What I don't get at first glance is - why this was even seen as a desired thing? The whole conglomeration of gaming websites under one unified look and banner such that they all look the same. Especially games with such extremely different experiences and feels as Star Trek, Champions, and the rest of PWE's line-up. I mean - why NOT let Star Trek and Champions - Classic Sci-Fi and Superheroes - have a different look and experience to their websites? The rest of PWEs stable are all bog-standard fantasy grinders, so sure, lump them all together in theme and look. But STO and Champions?
I have to wonder, is it actually costing the company money to keep the sites separate? Does it require different website teams? Is this all about cutting costs by cutting the workforce down?
It's not as if PWE is alone in this trend. Activision did it with WoW and their other games for example.
But PWE is kind of unique - before it acquired Cryptic, their work was almost exclusively "Grinders". It seems everything they've done since buying Cryptic has been an attempt to use the Western games to draw in new players to their other games or make the Western games more like the grinders. Arc is just the latest attempt. A much more heavy-handed effort at that.
But will it work this time?
As far as "cross-pollination" goes, there's STILL not likely to be any overlap between Star Trek and PWE's fantasy grinders. We've made that much ABUNDANTLY clear as a community. So have the folks at Champions. (Not sure about Neverwinter - don't play it, never visited their website or forums)
Yet it's true that forum people aren't the majority of the people playing. So could I be wrong in assuming minimal crossover appeal from casual STO gamers? Are PWE's grinders actually going to see some benefit to this whole shebang? Short term or long term?
But lets assume I'm right, and that PWE does NOT see any real crossover in terms of customers of CO, STO and NW playing their other games? What then?
What's next if - despite all their efforts, they STILL don't get the numbers they want?
I do not like the new website. Ive seen it on yahoo.com sometimes where you can scroll down endlessly to useless tiles foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I do not understand when players ask for certain functionality (i.e. out of game mailbox) they refuse to add it but decide to butcher, chew up, and spit back a terrible site like this.
I hate the migration ENTIRELY I am an STO player a cryptic atari customer not PWE I hate every game PWE has ever made period, STO is a purchased into property that is bigger and better than all of PWE prior products created or bought into, this botches much of the STO brand individuation from PWE line up of total trash cash grab schemes for substandard gaming experiences... GIVE US OUR site back, if you made anything worth while these "integrations" would not be needed, your other titles are diminishing to this brand. Stop shooting your feet. If you had anything worth buying (or accepting for free) we would have taken it already, forcing us to view spam advertisements every time we try to go to STO is complete garbage. DIE PWE die.
No, it's not going to work. If Star Trek Online suffers that badly, CBS will take it and they won't give it back. They won't see it as "Oh, PWE is doing a horrible job with it, let's give it to someone else who will do better with it", they'll see it as "Oh, the game isn't profitable anymore. That's the end of the venture."
You're playing with fire for trying the "talking with your wallet by never touching it again" and if you try it like that over a WEB SITE, then you're out of your mind.
Oh no, i get it just fine. For the record though sometimes lighting a fire under a companies TRIBBLE is beneficial. Especially in this case where PWE apparently doesn't give a TRIBBLE about what the players want or care about, and in a sad failed attempt at a cross-game cash grab try to force this ARC TRIBBLE down our throats.
Besides as TRIBBLE poor of a track record as PWE has with it's other grindfest games i really don't see what the hell the drawback is if the star trek license gets pulled from PWE's control. Hell come to think of it, it might actually be a damn good idea since no STO would be better then having to watch a PWE controlled STO slowly die from PWE's ARC fetish. Then again like i said you never know if another company is lying in wait ready to pounce on the opportunity that is STO to take it over from PWE.
At any rate it's not just their crappy TRIBBLE ARC website that looks like a drug addicted idiot designed it in a sad attempt by PWE to "cross-brand" games (seriously i have seen amateur's with no website building knowledge come up with better sites then that), It's about PWE using ARC to destroy STO PERIOD, and where we as a community draw the line! I started playing STO before PWE took it over and it was fun to play and a nice break... now, not so much.
So Cryptic do you want "FEEDBACK"???
heres mine...
why designers latelly have to make EVERYTHING look like a cellphone app or page??
nothing against a actual mobile page or something like it but i personally (and most people who play the game) DONT access the STO page from a mobile but from a notebook at least but most commoly from a desktop PC
the new site need A LOT of tweaks forgive me but its ugly just ugly...
the new site is a hell of a mess... i feel like being bombarded by a dozen of boxes swooping on my screen...
so please make a WEB BROWSER for those who use PC And notebook and leave the mobile style for the mobiles please?????????
windows 8 is already the pinacle of uglyness (fricking retro IS UGLY AS A TRAIN CRASH DONT USE THAT AS A MODEL!!! FOR GOD SAKE'S!!!)
nothing against arc... but the page itself just DONT feel Trekkie (the best quality of the old site)
Been to the new site a every day on my way to the forums, but today when I hit my bookmark and it popped up I was hit anew with disgust. Such a God awful site. Makes me think of a gray cinder block jail cell. GJ, PWE! :mad:
Went to my Accounts page and see:
Member Since:
02/15/2012
Total Playing Time:
28 mins
Why bother w/ these if you can't bother to have the right values?
It seems everything they've done since buying Cryptic has been an attempt to use the Western games to draw in new players to their other games
Pretty much this. Google some of the press releases from around the time PWE acquired Cryptic. They wanted a foothold into the American/European markets.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
100% client side CSS changes in my browser as we speak (also available in 1 or 2-column layout for the news page). I can share the style if anyone's interested.
As for the other parts of my proposal, the Overview button, copying the nav bar to the product page, replacing the text title with an actual STO banner, those would be easy to implement client side for anyone that knows a little bit of javascript and has the Greasemonkey extension. Unfortunately I'm no good at javascript; I might try but the result may or may not work. :P
Also, depending on how they have their Server Up/Down banner code working on the current STO site, it might be fairly easy to tap into that and get it working too but that's even more over my head than the simple layout changes.
Same with the search box (I think that currently their "search" only works on the tags in their articles, e.g. community.arcgames.com/en/news/star-trek-online/tag/sto-patch-notes).
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
I still keep hitting the 'Stay Logged In' option every time I visit the forums, in the vein hope that it'll actually listen to me. So far it's around 50/nil to the button.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
Okay I did it. I dove in and took a shot at a Greasemonkey script and hated every second of it (except for a moment of euphoria when I got it to work). I got everything as seen in my concept images except for the Server Status indicator and the search box.
No photoshop trickery involved. Just the Stylish theme I wrote before, combined with a new Greasemonkey script.
I still need to make some adjustments to some elements to make them a little easier to read, and adjust some padding on some elements that weren't designed to have a distinct background color and pixel stroke border.
Also my amateur code is really pooptacular and I need to run it through some refinements (when I'm done my code will be a polished TRIBBLE instead of a regular TRIBBLE ).
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
I still keep hitting the 'Stay Logged In' option every time I visit the forums, in the vein hope that it'll actually listen to me. So far it's around 50/nil to the button.
I've got the same problem. It's won't keep me signed in.
You know what's funny though?
If I'll visit the old STO page - http://sto.perfectworld.com/ - wait for it to load the horrendous Arc page, and then go to the forums from there, I'm magically signed in automatically.
If I'll just go to the forums straight away, then I'm not signed in regardless of what I do.
But we can scream, shout and even provide "constructive feedback" all we want - it won't matter. PWE will have it their way regardless of what we have to say about all those changes. And 2014 has really started off the wrong foot for STO if you ask me, both when it comes to the game itself, as well as all the Arc BS.
I've got the same problem. It's won't keep me signed in.
You know what's funny though?
If I'll visit the old STO page - http://sto.perfectworld.com/ - wait for it to load the horrendous Arc page, and then go to the forums from there, I'm magically signed in automatically.
If I'll just go to the forums straight away, then I'm not signed in regardless of what I do.
The old site probably uses the same cookie as the forums for keeping you logged in (or the other way around) while the Arc site most likely does not.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
Okay I did it. I dove in and took a shot at a Greasemonkey script and hated every second of it (except for a moment of euphoria when I got it to work). I got everything as seen in my concept images except for the Server Status indicator and the search box.
Also my amateur code is really pooptacular and I need to run it through some refinements (when I'm done my code will be a polished TRIBBLE instead of a regular TRIBBLE ).
So, my feedback for the site migration:
The site simply looks worse than before, especially the News portion. This does have the side benefit that compared to the new site, the new Forum design is gorgeous (which does not mean I actually prefer the slate blue/grey look; too low contrast and generally looks like your designers are suffering from depression). The site still looks, well, inferior to an unpolished TRIBBLE.
You guys really need to hire the amateurs working back there to improve you site. Put them in charge of design and implementation so they can fix the actual site directly instead of having to cover up the base site on the client side.
As far as the migration itself... it's irritating. The arcgames popup and redirect actually means that we lose access to site content, dev blogs, services, etc. It reflects rather poorly that you follow a link on this page and it sends you to this one, so you end up getting booted back to the [sarcasm] ever so lovely [/sarcasm] new News page. Would it be that hard to only place the redirect on the pages you'd actually moved and deleted thus far?
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
Okay I did it. I dove in and took a shot at a Greasemonkey script and hated every second of it (except for a moment of euphoria when I got it to work). I got everything as seen in my concept images except for the Server Status indicator and the search box.
And once again the people being paid by PWE have been shamed.... and not a single frak was given by PWE or Cryptic
So... I checked the STO site daily to see if there were any new devblogs.
That's going to stop.
Not because the new site is ugly, though it is, but it's a jumbled mess and I don't know where to look for the latest news on it. Or rather, it's not there. This was already the case in the ARC client before. It seemed to be trailing behind the latest news by over a week. Right now, the latest news it's showing me is Dev Blog #47. It's just completely pointless.
It is real easy to get to the forums. When on the main arcgames site, you click social and boom there is all the games with sto up on the first line. Click forum and boom there you go.
And NO not all the members don't want ARC. Forum posters are the minority, majority of the players don't even come on the forums cause they are too busy playing the game.
I have been using ARC since day 1 when they did the first release of it last year and have never had a single issue with it.
This ^^ message was brought to you by PWE. Copyright 2014. All Rights Reserved.
As you can tell, STO has been officially migrated over to the new Arc website layout. You will now automatically be redirected to this site and no longer the old one. We want to inform you that this does NOT mean Arc is mandatory, yet, but in the near future this abortion will be shoved down your throats whether you like it or not, and that you can still access your games through the old launchers. As always, we do not give a rats behind about player concerns, so if you have any feedback or questions, don't bother with them because, again, we do not give a rats behind.
Thanks,
Sparkiesoft and the Arc Team
There you go Sparkie. I fixed your post for you. You're welcome.
I don't care what the header says, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, an "ARC user".
EDIT: Wait, on second thought: Am I the only one who keeps getting "javascript:void(0);" essentially "stuck" in the lower-left corner of my browser? (Chrome Version 33.0.1750.117 m) This just started with the "migration," and this is the only place it happens. Refreshing the page usually gets rid of it, but still- what the...?
Well yesterday I went to purchase some zen and was redirected to the new web site. After clicking on the Zen tab i waited for 5 minutes before being taken to the page to purchase zen. Not impressed with the big tiles to select which denomination you want to purchase, even less impressed with having to dig to find where I could enter my ultimate game card info to complete the transaction. But the biggest problem was haveing to spend close to 25 minutes trying to navigate to My Wallet to transfer the zen to the game. This is your idea of new and improved. Two old sayings for you; If its not broke dont fix it, and New isnt always better! Please fix the links to function properly. Oh and one last note your migration and redirection to the new web site apprantly isnt working either since i accessed the forums via the old web site to post this. Remember people appreciate well designed and tested products....in all honesty I would give this new web page a C, (get rid of the tiles and it goes to a .
Howdy, just me logging in again because, y'know- PWE web developer.
Weird, I'm having no problems staying logged in. Sometimes when I open the site it says I'm not, but if I click "login" with the middle mouse button it will open a new tab where I am logged in without having to put in any details.
The STO forums have been doing this to me since before the redesign.
Comments
I have to wonder, is it actually costing the company money to keep the sites separate? Does it require different website teams? Is this all about cutting costs by cutting the workforce down?
It's not as if PWE is alone in this trend. Activision did it with WoW and their other games for example.
But PWE is kind of unique - before it acquired Cryptic, their work was almost exclusively "Grinders". It seems everything they've done since buying Cryptic has been an attempt to use the Western games to draw in new players to their other games or make the Western games more like the grinders. Arc is just the latest attempt. A much more heavy-handed effort at that.
But will it work this time?
As far as "cross-pollination" goes, there's STILL not likely to be any overlap between Star Trek and PWE's fantasy grinders. We've made that much ABUNDANTLY clear as a community. So have the folks at Champions. (Not sure about Neverwinter - don't play it, never visited their website or forums)
Yet it's true that forum people aren't the majority of the people playing. So could I be wrong in assuming minimal crossover appeal from casual STO gamers? Are PWE's grinders actually going to see some benefit to this whole shebang? Short term or long term?
But lets assume I'm right, and that PWE does NOT see any real crossover in terms of customers of CO, STO and NW playing their other games? What then?
What's next if - despite all their efforts, they STILL don't get the numbers they want?
I do not understand when players ask for certain functionality (i.e. out of game mailbox) they refuse to add it but decide to butcher, chew up, and spit back a terrible site like this.
My god, man! Now THAT'S a good redesign!
Is there any way to implement that client side? Like what you did with the style changes to the forums?
You are giving credit to the wrong person for the forum style theme. That was Eradicator84.
Whoops! So noted. Thanks!
Oh no, i get it just fine. For the record though sometimes lighting a fire under a companies TRIBBLE is beneficial. Especially in this case where PWE apparently doesn't give a TRIBBLE about what the players want or care about, and in a sad failed attempt at a cross-game cash grab try to force this ARC TRIBBLE down our throats.
Besides as TRIBBLE poor of a track record as PWE has with it's other grindfest games i really don't see what the hell the drawback is if the star trek license gets pulled from PWE's control. Hell come to think of it, it might actually be a damn good idea since no STO would be better then having to watch a PWE controlled STO slowly die from PWE's ARC fetish. Then again like i said you never know if another company is lying in wait ready to pounce on the opportunity that is STO to take it over from PWE.
At any rate it's not just their crappy TRIBBLE ARC website that looks like a drug addicted idiot designed it in a sad attempt by PWE to "cross-brand" games (seriously i have seen amateur's with no website building knowledge come up with better sites then that), It's about PWE using ARC to destroy STO PERIOD, and where we as a community draw the line! I started playing STO before PWE took it over and it was fun to play and a nice break... now, not so much.
heres mine...
why designers latelly have to make EVERYTHING look like a cellphone app or page??
nothing against a actual mobile page or something like it but i personally (and most people who play the game) DONT access the STO page from a mobile but from a notebook at least but most commoly from a desktop PC
the new site need A LOT of tweaks forgive me but its ugly just ugly...
the new site is a hell of a mess... i feel like being bombarded by a dozen of boxes swooping on my screen...
so please make a WEB BROWSER for those who use PC And notebook and leave the mobile style for the mobiles please?????????
windows 8 is already the pinacle of uglyness (fricking retro IS UGLY AS A TRAIN CRASH DONT USE THAT AS A MODEL!!! FOR GOD SAKE'S!!!)
nothing against arc... but the page itself just DONT feel Trekkie (the best quality of the old site)
spocked thumb face...
Oh god Cryptic fix this.
Yeah but at least battle.net has appropriate themes for their sites!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/
Arc is the same soul-less gray everywhere.
Pretty much this. Google some of the press releases from around the time PWE acquired Cryptic. They wanted a foothold into the American/European markets.
Joined January 2009
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y110/mightybob2000/PWE_Site_Changes/MB_CSS.jpg~original
100% client side CSS changes in my browser as we speak (also available in 1 or 2-column layout for the news page). I can share the style if anyone's interested.
As for the other parts of my proposal, the Overview button, copying the nav bar to the product page, replacing the text title with an actual STO banner, those would be easy to implement client side for anyone that knows a little bit of javascript and has the Greasemonkey extension. Unfortunately I'm no good at javascript; I might try but the result may or may not work. :P
Also, depending on how they have their Server Up/Down banner code working on the current STO site, it might be fairly easy to tap into that and get it working too but that's even more over my head than the simple layout changes.
Same with the search box (I think that currently their "search" only works on the tags in their articles, e.g. community.arcgames.com/en/news/star-trek-online/tag/sto-patch-notes).
This is correct. I did help him a tiny tiny tiny bit but it's like 98/99% his work so muchos creditos to him!
Joined January 2009
Only because I love you guys though.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y110/mightybob2000/PWE_Site_Changes/MB_CSS_v2.jpg~original
No photoshop trickery involved. Just the Stylish theme I wrote before, combined with a new Greasemonkey script.
I still need to make some adjustments to some elements to make them a little easier to read, and adjust some padding on some elements that weren't designed to have a distinct background color and pixel stroke border.
Also my amateur code is really pooptacular and I need to run it through some refinements (when I'm done my code will be a polished TRIBBLE instead of a regular TRIBBLE
Joined January 2009
You know what's funny though?
If I'll visit the old STO page - http://sto.perfectworld.com/ - wait for it to load the horrendous Arc page, and then go to the forums from there, I'm magically signed in automatically.
If I'll just go to the forums straight away, then I'm not signed in regardless of what I do.
But we can scream, shout and even provide "constructive feedback" all we want - it won't matter. PWE will have it their way regardless of what we have to say about all those changes. And 2014 has really started off the wrong foot for STO if you ask me, both when it comes to the game itself, as well as all the Arc BS.
The old site probably uses the same cookie as the forums for keeping you logged in (or the other way around) while the Arc site most likely does not.
Joined January 2009
I'm sure some helpful folks here could point y'all to a competent web developer who could fix this.
So, my feedback for the site migration:
The site simply looks worse than before, especially the News portion. This does have the side benefit that compared to the new site, the new Forum design is gorgeous (which does not mean I actually prefer the slate blue/grey look; too low contrast and generally looks like your designers are suffering from depression). The site still looks, well, inferior to an unpolished TRIBBLE.
You guys really need to hire the amateurs working back there to improve you site. Put them in charge of design and implementation so they can fix the actual site directly instead of having to cover up the base site on the client side.
As far as the migration itself... it's irritating. The arcgames popup and redirect actually means that we lose access to site content, dev blogs, services, etc. It reflects rather poorly that you follow a link on this page and it sends you to this one, so you end up getting booted back to the [sarcasm] ever so lovely [/sarcasm] new News page. Would it be that hard to only place the redirect on the pages you'd actually moved and deleted thus far?
And once again the people being paid by PWE have been shamed.... and not a single frak was given by PWE or Cryptic
That's going to stop.
Not because the new site is ugly, though it is, but it's a jumbled mess and I don't know where to look for the latest news on it. Or rather, it's not there. This was already the case in the ARC client before. It seemed to be trailing behind the latest news by over a week. Right now, the latest news it's showing me is Dev Blog #47. It's just completely pointless.
So take it outside and shoot it.
This ^^ message was brought to you by PWE. Copyright 2014. All Rights Reserved.
There you go Sparkie. I fixed your post for you. You're welcome.
You know, it's not OK to complain you're not being listened to, and also belittle the folks who have a different opinion.
There's room here for everybody's opinions. IDIC; it's the Star Trek way.
EDIT: Wait, on second thought: Am I the only one who keeps getting "javascript:void(0);" essentially "stuck" in the lower-left corner of my browser? (Chrome Version 33.0.1750.117 m) This just started with the "migration," and this is the only place it happens. Refreshing the page usually gets rid of it, but still- what the...?
aperantly i am using an unsupported browser now for the website and it looks broken and worse LOL
who knew chrome was a rare browser to not be supported
Weird, I'm having no problems staying logged in. Sometimes when I open the site it says I'm not, but if I click "login" with the middle mouse button it will open a new tab where I am logged in without having to put in any details.
The STO forums have been doing this to me since before the redesign.