I agree with Zerobang's post: that's the issue with the game. I understand that the boss is asking you to keep releasing new stuff to make more money and make a bigger game because THAT is what you can go around announcing on podcasts and magazines and such... I understand you cannot go around announcing that you have fixed lots and lots of bugs and malfunctioning gear or missions, but right now is what the game needs.
Every season we're told devs are working on the next season or the next release when asked about what "are they doing", but they are asked that because... ok, the game is getting new stuff, but they shouldn't be releasing so much new things when the ones released before those still have some annoying and reported bugs.
That's why our mother asked us sometimes "what we were doing", not because she thought we were doing nothing, but because she thought we were not doing what we were supposed to.
I understand you cannot go around announcing that you have fixed lots and lots of bugs and malfunctioning gear or missions, but right now is what the game needs.
Actually.. They did that once or more in EVE Online, dedicated a big superpatch to fix just those things that never got fixed and had been around for long. And they gained so much love from us players.
Following the usual paradigm, the breakdown is thus:
10% managerial/administration
5% marketing
5% audio
10% programmers
5% engineers
5% QA
60% artists
?% CS
And I would estimate that NeverWinter is the current company focus which places 70-80% of HR/other resources in its grasp.
This leaves you with roughly 10-15 dedicated personnel, from the various aforementioned classification groups, allotted to STO with the occasional shift as the projects temporarily borrow from each other (goes both ways) as certain skills are required to complete a special task or to hit a schedule milestone.
If you manage to nab Dstahl onto a corner with a bottle of Romulan Ale I suspect you'd find this assessment predictably accurate within the given 12% margin of error.
That would be, overall, for a company. There are around 45 people on STO. I believe the idea of STO getting programmers is a new idea as programmers were traditionally a floating team that individual game teams had to outsource to, competing with other games for resources on.
And there is no in-house marketing, as far as I know.
There's offsite marketing but they handle promotions and information gathering, which makes Cryptic's utilization of marketing rather like a production firm. (In other words, they hand marketing a product and say, "Make it sell and collect feedback for us." It's a bit dated as a model.)
Cryptic, overall, has a CEO, CFO, CTO (Chief Technical), and CCO (Chief Creative). I don't believe they have a CMO or that they integrate marketing as a department. The closest thing is the CCO, who I believe is still Jack Emmert -- although I think the role is basically "Founder Emeritus" -- a kind of position where Jack gets the creative side of the CEO role while the CEO handles the more mundane (from an outside perspective, anyway) CEO roles. This frees up Jack to be an evangelist for Cryptic both at gaming conventions and in interfacing with PWE, Runic, etc. It's the pure "Ted Talk" side of being a CEO.
There is no CMO. I think the company suffers from not having internal marketing emphasis.
Bran, for example, may stay informed but I doubt he's at every design meeting, being given equal weight with the production leads, pushing back patches for marketing considerations, etc. Those tasks may often be split between Stahl and Geko, I'd say, but I also think it means the result is that if anything gets compromised in the hashing out of strategic planning, it's marketing.
If they don't get it in their heads to do a comprehensive bug-sweep of the primary advancement missions there won't be a game. If people can't play these missions due to show-stopping bugs, broken background and utterly screwed up AI... no one will make it to VA to spend money.
Really? We have had plenty of players going through the ranks with new toons in our fleet and I don't recall any issues with the missions? Can you elaborate?
Same thing only speaking from personal experience here, I have 1 fed Vice Admiral, I'm levelling 2 more Fed chars, just finished a KDF one and replaying all the story missions with my first Vice Admiral for Expertise and haven't hit a single bug that stops me from progressing with the exception of the fact that my first 50 went to do fire caves just after they resized Bajor, I skipped the mission and they fixed it a week later.
And for reference, I wouldn't touch the Mirror Universe event with a barge pole the length of my Oddessy Class ship so I'm levelling through pure story missions with a little DOff help.
Really? We have had plenty of players going through the ranks with new toons in our fleet and I don't recall any issues with the missions? Can you elaborate?
I haven't done it in a while, but on 'Boldly They Rode' I kept getting stuck at the part where you override the 'Security Panel' in order to get into the Promenade. I'd hit the Security Panel, then....nothing. It's supposed to say 'Enter Promenade' and direct you over to the Hatch, but 4 out of the 6 times I did that stretch (for the Dominion weapons) this happened to me. Incredibly frustrating considering the only way to resolve it was to abandon the entire thing and start over.
Also, I'll just put 'Server Problems'. Way, way more prevalent than any other MMO I play(ed).
People asked what we were doing 6 months ago, and the answer was Season 7.
People asked 6 months before that, and the answer was Season 6.
Why do people think we stop working on things?
(SNIP)
The forum ate my post, and I'm too tired to try and put it together again, so here's the TLDR version.
No one at Cryptic tells the playerbase anything about what they are working on until its already on the server, either holodeck or tribble or a few days away from that. As a result, since we have no proof that you are doing anything we think your aren't. Not logical, but human. If you want people to believe that you are working on something, you have to show them the proof. For instance, season 7, have a dev blog about how you created New Romulus. The no longer season 8, have a dev blog about whatever it is you are doing. At any time, have a dev blog about how you tracked down and got rid of some bug. Like your math teacher said all those years ago, show your work for credit. And I know you TAco aren't in charge of all of these things, I'm using the collective you. That is why we think you don't work on things, you never show us that you do.
They used to tell us everything they were working on. But then, every time something slipped or had to be scrapped because it didn't work out, everybody started screaming "LIAR!" at them. So they stopped.
Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
Following the usual paradigm, the breakdown is thus:
10% managerial/administration
5% marketing
5% audio
10% programmers
5% engineers
5% QA
60% artists
?% CS
And I would estimate that NeverWinter is the current company focus which places 70-80% of HR/other resources in its grasp.
This leaves you with roughly 10-15 dedicated personnel, from the various aforementioned classification groups, allotted to STO with the occasional shift as the projects temporarily borrow from each other (goes both ways) as certain skills are required to complete a special task or to hit a schedule milestone.
If you manage to nab Dstahl onto a corner with a bottle of Romulan Ale I suspect you'd find this assessment predictably accurate within the given 12% margin of error.
Um, nope DStahl has stated numerous times Cryptic has a larger group of employees, but currently STO itself has a team of 40 Devs (and still growing) assigned to it alone.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 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..."
They used to tell us everything they were working on. But then, every time something slipped or had to be scrapped because it didn't work out, everybody started screaming "LIAR!" at them. So they stopped.
Yeah, it's amazing how often the forum itself forgets how they are the reasons behind some changes, whether in-game or out-of-it
Was named Trek17.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
They used to tell us everything they were working on. But then, every time something slipped or had to be scrapped because it didn't work out, everybody started screaming "LIAR!" at them. So they stopped.
That is a failure with picking goals, not with keeping the playerbase informed. And also part of the reason why no one believes anything they say now. Honestly, if they have a plan, and stick to the plan, then even if something slips, as long as they tell us, and follow threw, it will end up being okay. Yes, the first few times will be rough, but as long as they give us a word saying that this is our plan, and this is what we will do, it will work.
Please see Eve Online and Walking in stations, which is probably the biggest joke that game has. Walking in stations flopped, big time, and its not being worked on that anyone will say, but the devs were up front and said sorry, we can't do this right now, we're going to go over here and do this, becasue we know we can, and maybe we'll come back to it when we have a better idea. And yes, people were pissed off, but they got over it because CCP learned to pick better goals. I just don't think Cryptic has learned to do anything other than to hide better.
Please see Eve Online and Walking in stations, which is probably the biggest joke that game has. Walking in stations flopped, big time, and its not being worked on that anyone will say, but the devs were up front and said sorry, we can't do this right now, we're going to go over here and do this, becasue we know we can, and maybe we'll come back to it when we have a better idea. And yes, people were pissed off, but they got over it because CCP learned to pick better goals. I just don't think Cryptic has learned to do anything other than to hide better.
They worked on that for FIVE YEARS with basically no updates, then botched it when they introduced it, and the forums and official IRC were on FIRE over the demands (not requests, demands) that there be a way to turn it off. They got actual death threats over the issue.
I'm sorry, things are not rosy over there. It looks very much like here, and like Cryptic they've gone back and forth between more and less information over time. Actually, in many cases it's the same people complaining in both places.
Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
They worked on that for FIVE YEARS with basically no updates, then botched it when they introduced it, and the forums and official IRC were on FIRE over the demands (not requests, demands) that there be a way to turn it off. They got actual death threats over the issue.
I'm sorry, things are not rosy over there. It looks very much like here, and like Cryptic they've gone back and forth between more and less information over time. Actually, in many cases it's the same people complaining in both places.
So, like I said, it flopped big time, and they said we can't make this work right now, we're going to do something else. You just said it with more caps.
From what I have seen, things are as rosy over there as they have ever been, soon is still a trademark, and so on, but I am still specifically pointing to their dev blogs as being a better way of doing things. Like this one. It says exactly what they plan to do, is about a month ahead of the release, instead of a few days, and actually gives some details rather than saying hey, you can duel be sure to try it out, like I would expect from STO. I see no reason that STO could not do the same thing.
Um, nope DStahl has stated numerous times Cryptic has a larger group of employees, but currently STO itself has a team of 40 Devs (and still growing) assigned to it alone.
Ah, I see. I thought it was the number of employees total. Cryptic always seemed like a rather small operation to me.
In that case, we'd need to break them into interns, leads, grunts and IT.
Artists would still occupy the majority numbers, though.
So...40-50 people and 5 months each per of these recent "seasons"?
Oh-Kay...
With this kind of self entitled drivel no wonder they don't tell us much, I wouldn't either, I'd say to hell with them they can freaking well wait and see!!!
While you could call it self-entitlement, it will be a very poor way to go about it.
Although, I don't think he was speaking out of self-entitlement, either, rather interest and curiosity.
There's also a very strong argument to the contrary of your perspective.
That is a failure with picking goals, not with keeping the playerbase informed.
That's quite possibly a factor (if to believe the company reviews on glass door).
However, I would attribute it more to communication failure.
As the saying goes, the worst thing is half-truths.
Initially they were very upfront and talked about their plans openly, indeed. However, whenever the direction got changed no one bothered to go to the community and explain that they've hit a snag and re-prioritized goals for certain reasons and the things they talked about unfortunately have been shelved for now.
Instead, players got a partial communique about something in the oven without any follow-ups on its condition.
So, after waiting and waiting they came to Cryptic and asked about it and got told "oh, we ditched that a while ago, we're doing something else now".
Of course, when that something else also fizzled (and this ties with the goal placing issue you raised)...well...throw another log onto the bonefire; and that in turn fostered the "cryptic are liars" mentality.
The important thing to remember about talking to the community is that it's not a water tap. It's not a valve. You can't turn it on/off at will, or keep it slightly open so it trickles.
It's more like a main circuit breaker. Either it's on, or it's off.
And if you do open a communication channel, then you must keep communicating and updating the community on the situation.
If you can't do that, then you might as well just turn it off and announce things when they're done.
Cloud Imperium is running a very interesting experiment in that regard. It will be most fascinating to see how it turns out.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
___________________________
Joined April 2008. Lifetime Subscriber. Original member of the original 2nd Fleet.
Expended $1,961 USD on this game - regretting it all. This game and some of its staff disappointed me, time and again, per every single cent spent!!!
In hindsight, those at Cryptic really did some miraculous work with just 24-25 people up until Perfect World took over. They essentially was like Atlas in having the Star Trek Universe on their backs.
Yeah, they got quite a bit of flak for promises not being kept and going back on their word a few times, but in general they did more work than those at Bioware did with TOR, with only a faction of the budget.
So they really should be applauded.
Now given their bragging about 40+ people, I personally am expecting a lot more than just simple maps from now on. Season 6 was essentially one zone and a bunch of grinding and Season 7 was a couple of new maps and a bunch of grinding. But when it comes to Season 8, it better be all fireworks as they hype it up to be. I really want to see more than 5 new zones. In fact, given their promise Season 8 was KDF Focused and now we got Romulan talk, I'm upping that expectation to be at least 10 new maps.
Please see Eve Online and Walking in stations, which is probably the biggest joke that game has. Walking in stations flopped, big time, and its not being worked on that anyone will say, but the devs were up front and said sorry, we can't do this right now, we're going to go over here and do this, becasue we know we can, and maybe we'll come back to it when we have a better idea. And yes, people were pissed off, but they got over it because CCP learned to pick better goals. I just don't think Cryptic has learned to do anything other than to hide better.
How could it flop, it was never implemented, and don't tell me that the Captain Quarters is it, BS. The devs got greey and got caught trying to introduce a money store into the game, and WiS got thrown under the bus right along with it. What angered so many such as myself, is that they concentrated on the graphics, the look, the fact that your coat tail will flail in the wind correctly, but they didn't introduce the features that would of made it more then a chat room. Like Station run businesses that are both run by players and NPCs, actual corporate offices that you can visit with programmable NPCs, using the programmable NPCs to give missions, contracts etc, without posting it on the PUBLIC boards. They didn't focus on that but focused on making it look pretty.
As far as I am concerned Incarna is NOT WiS not even close, it's a room that they then tried to add a cash store to the game, which royally angered people.
Cryptic's problem is that they have or rather had a complete problem with managing the project as a whole, there are still bugs that are months if not years old. And certain features remain broken or ostensibly broken that are awaiting refit. Such as Crafting for example.
And Dilithium, it's IN everything now, even crafting, which pretty much negates the whole purpose of crafting which is to create an "alternate" source of gear.
I never have liked dilithium because of what it represents, I have advocated that subbers should have some sort of discount or removal of dilithium needs from certain things, or even a dilithium stipend, since Cryptic Points are ironically all but worthless now in that regard.
Can you blame them? Quite a few promises were made in the past that were never kept. Stuff happens and I don't think this is deliberate on Cryptic's part. I do agree with those who have pointed out that it's more poor choice in picking goals, then changing the direction without following up.
there's a BIG difference between a statement of intent and a promise... While that list is for the most part true.... the user who collected the data is misrepresenting the data's significance.
Saying "We're planning to do this." is a statement of intent, NOT a promise.
Comments
Every season we're told devs are working on the next season or the next release when asked about what "are they doing", but they are asked that because... ok, the game is getting new stuff, but they shouldn't be releasing so much new things when the ones released before those still have some annoying and reported bugs.
That's why our mother asked us sometimes "what we were doing", not because she thought we were doing nothing, but because she thought we were not doing what we were supposed to.
Join date 20 Sept 2008
Actually.. They did that once or more in EVE Online, dedicated a big superpatch to fix just those things that never got fixed and had been around for long. And they gained so much love from us players.
Join date 20 Sept 2008
That would be, overall, for a company. There are around 45 people on STO. I believe the idea of STO getting programmers is a new idea as programmers were traditionally a floating team that individual game teams had to outsource to, competing with other games for resources on.
And there is no in-house marketing, as far as I know.
There's offsite marketing but they handle promotions and information gathering, which makes Cryptic's utilization of marketing rather like a production firm. (In other words, they hand marketing a product and say, "Make it sell and collect feedback for us." It's a bit dated as a model.)
Cryptic, overall, has a CEO, CFO, CTO (Chief Technical), and CCO (Chief Creative). I don't believe they have a CMO or that they integrate marketing as a department. The closest thing is the CCO, who I believe is still Jack Emmert -- although I think the role is basically "Founder Emeritus" -- a kind of position where Jack gets the creative side of the CEO role while the CEO handles the more mundane (from an outside perspective, anyway) CEO roles. This frees up Jack to be an evangelist for Cryptic both at gaming conventions and in interfacing with PWE, Runic, etc. It's the pure "Ted Talk" side of being a CEO.
There is no CMO. I think the company suffers from not having internal marketing emphasis.
Bran, for example, may stay informed but I doubt he's at every design meeting, being given equal weight with the production leads, pushing back patches for marketing considerations, etc. Those tasks may often be split between Stahl and Geko, I'd say, but I also think it means the result is that if anything gets compromised in the hashing out of strategic planning, it's marketing.
There was, in the Atari days. I only had one exchange with her, but she seemed nice.
That's when the game dies.
We're on the verge of that now.
Same thing only speaking from personal experience here, I have 1 fed Vice Admiral, I'm levelling 2 more Fed chars, just finished a KDF one and replaying all the story missions with my first Vice Admiral for Expertise and haven't hit a single bug that stops me from progressing with the exception of the fact that my first 50 went to do fire caves just after they resized Bajor, I skipped the mission and they fixed it a week later.
And for reference, I wouldn't touch the Mirror Universe event with a barge pole the length of my Oddessy Class ship so I'm levelling through pure story missions with a little DOff help.
I haven't done it in a while, but on 'Boldly They Rode' I kept getting stuck at the part where you override the 'Security Panel' in order to get into the Promenade. I'd hit the Security Panel, then....nothing. It's supposed to say 'Enter Promenade' and direct you over to the Hatch, but 4 out of the 6 times I did that stretch (for the Dominion weapons) this happened to me. Incredibly frustrating considering the only way to resolve it was to abandon the entire thing and start over.
Also, I'll just put 'Server Problems'. Way, way more prevalent than any other MMO I play(ed).
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The o3 - Killed you good
You've just answered yourself.
people seem to think that they sit on their asses for a few months before starting on the next season/event.
i bet those who werent working on the anniversary event were working on the "super big not season 8" content for may.
The forum ate my post, and I'm too tired to try and put it together again, so here's the TLDR version.
No one at Cryptic tells the playerbase anything about what they are working on until its already on the server, either holodeck or tribble or a few days away from that. As a result, since we have no proof that you are doing anything we think your aren't. Not logical, but human. If you want people to believe that you are working on something, you have to show them the proof. For instance, season 7, have a dev blog about how you created New Romulus. The no longer season 8, have a dev blog about whatever it is you are doing. At any time, have a dev blog about how you tracked down and got rid of some bug. Like your math teacher said all those years ago, show your work for credit. And I know you TAco aren't in charge of all of these things, I'm using the collective you. That is why we think you don't work on things, you never show us that you do.
Nouveau riche LTS member
Um, nope DStahl has stated numerous times Cryptic has a larger group of employees, but currently STO itself has a team of 40 Devs (and still growing) assigned to it alone.
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..."
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
That is a failure with picking goals, not with keeping the playerbase informed. And also part of the reason why no one believes anything they say now. Honestly, if they have a plan, and stick to the plan, then even if something slips, as long as they tell us, and follow threw, it will end up being okay. Yes, the first few times will be rough, but as long as they give us a word saying that this is our plan, and this is what we will do, it will work.
Please see Eve Online and Walking in stations, which is probably the biggest joke that game has. Walking in stations flopped, big time, and its not being worked on that anyone will say, but the devs were up front and said sorry, we can't do this right now, we're going to go over here and do this, becasue we know we can, and maybe we'll come back to it when we have a better idea. And yes, people were pissed off, but they got over it because CCP learned to pick better goals. I just don't think Cryptic has learned to do anything other than to hide better.
Nouveau riche LTS member
They worked on that for FIVE YEARS with basically no updates, then botched it when they introduced it, and the forums and official IRC were on FIRE over the demands (not requests, demands) that there be a way to turn it off. They got actual death threats over the issue.
I'm sorry, things are not rosy over there. It looks very much like here, and like Cryptic they've gone back and forth between more and less information over time. Actually, in many cases it's the same people complaining in both places.
So, like I said, it flopped big time, and they said we can't make this work right now, we're going to do something else. You just said it with more caps.
From what I have seen, things are as rosy over there as they have ever been, soon is still a trademark, and so on, but I am still specifically pointing to their dev blogs as being a better way of doing things. Like this one. It says exactly what they plan to do, is about a month ahead of the release, instead of a few days, and actually gives some details rather than saying hey, you can duel be sure to try it out, like I would expect from STO. I see no reason that STO could not do the same thing.
Nouveau riche LTS member
Ah, I see. I thought it was the number of employees total. Cryptic always seemed like a rather small operation to me.
In that case, we'd need to break them into interns, leads, grunts and IT.
Artists would still occupy the majority numbers, though.
So...40-50 people and 5 months each per of these recent "seasons"?
Oh-Kay...
While you could call it self-entitlement, it will be a very poor way to go about it.
Although, I don't think he was speaking out of self-entitlement, either, rather interest and curiosity.
There's also a very strong argument to the contrary of your perspective.
That's quite possibly a factor (if to believe the company reviews on glass door).
However, I would attribute it more to communication failure.
As the saying goes, the worst thing is half-truths.
Initially they were very upfront and talked about their plans openly, indeed. However, whenever the direction got changed no one bothered to go to the community and explain that they've hit a snag and re-prioritized goals for certain reasons and the things they talked about unfortunately have been shelved for now.
Instead, players got a partial communique about something in the oven without any follow-ups on its condition.
So, after waiting and waiting they came to Cryptic and asked about it and got told "oh, we ditched that a while ago, we're doing something else now".
Of course, when that something else also fizzled (and this ties with the goal placing issue you raised)...well...throw another log onto the bonefire; and that in turn fostered the "cryptic are liars" mentality.
The important thing to remember about talking to the community is that it's not a water tap. It's not a valve. You can't turn it on/off at will, or keep it slightly open so it trickles.
It's more like a main circuit breaker. Either it's on, or it's off.
And if you do open a communication channel, then you must keep communicating and updating the community on the situation.
If you can't do that, then you might as well just turn it off and announce things when they're done.
Cloud Imperium is running a very interesting experiment in that regard. It will be most fascinating to see how it turns out.
___________________________
Joined April 2008. Lifetime Subscriber. Original member of the original 2nd Fleet.
Expended $1,961 USD on this game - regretting it all. This game and some of its staff disappointed me, time and again, per every single cent spent!!!
Yeah, they got quite a bit of flak for promises not being kept and going back on their word a few times, but in general they did more work than those at Bioware did with TOR, with only a faction of the budget.
So they really should be applauded.
Now given their bragging about 40+ people, I personally am expecting a lot more than just simple maps from now on. Season 6 was essentially one zone and a bunch of grinding and Season 7 was a couple of new maps and a bunch of grinding. But when it comes to Season 8, it better be all fireworks as they hype it up to be. I really want to see more than 5 new zones. In fact, given their promise Season 8 was KDF Focused and now we got Romulan talk, I'm upping that expectation to be at least 10 new maps.
So Cryptic, the balls in your court. :cool:
How could it flop, it was never implemented, and don't tell me that the Captain Quarters is it, BS. The devs got greey and got caught trying to introduce a money store into the game, and WiS got thrown under the bus right along with it. What angered so many such as myself, is that they concentrated on the graphics, the look, the fact that your coat tail will flail in the wind correctly, but they didn't introduce the features that would of made it more then a chat room. Like Station run businesses that are both run by players and NPCs, actual corporate offices that you can visit with programmable NPCs, using the programmable NPCs to give missions, contracts etc, without posting it on the PUBLIC boards. They didn't focus on that but focused on making it look pretty.
As far as I am concerned Incarna is NOT WiS not even close, it's a room that they then tried to add a cash store to the game, which royally angered people.
Cryptic's problem is that they have or rather had a complete problem with managing the project as a whole, there are still bugs that are months if not years old. And certain features remain broken or ostensibly broken that are awaiting refit. Such as Crafting for example.
And Dilithium, it's IN everything now, even crafting, which pretty much negates the whole purpose of crafting which is to create an "alternate" source of gear.
I never have liked dilithium because of what it represents, I have advocated that subbers should have some sort of discount or removal of dilithium needs from certain things, or even a dilithium stipend, since Cryptic Points are ironically all but worthless now in that regard.
-
Saying "We're planning to do this." is a statement of intent, NOT a promise.
My character Tsin'xing
Picking their noses and playing solitaire...pretending to work...till the boss comes around (if he actaully cares at all)....how do I apply there?