The return of the Defense of Pahvo featured event has brought back the hot button topic that is The Jelly Drama.
Jelly refers to the Cnidarian Defender, a playable starship based on the cosmozoan Star Jellies from TNG’s first season episode, Encounter At Farpoint. The controversy isn’t about how terrible an episode it was–and it was–but because the ship has a mode that makes AFK’ing event missions so easy.
In Jelly Mode, the starshippy version morphs into a literal space jellyfish and emits a huge pink field that heals allies and damages enemies (and eyeballs) with plenty of swirling and lightning effects. The “ship” can barely move in that mode, and its weapons are inactive, but it can still use abilities like Gravity Well.
In game content like the mission Peril Over Pahvo, part of the event running right now, constant waves of enemies attack fixed points. People with the Defender can park themselves at those fixed points and walk away from the computer.
AFK players during grueling event grinds isn’t new. Unlike normal AFK players, a Jelly Mode player is actually contributing by passively obliterating enemies. So people hate on Jelly players, but Jelly players feel like they are doing their part. I’ve always had mixed feelings about using Jelly Mode, but here’s what I told a Reddit poster wondering why all the jelly hate in the current event and how to see both sides:
As a sometime-jelly player, I will say there are three things that bother me and that I try to mitigate for other players when jellying: AFK jellies feel like cheating, robbing other players of kills for endeavors, and visual spam.
For “AFK cheating”, I try to be an active jelly—throwing down gravity wells and dishing out buffs/heals. Do most players even notice? Probably not. But I try. And that should also show up in server logs and help refute reports.
For blocking other players’ progress, like getting dreadnought kills for endeavors in Peril, I try to position myself in a way where people can clearly avoid me or have time to burn down targets before they reach my aura. AND I stifle my natural if invalid feeling that they are kill stealing from ME which I have to admit I feel even as a jelly!
The visual spam thing is my biggest pet peeve with jellying–and much of the game as it is now with out-of-control space magic FX. Again, positioning so players have options to be outside the aura helps, but this really has to be solved across the entire game by Dekka to stop so much gnashing of teeth.
Of course the fundamental problem is the long grinds the game forces on us for TFO themed events. Of course people are going to try to minimize the repetitive loops the rewards force them into. I get that, I feel it too, but at least I try to minimize my impact on other players when trying to reclaim my time from The Grind.