By now you’ve heard that another set of “game-balancing” changes have been added to this weeks release to Holodeck.  Originally mentioned during the P1 200th podcast, Gecko described changes to XIII and XIV weapons that would see an increase to overall DPS.  He followed up with a longer description via the forum.

I won’t get into the actual numbers here.  They’re confusing even the experts.  But in general a small increase of 23% or more has been noted.

The real question is why?  New records are being set daily by the 1% of players who can afford to make the upgrades and have the skills to effectively use them.

As we play with Winter Wonderland (It’s the most fun you’ll have in STO at the moment), it’s hard not to notice that the queues are not just empty.  It’s still a ghost town.  Even private queues are difficult to fill during normally busy times of the day.   I have all but given up pugging.

The general consensus is that the changes dropped with DR (difficulty, XP, progression, goal posts, and the impression that you need to upgrade and buy new $hips to compete) has driven a portion of the player base away.  While we don’t expect an overnight patch solution, do you think another boost to dps is the solution to bring players back – or – I$ it a way to make upgrading more palatable to the remaining player$?

Given the dysfunctional state of of game balance today, would it not be wiser to:

1. Roll back some of the difficulty within the STF’s (not all, but some)
2. Add 20% more time to required objectives
3. Make optional goals actually ‘optional’, or rename them ‘required objectives’
4. Add incentives to the queues again, with at least 1 random drop of a superior universal upgrade in advanced – or better yet – a random enhanced superior universal upgrade bound on pick-up.
5. Fix the Benthan stage in The Battle of Korfez.  Using BoB (Bail on Benthan) is NOT an a reasonable solution.

Come on Cryptic – you can do better.