The problem that is cryonite.

[Dakahn]

Everyone has a few problems with Pirate Galaxy. That is no secret. The delay on Tau Ceti and the long time it requires to grind a parsec class ship are two prime examples.


Here are a few of the problems that I see in the status quo:

1. The Tau Ceti problem.
Whole planets are being developed for events which later disappear, yet we are supposed to believe that it takes years to make one system?


2. Cryonite.

It takes too long to grind cryo. There are things outside of this game to do. I'm not asking for a free ride, all I want is a stable way to grind cryo that wont take months and months on end just to buy one ship.

Another part of the cryonite issue is the cryo drop reduction. Although the amount is said to cap at 20%, it seems to be much larger than that. It seems off that i can grind more efficiently on earth with a draconis sniper, than on gazica with a sirius myst.



Some suggestions to alleviate the distaste for the current situation:

1. Increase the cryonite drops that are in Tau Ceti currently. (Rebalance enemies if required)

The drops would have to be balanced in a way that gave incentives (better than harving) however had an opportunity cost (requiring an ancient ship or a parsec). This would provide entertainment to those who are most affected by the Tau Ceti delay (r85's).


2. Temporarily remove the cryonite reduction.

This would last until the actual release of Tau Ceti and be enacted as an appeasement measure. This would not reduce funding to splitscreen either, as more people would want to utilize the temporary increase in efficiency.


I can further expound on my ideas if required in later posts.

To forum moderators: Would this be better sent to Splitscreen support, or will the developers hear my suggestion through this avenue?

Thanks for reading,
Dakahn

 

[Necrofly]

Forum posts with suggestions (like the one you just did) are a good way to get heard

 

[ZeribreX]

if you grind in Sirius for cryonite it won't take you months on end to get one ship. Had someone in my clan go from Bulkwark Parsec to fully armored/teched in a week due to him just killing things in Sirius, he was in a 70 ship with Sirius tech. If you have an 85 ship then you have an even easier ride through. Just solo the med/strong units or RTs if you can and you'll be loaded with cryo in no time.

 

[cargone96]

It may be theoretically possible to get prototypes quickly, but that is not the problem Dakahn mentioned. The problem is getting them in a decent amount of playing time. If using a myst in sirius without cryonite boosters, and while getting an average of 20k cryonite per hour (which requires extremely good luck), it would take approximately 150 hours to finish a parsec with all-ancient tech, from bulwark (without buying the ship). If the game is played twenty-four hours a day, then only six days would be required to build it. HOWEVER, for players like me who spend two hours a day or less grinding, it would take a minimum of two and a half months. It would take even longer seeming as I am only playing this much due to having a break from schoolwork.

I personally am using an r70 ENGINEER in sirius, so I don't see how I would be able to do that. These cryonite grinding numbers per hour are from dakahn (my brother). If I were to grind solo in sirius, I would make absolutely nothing. Surviving through anything other than a shysis fight in r5 is impossible. I had to spend 400k to buy a draconis sniper so that I could grind on earth, and the earth harvs are nearly always taken. Also, the 400k that I spent on the sniper was nearly all of the cryonite I got from rank 72 to 85, which took me over a month and a half.

Also, grinding for so long for a prototype seems counter-productive at the moment, because mysts can survive better than dominators, and punishers have as much health as dominators and deal more damage than a hunter/parsec/disruptor can. Mutilators are still fairly good because they provide good team healing while still dealing damage, but many people do not have the blueprints for it, and it costs around $100 to buy with gold. The obsidian is useful for PvP and for (once again) grinding. The Black Granite is the best tank that has been released so far, but nearly no one that I know of spent the time on the event to try to get it because of the large amount of time it took. Two of my clan mates decided to do the mission for it, and it took them ten hours to get it for both of them. As for the constructor, not many people are interested in engineers, and even those who are would most likely prefer a ghost or something like that because ancient ships are so much cheaper. I don't want a constructor because I don't see how having a 50% armor boost on a ship is worth spending half a year doing almost nothing on pirate galaxy other than grinding.

Summary: Some people do not have the time or means to grind cryonite for a prototype, nor is it worth the effort at the moment for most of the available prototypes.

 

[ZeribreX]

And that reason alone about you saying you used an engi is why I always mention to quite a lot of people, 'never start out with support ships even if that's the class you main, always start out with a grinding ship that way you can grind out the cryo for the support ships a lot quicker.' There is someone on Solaria called Northstar, he went the whole game rank 1-85 in just Stun ships, he had a Terrorizer by rank 60 and that took him about 3 weeks, in a stun ship. Also I'm not sure why people think grinding always means going to harv fields. You could go on Hive and try find golds while getting 200-300 cryo per drop that has a 13% reduced chance. In one day, 7 hours whilst rare hunting on Hive I also managed to grind out about 250k. Another good spot I like to do is Lustra, go in anything higher than a Sol ship or stay in one if you don't have membership then go to any harv field and one shot the harvs, the cry drop rate is a lot higher so the 20% doesn't seem to do much and the harvs respawn as quick as you kill them most of the time. Even doing whites can net you a ton of cryo if you have the patience and friends to do them. Going from Vega-Earth will get you about 250k not including cryo gotten from drops. You could probably do that in a day also.

 

[cargone96]

My point in bringing up the engineer in my first post was to emphasize that I am not able to grind in sirius. I literally did not leave sirius from r72 to r78, so you can guess how much grinding I did then. However, I had a sol sniper with draconis tech on it, and could grind with that. Also, I have managed to buy a draconis sniper, and can now grind 20k an hour on earth. I have gone to hive for cryo hunting, and it doesn't work as far as I've seen. Cryo drops are not 200-300, they are around 100-185 at most unless you are using a cryonite booster. In order to get 250k in 7 hours without a cryonite booster, assuming you are constantly killing nothing but custodian commanders and signors (highest drop quantities), you would have to get one cryonite drop every fifteen seconds, without any travel time at all, to get 35k per hour. I went to hive recently, and couldn't even drop one per minute. I have kenyte tech on my engineer (17% drop reduction), and I can two-shot basically anything there, so the speed at which I kill enemies shouldn't be a problem.

I can get a little less than 20k an hour on moli harvs by two-shotting them with my zp-power tech sol sniper, so getting up to a drac sniper is possible with grinding time. This is the method I have used for a while now since I wanted to try it out. If I spent all of my playing time grinding there, it would take me around three weeks to get a fully-teched draconis ship, which could be worse. The problem is the cryo drop numbers don't change after buying a draconis ship. I get 20k an hour on earth with drac tech, I get 20k an hour on molikar, and Dakahn gets less than 20k an hour grinding in sirius, meaning that having better tech basically doesn't effect cryonite grinding. Grinding for a prototype would take 184 hours, which for me would equal around six months of spending half of my time grinding, though in reality it would take a little less than that since summer break will come before then. However, be it six months or four months, that is still too long to spend on one ship, and that amount of time does not shorten even after buying higher tech.

I support dakahn's idea of rebalancing the current tau ceti, but maybe add an instance-type program so that each clan gets their own set of enemies to kill, and balance the enemies in a way that makes them hard to kill, but worth killing due to large and consistent cryo drops that allow grinding above 20k per hour for those of us who don't have cryonite refiners. (and yes, I am assuming that it will be a group effort to kill each enemy.)

Side note: Having a terrorizer and having a fully-teched sirius terrorizer are two completely different things. Grinding for three weeks, spending a little under 1hr 35min a day at 20k per hour gets a terrorizer shell, which is what it sounds like you are saying that individual got. However, at the same rate, a sirius ancient tech terrorizer would take three and a half months to grind for, which is still too long for a single ship.

 

[Gon]

Welcome to grind galaxy. Unfortunately, most(not all) people here won't understand that people like you or me don't have time to grind more than 30-40k cryo per day because most of people here are one's with few parsec class ships and hybrids because they spend much more than 5 hour per day for grinding. This game is designed for people like that, ravendynamics ships are proof for this because it made dominator and parsec useless, however domi have bigger problems because black granite is far much better than domi. Now domi is just obsolete and worthless. Waste of time. Advice: if you want to buy a parsec class ship, buy only black granite or obsidian. Or better: don't waste time on this game, it's not worth it anymore because ssg can make any parsec class ship worthless when they add much better prototypes next time. You should be happy that you didn't buy any parsec class before that update.

 

[Joe-Bob]

I agree with these ideas...it would give people a reason to actually go to Tau Ceti, and give bored players something new (and productive) to do. It might also give incentive to ssg to make something out of TC before everyone grinds the cryo to build every ship they want while the reduction penalties are gone.

Post by ZeribreX » Fri Dec 27, 2013 1:00 pm

if you grind in Sirius for cryonite it won't take you months on end to get one ship. Had someone in my clan go from Bulkwark Parsec to fully armored/teched in a week due to him just killing things in Sirius, he was in a 70 ship with Sirius tech.

The only way this would be possible is if they grinded 20-22k an hour 24/7 for a whole week straight (literally. you can do the math.) Its more likely that they had several 100k cryo saved up prior to "starting" at the beginning of the week...in any case, its unrealistic to compare a player with this much time for a game to...well, the rest of the server lol

 

[Dakahn]

Thank you all for your feedback, whether you agree or disagree. The only way that we will attract the attention of the developers is with a constructive conversation that provides all sides of the argument.

The goal of the changes was to make cryonite grinding feasible for those who have a limited amount of time. I personally see the 9 million cryonite that i need to grind to get the ships i want (punisher, obsidian, and mutilator) and groan and wonder whether it's worth the time or not.

Also as previously pointed out, adding incentives to grinding in Tau Ceti would not only add entertainment for those of us at the top of the game, but also reward players for reaching that top tier. Currently the best cryonite grinding is achieved either with a punisher on ring 5 or with a draconis sniper on earth. Both of these methods produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 20k an hr (perhaps more with the punisher, but cryo drops in sirius are sporadic, which makes the draconis sniper the most stable). It would make sense to provide an increased grinding capacity to those who need more cryonite.

Again, thank you all for your input to my suggestion.
Dakahn

 

[WRAITH1]

i agree the game is not tailored to "normal" players ... i have time to play and still due to the boredom of it all i tend to play less and less lately.

i have simpathy for a "normal" player average 2 hours or less per day and i saw many quit after reaching sirius and seeing its not the promised land and most fun ends and only non stop grinding starts.

i know of games tht failed to notice in time tht its a disadvantage to have low/unreasonable game income and now in despearation even doubled the game currency reward to keep their players from leaving....
ppl leaving ud think is no big deal new "fools" born each day but usually its not only them never really regaining "appetite" for tht game but their "word of mouth" bad advertising has chance to prevent even many others from ever trying tht game ... so even some desperate changes sometime may come to late .

 

[Gon]

"Normal" players quit and this is inevitable. It's nice that someone understand that not everyone play this game 24/7. On sirius most of players are people who invest huge amount of time for this game and these players won't leave no matter what happen. I'm a "normal" player and I already quitted. ssg won't close this game, it's 99% sure, but there's no chance for this game to get any interest. From Vega to Mizar it's a great game. Sol is also ok. When Draconis was released, this game turned into grind galaxy. On lower systems sometimes you can see more 85-70r players than players who just arrived to gemini/mizar/sol. There's probably no hope for this game anymore. I would like to even play sometimes... but why? To make myself bored or annoyed?

 

[Lazerbolt]

It is also a problem for young children like me. My parents only lets me use cpu on weekends and on top of that, only a few hours. Now, at that rate, How long do you think it would take me to get a Parsec?

 

[spocklet]

The problem isn't just cryonite, it's player interest too. Now I've been playing this game some 4-5 years, on and off, but my interest kinda 'fell off the roof' when I lost my big pilot when ownership of the game moved from Gamigo to Splitscreen, and my pilot wasn't moved across with it. The same thing happened to several other players too I understand, and our accounts remained languishing on the Gamigo servers, forever out of our reach !!

So these days you'll find my (currently) level 17 ship grinding away in some part of the Aurora landscape. Where once I had the will and determination to become a high level player (and lvl 44 was high level in those days), now I just come in to grind and help new players with advice about the game !!