8:19 AM - Blaine: I see someone's had a weekend to contemplate the ramifications of playing space lizard Barbie
8:19 AM - Lizard King: Mostly gardening, but that was in the background
8:19 AM - Lizard King: "Oh no I can't refine me 8k dilithium on the weekend... wait do I still care?"
8:20 AM - Blaine: The instructions, simply put, are to run those instances about six times per day, per pylon; and something about not actually using marks except on certain characters, but hoarding them instead
8:21 AM - Blaine: Because it's better for other characters to get sponsored and rank up at half-cost, once a given pylon maxes out a few
8:21 AM - Lizard King: Where is this shit even going? At least Warframe had raids and sorties; unique challenges with unique rewards. The fuck are we aiming for on STO? Doing the exactly same thing on a higher difficulty to just get even more dil?
8:22 AM - Blaine: Yeah, pretty much
8:22 AM - Lizard King: Might as well just go back to playing Overload since I still get to shoot ships but don't need help from whales or to spend 5 hours cycling characters
8:22 AM - Blaine: The thing is, once you do have a bunch of pylons with a sort of personal economy, I'm sure it's interesting to try different builds and play Barbie with characters and ships
8:23 AM - Lizard King: What in 6 months time?
8:23 AM - Blaine: Yeah, as far as I can tell
8:23 AM - Blaine: It's nothing I hadn't suspected two weeks ago, and the game's critical weakness really
8:23 AM - Lizard King: If it didn't take as long it might be worth it, but I think it's far too much work for too little payoff
8:24 AM - Blaine: Did you know that some of those epic MkXVs do 4x the damage of rare XIIs?
8:24 AM - Lizard King: Yeah, the damage scaling is bonkers after XII
8:24 AM - Blaine: It's a slow linear creep from 0-XII, then suddenly, ZWOOP
8:25 AM - Lizard King: Of course even trying to get that done before you've done your prerequisite 6 months in gulag character hell is pointless
8:25 AM - Blaine: Even Norfleet flat-out said there's no point in attempting to play until you're kitted out with gold XVs while I was touring some bridges this weekend, not that I didn't know that already
8:26 AM - Blaine: Well, you can pay for Jewbux and use those, of course, although getting golden guns from the Exchange is a huge ripoff compared to how much it costs someone like Norfleet to make them, he says it costs him the equivalent of 3-7m EC per gun, whereas on the Exchange they start at 20m EC and go upwards from there
8:27 AM - Blaine: Bear in mind that Norfleet actually advised me not to play this game, lol
8:27 AM - Lizard King: If I was going to spend money I'd prefer to just spend it on something non-shit
8:27 AM - Blaine: Yeah
8:27 AM - Lizard King: Instead of basically paying to not play the game
8:28 AM - Blaine: If there were anything to do but suicide leech PvE queues in the meantime, they might get me to pay, but as it is, there isn't... possibly doffing, but that would at the least require five or more like fifteen more pylons to do turn-ins, and efficient actual doffing on about half a dozen pylons
8:29 AM - Lizard King: Yeah. And even when we're geared up, we'll STILL be doing that stuff, because as far as I can tell, there isn't really anything else
8:30 AM - Blaine: With twenty pylons turning in 100 cat foot per day, that's 40k dil per day just from doffing, which is enough to buy just north of two (pack) ships per month
8:30 AM - Blaine: I finally figured out exactly what he means by pack-breaking
8:31 AM - Blaine: You can only resell keys, ship upgrades, fleet modules, and lobi boxes on the exchange, nothing else
8:31 AM - Blaine: In terms of premium shit
8:31 AM - Blaine: The idea is to save up dil until you can afford an entire ship pack, of 3 at least, preferably on sale, then buy that
8:32 AM - Blaine: Because if you buy just one, it ends up costing 3k Z instead of 2k, and then later, if you do buy the pack containing that ship, you're really only getting two ships from pack, since each is an account-wide unlock reclaimable at any time
8:33 AM - Blaine: So in essence, you simply don't get the one ship from that pack that you bought at a previous time, because you've already got it
8:33 AM - Blaine: And there's no factored-in additional discount based on what you already have
8:33 AM - Blaine: Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life from people running a F2P game, I should add
8:34 AM - Lizard King: Not exactly encouraging is it
8:35 AM - Blaine: No, not particularly
8:36 AM - Blaine: If we for example bought the featured Gamma Vanguard pack, we would still need to get weapons and other equipment for it, which even if we paid Norfleet to make them at-cost for us, would come out to...
8:36 AM - Lizard King: Too much
8:37 AM - Blaine: Let's say between 500k-700k dil/~2500z
8:37 AM - Blaine: Or 100m EC
8:38 AM - Blaine: So again that's about three weeks of several hours per day suicide leeching queues, ameliorated/augmented by whatever else you do to get dil in the meantime
8:39 AM - Blaine: There is no great secret to the dil part, Norfleet's secrets are all powerleveling and having a whole lot of characters, nothing more
8:39 AM - Lizard King: And only after doing that for hours each day are you allowed to try and have fun
8:40 AM - Lizard King: But again, you're probably just doing the same missions you've done a billion times already, except now you can shoot stuff too, wheeeee
8:42 AM - Blaine: Well, I mean, you could pay an additional ~$20 for 2000z to offset that cost as well, then slather your first choice of the ten ships from the pack (which are account-wide, so there's that) in golds after only a few more days of dil-gathering and conversion
8:42 AM - Blaine: And strictly speaking, only the junior pack is really needed
8:42 AM - Blaine: So you're looking at about $40 US
8:42 AM - Blaine: But yeah, it's still gay even if you have your outfitted ship
8:43 AM - Lizard King: I can't tell if you're playing devil's advocate, trying to get me to play some more, or just carrying on the conversaion
8:43 AM - Lizard King: Because fwiw I'm not convinced
8:43 AM - Blaine: Layout out the facts and options, nothing more
8:44 AM - Blaine: Personally, I'm leaning towards getting out while the getting's good, because not only is it an all-or-nothing F2P proposition, we can't even tell if the payoff is worthwhile
8:45 AM - Blaine: The simple fact is that a guy who clearly knows the game in and out has just told us to grind queues that we can't even participate in for three weeks over and over again, and preferably also not together, since being together increases the number of useless leeches in the instance
8:45 AM - Blaine: It's not exactly a convincing pitch
8:47 AM - Lizard King: I was gone from it for 3 days, and couldn't give a single fuck about getting back into it again. Usually if I miss something for a few days I want to jump back in. Not this time.
8:47 AM - Lizard King: If there was some actual interesting content to aim for that needed decent equipment, maybe
8:47 AM - Blaine: I figured you'd gain some perspective while you were on hiatus, one way or the other