But some abilities like charged particle burst were always TRIBBLE in PVE. Because instead of some sort of AI and self heals, the NPCs have 10x hps/shield points.
AI is stupid, PVE it's a dps contest basically.
But even in pve there was a time.... there was a time when a true sci ship, without skill points on energy weapons or torpedoes but with 9 points on astrometric and photonic, could fire cpb3+psw1 and oneshot a wave of probes in the old KA stf for example
-cries
Being an Engineering Captain who rolls a lot of Science Vessels I agree. Anything linked to Particle Generators has become nearly useless in PVP and PVE and I do both.
You don't know any more than any of the rest of us about how much documentation Cryptic keeps or works off of. From in-game evidence, the verdict is in favor of the notion that there's very little or that what documentation exists is poor (hence the various DOff bugs, the way certain skills like turn rate work, the way probability is handled, the Jem shields/tach mine bugs, the way FAW works, etc etc etc).
It's a good thing if they are capable of reading and correctly interpreting the data they collect.
And they aren't.
The reason they aren't, is quite simple really. They don't pvp, they have 0 experience with the game, which translates into them just staring at a bunch of #s and seeing some that seem out of line with the others, and simply "correcting" them.
What they don't know however, is that those "out of line #s" are actually necessary to keep things in balance, and keep ship types relevant.
In short you can have all the data in the world, I could provide someone with all the parts and part #s to build a car but if they have no clue what the hell they are doing, they will do it wrong and make a crappy product.
For the record, I agree, too. Finding time in the schedule to do so is ... non-trivial.
Then clearly there are management issues.
When making a change those changes should be fully tested. This should lead to refinements and then it should be moved to tribble and player input be requested. (if for no other reason then Dev-Player relations).
What I see over and over again is timetables that do not allow for much more then patch and pray. Saying we'll get back to it...sometime. Where are the standards?
Then clearly there are management issues.
When making a change those changes should be fully tested. This should lead to refinements and then it should be moved to tribble and player input be requested. (if for no other reason then Dev-Player relations).
What I see over and over again is timetables that do not allow for much more then patch and pray. Saying we'll get back to it...sometime. Where are the standards?
They left their standards on the table, before they went out bar hopping.
Now they are stuck waking up each morning next to a nightmare.
Well, if that is the case, then they clearly are beginning to change it, hence this change, it fits. And that's a good thing.
No, this is *not* a good thing. They are fixing something that, for all intents and purposes, did not *require* fixing given the amount of time they are apparently able to devote to this issue.
The two items they should be primarily focused on is fixing bugs and ensuring game balance. If a math/coding "bug" creates balance, it behooves them to figure out how to balance the game post-"fix" *before* they decide to "fix" it. They failed to do this, and instead of looking at the fact that they broke one of the few balanced science abilities (relatively speaking, of course), you're latching onto the fact that they're going back and making sure all the skill bonus numbers are correct for a single ability.
So now that they have broken PSWIII, we are then told that the time required to then fix their "fix" is "...non-trivial." You're apparently happy that they went about their job not only without a clue as to how this would affect balance, but then proceeded to ignore the community's input on Tribble and send it straight away to Holodeck. All because you think it's fantastic that they "fixed a bug." You're congratulating them for knocking down a load-bearing wall because it was about time someone did something about that crooked painting.
I'm listening to your feedback (yes, even the rude and insulting stuff, amazingly enough), but I'd like to know for certain: Which of the following do you feel is -more- accurate?
1) You feel that these powers are flat-out ineffective. (PvE and PvP)
-or-
2) You feel that these powers are ineffective against players that have high resists to them. (PvP)
Depends on the powers a bit, I think.
2) is probably always the case.
1) is a problem for some powers. Charged Particle Burst and Tachyon Beam are not that great in PvE since the enemy there doesn't have much in the way of shield damage reduction (not to be confused with drain resists), unlike players. It's more useful to equip more weapons and switch to high weapon power rather than use shield drains then.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Borticus was talking about a general power rebalancing. And I think nobody will doubt that the time to do that is non-trivial, or will you?
They can ask players. Instead banning them from forums, they can get valuable feedback. Hell, some players could balance the numbers probably better and won't TRIBBLE anything else in process because they have much deeper understanding of the metagame.
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
That way, they will be sitting in piles of bugs in no time, because it just takes too long that way
In fact, they ARE sitting in piles of bugs.
And not because their documentation is not accurate, it's because they don't have any good documentation about the code that was written.
Proof of it?
Just re-read Gozer posts when he was trying to fix "Terradome", he had no idea on how to fix it, and on how it was written. He ended up fixing it by moving the Sulu character in a safe place and reducing the number of enemies lol.
Probably back in 2010 there was someone who designed documentation for the game, planning how powers should work and so on.
On paper it was mathematically perfect, and if you looked at the table of powers on stowiki they were balanced.
Then the game was released and:
- people were oneshotting other people with crf3
- people were oneshotting themself with fbp3
- viral matrix was a death sentence
- and so on, there were so many bugs that i barely remember them
Then a developer (snix if i remember correctly) started to balance powers, introducing exceptions to the original mathematically perfect power table, leaving probably no documentation of his changes.
And the game was balanced for a while, and that balance started a golden age in pvp, queues were full, there were monthly tournaments, several fleets were devoted to pvp.
Then developers changed and abilities were broken one after the other, and the last developer assigned to us is hunting down mathematical errors....
You talk about IT processes, as i said the basis of any development cycle is TEST.
There's no excuse for what happened: borticus fixed a bug that nobody asked to be fixed, that was balanced, and that was released into production environment after a one day test on tribble. And all this after he collected extremely negative feedback from all of us, and knowing that any balance pass on this and any other science ability will require weeks and further approval by their boss, and making useless a whole class of ships.
Stop getting rid of exploits that make life easier like being able to take a big ship into the vault now unless there is some sort of coding error that occurs there is no reason to stop people doing that. Besides what business is it of yours how we play the game anyway instead of punishing those people who did that in the vault why not just change it so that it scales to in accordance with the ship types that way everyone is happy.
Some exploits are either funny or just fun and to be honest I like them for they add some much needed spice in this game at the moment lol
What Soph said about research on bugs taking too much time prior to "fixing" them (because clearly PSW was just too strong and needed an urgent hazards team... lol) might actually be worth a damn if not for the fact that bugs like the BoP decloaking on prompt windows have been known to the devs and have still remained in the live server for over a year now.
The odds are high that the only reason anyone even noticed the PSW "math error" is because someone in Ker'rat got instagibbed by a lucky crit and filed a grade-A class action whinesuit.
Or some fed sci ship captain did crit a poor bop 40k, was curious, experimented and made thread about it...
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
Haven't tried PSW3 on my sci ship, but glad to know that I won't need to waste time trying it out since I was considering using it.
My Fleet recon sci ship is built more like a support dps/tank/healer, but was considering giving it some cc abilties, guess I will leave my ship build alone for now. I guess they just want my sci ship to be a escort/cruiser hybrid then which it does great at, but would have liked to try a more sci oriented build out if most of the abilities weren't so nerfed.
Yep, because in the past, they too often did what was proposed here. Not the way it works on the long run.
If that was the case, then why bark at people when they are beginning to change that?
They need transparency on their game. The PSW3 change just increased transparency on the mechanics, and yes, damage is now very low (but it wasn't exactly one-shot-killing before anyway), but that can be adjusted via the base damage or via changing the formula for all three PSW's. Fudging the numbers as was the case before certainly won't do.
Well didn't know you where a Cryptic employee ... so assuming game bugs now exist, due to game changes added at any point is conjecture on your part as well correct ?
Well... I can tell you that before your time another Developer sort of changed the code on purpose to make it the way it was before this "fix". There was a time when shockwave 1 was favored by BOP pilots as a way to stun someone out of cloak and give them almost ZERO chance of defending themselves. This Previous dev... swung a hammer and reduced the stun on all levels and the dmg... and it is my belief that the offending code that needed to be corrected was his way of making the skill still useful in the hands of a Science Ship... or a FULLY Sci committed BOP. By doing this he made it an unattractive option for Mvams and bops wanting to stun kill.... while keeping it as a relevant option in terms of dmg on version 3.
So in your mind, the fact that all 3 versions where not Liner may bother you. However there was a Cryptic Employee at one time that was well aware of the non liner dmg graph on Shockwave... in fact he made it that way to lower the attractive options of running a stun escort. At this point if the new Cryptic guy was to increase the stun... I will Laugh like Hedoublehockeysticks and dust of my stun BOP.
Then that delveoper did not do a good job, as it was neither documented nor done with all three PSW's. That is just not the way one should work, and that's not even IT industry specific. It is general common sense.
Or he could just think about changing the damage for all three PSW's.
Well no doubt he should have noted his stuff better... really though when an employee does something monumentally stupid... and their actions are of such a bad nature for the company that they are looking at hundreds of man hours to correct it... who do you blame. The Employee or the horrible management. Now of course I am guess and it does seem to be the case that the code is not properly documented. When one dev basicly in a chat somewhere says one thing... and later it seems his replacements have no idea of the intentions it seems clear there was no information passed on... but anyway.
Frankly no changing the dmg of all 3 was an issue. The ships are designed so that 2 of the games escorts can slot Shockwave. The real issue was never the dmg it was that the consoles also boosted the stun effect... which of a sci ship investing there commander slot... it was a pretty high opportunity cost and was really in no way OP.
However at one time as I was saying Shockwave 1 was basicly = to shockwave 3... Ask anyone who had the pleasure of facing a gang running pre pre nerf shockwave... we would decloak... and Shock... fire fire... second bop Shock fire fire fire... bottom line we could chain 10+s of stun and we killed people like that. One devs fix... was designed to protect shockwave as a legitimate option for a full boar Sci Sci... while also making running multiple escort style raiders with shockwaves less attractive.
The shock wave bop disapeared as you know.... cause you never experienced the shock stun kill... however the skill remained in use by Sci Sci ships.... I would call that a proper adjustment. The skill was used for its intended purpose... and the overuse / abuse of the skill was stomped out. I think that previous dev had it right... he should have just noted it better... In fairness to him... the messy changes he made where the result of botched previous code that wasn't noted properly either. LMAO
Common sense????????
It's not common sense, it's stupid!
Let me explain. (I'm former CIO of a company listed on the stock exchange, I think that I know how IT processes should be).
Let's pretend that Cryptic it's a company that produce and sells three products: A,B and C.
It will be easier to explain in this way.
A guy in the IT department discovers that the program that control packaging of product A has a bug: the progam is labeling packages using a printed label that is 2cm larger of what's specified on documentation (let's suppose also that they have documentation).
The developer investigates and discover that the problem is in the label printing program, that uses a font too big to fit into the correct label, therefore other IT guys before him have programmed the labeling machine to use a bigger one.
However, everyone in the company agree that luckily the bug is not affecting product compliance, giving them some time to find a solution.
They now know what must be done:
- Correct the program so that it uses the correct font (needs some "non trivial" scheduling)
and then
- Reprogram the labeling machine to use the correct labels (this can be done in 5 minutes, removing 2 chars from the code)
But the IT department guy cannot sleep that night: the idea of his labels having a "math error" is killing him!!
So the next morning he goes to work, and decide to reprogram the labeling machine to use the correct and documented labels.
From that moment on, ALL boxes containing product A (one of the three products produced by our fantastic company) are not compliant because the writings on each label are partially outside the label edges.
Shipments of product A are suspended, and company earnings are heavily affected because they can't sell 1\3 of their products.
Customers start to complain on the company support forum because they aren't getting what they have ordered.
But our developer is like a Deferi, he thinks that balance is restored with his "fix", and now he can concentrate on solving the font problem, but finding time will be non trivial of course.
The next morning his boss fire him.
Correct procedure was:
- Plan a fix both for labels and printing program
- Schedule a test
- Collect feedback from test
- Make necessary adjustments
- Schedule a second test
- If everything ok, release
However at one time as I was saying Shockwave 1 was basicly = to shockwave 3... Ask anyone who had the pleasure of facing a gang running pre pre nerf shockwave... we would decloak... and Shock... fire fire... second bop Shock fire fire fire... bottom line we could chain 10+s of stun and we killed people like that. One devs fix... was designed to protect shockwave as a legitimate option for a full boar Sci Sci... while also making running multiple escort style raiders with shockwaves less attractive.
Exactly, that's the point.
I'm happy that i'm not the only one to remember that.
I want you to stop talking because you're oblivious to what the guy above you has said, and what so many other posters have pointed out. Your argument has been refuted ad nauseam now and repeating yourself will not change that. You're making yourself look foolish, yet again, and it's painful for people to watch.
Comments
AI is stupid, PVE it's a dps contest basically.
But even in pve there was a time.... there was a time when a true sci ship, without skill points on energy weapons or torpedoes but with 9 points on astrometric and photonic, could fire cpb3+psw1 and oneshot a wave of probes in the old KA stf for example
-cries
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vids and guides and stuff
[9:52] [Zone #11] Neal@trapper1532: im a omega force shadow oprative and a maoc elite camander and here i am taking water samples
And they aren't.
The reason they aren't, is quite simple really. They don't pvp, they have 0 experience with the game, which translates into them just staring at a bunch of #s and seeing some that seem out of line with the others, and simply "correcting" them.
What they don't know however, is that those "out of line #s" are actually necessary to keep things in balance, and keep ship types relevant.
In short you can have all the data in the world, I could provide someone with all the parts and part #s to build a car but if they have no clue what the hell they are doing, they will do it wrong and make a crappy product.
Then clearly there are management issues.
When making a change those changes should be fully tested. This should lead to refinements and then it should be moved to tribble and player input be requested. (if for no other reason then Dev-Player relations).
What I see over and over again is timetables that do not allow for much more then patch and pray. Saying we'll get back to it...sometime. Where are the standards?
They left their standards on the table, before they went out bar hopping.
Now they are stuck waking up each morning next to a nightmare.
No, this is *not* a good thing. They are fixing something that, for all intents and purposes, did not *require* fixing given the amount of time they are apparently able to devote to this issue.
The two items they should be primarily focused on is fixing bugs and ensuring game balance. If a math/coding "bug" creates balance, it behooves them to figure out how to balance the game post-"fix" *before* they decide to "fix" it. They failed to do this, and instead of looking at the fact that they broke one of the few balanced science abilities (relatively speaking, of course), you're latching onto the fact that they're going back and making sure all the skill bonus numbers are correct for a single ability.
So now that they have broken PSWIII, we are then told that the time required to then fix their "fix" is "...non-trivial." You're apparently happy that they went about their job not only without a clue as to how this would affect balance, but then proceeded to ignore the community's input on Tribble and send it straight away to Holodeck. All because you think it's fantastic that they "fixed a bug." You're congratulating them for knocking down a load-bearing wall because it was about time someone did something about that crooked painting.
Depends on the powers a bit, I think.
2) is probably always the case.
1) is a problem for some powers. Charged Particle Burst and Tachyon Beam are not that great in PvE since the enemy there doesn't have much in the way of shield damage reduction (not to be confused with drain resists), unlike players. It's more useful to equip more weapons and switch to high weapon power rather than use shield drains then.
They can ask players. Instead banning them from forums, they can get valuable feedback. Hell, some players could balance the numbers probably better and won't TRIBBLE anything else in process because they have much deeper understanding of the metagame.
In fact, they ARE sitting in piles of bugs.
And not because their documentation is not accurate, it's because they don't have any good documentation about the code that was written.
Proof of it?
Just re-read Gozer posts when he was trying to fix "Terradome", he had no idea on how to fix it, and on how it was written. He ended up fixing it by moving the Sulu character in a safe place and reducing the number of enemies lol.
Probably back in 2010 there was someone who designed documentation for the game, planning how powers should work and so on.
On paper it was mathematically perfect, and if you looked at the table of powers on stowiki they were balanced.
Then the game was released and:
- people were oneshotting other people with crf3
- people were oneshotting themself with fbp3
- viral matrix was a death sentence
- and so on, there were so many bugs that i barely remember them
Then a developer (snix if i remember correctly) started to balance powers, introducing exceptions to the original mathematically perfect power table, leaving probably no documentation of his changes.
And the game was balanced for a while, and that balance started a golden age in pvp, queues were full, there were monthly tournaments, several fleets were devoted to pvp.
Then developers changed and abilities were broken one after the other, and the last developer assigned to us is hunting down mathematical errors....
You talk about IT processes, as i said the basis of any development cycle is TEST.
There's no excuse for what happened: borticus fixed a bug that nobody asked to be fixed, that was balanced, and that was released into production environment after a one day test on tribble. And all this after he collected extremely negative feedback from all of us, and knowing that any balance pass on this and any other science ability will require weeks and further approval by their boss, and making useless a whole class of ships.
Some exploits are either funny or just fun and to be honest I like them for they add some much needed spice in this game at the moment lol
The odds are high that the only reason anyone even noticed the PSW "math error" is because someone in Ker'rat got instagibbed by a lucky crit and filed a grade-A class action whinesuit.
vids and guides and stuff
[9:52] [Zone #11] Neal@trapper1532: im a omega force shadow oprative and a maoc elite camander and here i am taking water samples
Oh, i rembember that thread...
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=325441
The third answer you got from naz was "Carry on with this thread and the sci sci will RIP...."... that's what happened, sadly.
My Fleet recon sci ship is built more like a support dps/tank/healer, but was considering giving it some cc abilties, guess I will leave my ship build alone for now. I guess they just want my sci ship to be a escort/cruiser hybrid then which it does great at, but would have liked to try a more sci oriented build out if most of the abilities weren't so nerfed.
Well didn't know you where a Cryptic employee ... so assuming game bugs now exist, due to game changes added at any point is conjecture on your part as well correct ?
Well... I can tell you that before your time another Developer sort of changed the code on purpose to make it the way it was before this "fix". There was a time when shockwave 1 was favored by BOP pilots as a way to stun someone out of cloak and give them almost ZERO chance of defending themselves. This Previous dev... swung a hammer and reduced the stun on all levels and the dmg... and it is my belief that the offending code that needed to be corrected was his way of making the skill still useful in the hands of a Science Ship... or a FULLY Sci committed BOP. By doing this he made it an unattractive option for Mvams and bops wanting to stun kill.... while keeping it as a relevant option in terms of dmg on version 3.
So in your mind, the fact that all 3 versions where not Liner may bother you. However there was a Cryptic Employee at one time that was well aware of the non liner dmg graph on Shockwave... in fact he made it that way to lower the attractive options of running a stun escort. At this point if the new Cryptic guy was to increase the stun... I will Laugh like Hedoublehockeysticks and dust of my stun BOP.
Well no doubt he should have noted his stuff better... really though when an employee does something monumentally stupid... and their actions are of such a bad nature for the company that they are looking at hundreds of man hours to correct it... who do you blame. The Employee or the horrible management. Now of course I am guess and it does seem to be the case that the code is not properly documented. When one dev basicly in a chat somewhere says one thing... and later it seems his replacements have no idea of the intentions it seems clear there was no information passed on... but anyway.
Frankly no changing the dmg of all 3 was an issue. The ships are designed so that 2 of the games escorts can slot Shockwave. The real issue was never the dmg it was that the consoles also boosted the stun effect... which of a sci ship investing there commander slot... it was a pretty high opportunity cost and was really in no way OP.
However at one time as I was saying Shockwave 1 was basicly = to shockwave 3... Ask anyone who had the pleasure of facing a gang running pre pre nerf shockwave... we would decloak... and Shock... fire fire... second bop Shock fire fire fire... bottom line we could chain 10+s of stun and we killed people like that. One devs fix... was designed to protect shockwave as a legitimate option for a full boar Sci Sci... while also making running multiple escort style raiders with shockwaves less attractive.
The shock wave bop disapeared as you know.... cause you never experienced the shock stun kill... however the skill remained in use by Sci Sci ships.... I would call that a proper adjustment. The skill was used for its intended purpose... and the overuse / abuse of the skill was stomped out. I think that previous dev had it right... he should have just noted it better... In fairness to him... the messy changes he made where the result of botched previous code that wasn't noted properly either. LMAO
It's not common sense, it's stupid!
Let me explain. (I'm former CIO of a company listed on the stock exchange, I think that I know how IT processes should be).
Let's pretend that Cryptic it's a company that produce and sells three products: A,B and C.
It will be easier to explain in this way.
A guy in the IT department discovers that the program that control packaging of product A has a bug: the progam is labeling packages using a printed label that is 2cm larger of what's specified on documentation (let's suppose also that they have documentation).
The developer investigates and discover that the problem is in the label printing program, that uses a font too big to fit into the correct label, therefore other IT guys before him have programmed the labeling machine to use a bigger one.
However, everyone in the company agree that luckily the bug is not affecting product compliance, giving them some time to find a solution.
They now know what must be done:
- Correct the program so that it uses the correct font (needs some "non trivial" scheduling)
and then
- Reprogram the labeling machine to use the correct labels (this can be done in 5 minutes, removing 2 chars from the code)
But the IT department guy cannot sleep that night: the idea of his labels having a "math error" is killing him!!
So the next morning he goes to work, and decide to reprogram the labeling machine to use the correct and documented labels.
From that moment on, ALL boxes containing product A (one of the three products produced by our fantastic company) are not compliant because the writings on each label are partially outside the label edges.
Shipments of product A are suspended, and company earnings are heavily affected because they can't sell 1\3 of their products.
Customers start to complain on the company support forum because they aren't getting what they have ordered.
But our developer is like a Deferi, he thinks that balance is restored with his "fix", and now he can concentrate on solving the font problem, but finding time will be non trivial of course.
The next morning his boss fire him.
Correct procedure was:
- Plan a fix both for labels and printing program
- Schedule a test
- Collect feedback from test
- Make necessary adjustments
- Schedule a second test
- If everything ok, release
There's no excuse for what happened, really.
Exactly, that's the point.
I'm happy that i'm not the only one to remember that.