to let the players believe everything is find and make them looking forward to the event... while then you silently do such terrible changes.
The trust between players and cryptic was already damaged before this incident but now its totally broken.

Turning the dilithium weekend in to a full week now clearly does not compensate what players potentially have lost.
If you were up for compensation and showing good will you would have told your developers to do an emergency fix to restore the original content.
Maybe you have not noticed yet.... we have another event running atm. Time is limited.

sorry salamiinferno... you had no good start here and players are more angry than ever before

btw. why are you guys so overly sensitive about how much dilithium ore players earn?
There is a limit at which rate they can convert the ore.
It does not matter if a player has 100k dilithium or 20mio dilithium.... there is this damn limit which prevents the players to convert more than allowed.
There is absolutely no risk for cryptic because of this limit... but once more you guys overreact.

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a few more days to do even more grind wont make a big difference

ist bestenfalls ne frechheit die cryptic mit den spielern abzieht

wenn man den bonus hätte entfernen wollen so hätte man dies auch offen mit den spielern im vorfeld kommunizieren sollen
und nicht die spieler täuschen

alle paar wochen wird neuer mist einführt der noch mehr dil kostet... der schwierigkeitsgrad der missionen ist bereits unerträglich geworden und die sprechen noch immer von stabilen dilithium belohnungen
das ist ja wohl ein witz

und das dilithium event um 3 tage zu verlängern kann ja auch nicht die lösung sein.... immerhin läuft ja derzeit auch noch das geburtstags event und eben da werden diese 3 tage wieder fehlen

naja... wir gehen dann halt dinos killen