the reason for this crashing is due to there being one server for the whole planet (which usually is not a good idea)... if it was split up into regions things might be more stable...
Not regions, we need something more... specific.
Maybe a server for all the trolls (toothpaste for sale, 20 dil per tube), politics and religion "experts", "where is Q" people, and general morons that are far too stupid to ever be admitted to Starfleet, and too weak to survive in the KDF.
They're working on klingon content and finishing up the rommie faction to be released at the same time in May of this year as we recently found out.
This is no different than what they have been saying for 2 years. Carrots on fishing poles comes to mind.
They will never tell the community at large what their resource distribution really is, because I'm sure it's not at all what they say it is. The name for this company is truly fitting.
This is actually a good thing. In a backhanded kind of way. By pushing resources on the game that is going to be hinged upon the usefulness of the "foundry" technology, they will hopefully improve, evolve and push forward the capabilities and tools that players have with that.
Which then can be turned right back around and boosted into STO.
Giving this game the chance to FINALLY improve on its content, by just letting the players do the work and heavy lifting.
While the brass at Cryptic HQ give DStahl the go ahead for his kickstarter idea.
Rommies release and klingon faction upgrades (FIIIINALLLY!), we know for 90% certain from the anniversary videos and the friday 'screenshot'.
Proof please. The Friday screenshot is not a certainty of a Romulan faction, and I saw nothing in the Anniversary video to suggest that a Romulan faction was coming with a 90% certainty.
You're just a machine. And machines can be broken.
each MMO in the company has its own seperate dev team. a few might cross between the games, but thats most likely just the PR/Community people as each game is different at the core, even if they run on the same engine and such.
It wouldnt make sense for the company to only have one dev team to be split between Different MMO's.
This is Cryptic we're talking about....
Ask the guys over at CO how that whole separate dev team thing is working out. I think they're down to "just enough to keep the lights and lockboxes on". Everyone else is either here or Never Winter.
Ask the guys over at CO how that whole separate dev team thing is working out. I think they're down to "just enough to keep the lights and lockboxes on". Everyone else is either here or Never Winter.
yet they just released a content update not to long ago.
No. Dan is not talking about all of Cryptic. He's talking about STO. I'm sure I'm missing departments, but there are Devs working on:
Production
QA
Content
Systems UI
Programming
Art
Environment
VFX
Software
Design
Animation
Etc.
Cheers,
Brandon =/\=
so, what has the UI guy been doing lately?
all i remember is that he made some mess with the Shuttles when the season launched, but there are still some pretty nasty bugs around that he really should fix (before MAY), yet i've not seen a single patchnote since the shuttle / forced boff reset mess he created.
...and i mean the coder person, not Thomas The Cat who does the visuals, like DOff icons and what not.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
all i remember is that he made some mess with the Shuttles when the season launched, but there are still some pretty nasty bugs around that he really should fix (before MAY), yet i've not seen a single patchnote since the shuttle / forced boff reset mess he created.
...and i mean the coder person, not Thomas The Cat who does the visuals, like DOff icons and what not.
What changed regarding UI in the last 6 months:
- doffs
- the exchange
- the new reputation tab
- a better "asset" tab for characters
- all the starbase stuff
It may not be enough but i'm pretty sure this team is a bit overwhelmed currently. :P
I commend the effort, but I seriously don't know why a lot of the gold names even bother posting here when forum users are going to ignore the information given and propagate their own ideas of "reality" anyway.
Well I can tell you one thing they AREN'T doing (at least a majority of them) -
A lot of em aren't posting int he forum. :P
aside from the community guys, none of the devs are required to post here. if they are busy reading the forums/posting its less time they are doing their work, also once they leave the job they should not feel they need to use their off time to read the forums and post.
if i recall, one of the jobs of the guys like Branflakes is to pass along information from the forums to the dev team and back, thus meaning its not neccessary for the dev's to post if they got 'lackies' that can pass the info along.
What changed regarding UI in the last 6 months:
- doffs
- the exchange
- the new reputation tab
- a better "asset" tab for characters
- all the starbase stuff
It may not be enough but i'm pretty sure this team is a bit overwhelmed currently. :P
6 months is a bit more than i was asking, i was asking specifically since Season 7 (not counting the season update itself either), because S7 broke at least 3 important things that i know of and only one has been fixed so far.
That one fix was some time ago and since then there is only silence, no Patchnote nothing.
So where is he? Vacation? Busy on Neverwinter? Finally coding a new UI that doesn't run on a single cpu core, dragging the Framerate of the game down for everyone with less than 20 GHz per core???....
Somehow given the sheer amount of bugs that get released and never fixed... I doubt this department really exists.
Either that or the person who does "QA" has other duties as assigned and has less than zero time to do his or her job.
WE ARE FORCED TO ENDURE BUGS FROM THREE SEASONS AGO THAT BREAK THE BASIC PLOT PROGRESSION MISSIONS FOR GRIPES SAKE.
QA should be all over that. If you want I can write up a fresh batch of tickets for you...
That was my first response to Bran's post. QA really did kind of stick out like a sore thumb. I'm glad you posted this. And support your critique.
Though I do keep in the back of my head the fact that Creed Bratton is the QA person for Dunder Mifflin on the Office, so, maybe that's what's going on here at Cryptic as well?
QA, which should mean Quality Assurance only does testing they really dont fix the bugs. they are basically the "in house beta testers" so no matter what they send up the ladder there is likely a priority of what gets fixed first that they have no control over.
QA, which should mean Quality Assurance only does testing they really dont fix the bugs. they are basically the "in house beta testers" so no matter what they send up the ladder there is likely a priority of what gets fixed first that they have no control over.
The way the testing system has worked in this company, and the commentary given about how things go from development to in-house testing to the test server and then to live, demonstrate that QA, if it does have employees, don't have an actual infrastructure in place to do their job.
It's not that bugs make it live. It's that bugs get found, reported, noticed, in every step of the process, and they don't have a system available to them to do anything about it until after it's live.
Tester feedback is pointless. You go on the test server. You do their little dance and report a bug, that you can find and repeat, and nothing happens.
The ticket sits there. The report is ignored. The bug goes live.
Months later you finally get a response from someone and you realize that they never saw the bug report.
I got a bug fixed in this game. Way back when. Two years ago. It was a bug that was there in beta. And the game launched with this bug. There was a vendor on one of the KDF stations that sold two items of the same MK level and completely skipped the next level of item.
It took a conversation with Stormshade, and one screenshot, to get it noticed and fixed.
That's it. Just tweaking a vendor. But that bug sat, reported, and unfixed, for over 9 months after release.
Quality Assurance? Really?
You know this game launched with Starfleet Vendors selling Disruptors and Klingon Vendors selling phasers. That's backwards. And that didn't get fixed. That got missed? No. It got reported.
Quality Assurance. Nope. Not buying it. And that was back then, when there was working customer service. These days? I absolutely shudder to think what goes on.
It might sound weird but since Cryptic is working on @5 games at the same time they probably don't have too many people working on STO at the same time so the real number is probably closer to 5 maybe 10 employees .
all i remember is that he made some mess with the Shuttles when the season launched, but there are still some pretty nasty bugs around that he really should fix (before MAY), yet i've not seen a single patchnote since the shuttle / forced boff reset mess he created.
...and i mean the coder person, not Thomas The Cat who does the visuals, like DOff icons and what not.
What changed regarding UI in the last 6 months:
- doffs
- the exchange
- the new reputation tab
- a better "asset" tab for characters
- all the starbase stuff
It may not be enough but i'm pretty sure this team is a bit overwhelmed currently. :P
Dan Stahl outlined in the recent Q&A that we can expect an update to the UI in the May update, to make it appear more inspired from LCARS without being LCARS (presumably), but that we will finally be able to customize what color it is. I don't think the UI team (design and code) is big, and hearing that the schedule allows them to finally work on customization that has been requested since beta is good news and a sign that they are busy. Plus I bet they are also tied up with the character creator redesign.
[10:27] [REDALERT] <Dev> Oaks@dstahl: New UI that Thomas the Cat is working on is a reskinning and reLCARsing of existing UI - improving - not replcaing
[10:30] [REDALERT] <Dev> Oaks@dstahl: We are going to support your choice UI coloring
[10:37] [REDALERT] <Dev> Oaks@dstahl: We are redoing our Character Creator for May - almost completely remade
I know that very few of them are in the QA department. If they have a lot of people in the QA department, they need to be fired/reassigned and quick. There have been too many game breaking bugs recently with newly introduced items and duty officers.
That said, the guys they have working on their mission content have certainly impressed me with the anniversary mission. I hope it's a sign of things to come.
Joined: January 2010
Fanfiction! ZOMG! Read it now!
kate-wintersbite.deviantart.com/art/0x01-Treachery-293641403
Hey kids, lay off the staff ok? They do what they are told to do by the suits, not by the customers. Thats just the way it is.
As for what have they been doing. Just about every single patch has some sort of small UI and interface improvement. All those "server stability" patches that you don't realy notice unless the server is NOT stable. And a by the by.. that is serious code monkey ka-ka guys and gals. It is niether easy or quick.
As for what the rest of the staff is doing.
Lets see, if you've been paying attention.....
Season 8 work (which is aparently more of a game expansion then a season due to a whole bunch of content in the pipe!) which is going to have a new FE series (the fact it was going to have an new FE was announced week ago..and with the 3rd anniversery video we have a name for it now.. "Under the Raptors Wings" gosh.. might be romulan.. sounds inperial, Denise Crosby was in town doing Voice work, might be Sela) It has been stated the KDF stuff be coming...How much we don't know.. but if it is indeed the long awaited level one KDF tutorial and a whole passle of missions (along with some minor but importand adjustments to the story of several existing FE.. yea they need a little retcon work)..well, I'd have to say thats a bit more then just a season ya know.
Now, tuck in the mention in a very recent Stahl interview where he spoke of a rep system built around running Foundry mission.. ((did you complainers just happen to notice the new feature on foundry where the "spotlighted" missions have thier own catagory? That is a UI improvement in case anyone happened to have missed that.)) Add this to the other things that have been slid out concerning foundry and the note Neverwinter is I belive at closed beta, so we may shortly see the last of the code merge for away concerning Foundry/ugc witha final slew of new features/ways of doing things..
Oh.. and that wasn't the only possible new rep system on his mind.. more then the foundry rep though is still in the "Humm, what about...?" stage. Chill ain't happen'n yet.
so this pretty much echo another post of mine in the forums..
whats coming. A New FE.
KDF content and filler...possibly compleating the faction to where it has about 80% of the content the Federation faction has instead of its current 40% (adjusted for actuall utility to the factrion and how it relates to story line)
Yet another new rep system or two, or three, or more.
plus more additional its and bits, uniforms, costumes, ships etc... stuff to spend your zen on... be nice to see some new mechinisim to get lobi crystals without the frustration of opening those stink'n lock boxes.. I really don't like them. At this point I open them for the lobi because truely, I don't expect more then garbage out of them and I have yet to be dissapointed.
In the mean time, there is pleanty to do. There is Omega rep, embasy rep, and fleet rep, and projects to be done, and a lot of dilithium to be ground. Nothing is going to make it happen any faster.
Please be aware that this is not exactly what the cryptic crew had in mind. This is all about how PWI makes money. ALL of thier other games do the exact same thing. They toss chance boxes out, and charge you for keys, and have other gated in game currencies (Like dilithium)..........
Its not very nice at all, it is a system that ties right into human psycology and takes adavantage of triggers for addictive behavior. It really one of those thing that I honestly belive needs to be regulated at the government level due to the huge number of minor children playing. Taking advantage of an adult, ok, fine..informed consent and all that.. but kids.. I got a problem with that..and when you toss in parents that simply cannot effectivly monitor thier kids ((which for the record it has always been that way.. ALWAYS.. in like for thousands of years, so its nothing new.. parents give birth to children, but thier raised by the community, and the society they're born into)) and we end up with children having addictive behavior patterns being reinforced in a way that is NOT conducive to thier future wellfare or the maintainence of an orderly society.
yea.. i dont like the mind games the lock boxes play. And I like even less what they can cause in the long term.
still back on point.
Cryptic staff doesn't get to choose the job they do, or toa great point, how they go about doing it. They're employees performing jobs as part of a team, under the direction of yet another team, which is in turn directed by several levels of executive types.. It's called a corporation, and they were invented to make money for investors, no nessesarily create a quality product.. just one good 'nuff that people would by it. U.S.corporate law came into being after the civil war as a way to allow northern investors to exploit the cheap availible labor of the beaten southern states while avoiding any personal or financal responsibilities for thier action. Things have changes since then, but the primary objective.. the avoidance of responsability, still holds true.
all i remember is that he made some mess with the Shuttles when the season launched, but there are still some pretty nasty bugs around that he really should fix (before MAY), yet i've not seen a single patchnote since the shuttle / forced boff reset mess he created.
...and i mean the coder person, not Thomas The Cat who does the visuals, like DOff icons and what not.
You kind of invalidated your own question. Someone who works on the UI would be unlikely to be the one who actually codes for it; he'd be a designer who provides the wireframes etc. to the programmer to implement.
Comments
Maybe a server for all the trolls (toothpaste for sale, 20 dil per tube), politics and religion "experts", "where is Q" people, and general morons that are far too stupid to ever be admitted to Starfleet, and too weak to survive in the KDF.
:cool:
This is no different than what they have been saying for 2 years. Carrots on fishing poles comes to mind.
They will never tell the community at large what their resource distribution really is, because I'm sure it's not at all what they say it is. The name for this company is truly fitting.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The o3 - Killed you good
This is actually a good thing. In a backhanded kind of way. By pushing resources on the game that is going to be hinged upon the usefulness of the "foundry" technology, they will hopefully improve, evolve and push forward the capabilities and tools that players have with that.
Which then can be turned right back around and boosted into STO.
Giving this game the chance to FINALLY improve on its content, by just letting the players do the work and heavy lifting.
While the brass at Cryptic HQ give DStahl the go ahead for his kickstarter idea.
Shopping for more cups and holding DStahl cup, while he gives Obama like speeches. :P
Proof please. The Friday screenshot is not a certainty of a Romulan faction, and I saw nothing in the Anniversary video to suggest that a Romulan faction was coming with a 90% certainty.
This is Cryptic we're talking about....
Ask the guys over at CO how that whole separate dev team thing is working out. I think they're down to "just enough to keep the lights and lockboxes on". Everyone else is either here or Never Winter.
No relation to "the" Nighthawk.
Refugee from Paragon City.
[SIGPIC]http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z297/MetalRacer78/FacesOfNighthawk-ForumSig.jpg[/SIGPIC]
yet they just released a content update not to long ago.
No. Dan is not talking about all of Cryptic. He's talking about STO. I'm sure I'm missing departments, but there are Devs working on:
Production
QA
Content
Systems
UI
Programming
Art
Environment
VFX
Software
Design
Animation
Etc.
Cheers,
Brandon =/\=
so, what has the UI guy been doing lately?
all i remember is that he made some mess with the Shuttles when the season launched, but there are still some pretty nasty bugs around that he really should fix (before MAY), yet i've not seen a single patchnote since the shuttle / forced boff reset mess he created.
...and i mean the coder person, not Thomas The Cat who does the visuals, like DOff icons and what not.
A lot of em aren't posting int he forum. :P
I know what the departments are, what I want to know is how many people are in each department.
He just changes hats as needed.
What changed regarding UI in the last 6 months:
- doffs
- the exchange
- the new reputation tab
- a better "asset" tab for characters
- all the starbase stuff
It may not be enough but i'm pretty sure this team is a bit overwhelmed currently. :P
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
Somehow given the sheer amount of bugs that get released and never fixed... I doubt this department really exists.
Either that or the person who does "QA" has other duties as assigned and has less than zero time to do his or her job.
WE ARE FORCED TO ENDURE BUGS FROM THREE SEASONS AGO THAT BREAK THE BASIC PLOT PROGRESSION MISSIONS FOR GRIPES SAKE.
QA should be all over that. If you want I can write up a fresh batch of tickets for you...
Raptr profile
aside from the community guys, none of the devs are required to post here. if they are busy reading the forums/posting its less time they are doing their work, also once they leave the job they should not feel they need to use their off time to read the forums and post.
if i recall, one of the jobs of the guys like Branflakes is to pass along information from the forums to the dev team and back, thus meaning its not neccessary for the dev's to post if they got 'lackies' that can pass the info along.
oh, you haven't heard. QA is now the new PC term for janitors.
6 months is a bit more than i was asking, i was asking specifically since Season 7 (not counting the season update itself either), because S7 broke at least 3 important things that i know of and only one has been fixed so far.
That one fix was some time ago and since then there is only silence, no Patchnote nothing.
So where is he? Vacation? Busy on Neverwinter? Finally coding a new UI that doesn't run on a single cpu core, dragging the Framerate of the game down for everyone with less than 20 GHz per core???....
That was my first response to Bran's post. QA really did kind of stick out like a sore thumb. I'm glad you posted this. And support your critique.
Though I do keep in the back of my head the fact that Creed Bratton is the QA person for Dunder Mifflin on the Office, so, maybe that's what's going on here at Cryptic as well?
The way the testing system has worked in this company, and the commentary given about how things go from development to in-house testing to the test server and then to live, demonstrate that QA, if it does have employees, don't have an actual infrastructure in place to do their job.
It's not that bugs make it live. It's that bugs get found, reported, noticed, in every step of the process, and they don't have a system available to them to do anything about it until after it's live.
Tester feedback is pointless. You go on the test server. You do their little dance and report a bug, that you can find and repeat, and nothing happens.
The ticket sits there. The report is ignored. The bug goes live.
Months later you finally get a response from someone and you realize that they never saw the bug report.
I got a bug fixed in this game. Way back when. Two years ago. It was a bug that was there in beta. And the game launched with this bug. There was a vendor on one of the KDF stations that sold two items of the same MK level and completely skipped the next level of item.
It took a conversation with Stormshade, and one screenshot, to get it noticed and fixed.
That's it. Just tweaking a vendor. But that bug sat, reported, and unfixed, for over 9 months after release.
Quality Assurance? Really?
You know this game launched with Starfleet Vendors selling Disruptors and Klingon Vendors selling phasers. That's backwards. And that didn't get fixed. That got missed? No. It got reported.
Quality Assurance. Nope. Not buying it. And that was back then, when there was working customer service. These days? I absolutely shudder to think what goes on.
Dan Stahl outlined in the recent Q&A that we can expect an update to the UI in the May update, to make it appear more inspired from LCARS without being LCARS (presumably), but that we will finally be able to customize what color it is. I don't think the UI team (design and code) is big, and hearing that the schedule allows them to finally work on customization that has been requested since beta is good news and a sign that they are busy. Plus I bet they are also tied up with the character creator redesign.
That said, the guys they have working on their mission content have certainly impressed me with the anniversary mission. I hope it's a sign of things to come.
Fanfiction! ZOMG! Read it now!
kate-wintersbite.deviantart.com/art/0x01-Treachery-293641403
As for what have they been doing. Just about every single patch has some sort of small UI and interface improvement. All those "server stability" patches that you don't realy notice unless the server is NOT stable. And a by the by.. that is serious code monkey ka-ka guys and gals. It is niether easy or quick.
As for what the rest of the staff is doing.
Lets see, if you've been paying attention.....
Season 8 work (which is aparently more of a game expansion then a season due to a whole bunch of content in the pipe!) which is going to have a new FE series (the fact it was going to have an new FE was announced week ago..and with the 3rd anniversery video we have a name for it now.. "Under the Raptors Wings" gosh.. might be romulan.. sounds inperial, Denise Crosby was in town doing Voice work, might be Sela) It has been stated the KDF stuff be coming...How much we don't know.. but if it is indeed the long awaited level one KDF tutorial and a whole passle of missions (along with some minor but importand adjustments to the story of several existing FE.. yea they need a little retcon work)..well, I'd have to say thats a bit more then just a season ya know.
Now, tuck in the mention in a very recent Stahl interview where he spoke of a rep system built around running Foundry mission.. ((did you complainers just happen to notice the new feature on foundry where the "spotlighted" missions have thier own catagory? That is a UI improvement in case anyone happened to have missed that.)) Add this to the other things that have been slid out concerning foundry and the note Neverwinter is I belive at closed beta, so we may shortly see the last of the code merge for away concerning Foundry/ugc witha final slew of new features/ways of doing things..
Oh.. and that wasn't the only possible new rep system on his mind.. more then the foundry rep though is still in the "Humm, what about...?" stage. Chill ain't happen'n yet.
so this pretty much echo another post of mine in the forums..
whats coming. A New FE.
KDF content and filler...possibly compleating the faction to where it has about 80% of the content the Federation faction has instead of its current 40% (adjusted for actuall utility to the factrion and how it relates to story line)
Yet another new rep system or two, or three, or more.
plus more additional its and bits, uniforms, costumes, ships etc... stuff to spend your zen on... be nice to see some new mechinisim to get lobi crystals without the frustration of opening those stink'n lock boxes.. I really don't like them. At this point I open them for the lobi because truely, I don't expect more then garbage out of them and I have yet to be dissapointed.
In the mean time, there is pleanty to do. There is Omega rep, embasy rep, and fleet rep, and projects to be done, and a lot of dilithium to be ground. Nothing is going to make it happen any faster.
Please be aware that this is not exactly what the cryptic crew had in mind. This is all about how PWI makes money. ALL of thier other games do the exact same thing. They toss chance boxes out, and charge you for keys, and have other gated in game currencies (Like dilithium)..........
Its not very nice at all, it is a system that ties right into human psycology and takes adavantage of triggers for addictive behavior. It really one of those thing that I honestly belive needs to be regulated at the government level due to the huge number of minor children playing. Taking advantage of an adult, ok, fine..informed consent and all that.. but kids.. I got a problem with that..and when you toss in parents that simply cannot effectivly monitor thier kids ((which for the record it has always been that way.. ALWAYS.. in like for thousands of years, so its nothing new.. parents give birth to children, but thier raised by the community, and the society they're born into)) and we end up with children having addictive behavior patterns being reinforced in a way that is NOT conducive to thier future wellfare or the maintainence of an orderly society.
yea.. i dont like the mind games the lock boxes play. And I like even less what they can cause in the long term.
still back on point.
Cryptic staff doesn't get to choose the job they do, or toa great point, how they go about doing it. They're employees performing jobs as part of a team, under the direction of yet another team, which is in turn directed by several levels of executive types.. It's called a corporation, and they were invented to make money for investors, no nessesarily create a quality product.. just one good 'nuff that people would by it. U.S.corporate law came into being after the civil war as a way to allow northern investors to exploit the cheap availible labor of the beaten southern states while avoiding any personal or financal responsibilities for thier action. Things have changes since then, but the primary objective.. the avoidance of responsability, still holds true.
Khemaraa Sends
People are absurd.
Why do you want to know this?
So you know when and when not to complain about someone working to please you?
You shouldn't be complaining at all.
Get over yourself OP...
...and I notice you're the same person who wants to get rid of everything that doesn't please you...even though many others like it.
So I guess I shouldn't be surprised you made this thread.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Nah. That just keeps things complacent.
The source of that info is not all that trustworthy. It's been promised before.
Speaking of "it's been promised before" ...
You kind of invalidated your own question. Someone who works on the UI would be unlikely to be the one who actually codes for it; he'd be a designer who provides the wireframes etc. to the programmer to implement.