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Season 7 Concerns
bugshu
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Hello Friends,
Season 7 is upon us and as always there are many concerns. Lets open this up for some friendly discussion and hope that the Devs actually pay attention to us this time and listen to us.
Right now, there is a huge disparity between the needs of the company and that of the player base. In the last 10 weeks we have watched a Cryptic developed game go bankrupt in City of Heroes. This particular game was cited as a role model by certain devs at Cryptic as being a noteworthy role model worth emulation in moving to the free to play business model. It failed. Therefore we need to be mindful of balancing the needs of Cryptic to make money versus the need for players to get value for their product.
As I see it, City of Heroes proved without argument that even a great MMORPG cannot focus or cater its product exclusively to plastic credit card players. At COH, those that spent the most money became better and better and better and those that did not started a gentle exodus from the game. The base players on the pyramid of the game slowly trickled out and there were fewer at the tip of the pyramid to support it. One of the appeals of an MMORPG is to achieve, excel, and improve. And the chase to constantly outdo the other players was a problem at COH. There was always something new to buy and those that didnt buy it got left behind. Eventually it cost more and more to outdo your competition and fewer and fewer wanted to pay to win. City of Heroes failed and it closed. It was a free to play game and also a very expensive game to play if you wanted to be any good and enjoy it.
There is little doubt that pvp has been removed from the game for the majority of players. The best fleets that still pvp are only doing so with other premades from other fleets where they feel they can fight balanced and fair matches. Some players still enter public Q's on occasion and they come up against rides that cost 1 billion energy credits or more and they get slaughtered and you cannot get them to pvp anymore. A new player cannot come into the game and do pvp without facing legacy equipment, and firepower, that they can honestly compete with and hope to win. Other than prepaid matches and pvp accolade dilithium runs pvp is disappointing even for the fleets and players that still enjoy it, PvP is dead, and its been destroyed for 98% of the player base as a pay to win monstrosity. A friend said, why pvp to lose and give pay to win players the satisfaction of a win? He was right and outside of accolade pvp dilithium runs I havent done a pvp since that time and many feel the same.
So that brings us to pve and stfs. Since season 3 and the introduction of the foundry, Cryptic has dropped the ball on new content and handed off the responsibility for growing this game to player authors rather than expanding content themselves. The days of DStahl promising us 10 5 mission sets of new featued episode content per year similar is dead ringer buried. Cryptic has handed the ball off to players on new missions and content and told us if we want it then we have to create our own. In the past, I warned of this mistake but its a reality now so we live with it. So we look to STFs to seperate ourselves as quality players and give us what really are the last few remaining challenges left in the game for decent players. We can no longer find honest challenge in unbalanced pay to win pvp. Trophy missions are ignored and new featured episodes are 6 feet under. I dont really consider pew pew based fleet mark missions really new content other than novelty factor. They are fun for 2-3 times but they get old fast. Seeing the Vault the first time was beautiful and it got players excited to try experience it. We havent had that in awhile.
Im not sure about rumor and fact but Stuffies are facing hard times. Personally I adore the trophy missions but Gekli has problems, Crystalline Entity has come and gone, Starbase 24 has seemed to have lost its ground map, Deep Space 9 has been removed, and there are just problems on all the trophy mishies. Anything you punish you get less of and anything you reward you get more of in the future. Cryptic has punished trophy missions with lack of attention to detail, updates, acceptable gameplay, and other issues. It seems stuffies arent holding the interest of the devs and will be next on the chopping block. A few dev posts have almost sneered at us that DO play 50 hours a week or more and really do look hard for things to love about the game. There are a whole lot of players in the subset of this world of experience that work harder at the game than the Devs and it might be in the best interest for the decision makers to listen to some of them.
Rumor has it that a set of MK XII gear for both ground and space will cost 216,000 dilithium. Rumor also has it that payouts for stuffies will drop to 480 per win. According to my handy dandy calculator a player would have to play 450 stuffies to earn enough dilithium from them to buy a complete ground AND space set for a toon. Buy a Maaco set and decide you want to try an Omega set, do another 450 stuffies. This is punishing and players will not do it or go for it. A few players play stuffies for fun but most play it for rewards. My friend Cutter Slade is really good at them and he calls them the grinders. People will grind hoping for that proto drop but if they see low payouts and high dilithium prices for gear many will cease trying to fight for the cause.
Its absolutely problematic that the Devs are setting up Stuffies to compete with fleet projects. No fleet leader in their right mind can honestly ask or expect any fleet member to contribute to projects when they already have dilithium needs for crafting, duty officers, mk xii maaco, omega, honor guard or other costume wear. If a guy says that he needs another 150,000 dili for costume wear its not fair to ask him to contribute to your fleet as well. Season 7 undermines everything season 6 accomplished with new content when most fleet based projects will come to grinding halts as players save dili for personal needs instead of donating to fleet needs. Season 7 takes us backwards and destroys season 6 just as the foundry destroyed new featured episodes and new content progression. Its backward looking.
As an aside, I have problems with stuffie progression in reputation system. Stuffies were hard, people had to learn to do them, and practice to get good at them. We dumbed them down and split them in 2 to make them easier. 3 stuffies became 6 and they are much easier now. If people need 450 stuffies to afford enough dili for the new gear then Cutter will be right and they will have turned into grinders. People will pick the easiest one and do it over and over and over. IGE is hard for some people but right now if you want a PSG proto drop thats what you have to play to get it. People that earn the same payouts from ISE as IGE just wont play IGE anymore. You will see people with perfect mk xii ground sets that have never set foot in a ground stuffie. It will mean nothing to me or have zero prestige to see someone in Omega Shadow Force gear if I know they played ISE 400 times to get it or bought it on their plastic for $500.
A lot of people are saying thats Ok, I will get fleet gear from the stores. Its as good as the mk xii gear. But fleet projects are going to die. Store provisions will dry up as people quit giving dili to fleet projects. Some fleets are already experience problems with nose snot factors as some plastic players vault up leaderboards and other game based mission players look bad because they merely play the game rather than buy zen and donate dilithium. I do not know how long this can continue. One verified real life multi millionaire that can afford what she wants told me, "Bug, Im not going to spend more on enough zen points to buy mk xii gear than it would cost me to buy Guildwars 2." This game cannot afford to charge Neiman Marcus prices and offer Wal-Mart service. Even those that can afford it, look for value in their game play spent, and financial investment in entertainment choice. Charging more Zen for gear already in the game or new gear thats pay to win is a declining reward business model. When the bad idea of f2p was launched we were told free would bring in more customers, more players, and more money and everyone would win. Tilting the game so that only the spendiest of players can enjoy it is against every hoped for advance when they went free to play. I warned then and I warn now, you have to offer customers something to really buy other than costumes and new ships. They looked to dilithium but its exclusive rather than inclusive and its starting to drive non spendy players from the game in frustration.
I will tell you in no uncertain terms that it may seem like a revenue source but if you make dilithium harder to get and higher prices / competition and sinks for its use then you are going to have fewer players trying for it. Anything you punish you will get less of in the future. And if you punish people that "play" the game game to grind for dilithium rather than buy it with zen you will get fewer players. You can say who needs em anyway but ask those former Cryptic employees that built City of Heroes how they think about losing their jobs.
There are a few fan boys and plastic credit card players that are loving it. They are saying, Im well heeled and I can afford it so it makes it easier for me. It makes me better than the suckers that play for fun and arent as rich as me. Ive heard them on the fan boy channel talking it up. But if prices continue to rise and more people get shut out of the game, it will be a repeat of the City of Heroes experience. It doesnt have to be this way. The dreadnought worked well. They charged $25 for it. It seemed that half the game bought it. It really wasnt overpowered and everyone stayed on equal footing. People could afford $25 and lots of them bought it. Charging more and more and more for players to seperate themselves from crowd will eventually result in a much smaller crowd. The players will go away and so will the game. Truly, trying to tap a shrinking player base is a hard way to grow revenues and keep the game moving forward. Sure you can keep raising prices and showing more appeal to an every growing subset of the game. But its hard, hard hard, to stay in business that way. Again, more people set foot in Target every day than in Lord and Taylors. Fans of Lord and Taylors may not want to mingle with the slurpee crowd but that doesnt work well in an MMORPG. You still need the massive to make it.
PvP is dead and we know it. Trophies are ignored. I ask the Devs not to kill Starbases and Stuffies so they can remove appeal of the game to all but the highest of limit Visa based players.
1. Keep gear independent related to each particular stuffie
2. Remvove dilithium requirements altogether for gear
3. Keep dilithium flowing and do not add more competition for it and kill fleet projects
4. Add some new featured episodes and content
5. Fix the trophy missions
PvP is dead and if you dont do these things PvE goes away also.
And the Cryptic will follow City of Heroes into the realm of the dead.
Peace,
Bug out
Season 7 is upon us and as always there are many concerns. Lets open this up for some friendly discussion and hope that the Devs actually pay attention to us this time and listen to us.
Right now, there is a huge disparity between the needs of the company and that of the player base. In the last 10 weeks we have watched a Cryptic developed game go bankrupt in City of Heroes. This particular game was cited as a role model by certain devs at Cryptic as being a noteworthy role model worth emulation in moving to the free to play business model. It failed. Therefore we need to be mindful of balancing the needs of Cryptic to make money versus the need for players to get value for their product.
As I see it, City of Heroes proved without argument that even a great MMORPG cannot focus or cater its product exclusively to plastic credit card players. At COH, those that spent the most money became better and better and better and those that did not started a gentle exodus from the game. The base players on the pyramid of the game slowly trickled out and there were fewer at the tip of the pyramid to support it. One of the appeals of an MMORPG is to achieve, excel, and improve. And the chase to constantly outdo the other players was a problem at COH. There was always something new to buy and those that didnt buy it got left behind. Eventually it cost more and more to outdo your competition and fewer and fewer wanted to pay to win. City of Heroes failed and it closed. It was a free to play game and also a very expensive game to play if you wanted to be any good and enjoy it.
There is little doubt that pvp has been removed from the game for the majority of players. The best fleets that still pvp are only doing so with other premades from other fleets where they feel they can fight balanced and fair matches. Some players still enter public Q's on occasion and they come up against rides that cost 1 billion energy credits or more and they get slaughtered and you cannot get them to pvp anymore. A new player cannot come into the game and do pvp without facing legacy equipment, and firepower, that they can honestly compete with and hope to win. Other than prepaid matches and pvp accolade dilithium runs pvp is disappointing even for the fleets and players that still enjoy it, PvP is dead, and its been destroyed for 98% of the player base as a pay to win monstrosity. A friend said, why pvp to lose and give pay to win players the satisfaction of a win? He was right and outside of accolade pvp dilithium runs I havent done a pvp since that time and many feel the same.
So that brings us to pve and stfs. Since season 3 and the introduction of the foundry, Cryptic has dropped the ball on new content and handed off the responsibility for growing this game to player authors rather than expanding content themselves. The days of DStahl promising us 10 5 mission sets of new featued episode content per year similar is dead ringer buried. Cryptic has handed the ball off to players on new missions and content and told us if we want it then we have to create our own. In the past, I warned of this mistake but its a reality now so we live with it. So we look to STFs to seperate ourselves as quality players and give us what really are the last few remaining challenges left in the game for decent players. We can no longer find honest challenge in unbalanced pay to win pvp. Trophy missions are ignored and new featured episodes are 6 feet under. I dont really consider pew pew based fleet mark missions really new content other than novelty factor. They are fun for 2-3 times but they get old fast. Seeing the Vault the first time was beautiful and it got players excited to try experience it. We havent had that in awhile.
Im not sure about rumor and fact but Stuffies are facing hard times. Personally I adore the trophy missions but Gekli has problems, Crystalline Entity has come and gone, Starbase 24 has seemed to have lost its ground map, Deep Space 9 has been removed, and there are just problems on all the trophy mishies. Anything you punish you get less of and anything you reward you get more of in the future. Cryptic has punished trophy missions with lack of attention to detail, updates, acceptable gameplay, and other issues. It seems stuffies arent holding the interest of the devs and will be next on the chopping block. A few dev posts have almost sneered at us that DO play 50 hours a week or more and really do look hard for things to love about the game. There are a whole lot of players in the subset of this world of experience that work harder at the game than the Devs and it might be in the best interest for the decision makers to listen to some of them.
Rumor has it that a set of MK XII gear for both ground and space will cost 216,000 dilithium. Rumor also has it that payouts for stuffies will drop to 480 per win. According to my handy dandy calculator a player would have to play 450 stuffies to earn enough dilithium from them to buy a complete ground AND space set for a toon. Buy a Maaco set and decide you want to try an Omega set, do another 450 stuffies. This is punishing and players will not do it or go for it. A few players play stuffies for fun but most play it for rewards. My friend Cutter Slade is really good at them and he calls them the grinders. People will grind hoping for that proto drop but if they see low payouts and high dilithium prices for gear many will cease trying to fight for the cause.
Its absolutely problematic that the Devs are setting up Stuffies to compete with fleet projects. No fleet leader in their right mind can honestly ask or expect any fleet member to contribute to projects when they already have dilithium needs for crafting, duty officers, mk xii maaco, omega, honor guard or other costume wear. If a guy says that he needs another 150,000 dili for costume wear its not fair to ask him to contribute to your fleet as well. Season 7 undermines everything season 6 accomplished with new content when most fleet based projects will come to grinding halts as players save dili for personal needs instead of donating to fleet needs. Season 7 takes us backwards and destroys season 6 just as the foundry destroyed new featured episodes and new content progression. Its backward looking.
As an aside, I have problems with stuffie progression in reputation system. Stuffies were hard, people had to learn to do them, and practice to get good at them. We dumbed them down and split them in 2 to make them easier. 3 stuffies became 6 and they are much easier now. If people need 450 stuffies to afford enough dili for the new gear then Cutter will be right and they will have turned into grinders. People will pick the easiest one and do it over and over and over. IGE is hard for some people but right now if you want a PSG proto drop thats what you have to play to get it. People that earn the same payouts from ISE as IGE just wont play IGE anymore. You will see people with perfect mk xii ground sets that have never set foot in a ground stuffie. It will mean nothing to me or have zero prestige to see someone in Omega Shadow Force gear if I know they played ISE 400 times to get it or bought it on their plastic for $500.
A lot of people are saying thats Ok, I will get fleet gear from the stores. Its as good as the mk xii gear. But fleet projects are going to die. Store provisions will dry up as people quit giving dili to fleet projects. Some fleets are already experience problems with nose snot factors as some plastic players vault up leaderboards and other game based mission players look bad because they merely play the game rather than buy zen and donate dilithium. I do not know how long this can continue. One verified real life multi millionaire that can afford what she wants told me, "Bug, Im not going to spend more on enough zen points to buy mk xii gear than it would cost me to buy Guildwars 2." This game cannot afford to charge Neiman Marcus prices and offer Wal-Mart service. Even those that can afford it, look for value in their game play spent, and financial investment in entertainment choice. Charging more Zen for gear already in the game or new gear thats pay to win is a declining reward business model. When the bad idea of f2p was launched we were told free would bring in more customers, more players, and more money and everyone would win. Tilting the game so that only the spendiest of players can enjoy it is against every hoped for advance when they went free to play. I warned then and I warn now, you have to offer customers something to really buy other than costumes and new ships. They looked to dilithium but its exclusive rather than inclusive and its starting to drive non spendy players from the game in frustration.
I will tell you in no uncertain terms that it may seem like a revenue source but if you make dilithium harder to get and higher prices / competition and sinks for its use then you are going to have fewer players trying for it. Anything you punish you will get less of in the future. And if you punish people that "play" the game game to grind for dilithium rather than buy it with zen you will get fewer players. You can say who needs em anyway but ask those former Cryptic employees that built City of Heroes how they think about losing their jobs.
There are a few fan boys and plastic credit card players that are loving it. They are saying, Im well heeled and I can afford it so it makes it easier for me. It makes me better than the suckers that play for fun and arent as rich as me. Ive heard them on the fan boy channel talking it up. But if prices continue to rise and more people get shut out of the game, it will be a repeat of the City of Heroes experience. It doesnt have to be this way. The dreadnought worked well. They charged $25 for it. It seemed that half the game bought it. It really wasnt overpowered and everyone stayed on equal footing. People could afford $25 and lots of them bought it. Charging more and more and more for players to seperate themselves from crowd will eventually result in a much smaller crowd. The players will go away and so will the game. Truly, trying to tap a shrinking player base is a hard way to grow revenues and keep the game moving forward. Sure you can keep raising prices and showing more appeal to an every growing subset of the game. But its hard, hard hard, to stay in business that way. Again, more people set foot in Target every day than in Lord and Taylors. Fans of Lord and Taylors may not want to mingle with the slurpee crowd but that doesnt work well in an MMORPG. You still need the massive to make it.
PvP is dead and we know it. Trophies are ignored. I ask the Devs not to kill Starbases and Stuffies so they can remove appeal of the game to all but the highest of limit Visa based players.
1. Keep gear independent related to each particular stuffie
2. Remvove dilithium requirements altogether for gear
3. Keep dilithium flowing and do not add more competition for it and kill fleet projects
4. Add some new featured episodes and content
5. Fix the trophy missions
PvP is dead and if you dont do these things PvE goes away also.
And the Cryptic will follow City of Heroes into the realm of the dead.
Peace,
Bug out
Post edited by bugshu on
0
Comments
All good points and I second that motion so I bump it...read it people...dont know if any DEVS would..perhaps too late for it. Why punish those who "do better" than others..exceptionalism is NOT a disease
Is there a tl:dr version of this post? I didn't come here to read a dissertation.
The Armada
Original join date: Feb 5, 2010
Twitter: @davejl_99, & @STO_BBArmada
I Agree with you, but 'it's working as intended', and S7 will work because "There are a few fan boys and plastic credit card players that are loving it. They are saying, Im well heeled and I can afford it so it makes it easier for me. It makes me better than the suckers that play for fun and arent as rich as me. " This is what Cryptic thinks WE want, because they heard them. We'll see if they hear US after S7 hits.
:cool:
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
That people on their forum is the 1% of the userbase that buys everything regardlessly of what they say.
I've never been in a game where the user base was actually listened to. I am sure if you played swg or whatever you played you can name plenty of examples.
So not only won't have a chance of changing anything you won't even be taken seriously
... not that you shouldn't voice your opinion anyway :cool:
All the people complaining over the reputation system for example, we all know they are going to play it anyway
COH wasnt shut down due to a declining player base or income, it was due to age and the studio wanting to do other things
I heard the same thing, the game was still profitable when it was shut down.
Anyways I think OP makes some great points here and I share allot of the same concerns.
I want to see this game continue to grow, but I feel like the new business model is to try and milk players dry on dilithium in the hopes they have to make up the differences by using zen. Good in the short term (for Cryptic), but in the long term many players will be turned off by this, I think especially if you like to play multiple characters.
Let's keep up the good fight to advance the parts of this game that are severely underdeveloped, pvp, story, exploration, crafting, kdf. Those game aspects open the door to new play styles and long term sustainability. Easy PVE grind has the opposite effect, but that's just my opinion.
You may want to check your facts:
1) CoH was by all accounts still profitable - but that said, was being worked on by NCSoft's former NA in house studio, Paragon. Now, while Paragon Studios started with a majority of former Cryptic staffers; 5 years later, they had plenty of people, who had never worked for Cryptic developing that game.
2) NCSoft decided to shut down CoH and close Paragon Studios because they are re-aligning their Company focus. They want to focus on the Asian market primarily; and just localize (IE translate into English) Asian developed MMOs that they think U.S. players may also play.
CoH was most likely targeted because the Asian port of the game failed to gain any following in the Asian market, and as such was the ONLY NCSoft MMO not being developed and run for both markets. NCSoft probably didn't feel the ROI for maintaining a single NA MMO Development team for a single NA only property made a lot of sense given their paradigm shift. They could also take the cash that freed up and further invest it across their existing Asian properties, that in their eyes net an overall better ROI.
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..."
Instead of arguing your points , I'll take a different path :
Take a look at "the chunkys" .
Who are "the chunkys" ? Simple . They are Cryptic .
Now why would I call them that ?
Here's why :
- STO , year 1 : 4 STF's . FOUR . That be a chunk of work .
- STO , year 1 (well 13 months to b precise) : 3 FE's . Chunk # 2 .
- STO , year 3 : Season 6 , the season of Grind . A number of space maps to grind ... -- one might say "a chunk of maps" .
- STO , year 3 : Season 7 : The Grind - The Next Generation . A slew of ground maps similar in principle to the previous seasons space maps , aka more grind , aka last season's chunk just got larger .
So , if we go look for patterns of behavior , we can see that Cryptic has a tendency to produce bodies of work that mostly get done in chunks .
This is both good and very-very bad .
It's good because in theory Seasons 8-9 will be story focused (again , by the chunks) .
It's bad , because even tho Cryptic likes to think that they go the extra mile and add something different to the "chunks" , or they put in something extra here and there -- the magnitude of the chunks are so severe that they tend to block out everything else by a mile .
And this unfortunately translates to dissatisfaction to the players who are not enamored with the current "chunk" .
I can tell you that I am an STF-er , and that I'm done with grinding FA's (I can still do a few , but not as many as I did when S.6 started -- which may be what Cryptic actually intends) .
I don't have any meaningful insights to offer here except for what I've stated above in regards to the "chunks" of workload that Cryptic seems to follow .
I can point out the obvious -- that the FE's were met with the least resistance from the playerbase as a whole -- but to be fair , then I'll also have to point out the lack or replayability of those missions ... , which looks like a bad ROI for Cryptic .
I can also point to a (possibly) winning formula : a little bit of everything , instead of the chunks -- but for that to happen , some real changes in attitude would have to happen at Cryptic .
The funny thing is ... , with the recent staff upgrades @ Cryptic , now they might actually have the manpower to pull off the winning formula , instead of leaving one of the player segment or another feeling continuously short changed .
PvP in general has more problems than mere players with the pay to win consoles & ships. I understand your argument and I wholeheartly agree, but PVP in STO has been in a woeful state prior to the introduction of Pay2Win Ships and consoles. The ships and consoles only made it worst between the have's and the have not's.
Excellent point, also keep in mind that CRYPTIC is holding back in providing a more indepth Foundry tool. It was recommended that if they wanted to generate more revenue that they should offer a somewhat pay subscription fee or just a fee to access better foundry tools.
My gripe is that if talented players can conjure up some indepth and interesting plotlines with just the tools at hand, why can't CRYPTIC devs make an episode or so with their superior tools. Heck adding an episode a month, like the"Alpha," episode and adding it to the episodes listing would help ease the lack of content.
I am assuming that by the term "Stuffies," You are referring to "Shiny's" or Pay2Win items. I do not entirely see it as a problem, aside from the PvP aspects of things. All the items CAN be obtain with time and dedication.
This is because you CAN farm Dilithium and convert them to Zen points. I know its very hard for many, but it can be done, and done for free. Someone with 2 to 3 toons have to be very selective in choosing what to buy.
STO is a huge money sink, and why the term "playing catch up?" You don't have to catch up to those players with their "Shiny's" or "Pay2Win" ships and consoles. Granted if you solely do PvP, then you have a legitmate argument, but for everything else, I kinda failed to see your logic in this.
I must ask, is the intention to drive away a majority of the players? If so, then they're right on with their assessment.
"Second star on the right, and straight on till morning."
U.S.S. Weatherlight
NcSoft is known for shutting games down, Tabula Rasa, Exteel (a game I loved) and now CoH are just 3 examples, you are simply grabbing at the ''bankrupt'' because it's a convenient addition to your post.