But surely Cryptic knows who the important people to listen to are, right? They have to give me what I want. I'm an LTS holder who has been here since early Closed Beta. I'M IMPORTANT!
Of course you are, of course. You are the Cosmic One person they listen to.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Not everyone is like that. Some people do work overtime for their customers.
I know I do, to a limited extent.
Usually happen when you like your job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you still get paid, and so does the company you work for. If it helps retain customers, then by all means do it. But don't cast yourself as morally superior for doing it, because that's insufferable.
You mean like how in City of Heroes the PvP base raid feature was bugged for 7 years. The bug was so far beyond their ability to fix and game breaking that NCSoft/Paragon Studios disabled the feature so it couldn't be exploited.
AT LEAST they DISABLED it. Cryptic never removed or "disabled" something that was bugged since eons ago. They just release things, bugged or not, and they forget about it. Sorry, nah, but ive never saw a case like this lol. I know you lfters love cryptic, of course, but you are not right lol.
Do cryptic read the forums and take feedback from it? Yes.
I made a post in a thread with a dev in it a few months back about a hole in the dyson battleground map. He acknowledged this and said it would be looked into. Boom a couple of months later fixed, I'm sure they knew about it anyway but the feedback was nice.
Do some bugs take allot longer to fix, hell yes. And the longer those bugs take to fix the more duplicate threads about the same issue pop up, the devs know about these bugs in allot of cases and are working on them I'm sure. But they are not going to respond to every single thread (regardless of how loudly and angrily people post).
For instance, in the same thread I asked the dev if he knew about the graphics bugs allot of players were having (with a brief explanation). He said yes they were aware of the problem, no they currently did not have a fix to hand but yes they are working on it. Given the size of this bug in comparison the dyson battlezone bug I am content to wait knowing they are working on it and I did see improvement until the recent updates bringing new rendering issues. But rather than ranting about it it just says to me that they are still working on it, which is a good thing.
Also ranting about game mechanics such as cooldowns and lockboxes won't help all to much either. They will make changes if they need to with those easily enough, and I see no reason for them to in most cases.
Posting a list of greivances isn't usually the way to incite a polite response in most situations I know of.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
One thing about bugs:
Some bugs in programs or games never get fixed because they are not worth fixing. Any effort spend on them is better spend on something else, helping more players or getting more money in. Sometimes it is because they are so trivial in effect, sometimes it is because they are so hard to reproduce, sometimes it is because they are hard to fix, but ultimately it results in it being not a sound investment of development time.
Yeah Starfleet Academy has been bugged since it was added to the game. But this bug is nothing more than a display glitch and thus so low priority it may never get fixed.
For duplication steps: go to SFA, click the button to go directly to sector space, or Sol Space. the name that appears is you Sci Boff, the picture? Well.... it might be your Sci Boff but usually it's one of your other boffs.
Problem is, if they listened to EVERYBODY, you'd have a big hot flaming mess.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
You are the one that obviously loves Cryptic and this game. The reason you complain so much is because you are embarrassed at how much you love this game and Cryptic/PWE. Someone that truly disliked things here as much as you claim you do would have left ages ago.
You aren't fooling anyone. :P
And you are totally right. I love this game. Because it is the only trek think we have. But, do you really think i will still playing if there will be out there another star trek game half decent than STO is??
I love STO but i hate cryptic for making the game really worst month after month. And because they are ruining a game that could be far 500% better than it is now. Specially if at least 50% of the bugs were solved. And because it seems that people must be really blind, since all of you apparently are really OK, about the way cryptic is leading this game. You like a game being broken day by day, that is what it seems. And then, if someone complains, its too bad, because apparently in these forums people can only say positive things about cryptic. Of course i know that, but it is so obvious... :eek: lol. Seriously.
They are fixing bugs all the time. Some are easier to fix than others. I for one would rather them go ahead and fix what they can when they can, as long as they are aware of the bigger issues and are indeed trying to figure out what is wrong. A lot of the problems people post about are not effecting everyone, or only happen occasionally. Use logic for a moment and ask yourself if those issues might require extensive digging to find the cause and come up with a solution that doesn't break something else?
LOL. Another naive person. Now tell me how many "fixes" are really applied after a patch. In normal circunstances, 75% of those "fixes" are just temporary things to make people happy and most of the times not even that, because the next week, we have those bugs again.
Of course i agree, that some fixes are easier than others. But apparently, ALL the bugs are really hard to fix for cryptic. Even the most stupid ones. And if you think 3 fixes every week, of really non important bugs are enough.. well, then i think you defnitely are talking about a completely different game. Because it doesnt matter if they fix 3 bugs every week, since they are not willing to fix the most important ones. And we have constant bugs almost every day. And things that were fixed, now they are broken again. And thinks that are totally game breaker, are still not fixed and cryptic doesnt even said anything about em. And all of this because people will never complain and they will ok and happy everytime cryptic launches another c-store new content or new ships or new reputation zones or dumb summer events. Even a stupid and ugly unnecessary new ESD.
And i could go on.
But you know what?, it ok. Because this is like a bomb, when the countdown reaches 0.. boom..!. :P
And you are totally right. I love this game. Because it is the only trek think we have. But, do you really think i will still playing if there will be out there another star trek game half decent than STO is??
I love STO but i hate cryptic for making the game really worst month after month. And because they are ruining a game that could be far 500% better than it is now. Specially if at least 50% of the bugs were solved. And because it seems that people must be really blind, since all of you apparently are really OK, about the way cryptic is leading this game. You like a game being broken day by day, that is what it seems. And then, if someone complains, its too bad, because apparently in these forums people can only say positive things about cryptic. Of course i know that, but it is so obvious... :eek: lol. Seriously.
You must be wearing rose-colored glasses if you think STO was better in the past. Cryptic and STO has always been like this with the odd time that they actually surprise us with content like the new FE episodes, the look of the Dyson Sphere, and Legacy of Romulus. STO is a cockroach that just won't die. It is ugly and stubborn, but we love it anyway.
If Cryptic just listened to me, and not you, the game will be awesome. :rolleyes:
So say we all.:rolleyes:
One could wish for a more complete official "Known Issues" list being posted and maintained so that we would at least know that the problems we report haven't disappeared into some bureaucratic abyss to be ignored and forgotten.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
Cryptic do NOT listen. In fact they don't even play the game. They have actually been called out on their responses before, and in their own words claimed that any negative responses they've seen so far have been (to their utter failure at any type of statistics or mathematics) unrepresentative of the real player base -- mean while in the same thread they would use one or two isolated posts of praise as proof that their preconcieved notions were correct and they are just and right in making the changes they do.
They openly admit they don't bug fix. It's too hard for them. For god's sake, it took them HOW many years to add a simple change log to the patches? The excuse before that? "Well, we can't know what's in the patch so we can't make a change log" -- yes, this is SERIOUSLY the reason they gave.
Then they would dump a buggy release so bad it breaks several aspects of gameplay and let it sit for months on end. They would announce they'ved "turned all efforts to the next patch" and would not issue any bug fixes or update.
No matter how much outrage they received, "it doesn't represent the playerbase" (in their own words) and when proven wrong by some folks that actually knew a bit about statistics and sample sizes, and the like, they shut up and never answered anything on the topic again.
But what they did admit if you read between the lines -- and if you read the lines themselves when Cryptic accidentally told the truth -- is that they don't give a rat's butt about the players, about balance, about anything. The entire game now, whether from directive by PWE or just from handed-down guidelines, is geared entirely for selling power-ups and shortcuts.
Mind you, before they started selling theses powerups, you didn't NEED them. They have continually buffed the AI NPCs to absurd levels and made certain missions 99% unwinnable with your older ship and boff setup and skills trees.
And on top of that, before they started selling you a way to speed up delays, these delays didn't exist. They have been adding time gates to everything. They have increased dilithium costs to exponentially high new levels meanwhile have cut back drastically how much dilithium you can get from any given mission. They have started charging large quantities of dilithium for things that never required it before, and the biggest scam of all -- the rep system and the fleet holdings, charge you Billions of Dilithium in total -- which you can conveniently get from z-points -- which conveniently cost real-world-money and make Cryptic butt-loads of money.
So, by their own admission on these forums, by their own comments, by their own deeds, they have shown they have their own money-based game design for this game, and NOT any ideas of balance or gameplay. They don't listen, period. They only care about the next money-making "feature" of the coming update, which they work solely on at the expense of any bug fixing or long-term maintenance the game requires.
None of this is opinion. This is all fact from observing and participating in these forums for years. If you doubt this, I have about 2000 hours played on this game. I've put a lot of time and money into it. Many others could tell you this as well, but alas most have left the game because of the above sad state of affairs.
How many employees a company might have has no bearing on how many are assigned to any particular division within the company. Between its 3 games, it's upcoming 4th game, its Foundry Team, its executive team, and so on Cryptic probably has close to 200 employees. They are not all assigned on STO any more then all of Bioware's employees are working on SWTOR.
The vast majority of MMOs do not even have 100-member teams. You cannot compare WoW to any other MMO. Even in its decline WoW has two to three times more Subscribers then its next largest Subscription game competition. When you look at comparable games in the industry - LotRO, SWTOR, ***, etc - none of them have hundreds of Devs on their team any more let alone thousands.
as I have said before, I have a friend who works in the industry. he has bounced around a couple of developers, and is now in the one he wanted to work for. I have asked him what the "average" mmo "game" has for a healthy size for development.. he said the smallest one he ever worked for was about 300 employees for "one game". sure if they had multiple games, there would be more employees.
but, like he said, you need x amount of employees to develop said game, you need x amount of employees to maintain said game, you need x amount of emplyees to promote, server maintnence, quality assurance, story writers, the leads (big wigs) secretary's, website developers/maintainers, in game moderation, customer service, billing, art rendering, cutscene renders, code monkeys, and so on and so forth.
im not saying cryptic didn't get it done for sto with the 20 employees the game "admitantly" started with. but, cryptic/pwe need to sit down, evaluate the game, and make a decision to either stop ***** footing around and hiring an extra body here and there, or just give the game a "healthy" development team. Christ, just think of what this game would be like without some of the content devs have done in their "own" time. they had to put charity work in just to make the game what it is today.
in response to why people might feel that cryptic ignores the plees to crush bugs, balance, provide meaningfull customer service, and what not. well it is because they cannot. the simply do not have the man power. this has been said in interviews.. gecko and stahl have said this. they have said they have to balance putting recources (employees) on bug fixes or developing content.
as said by gecko in one of his more recent interviews.. season 9 is the first season the dev team actually had the content done a little before the release.. every other content release has been up to the wire. because they don't have the man power to get it done, they were drowning.. they are now at a turning point as they have been hiring people.. but imagine what the game would be like if they went out and doubled the size of the team now, and not one at a time, but did a mass hiring. it would be glorious.
as far as you using wow as a fram of reference, yes, they are the biggest. they have over3-5 thousand employees. but.. lets look at it this way.
trion released rift almost at the same time sto was released.. (trion was a relatively new company as well. ) trion has thousands of employees just working on rift. and rift is literally 10 times (content wise) larger than sto. rift has one of the best customer service teams I have ever had to deal with. trion employees have a wonderfull relationship with their customers (players) and even buck up when they mess up. they say "sorry" lol.. and, its rare that their servers come down, and even rarer that a bug, once it is cought, is in the game for more than a week.
star wars, is a younger game than this, is a much larger failure, and still has better support and production quality (not that I play the game anymore lol, because of the reason it failed).
eve online, to get a sci fi game in here, has a few thousand emplyees if memory serves (my friend worked on this game).
even star citizen, which isn't even in beta yet, has more emplyees just for the one game, than cryptic has for all its games put together.
not that I know, but im willing to bet that the development teams for each of the perfect world games is larger than all the employees combined at cryptic.
but like I said, I understand business, I understand you have to start somewhere, sto was cryptic break out game. but if cryptic is having all the success that they claim, and that players like you always say, than why are they not bringing their operation up to par with the industry standards? why is the game not being brought up to industry standards?
ill say this, if cryptic were to dump recources and manpower into sto, the game would skyrocket. bugs could be worked on, content could be released in much larger (longer lived) releases. an expansion might actually be worthy of being called an expansion. we might actually get a real life customer service team, instead of the auto ressponses lol.. it would be good for both players and cryptic/pwe. like I have said before. sometimes you have to spend a buck, to make a buck.
The problem with a mass hire is that training people takes time and players assume that hiring a ton of devs will fix everything at once instead of the more realistic view of it taking months before we see improvement. Every new dev has to learn the STO engine and some of the new hires don't work out.
yes, but would you rather a few devs take the time to train someone once or twice a year, and suddenly have a beast of a development team, or would you rather they hire someone everymonth, and that dev now spends 12 weeks out of the year training someone. ??
as I have said before, I have a friend who works in the industry. he has bounced around a couple of developers, and is now in the one he wanted to work for. I have asked him what the "average" mmo "game" has for a healthy size for development.. he said the smallest one he ever worked for was about 300 employees for "one game". sure if they had multiple games, there would be more employees.
I have many friends who work in this industry too and I assure you that your friend is lying to you. The vast majority of MMOs do not have 300+ people permanently working on them. Working in the industry is not the same thing as working on an established MMO.
Look at Star Citizen as an example. It is still in development but only has around 80 in-house Developers working on it, as of last December. Pre-Launch development is when you have the most people working on a game. Once Development is done and the MMO is launched and stable most of that Development Team leaves the game and goes on to do other things - when STO was launched most of the Development Team went off to start work on NWN's foundations. When NWNs was Launched most of that team went on to start work on the 4th upcoming game, and so on.
As far as websites, billing, promotion, etc, that is all handled by Perfect World and has no bearing on how many people work for Cryptic or how many are on the STO team. Even our two Community Mangers work for PW rather then Cryptic.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Have anyone consider the possibility that Cryptic is still making back the money that PWE paid to acquired them from Atari? Then as a result of that, they can't ramp up their human resources as fast as we like them to?
Member since November 2009... I think. (UFP) Ragnar
Have anyone consider the possibility that Cryptic is still making back the money that PWE paid to acquired them from Atari? Then as a result of that, they can't ramp up their human resources as fast as we like them to?
That is not really how it works in most multi-division corporations. Cryptic was purchased for a little over $50 million. Perfect World's goal, like any investor, is to get a certain percentage of ROI. So if PW's goal is to make 20% ROI then they expect that $50 million investment to make them $10 million per year. Perfect World is not scrambling for cash like Atari was. PW is using in-house profits to make all its acquisition and expansions.
It is also important to keep in mind that Cryptic makes no direct profit. All Zen is purchased from Perfect World - thus all income goes directly to PW rather then from Cryptic to PW. Cryptic is given an operating budget and given a minimum income requirement. From that point Cryptic then decided where that budget will be spent and what is the best way to make money to achieve those income requirements - and it is also important to keep in mind that bonuses for exceeding goals are probably also part of the mix. So the more money Cryptic makes, the bigger the bonuses made for various Cryptic employees, as well as more money for PW.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
That is not really how it works in most multi-division corporations. Cryptic was purchased for a little over $50 million. Perfect World's goal, like any investor, is to get a certain percentage of ROI. So if PW's goal is to make 20% ROI then they expect that $50 million investment to make them $10 million per year. Perfect World is not scrambling for cash like Atari was. PW is using in-house profits to make all its acquisition and expansions.
It is also important to keep in mind that Cryptic makes no direct profit. All Zen is purchased from Perfect World - thus all income goes directly to PW rather then from Cryptic to PW. Cryptic is given an operating budget and given a minimum income requirement. From that point Cryptic then decided where that budget will be spent and what is the best way to make money to achieve those income requirements - and it is also important to keep in mind that bonuses for exceeding goals are probably also part of the mix. So the more money Cryptic makes, the bigger the bonuses made for various Cryptic employees, as well as more money for PW.
So if I understood that correctly, Cryptic's operating budget won't increase unless PW allows it no matter how much ZEN is spent on the game? Which means that Cryptic cannot increase the number of Devs unless it lobbies for more budget from PW, while citing convincing evidence for potential increased revenue?
If all of that is correct, then the dev manpower resource that some of us are desiring may have to be the result of multiple expansions. We did see an increase in devs (+1 ship artist comes to mind) after the LoR expansion. So perhaps this Fall's expansion will bring in more Devs like we wanted?
Member since November 2009... I think. (UFP) Ragnar
So if I understood that correctly, Cryptic's operating budget won't increase unless PW allows it no matter how much ZEN is spent on the game? Which means that Cryptic cannot increase the number of Devs unless it lobbies for more budget from PW, while citing convincing evidence for potential increased revenue?
If all of that is correct, then the dev manpower resource that some of us are desiring may have to be the result of multiple expansions. We did see an increase in devs (+1 ship artist comes to mind) after the LoR expansion. So perhaps this Fall's expansion will bring in more Devs like we wanted?
Possibly, but it also means that there's considerable pressure on Cryptic to do more with less (which is true just about everywhere). If the game is profitable as it is with a team as big--or small as it is, what incentive is there to expand the team? Recruiting, training, and paying employees is expensive.
So if I understood that correctly, Cryptic's operating budget won't increase unless PW allows it no matter how much ZEN is spent on the game?
This is essentially correct, and what did happen. PW increased Cryptic's budget after the purchase - making room for STO's Dev team to go from 20 to near 50. But STO, via DStahl and Jack, petitioned PW to allow them to make LoR, so PW gave them an additional budget increase for the Expansion Pack - after making certain there was a viable way to monetize the Expansion and make their money back.
I am certain Cryptic has some discretionary funds in its budget, and PW probably also looks at giving them additional funds if they are having a particularly good Quarter. So if the 1st Quarter projections were $5 million and Cryptic made $6 million PW might see that as incentive to throw an extra $250,000.00 back to Cryptic to fund additional development in the hope that it will make them even more return.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Comments
They don't sell kdf stuff so I have 30k zen and a million dilithium with nothing to spend it on
Some things never change?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you still get paid, and so does the company you work for. If it helps retain customers, then by all means do it. But don't cast yourself as morally superior for doing it, because that's insufferable.
AT LEAST they DISABLED it. Cryptic never removed or "disabled" something that was bugged since eons ago. They just release things, bugged or not, and they forget about it. Sorry, nah, but ive never saw a case like this lol. I know you lfters love cryptic, of course, but you are not right lol.
Actual join date: Open beta, 2009ish.
I made a post in a thread with a dev in it a few months back about a hole in the dyson battleground map. He acknowledged this and said it would be looked into. Boom a couple of months later fixed, I'm sure they knew about it anyway but the feedback was nice.
Do some bugs take allot longer to fix, hell yes. And the longer those bugs take to fix the more duplicate threads about the same issue pop up, the devs know about these bugs in allot of cases and are working on them I'm sure. But they are not going to respond to every single thread (regardless of how loudly and angrily people post).
For instance, in the same thread I asked the dev if he knew about the graphics bugs allot of players were having (with a brief explanation). He said yes they were aware of the problem, no they currently did not have a fix to hand but yes they are working on it. Given the size of this bug in comparison the dyson battlezone bug I am content to wait knowing they are working on it and I did see improvement until the recent updates bringing new rendering issues. But rather than ranting about it it just says to me that they are still working on it, which is a good thing.
Also ranting about game mechanics such as cooldowns and lockboxes won't help all to much either. They will make changes if they need to with those easily enough, and I see no reason for them to in most cases.
Posting a list of greivances isn't usually the way to incite a polite response in most situations I know of.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
For duplication steps: go to SFA, click the button to go directly to sector space, or Sol Space. the name that appears is you Sci Boff, the picture? Well.... it might be your Sci Boff but usually it's one of your other boffs.
My character Tsin'xing
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
And you are totally right. I love this game. Because it is the only trek think we have. But, do you really think i will still playing if there will be out there another star trek game half decent than STO is??
I love STO but i hate cryptic for making the game really worst month after month. And because they are ruining a game that could be far 500% better than it is now. Specially if at least 50% of the bugs were solved. And because it seems that people must be really blind, since all of you apparently are really OK, about the way cryptic is leading this game. You like a game being broken day by day, that is what it seems. And then, if someone complains, its too bad, because apparently in these forums people can only say positive things about cryptic. Of course i know that, but it is so obvious... :eek: lol. Seriously.
LOL. Another naive person. Now tell me how many "fixes" are really applied after a patch. In normal circunstances, 75% of those "fixes" are just temporary things to make people happy and most of the times not even that, because the next week, we have those bugs again.
Of course i agree, that some fixes are easier than others. But apparently, ALL the bugs are really hard to fix for cryptic. Even the most stupid ones. And if you think 3 fixes every week, of really non important bugs are enough.. well, then i think you defnitely are talking about a completely different game. Because it doesnt matter if they fix 3 bugs every week, since they are not willing to fix the most important ones. And we have constant bugs almost every day. And things that were fixed, now they are broken again. And thinks that are totally game breaker, are still not fixed and cryptic doesnt even said anything about em. And all of this because people will never complain and they will ok and happy everytime cryptic launches another c-store new content or new ships or new reputation zones or dumb summer events. Even a stupid and ugly unnecessary new ESD.
And i could go on.
But you know what?, it ok. Because this is like a bomb, when the countdown reaches 0.. boom..!. :P
You must be wearing rose-colored glasses if you think STO was better in the past. Cryptic and STO has always been like this with the odd time that they actually surprise us with content like the new FE episodes, the look of the Dyson Sphere, and Legacy of Romulus. STO is a cockroach that just won't die. It is ugly and stubborn, but we love it anyway.
One could wish for a more complete official "Known Issues" list being posted and maintained so that we would at least know that the problems we report haven't disappeared into some bureaucratic abyss to be ignored and forgotten.
They openly admit they don't bug fix. It's too hard for them. For god's sake, it took them HOW many years to add a simple change log to the patches? The excuse before that? "Well, we can't know what's in the patch so we can't make a change log" -- yes, this is SERIOUSLY the reason they gave.
Then they would dump a buggy release so bad it breaks several aspects of gameplay and let it sit for months on end. They would announce they'ved "turned all efforts to the next patch" and would not issue any bug fixes or update.
No matter how much outrage they received, "it doesn't represent the playerbase" (in their own words) and when proven wrong by some folks that actually knew a bit about statistics and sample sizes, and the like, they shut up and never answered anything on the topic again.
But what they did admit if you read between the lines -- and if you read the lines themselves when Cryptic accidentally told the truth -- is that they don't give a rat's butt about the players, about balance, about anything. The entire game now, whether from directive by PWE or just from handed-down guidelines, is geared entirely for selling power-ups and shortcuts.
Mind you, before they started selling theses powerups, you didn't NEED them. They have continually buffed the AI NPCs to absurd levels and made certain missions 99% unwinnable with your older ship and boff setup and skills trees.
And on top of that, before they started selling you a way to speed up delays, these delays didn't exist. They have been adding time gates to everything. They have increased dilithium costs to exponentially high new levels meanwhile have cut back drastically how much dilithium you can get from any given mission. They have started charging large quantities of dilithium for things that never required it before, and the biggest scam of all -- the rep system and the fleet holdings, charge you Billions of Dilithium in total -- which you can conveniently get from z-points -- which conveniently cost real-world-money and make Cryptic butt-loads of money.
So, by their own admission on these forums, by their own comments, by their own deeds, they have shown they have their own money-based game design for this game, and NOT any ideas of balance or gameplay. They don't listen, period. They only care about the next money-making "feature" of the coming update, which they work solely on at the expense of any bug fixing or long-term maintenance the game requires.
None of this is opinion. This is all fact from observing and participating in these forums for years. If you doubt this, I have about 2000 hours played on this game. I've put a lot of time and money into it. Many others could tell you this as well, but alas most have left the game because of the above sad state of affairs.
as I have said before, I have a friend who works in the industry. he has bounced around a couple of developers, and is now in the one he wanted to work for. I have asked him what the "average" mmo "game" has for a healthy size for development.. he said the smallest one he ever worked for was about 300 employees for "one game". sure if they had multiple games, there would be more employees.
but, like he said, you need x amount of employees to develop said game, you need x amount of employees to maintain said game, you need x amount of emplyees to promote, server maintnence, quality assurance, story writers, the leads (big wigs) secretary's, website developers/maintainers, in game moderation, customer service, billing, art rendering, cutscene renders, code monkeys, and so on and so forth.
im not saying cryptic didn't get it done for sto with the 20 employees the game "admitantly" started with. but, cryptic/pwe need to sit down, evaluate the game, and make a decision to either stop ***** footing around and hiring an extra body here and there, or just give the game a "healthy" development team. Christ, just think of what this game would be like without some of the content devs have done in their "own" time. they had to put charity work in just to make the game what it is today.
in response to why people might feel that cryptic ignores the plees to crush bugs, balance, provide meaningfull customer service, and what not. well it is because they cannot. the simply do not have the man power. this has been said in interviews.. gecko and stahl have said this. they have said they have to balance putting recources (employees) on bug fixes or developing content.
as said by gecko in one of his more recent interviews.. season 9 is the first season the dev team actually had the content done a little before the release.. every other content release has been up to the wire. because they don't have the man power to get it done, they were drowning.. they are now at a turning point as they have been hiring people.. but imagine what the game would be like if they went out and doubled the size of the team now, and not one at a time, but did a mass hiring. it would be glorious.
as far as you using wow as a fram of reference, yes, they are the biggest. they have over3-5 thousand employees. but.. lets look at it this way.
trion released rift almost at the same time sto was released.. (trion was a relatively new company as well. ) trion has thousands of employees just working on rift. and rift is literally 10 times (content wise) larger than sto. rift has one of the best customer service teams I have ever had to deal with. trion employees have a wonderfull relationship with their customers (players) and even buck up when they mess up. they say "sorry" lol.. and, its rare that their servers come down, and even rarer that a bug, once it is cought, is in the game for more than a week.
star wars, is a younger game than this, is a much larger failure, and still has better support and production quality (not that I play the game anymore lol, because of the reason it failed).
eve online, to get a sci fi game in here, has a few thousand emplyees if memory serves (my friend worked on this game).
even star citizen, which isn't even in beta yet, has more emplyees just for the one game, than cryptic has for all its games put together.
not that I know, but im willing to bet that the development teams for each of the perfect world games is larger than all the employees combined at cryptic.
but like I said, I understand business, I understand you have to start somewhere, sto was cryptic break out game. but if cryptic is having all the success that they claim, and that players like you always say, than why are they not bringing their operation up to par with the industry standards? why is the game not being brought up to industry standards?
ill say this, if cryptic were to dump recources and manpower into sto, the game would skyrocket. bugs could be worked on, content could be released in much larger (longer lived) releases. an expansion might actually be worthy of being called an expansion. we might actually get a real life customer service team, instead of the auto ressponses lol.. it would be good for both players and cryptic/pwe. like I have said before. sometimes you have to spend a buck, to make a buck.
yes my bad lol.. doff.. the difference one letter makes..
voyage home:
cop "he, I thought it was a she?"
kirk " one little mistake"
lol.
yes, but would you rather a few devs take the time to train someone once or twice a year, and suddenly have a beast of a development team, or would you rather they hire someone everymonth, and that dev now spends 12 weeks out of the year training someone. ??
Look at Star Citizen as an example. It is still in development but only has around 80 in-house Developers working on it, as of last December. Pre-Launch development is when you have the most people working on a game. Once Development is done and the MMO is launched and stable most of that Development Team leaves the game and goes on to do other things - when STO was launched most of the Development Team went off to start work on NWN's foundations. When NWNs was Launched most of that team went on to start work on the 4th upcoming game, and so on.
As far as websites, billing, promotion, etc, that is all handled by Perfect World and has no bearing on how many people work for Cryptic or how many are on the STO team. Even our two Community Mangers work for PW rather then Cryptic.
(UFP) Ragnar
It is also important to keep in mind that Cryptic makes no direct profit. All Zen is purchased from Perfect World - thus all income goes directly to PW rather then from Cryptic to PW. Cryptic is given an operating budget and given a minimum income requirement. From that point Cryptic then decided where that budget will be spent and what is the best way to make money to achieve those income requirements - and it is also important to keep in mind that bonuses for exceeding goals are probably also part of the mix. So the more money Cryptic makes, the bigger the bonuses made for various Cryptic employees, as well as more money for PW.
So if I understood that correctly, Cryptic's operating budget won't increase unless PW allows it no matter how much ZEN is spent on the game? Which means that Cryptic cannot increase the number of Devs unless it lobbies for more budget from PW, while citing convincing evidence for potential increased revenue?
If all of that is correct, then the dev manpower resource that some of us are desiring may have to be the result of multiple expansions. We did see an increase in devs (+1 ship artist comes to mind) after the LoR expansion. So perhaps this Fall's expansion will bring in more Devs like we wanted?
(UFP) Ragnar
Possibly, but it also means that there's considerable pressure on Cryptic to do more with less (which is true just about everywhere). If the game is profitable as it is with a team as big--or small as it is, what incentive is there to expand the team? Recruiting, training, and paying employees is expensive.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This, Work On This!!!
Lets make season 9.5 the season of the FIX!!!
[SIGPIC]Click here to visit my STO YouTube channel[/SIGPIC]
I am certain Cryptic has some discretionary funds in its budget, and PW probably also looks at giving them additional funds if they are having a particularly good Quarter. So if the 1st Quarter projections were $5 million and Cryptic made $6 million PW might see that as incentive to throw an extra $250,000.00 back to Cryptic to fund additional development in the hope that it will make them even more return.