Cryptic needs to add 480 Dilithium to the "Explore 3 Systems" missions. These used to reward Badges of Exploration and Emblems, and now don't reward anything even though those currencies were converted to Dilithium. What gives? Its especially hard to get enough dilithium to buy anything while leveling.

If you mean by Normal, that people become disgruntled and disgusted with the obvious push to the C-Store, being applied to EVERY mechanic of the game... and stop playing...,

Then yeah.. it's Normal.

The explores always absolutely sucked before. The only reason to do them was to get the badges to get gear. But now you can't even do that? Running them once every 24 hours is ridiculous. How are people going to get anything besides white gear at all?

I heard they were adding DL to into missions so players can still buy from the stores. But for the foremost outside of the Explore Strange new Worlds mission, the only reason to do Exploration zones is for the accolades.

Hopefully they are working on an updating the Exploration and DSE missions to make them fun.

what i was talking about when i said normal, was the economy itself, not how people reacted to it

with what i said, the economy stays normal. people's reactions vary widely, as they should

Do you really WANT people playing the exploration missions THAT much in their present state?

They're the one area aside from POSSIBLY Kerrat where, last we heard, the stated intent was to rip them out of the game.

Sure you're not confusing that with DSEs? (Regular, not Borg). Because Exploration Clusters are much better than those boring things.

But still, STO's exploration needs to be actual exploration and not some random mission generator.

The solution is to keep ignoring exploration until a revamp maybe in 2014? I can think of many things I'd rather not subject new players to in their present state.

2014? I imagine it will be revamped by August 2012 and is the next big "systems" project after F2P launches.

So they should unbalance it in the opposite direction, making the game all about getting Dilithium instead of doing missions and exploration? That's how an MMO dies.

I basically see this as the beginning of the end for STO; I pity anyone who bought a lifetime membership. The Badges/Merits/Marks system was very well balanced; the Dilithium System is crap. It's made the game into a Dilithium Grind; all aspects of story-based gameplay have been made trivial.