No challenge in pve, thats why we pvp, Except the new No win senario.

I guess why most people don't pvp is because they already struggle with the most basic pve missions with their bad setups, and don't bother reading other peoples guides to even make that easy.
Pvp is all about seeking to improve yourself or your own ship in this case increase the knowleage of what the skills powers do and make intresting builds with skills/doffs.

Then really good premade vs premade is even more fun when you have 10 people who try to push their outmost to win. Sad Pandas vs Tsi ... 22kdps on each team with 8k healing per second. Matches that usualy take 20 minutes but can go as far as 1 hour.

I wish more people would be interested in really Good pvp if you got an escort or cruiser or whatever learn the basic "approved" builds from pvpers and then try them out and see if you find it fun.

Imo pvp is too small and requires at least 10vs10 maps which are large, have natural obsticals which can help or hinder battle (think of klingon academy stuff). A pvp ranking system i.e points for kills, that keeps track of being a nobody to being someone of legendary status with full stat tracking like u would see in bf3 type of pvp system.

5vs5 or whatever and a map with barely anything in that just might look pretty but thats it isnt going to cut it thats like bare bones indie game stuff.

You want good pvp, get stats, medals, rewards, skins, gear, 10vs10 or 15vs15 or 20vs20 maps with functionality over visuals first and foremost. I reckon that kinda of pvp system would be more welcome than what is currently ingame right now. Also remove spawning in pvp you are playing ppl not pve so once ur killed thats it till next round imo.

Oh and a new lobby system would be nice, a dedicated ui system for creating pvp matches, chat windows for em, see what ships each person has and some stats. This would be nice as well.

The No Win Scenario isn't "challenging", it's just dumb as hell and it's continuing the NPC tradition of translating the word "difficulty" to "insta-death torps + 9,000 trillion hit points". No one is going to be remotely challenged by No Win because it's always easy to counter silly hp tanks or one-shotters (did you know that you can glitch Donatra's torps in Khitomer into killing herself)?

You're never going to get the real thrill of fighting other players from PvE, but a good start would be to stop creating dumb placid cows for NPCs. Why aren't all NPC ships like the Mogais or the bugged D'deridex? Why do so few of them bother using BO powers? It boggles the mind.

To be fair, 99.9% of MMORPG NPC AI is pathetic out there (I say that % because there's probably 1 title out there that has clever AI). The only reason why something is considered hard is usually a few things.

A) NPCs / Bosses have ridiculous health
B) NPCs / Bosses use cheap attacks, i.e. random insta-kill on a single player within range, or truly massive AOE.
C) Endless call-in of high end NPC helpers to overwhelm the player(s)

I haven't seen an MMORPG where the NPCs or even the bosses are skillful in ability selection, maneuvers/movement, etc. than what a player could provide as an opponent. NPCs/Bosses, like I said, just use mega cheapshots to win. Even in games where there's a harder difficulty, all it usually means is an increase in the 3 points I listed above, though with extra cheese.

A player though, that's a different story. You don't know their skill unless you're familiar with that name. They could suck or they could be good, or worse, way out of your league in PvP skill. That's the beauty of PVP. You're not too sure unless you know what you're about to face, like expecting premade vs premade.

In PVE, *any* build can work. In PVP, not all builds can work. Find an effective one, practice, get owned, tweak your build and/or skill with it. Part of the fun if finding a sweet spot style to suit your way of playing and still be effective.

As long as a new PVPer goes in with the mindset that "I'm going to get f**ked up hard, but hopefully get a win" and learn from the matches, then you'll get better. Expect to get killed quickly if you are not on your toes. There's escorts out there that will kill you within a few heartbeats if you are not ready.

A good PVP match with its dynamic flow, movements, and sometimes unorthodox tactics by players are far more dynamic than anything the cheesiest, cheapest AI can ever provide.

That's why I PvP in this game.

If only Cryptic had devoted time and effort to expand upon PVP, it would have been better. PvP has received almost no attention at all. Like I said in my earlier post in this thread, only 1 thing has received less development time, love, and effort from Cryptic than the KDF faction, and that's PVP. Frankly, it's been ignored.

And Cryptic wonders why PVP is in the state that it's in after 2 years of the game going live?

/baffled

I concur with server recognition of the best PVPers. FPS games even do this, like alot of the Battlefield games, which track ridiculous amounts of stats for each player.

Larger PVP matches would be better, as well as new locations to fight.

I suggested long ago when this game first came out for a region so the factions can PVP and fight over. Places where we can conquer, defend, setup starbases, or destroy those defenses as the attacker. Give the players a reason to probe around defenses and get a feel of what the enemy has setup. How about a reconaissance mission? Where the deeper you go, the more defenses and forces you ID and stuff, grants you rewards, just for scouting the strengths of the enemy. I even suggested some sort of supply system to keep forward fleets and starbases supplied and effective, and the supply convoys can be attacked by raiding parties (think Birds of Prey groups LOL). Continuous losses of supply convoys rendering remote forces less effective (debuffs) until they're closer to the rear, more defended and supplied regions. When closer to a well supplied friendly zone, the stronger buffs you get (Captain, you're getting a massive stock of torpedoes...). The further you are, the increase debuff due to extended supply lines.

Raids behind enemy lines? Ships designated classified as "raiders" can take missions that occur behind enemy lines. The more damage you cause, and the further behind the frontlines you do this, you get higher rewards. The debuff from being so far from friendly lines is minimal. But the forces you face, especially player ships, can be stronger since they're so deep in friendly territory.

On and on. Those are just some random ideas. Expanding on the idea of war between the Federation and Klingons could be monumental if done right. And if the KDF gets brought fully up to snuff as the Federation, then thrown in a new faction to play, like the Romulans and even a newly aggressive Dominion. Imagine how a dynamic, player run war would be like with these factions.

Warmaker01:
Warhammer has a GREAT model of territorial conquest, where the 'war' sweeps back and forth over large regions, with various strategic points and an ebb and flow of battle that can involve hundreds of people.

I'd love to see something like that.

I know what you're talking about. The foundations of a good player faction war was there.

The mistake their developers made was that getting into instanced PVP was fast and more rewarding. All those regions that were designed for RvR / Realm vs Realm? Unused. Nobody was there. If there was PVP going, it was only in the instances.

I play single player games on godmode quite frequently. Challenge has very little motivation for me.

I refer people to the Bartle types:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test

My experience is that most people are very strongly two out of the four. People tend to be very much put off my one of the four.

Killers and Achievers are demographically TINY parts of MMOs. Assuming no overlap, maybe the two categories put together account for less than one third of players in a typical MMO. These groups tend to have an all consuming worldview, reinforced by socialization within their group and defining "the point of the game" as being to kill or achieve.

Traditionally, MMO developers would operate under the assumption that supporting Killers and Achievers would motivate the rest of the player base. In general, this doesn't seem to be the case. Some games like EvE cater heavily to these types but catering to Killers and Achievers BOTH actively chases away people who hate killing and achievement focused mechanics.

In general, I'd say there are people who hate the very ideas of Killing and Achievement motivated play... and the people who hate that hate it more forcefully than most people hate Exploration and Socialization.

I'd say Killing is the most hated, followed by Achievement, then Socialization (people tend to slur roleplayers), and while not everyone GETS Exploration, I've seldom encountered anyone who hates on it.

Well I agree completely (hence why I said it's not ever really going to be possible to provide a satisfying challenge via PvE). In every game I've played with a multiplayer component I adore the learning process, taking your lumps, figuring out what works and what doesn't, trying out x or y to get your game just that little extra bit stronger, having to adapt to different mechanics, to players with builds or approaches you haven't seen before, etc. I guess I find it sad in STO in particular because it has such a fantastic, deep engine for PvP.

Ultimately, in most MMOs, you're lucky to get one in five people into PvP and most of those are not driven by the Killer mentality. So you get maybe 20% PvPers without designing the game for PvP and most of that 20% is into it for reasons other than killing, primarily.

Achievers value PvP because it has 50% success rate in a balanced game but achievement can skew that number. Explorers who like to PvP get into the math and gimmick builds. Socializers are the least likely group to PvP. STO has a large social community and I suspect probably doesn't hold its weight with exploration-based gameplay because gimmick builds, particularly in ground combat, don't exist, and there is very little in the way of tribal knowledge or hidden areas of the game.

The breakdown of developer interests in these systems rarely reflects the breakdown of player interest in these systems. Developers and PvPers tend to argue that emergent content like PvP takes less resources but it simply doesn't bear out that way. PvP requires extensive balancing and affects all other game systems.

Now, I'm not saying it isn't worthwhile but you ultimately either design a game around PvP or shoot for around one in five players, with PvP targeted mostly at Explorers and Achievers, which means heavy support for interesting gimmicks (lots of creative rock/paper/scissors) and good rewards.

I have more advanced thinking on this but it's going into a work I plan on publishing.