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Foundry Sunset, April 11th, 2019

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  • helixfungushelixfungus Member Posts: 172 Arc User
    Very bad, bad and sad decision. The Foundry is in fact the only thing that keep me attached to this buggy lame game. I wrote several missions, and enjoyed the Foundry and its community so much. Some of the best stories in the game are in the Foundry, and the runners of STO did all the possible to chunk it down season after season. I concour with Matt Johnson. Never again to throw a penny into it anymore. And this news brings ferociously the will to erase the game from my PC on April 11, and never look or turn back.
  • nickcastletonnickcastleton Member Posts: 1,212 Arc User
    Yay, a literal Birthday present for me!

    Not surprised by this move at all. Ambassador Kael mentioned, when asked about the Foundry a few weeks ago on a livestream or Priority One Podcast, that the Foundry was used by like less then 40% of the playerbase.
    Well when they put almost no effort into a system and make it difficult to not only create but to find said missions people wont bother.

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    "It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
  • themadprofessor#9835 themadprofessor Member Posts: 1,203 Arc User
    I'm not surprised that it is going away. Given the clunkiness of the whole interface and the lack of intellectual resources (the article did intimate that the people who really knew the nuances of the program were no longer there), it was inevitable.

    That said, I sincerely hope that this isn't the end of the Foundry system as a concept, but is instead more of a clearing away of the entire thing to allow for a fresh start with a new, scratch-built version. It's actually a sound practice to do that. You remove the old stuff, patch the holes, streamline the main process, then build a new shell to fit the current system. Basically, you'd be creating an add-on to fit the main system instead of trying to tailor and tweak the main system to match an add-on.

    I have my doubts that it's the case, but it would be nice.
    Space Barbie Extraordinaire. Got a question about Space Barbie? Just ask.

    Things I want in STO:

    1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
    2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
    3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
    4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
    5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
    6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
    7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
    8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
  • stlheestlhee Member Posts: 114 Arc User
    Unbelievable. Its the worst decision, ever, A shame. A nail... you know where.
    I'm thinking about... no, I planned to buy a LTS, and now, why should pay? Its not worth anymore for the half of the game. A lot of contents has removed recently: many good missions from Klingon-arc and now the whole Foundry. And they never come back. I don't understand why they do this. They would leave playable all foundry mission...
    Somebody said doom. Yes, its a sad day for us. The last part of the game's agony has begun.
    RIP Foundry. RIP Endeavour. RIP Star Trek Online. We never forget you. And sorry about my grammar.
  • crypticarmsmancrypticarmsman Member Posts: 4,100 Arc User
    edited March 2019
    (flame/troll/name and shame removed) - darkbladejk
    Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012
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    PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
  • iamynaughtiamynaught Member Posts: 1,285 Arc User
    So this is the way Cryptic is going to keep us from getting our Endeavors done in a timely manner? Wow, talk about cutting off the nose to spite the face. Guess this means I'll be doing even fewer Endeavors than I already am.

    As for the foundry itself, I only played a handful of missions and honestly thought they were all pretty bad fanfic. That, even despite the missions themselves having no established characters from the shows/movies. Even the spotlight ones left me scratching my head at times.

    Player generated content, of a non-farming nature, just isn't my cup of tea apparently. Probably why I've NEVER been able to get into PnP RPG's from established properties like Marvel, DC or D&D, and actually role play. I will give credit to the authors that created content though. Whether it was meant to be a serious story, something fun or simply pewpewpew, I appreciate your efforts. The players created more content for this game (and NW) than the Devs could ever hope to do.

    Now like the discarded Exploration Clusters, we can add another unique system to the bonfire of our memories. The only difference here is we were "promised" a replacement for the Exploration system, so some of us have held out hope. With this move though, I am officially letting my hope for any type of Exploration system simply die. My hope has been on life support for years now, it's time to pull the plug.

    I personally will not miss the Foundry, but I do believe I will miss the players who used it and may end up leaving the game. Their presence will be missed by many of us.

    Next to the gallows will be PvP.
    Hello. My name is iamynaught and I am an altaholic.

    Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.
  • zokiro12zokiro12 Member Posts: 18 Arc User
    The foundry doesn't need to go away, instead it needs to be expanded on and invigorated. Cryptic could and should have done far more to reward good foundry creators, either with monthly zen cash prizes for maps voted on by the community or some form of in game recognition. Right now the Foundry is the most arcane part of STO for me because it's rather hard to get into and more importantly not well advertised. If players had foundry missions put in their faces more often it would have resulted in them finding player stories that are on equal with some of the things that Cryptic can put out, freeing the team to do more stuff like LoR or Delta Rising. As it is, the admission that Cryptic simply lost the technical know-how to keep the Foundry running in STO and Neverwinter shakes my confidence in the dev team to the core. If your employees (and quite possibly ex-employees) are that passionate about Star Trek and STO then surely someone can just call up one of the team who made the original systems and have a chat with them to learn the ropes.

    For now, my wallet is staying firmly shut, whereas before I was a liberal spender on the game (perhaps not as liberal in recent years, but in years gone by STO's lockbox system bankrupted me mulitple times, THAT is how invested I was in this game despite being an otherwise vocal advocate of lootbox abolition and regulation).

    Unless Foundry 2.0 is in the works and the next announcement is going to center on that, my time in both STO and Neverwinter is going to be forseeably limited in the coming months.
  • postagepaidpostagepaid Member Posts: 2,899 Arc User
    Understandable to remove it from the consoles but for the PC it was a great way of folk showing what could be done with the games potential often showing up the iffy quality of the official missions.


    (as well as a way of getting some of the more irritating endeavours)
  • stolokstolok Member Posts: 144 Arc User
    There is some ambiguity in this announcement. Is it the ability to create new content in the Foundry that is going away? Or ALL of the missions already created? If the former, this is bad. If the latter, it's a catastrophe. The customized content that this added to the game, though limited by the options provided in the toolkit, was very important. Could at least some of the Foundry be kept available somehow?

    If the interface to allow players to create content is too difficult to support, please consider another mechanism to add content outside the episodes/seasons. Have a forum for players to post discussions of mission ideas, and have some devs take the time to actually implement a few of the good ones now and then. Miscellaneous missions findable around the map add tremendously to the interest and meaningfulness of the game.
  • wesleycrasherwesleycrasher Member Posts: 117 Arc User
    Not surprised to see this bad decision being made, I believe that a relatively small percentage of players use the foundry, but the ones that do use it, use it quite a bit.

    Any chance you could at least remove the xp/loot limit for the last month so people can go hog wild playing all the content they'll never see again and actually be rewarded for it?
    All the toys you can't afford.
  • iconiansiconians Member Posts: 6,987 Arc User
    edited March 2019
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    So, you barely supported the Foundry to begin with. Now I guess this gives you an excuse to stop supporting it entirely.

    Thanks for causing players to lose literally thousands upon thousands of hours dealing with your buggy UGC feature because you can't bother to figure out how your spaghetti code works.​​
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  • arkikimarkikim Member Posts: 1 Arc User
    Willing to wait to see if this is prelude to a new mission creation system. Wallet will be closed until then. Thank you for the hard work.
  • quepanquepan Member Posts: 540 Arc User
    to remove a Feature with out adding a similar Feature will push players away plain and simple , i understand the want to get rid of legacy code , but isn't 60% of this game legacy code? anything in the game before LoR i would think is using legacy tables and code , which is why when things are added older fixed bugs return to the live server ?? if Cryptc takes this and does a full pass to fix the game as a whole to the standards of the newer content fine if there just trimming one feature and leaving a gap and leaving all the broken and janky content thats not acceptable as a STO Player
  • themadprofessor#9835 themadprofessor Member Posts: 1,203 Arc User
    arkikim wrote: »
    Willing to wait to see if this is prelude to a new mission creation system. Wallet will be closed until then. Thank you for the hard work.
    Doubtful, mission creation systems are very rarely used in games by most of the playerbase.

    Even for Bethesda games, which have some of the most famous modding community in gaming, its rare to see new missions, rarer to see good ones, and even rarer to see good ones people play.

    Even in STO I believe it was less then 40% of the playerbase or w/e used them. Not to mention how the Foundry was mostly used for cheating/exploiting the game via accolade and endeavor farming.

    Eh, that could be easily remedied by having it set so that endeavors and accolades can only be earned from foundry missions if those missions qualify for rewards.
    Space Barbie Extraordinaire. Got a question about Space Barbie? Just ask.

    Things I want in STO:

    1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
    2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
    3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
    4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
    5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
    6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
    7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
    8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
  • ltminnsltminns Member Posts: 12,569 Arc User
    If it was a max of 40% that used it, that is way more than the number of people that play some of their TFOs.

    Personal Endeavors did this in.
    'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
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    'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
    l don't know.
    l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
    That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
    Lt. Philip J. Minns
  • guriphuguriphu Member Posts: 494 Arc User
    Hard to monetize... only a small percent of player base uses... takes up paid work hours...

    forums must be getting deleted next :open_mouth:
  • zerokillcf2011zerokillcf2011 Member Posts: 545 Arc User
    Less than 40% of players used the foundry?.....thats still more than double the number that have Romulans? and a tick more than the number of players that have a Klingon? So, are those next?
  • zerokillcf2011zerokillcf2011 Member Posts: 545 Arc User
    Also, am I the only one ticked off that the contributors will get a non combat Botany Bay? I was hoping the leaks were going to be for a playable ship. Sad
  • thay8472thay8472 Member Posts: 6,100 Arc User
    What we need is a strike. One week from 11th April, nobody login.

    That'll never work ... I've got a better idea but I need to see if it works first.

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    Typhoon Class please!
  • theboxisredtheboxisred Member Posts: 450 Arc User
    What a shame.

    The main reason I didn't use the Foundry more is because it's loaded with search field that go nowhere. I went to go take a look at the the new Spotlight Mission, In Silence, after it was announced only to find that it wasn't showing up in the Spotlight Missions list.

    Less that 40% of the player base plays Foundry Missions and someone thinks that's a negative? To get around 40% playing the Foundry with all the listed issues is a miracle. Just imagine how many would play if those issues were resolved in a meaningful way.

    For instance, here is an example what is NOT meaningful;

    When the exploration clusters were removed many of the players lamented their loss. This was brought up to a developer in either a written interview or a podcast (I think it was a written interview) and the developer's response was something akin to, "There is exploration in the Duty Officer system."

    This removal of the Foundry feels a bit like that to me.

    Now I may be wrong, but has the Dev Team ever asked the player base what it would take to get them to play the Foundry? I know I've mentioned the Not-A-Search function before, but that may have risen out of other topics.

    But, we are all just speculating here. We'll know more with the upcoming podcast.
  • ilithynilithyn Member Posts: 903 Arc User
    Understandable to remove it from the consoles but for the PC it was a great way of folk showing what could be done with the games potential often showing up the iffy quality of the official missions.


    (as well as a way of getting some of the more irritating endeavours)

    @postagepaid They're not removing it from console for the simple reason that it was never on console. If you ask me that is one of the many factors that contributed to this decision. Unlike with the rest of the game there's no way to share resources between PC and console for a feature that's PC exclusive.
    This is the main reason I've been expecting Foundry to get shut down ever since console launch. It lasted much longer than I thought it would so I genuinely believe them when they said that they don't want to do it, but sooner or later it comes down to a point where if it is costing them more to keep alive and to fix than it would to shut it down, it'll get shut down, especially when now a whole lot of people use it. This is a game people, Cryptic/PWE is a company, they're running this game to earn money.
    Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.
  • jennycolvinjennycolvin Member Posts: 1,100 Arc User
    But, we are all just speculating here. We'll know more with the upcoming podcast.

    Unfortunately, there's nothing to speculate about. We all know the reason why they are bringing down the whole thing: to stop people from completing endeavors - and get accolades - through foundry missions. Never mind the fact that there are limits to what you can actually get from playing the foundry in terms of kills and loot, which they could've tweaked accordingly, they created this situation themselves by:
    1) not implementing something that every other MMORPG have: a simple "I shoot him first - the kill is mine", which is essential when you're trying to get kill in any kind of public zone without a group (i.e. Undine Battlezone, Nukara, etc. etc.)
    2) not implementing something that every other MMORPG have: an account-wide system for completed, and in progress, accolades (or achievements, or whatever other name you can think of).
    Had they made this two simple changes in time, and especially before going with this new personal endeavors system, then all of this could have been avoided.
    They didn't close down the Foundry when it was used to get so much dylithium you couldn't even begin to calculate how much time you'd actually need to refine it all... and they close it down for a system no one asked for, that add absolutely nothing to the game except account-wide bonus that will hurt players in the end if they don't get them (and for which they suddenly found a way to make it account-wide)?

    But a part from all of this, I will sincerely mourn the hours I spent playing Foundry missions. I will mourn the freedom they gave me to play something new, even if not necessarily worthwile. I will mourn the community I was never really a part of but followed from afar, amazed by the ideas and the dedication those players poured into something that was made for the players by the players.
    I will mourn the idea of what could've be if only the devs had deigned themselves to give the Foundry even 1/100 of the love it deserves.
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    Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
    Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
  • psycoticvulcanpsycoticvulcan Member Posts: 4,160 Arc User
    Welp, guess I'm done with STO.
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    "Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
    -Thomas Marrone
  • baddmoonrizinbaddmoonrizin Member Posts: 10,240 Community Moderator
    Conspiracy theories are not helpful.
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  • marcase2marcase2 Member Posts: 103 Arc User
    I understand that the Foundry was a drain on Cryptic's programmer time/resources trying to fix its bugs and the cumbersome UI, but totally deleting it is rather... rash.

    I thoroughly enjoy the foundry, especially when you discover a mission that is both entertaining and actually adds to Trek's lore (be it non-canon). I also understand that many foundry maps were used to complete endeavors/accolades, but that could've been solved easily by not letting them count for any of the said endeavor/accolade.

    I hope(d) that Cryptic would just keep the foundry as is, warts and all, and let the community simply know that this is it, the final foundry version that will not be updated but will still be available as a sandbox to play in.

    The comment that *only* 40% of the player base uses it, is a void argument, as that is not small by any standard. 2% is small, or even 20%. At 40% it means that at least 1/3rd of the playerbase visits the foundry for exploration, fleet meets, testing of builds, training grounds, space barbie and yes, completing accolades/endeavors that are too cumbersome or otherwise impossible to complete otherwise (salt vampires).

    Ideally, the gems of the created foundry missions should have a sort of featured mini-episode option - I'd hate to see all the hard work by foundry authors just disappear into the Great Cyber Beyond...

    Cryptic, please reconsider.


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    The Mighty 44th. Boldly bashing Borgs to bits since 2010.



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