Cryptic’s been starting to address some of the grinding missions in the Foundry by un-publishing some and in some cases revoking some players’ Foundry access, see Wishtone’s post for an excellent summary. I like that they’re policing the published missions, and I originally though revoking player access is a bit heavy handed until I saw Wishstone’s post which implies that only players who were republishing removed missions were affected. She doesn’t say, but I assume that it’s a temporary measure until fixes are applied to Tribble and Holodeck.
Speaking of which the first patches to remove the exploitive mechanics that are now on Tribble:
Ship explosions will now only effect a maximum of 5 targets.
Apparently some of the missions that allowed players to level quickly relied on spawning a ton of ships on top of you and then blowing up as a result of the warp core breach from your own ship dieing. Â Someone further down in the thread asks if this is related to Foundry exploit missions and Salami_Inferno, the associate producer, confirms that it is.
I’m very please to see them addressing these issues. I hope that some of the suggestions regarding adding categories and tags to missions to help with searching will get implemented quickly as well.
Yup, better mission search should be top priority besides fixing exploitive abuse.
There are missions that, probably not only in my opinion, surpass everything that Cryptic themselves delivered so far. But finding them is very tricky. You can find “The Worst of All Worlds” by Captain Revo because it got many ratings and good word of mouth from Foundry days, but many others like “Conjoined” and “Nine of Space Deep” (especially this one, who would imagine this is a good mission after reading the silly name?) are not that easily found.
I go looking under “hot” as the good missions should all inevitably find themselves there. Using “top rated” to sort isn’t so helpful, as it doesn’t take into account total number of ratings.
Yeah, “Top Rated” isn’t that good a metric. But the problem with “Hot” is that it’s self-generating — people play the Hottest missions, and therefore the Hottest missions stay hot. It’s a good tool to find what’s popular, but not necessarily good, and especially not new.
I’m glad Cryptic moved pretty quickly on this, and that their stance is now out in the open. It’ll be impossible to keep exploit missions away all the time, always, but so long as those exploitive missions don’t crowd out truly excellent player-made content, I’m not too concerned.
In the meantime, I’ll have to look up the missions that Longasc recommended; “Conjoined” has been on my list, but “Nine of Space Deep”‘s silly name had put me off. I’ll have to give it a shot.
Sigh…this is why we (well, really, just some of us ) can’t have nice things.