So, saying that a dev needs to be the gatekeeper is like asking for it not to happen at all.
I think it's being unrealistic, but I don't think it's asking for it to not happen at all. I'm saying that if Cryptic is serious about quality, then it's a step that must be taken considering the 'honor system' of players policing the Foundry has failed.
Having a GM or some other gold name (it doesn't have to be a dev), is the only way to have that kind of accountability.
Look how many spotlights fed side we've had in the last 7 or 8 months: 2! Granted, there was a lot of downtime and bugs. And for genuine exploration, those clusters will need hundreds of missions. Even if Cryptic gave a dev 2 hours a week to play and pick a mission or 2, well, add the math up on that one. I don't think it's realistic.
It isn't realistic. I agree entirely. But if they opened up a position or two whose job it was is to rubber stamp various Foundry missions for exploration, it would be better than what we currently have. It would require little technical skill, since they wouldn't be developing anything. Not unlike Trevor and Trendy.
I don't like to settle for less if I don't have to. I will compromise (and have compromised) on plenty, but if I want quality... this unrealistic expectation is the only way I can see it happening.
If we're going to talk about 'realistic' changes however, I would argue any change to the current Foundry set-up is unrealistic. You know more than I do about how very little has actually improved on the Foundry. So any change at all at this point should be flagged as 'unrealistic' in terms of viability.
What makes your 'Next' button on the UI more realistic than my idea of paying someone for the non-technical skill of rubberstamping Foundry missions?
And I'd also like to ask everyone to simply consider what an actual Cryptic exploration revamp would be. It would likely be resource gathering, a UI with buckets, and ways to explore strange new grinds. This alternative would have lots of unique missions, with unique experiences.
Possible. But you would still have the accountability of that on Cryptic's shoulders -- not a nameless IP address or @handle. You have a name and you have a clear direction of where to point fingers if something is wrong. And to me that is more important.
Having a GM or some other gold name (it doesn't have to be a dev), is the only way to have that kind of accountability.
I'm fine with that. As long as it's somebody or a team that has rules for vetting, according to some specific and communicated standards, it would work.
I'm fine with that. As long as it's somebody or a team that has rules for vetting, according to some specific and communicated standards, it would work.
It's unreasonable to expect dev-made content that amounts to exploring strange new worlds and discovering new civilizations.
No. It is not unreasonable, because it is what the franchise is meant to be about. Show me one episode of Star Trek which starts off with "To massacre lots of aliens"!
We've had several useful suggestions already as to how an exploration component could be developed, within the constraints of existing technologies. Cryptic, frankly, ought to be exploring some of those options. And if that means binning their next tedious alien-shooting grind zone, so much the better.
If I want to mow down alien hordes in a gratuitous blood-bath, there are better games than this to do it in. I'm prepared to accept combat as part of the game - probably, of necessity, a big part - but it should not be all there is to it. We need exploration and diplomacy, not as some optional add-on (and certainly not as something knocked together by unpaid volunteers in their spare time); we need it at the heart of the game.
No. It is not unreasonable, because it is what the franchise is meant to be about. Show me one episode of Star Trek which starts off with "To massacre lots of aliens"!
We've had several useful suggestions already as to how an exploration component could be developed, within the constraints of existing technologies. Cryptic, frankly, ought to be exploring some of those options. And if that means binning their next tedious alien-shooting grind zone, so much the better.
If I want to mow down alien hordes in a gratuitous blood-bath, there are better games than this to do it in. I'm prepared to accept combat as part of the game - probably, of necessity, a big part - but it should not be all there is to it. We need exploration and diplomacy, not as some optional add-on (and certainly not as something knocked together by unpaid volunteers in their spare time); we need it at the heart of the game.
Assuming that your join date is an accurate reflection of your time with the game, you might like the story about diplomacy. When this game launched there was almost nothing to do but shoot first and ask questions later or ask no questions at all. Well, there was a quiz about miners and their broken holodeck. I remember so many folks screaming about the need for diplomacy. Cryptic listened and added 5 or 6 non-combat missions. I remember liking the one about a murder mystery, but otherwise, they were fetch quests.
Then there were the aid the planet missions where diplomacy consisted of flying back and forth between vendors and storyless planets, before we could just replicate the stuff.
And every new story content added to the game since that time has been put in to create a justification for a new ship, feature, adventure zone, where the goal is to slaughter dinosaurs or Undine space monsters.
IMO, it's unreasonable to expect this game to live up to your expectations. The game is a MMO. Pew pew. Look, new ship. Wanna fly a Borg cube? $$$. Look at the overall design.
There are few moments when I feel like the game is Star Trek. I have those moments in some Cryptic made feature episodes. But, more often than not, I experience them in a foundry mission. Play the Purity series, for example.
The stuff "knocked together by unpaid volunteers" often captures that "Trek feeling" better than dev made content, particularly if we're talking about Dinos with lazers.
So finally they could use the Foundry as an excuse to water out the game. For that is just what happened. I don't subscribe to secondary fan creations, so now the game became even staler and more rigid than it used to be. But with higher quality no doubt, like it matters when you get so bored you can't seem to log in anymore.
No. It is not unreasonable, because it is what the franchise is meant to be about. Show me one episode of Star Trek which starts off with "To massacre lots of aliens"!
Unfortunately, with their track record Cryptic has basically trained the players to expect faliure. People really don't expect Cryptic to do something competent any more. They expect them to fail.
Now, the funny thing here for me is that Cryptic seem to be perfectly comfortable with that. They behave like they're happy and relieved that the players' expectations are on such a low level that many of them don't expect anything substantial to ever come out of the studio. I guess they're happy to be the clowns of the industry.
If you think it is unreasonable for a game called Star Trek Online to reflect the spirit of the Star Trek franchise, then I'm afraid we're never going to reach a meeting of minds here.
If yelling at Cryptic can produce even some movement towards the provision of exploration and diplomacy, I will continue to yell. These things are feasible (and I don't know, by the way, why a "fetch quest" should be any more boring than a "pew-pew-shoot-everything quest"), and I will continue to agitate for them.
And I'll continue too, to support the idea of the Foundry, as a useful addition to the core elements of the game which it is Cryptic's job to provide.
And your YouTube clip kind of proves my point, doesn't it? All this shooty stuff is the exact opposite of what Star Trek's about. The mirror image, in fact.
Assuming that your join date is an accurate reflection of your time with the game, you might like the story about diplomacy. When this game launched there was almost nothing to do but shoot first and ask questions later or ask no questions at all. Well, there was a quiz about miners and their broken holodeck. I remember so many folks screaming about the need for diplomacy. Cryptic listened and added 5 or 6 non-combat missions. I remember liking the one about a murder mystery, but otherwise, they were fetch quests.
Then there were the aid the planet missions where diplomacy consisted of flying back and forth between vendors and storyless planets, before we could just replicate the stuff.
And every new story content added to the game since that time has been put in to create a justification for a new ship, feature, adventure zone, where the goal is to slaughter dinosaurs or Undine space monsters.
IMO, it's unreasonable to expect this game to live up to your expectations. The game is a MMO. Pew pew. Look, new ship. Wanna fly a Borg cube? $$$. Look at the overall design.
There are few moments when I feel like the game is Star Trek. I have those moments in some Cryptic made feature episodes. But, more often than not, I experience them in a foundry mission. Play the Purity series, for example.
The stuff "knocked together by unpaid volunteers" often captures that "Trek feeling" better than dev made content, particularly if we're talking about Dinos with lazers.
I have to agree with everything you say about this game not living up to our expectations on trek themed exploration and diplomacy. My question is why hasn't the procedurally generated exploration we have been revamped? The devs have had 4 years to come up with something innovative and still no cigar. Why can't the devs start with something small and build into it? Give us procedurally generated worlds with a sprinkle of doff missions here and there. Make a concerted effort to ensure that endings are always random. Is this too much to ask?
Let's not forget that the explorations really were kind of bad.
Some were uncompletable; several had flickering starfields that wrecked immersion. The missions were all basically the same.
That said, I think that the IDEA of exploration is something that really needs to be kept in STO. I HOPE that exploration will be revamped for expansion 2, and last I checked the wiki said that a full revamp was on the devs' radar.
A set of real, in-depth exploration missions that have little to no pewpew and require actual THINKING (sort of like that Acamar system patrol mission in the Tau Dewa sector) could be a metric buttload of fun. Sure, DPS fanbois would be upset, but the game is made up of more than DPS fanbois.
I'm still trying to understand where folks got these expectations for exploration and diplomacy from in the first place...it's as if they never actually watched any of the series or movies. They're sci-fi wild west action/adventure shows/movies...
It's like folks only listened to the Space speech and neglected to pay attention to anything else that was going on.
What are some of the exploration/diplomacy episodes they enjoyed from the shows or what movies stirred up these expectations?
Star Trek...is in the episodes and the Foundry. Not these atrocious missions that are an insult both to Star Trek and us...
I'm still trying to understand where folks got these expectations for exploration and diplomacy from in the first place...it's as if they never actually watched any of the series or movies. They're sci-fi wild west action/adventure shows/movies...
It's like folks only listened to the Space speech and neglected to pay attention to anything else that was going on.
What are some of the exploration/diplomacy episodes they enjoyed from the shows or what movies stirred up these expectations?
Star Trek...is in the episodes and the Foundry. Not these atrocious missions that are an insult both to Star Trek and us...
No. It is not unreasonable, because it is what the franchise is meant to be about. Show me one episode of Star Trek which starts off with "To massacre lots of aliens"!
Fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise. Something about a pair of episodes where the intro was replaced with a whole different deal...
Yeah, the exact words "to massacre lots of aliens" weren't said, but the attitude (shotgun reconstruction of First Contact scene) sure was there...
And on the question of "Dev Vetted Foundry Content" - isn't that the spotlight series?
Still, nobody caught on to my earlier allusion - I'm getting a bit "sick and tired" of Cryptic deciding on what award goes where, shoehorning players into specific areas. As it sits right now, you have the various "mark areas", dilithium is "concentrated" primarily in E-STFs and the Dyson battlezone, and now we're gonna have the rare crafting materials coming from - insert guess here, most likely places like SB24 / Big Dig / other random queue that has zero or extremely low participation rate...
And actually, outside of the Dyson Battlezone and Pi Canis dailies for KDF - you don't even have to travel to the various mark (and potential crafting) areas. just click on queue and off you go...
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Name a single episode from any of the series...I'm curious - where the expectation has come from. Seriously...I've been sitting here off and on for a few days looking at episodes from each of the series trying to find where folks got the idea from - that the cluster missions have anything to do with Star Trek and aren't just generic random missions that you could drop in the middle of any game.
StarbaseUGC is a central hub for Foundry authors. You can find almost all Foundry podcasters there, along with every tutorial and other resource. Anyone who is a Foundry author or player can post on that blog, advertising their missions, reviewing missions, etc.
A team at the site got together and made the spotlighted "Purity" series.
Edit: I put that name out there, because it's an already established community that does group projects like this. I wouldn't mind if Cryptic just picked 10 spotlight authors, or forum regulars, or whatever, so long as it's a team that could vet content for them.
And on the question of "Dev Vetted Foundry Content" - isn't that the spotlight series?
Still, nobody caught on to my earlier allusion - I'm getting a bit "sick and tired" of Cryptic deciding on what award goes where, shoehorning players i
The spotlights all start in non cluster locations, and they are usually long missions. The general intent, I believe, would be for exploration of the unknown to be the goal of short missions. So playing them random would feel like exploring an unknown region, kind of like a rinse and repeat version of Voy's format.
Spotlights are like the player-made version of a Cryptic-made "episode."
Vetted Foundry exploration missions would be the player-made version of the auto-generated stuff.
At least, that is how I envision it.
I've been brainstorming examples of the types of missions I'd like to create for a cluster.
A first contact where you have to choose a piece of fruit, and it means you've agreed to marry a leader's daughter. How do you resolve that diplomatically, when it's a time-honored tradition among their people?
A mission where you accidentally come upon a "rover" on an uninhabited world next to a pre-warp, but spacefaring civilization. The image of you is now that planet's discovery of alien life on their neighboring world, which was thought to be uninhabited.
A mission to discover the cultural impact of a misfired torpedo that hit a pre-warp civilization. They believed it was a sign from god or something.
Name a single episode from any of the series...I'm curious - where the expectation has come from. Seriously...I've been sitting here off and on for a few days looking at episodes from each of the series trying to find where folks got the idea from - that the cluster missions have anything to do with Star Trek and aren't just generic random missions that you could drop in the middle of any game.
First ten episodes of the original series, by broadcast order:
The Man Trap
Charlie X
Where No Man Has Gone Before
The Naked Time
The Enemy Within
Mudd's Women
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Miri
Dagger of the Mind
The Corbomite Maneuver
Combat isn't even a factor in several of them; in others, it's a last resort when non-violent solutions fail; in others, the non-violent solution doesn't fail, where violence would be futile.
And that's from the original series, not Next Generation, where it got really preachy.
Even in the Dominion War arc of DS9, which is the closest the show got to pure military SF, a lot of the emphasis was on out-thinking the enemy and finding clever solutions, not merely killing everything in sight.
First ten episodes of the original series, by broadcast order:
The Man Trap
Charlie X
Where No Man Has Gone Before
The Naked Time
The Enemy Within
Mudd's Women
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Miri
Dagger of the Mind
The Corbomite Maneuver
Combat isn't even a factor in several of them; in others, it's a last resort when non-violent solutions fail; in others, the non-violent solution doesn't fail, where violence would be futile.
And that's from the original series, not Next Generation, where it got really preachy.
Even in the Dominion War arc of DS9, which is the closest the show got to pure military SF, a lot of the emphasis was on out-thinking the enemy and finding clever solutions, not merely killing everything in sight.
Yeah, and even the dominion war had like 3 seasons of story building up to the battles. I'm not sure what he/she is trying to prove. Sure, there was always some form of struggle, but it was based around a story that explored a culture or an issue.
We just can't have any freeform action getting in the way of transporting the masses the cheapest way possible. That's public transportation for you, no deviation, no derivation, no variation. Get straight to the station.
First ten episodes of the original series, by broadcast order:
The Man Trap
Um...what? A thriller - murder mystery...with multiple deaths - including the murderer at the end, is your first example of a diplomatic/exploration episode that led to an expectation of having those cluster missions?
I think that's coming across as the biggest issue in these various threads - folks have woefully different opinions of what's diplomatic/exploration.
Name a single episode from any of the series...I'm curious - where the expectation has come from. Seriously...I've been sitting here off and on for a few days looking at episodes from each of the series trying to find where folks got the idea from - that the cluster missions have anything to do with Star Trek and aren't just generic random missions that you could drop in the middle of any game.
If you've been watching Star Trek episodes to find out where the expectation for exploration and diplomacy comes from, and still asking me then either:
A. You haven't been paying attention at all
B. You're flat out lying
^This refers to your previous post where you expressed confusion about people expecting these things in Star Trek.
If you're refering about the quality of the cluster missions, that you mentioned just now, I really hope that by now it's perfectly clear that noone is praising the cluster missions for their extraordinary level of quality. No, they don't really convey exploration & diplomacy as in Star Trek, but they were the closest damn thing we had to that and now it's getting removed with no substitute announced besides a rather vague whisper that sounded like "we're completely leaving exploration in the hands of the foundry authors".
And all of this has been said at least 100 times in this thread alone - that noone is outraged because content of extraordinary quality is being removed, but because it's content being removed without a replacement and without anything with similar profile in the game currently.
I'm not sure how some of you guys still behave like you're confused and don't understand this, by now it seems pretty much like trolling.
I'm not sure how some of you guys still behave like you're confused and don't understand this, by now it seems pretty much like trolling.
If I'm holding an apple and somebody calls it an orange, yeah - I'm going to be confused. Like I said in my last post, and if you go back and look through many of the wtf moments by various sides in the discussion - folks are looking at the same thing and seeing something different.
What episode gives the expectation of exploration? How about every one of them?
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Given the only thing resembling exploration in the game are the clusters... yeah.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the removal of the clusters. However, I do think they shouldn't be removed without adding some alternative that at least has a feel of exploration.
It would be hypocritical of me to complain about this being removed since, honestly, I kind of gave up on this section of the game. I like the concept of it, but found the implementation weak and uninspired.
I only did a few of these early on (thinking I had to for the storyline mission) and gave up fast. Maybe there's more than what I experienced, but what I found was:
1. Multiple times scan points would be buried underneath a terrain object, making it virtually impossible to scan unless you could find just the right indentation to stand on.
2. The HUD couldn't seem to deal with topography.
3. The Borg have taken Seven of Nine's advice to try to elicit assimilation volunteers - now they're apparently trying to rig elections and make people want to side with them instead of the Federation.
4. The Jem'Hadar are weaker than the scorpions on Nimbus.
When I ran through those way back when, it definitely FELT like this was a left-over beta part of the game, so I can understand the desire to simply remove it instead of spending the probably significant amount of time needed to fix/correct it.
Still, without some form of exploration, it definitely feels more like any generic space shooter and not Star Trek at all. Maybe that's what they're going for, I don't know, it just feels like there needs to be something to incentivize exploration, at least on the Federation side.
What episode gives the expectation of exploration? How about every one of them?
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. They explore it, film it, take notes, map it, etc, etc, etc. They return. The end...exploration.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. A typhoon comes in, trapping them underground. It becomes a fight for survival - man vs. nature. It's no longer just exploration.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. They disturb a crypt of ancient vampires that start killing them off. It becomes a horror story - a fight for survival vs. evil. It's no longer just exploration.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. Two of them have undisclosed feelings for each other, and during the course of the story they admit their feelings. It's a romance. It's no longer just exploration. Add in some bumbling, make one of the folks undecided, add in a second interest - you can go with a romantic comedy.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. One of them believes there is buried treasure there and is intent on grabbing it for themselves. It's a thriller/adventure. It's no longer just exploration. Replace treasure with drugs, stolen money, or whatever. All sorts of stories to be told there.
The gist is...exploration is just the backdrop for the countless stories that have been told in all the episodes/movies. What episode was just...they go somewhere, they take some notes, and they move on? All the episodes included some form of conflict, action, drama...there was always more to them. Exploration was just the backdrop - the reason that they were out there so they could go on all the grand adventures - that all the various stories could be told. We didn't have 45 minutes of the crew looking at rock samples...stuff happened.
edit: It's why some folks will point to the episodes and Foundry...cause...what's happening there is what happened in Star Trek. The repetitive grind and wholesale slaughter of folks that takes place in much of the game - not so much. But hitting up episodes or hitting up the Foundry...there you go.
Comments
Yes, yes we do.
I think it's being unrealistic, but I don't think it's asking for it to not happen at all. I'm saying that if Cryptic is serious about quality, then it's a step that must be taken considering the 'honor system' of players policing the Foundry has failed.
Having a GM or some other gold name (it doesn't have to be a dev), is the only way to have that kind of accountability.
It isn't realistic. I agree entirely. But if they opened up a position or two whose job it was is to rubber stamp various Foundry missions for exploration, it would be better than what we currently have. It would require little technical skill, since they wouldn't be developing anything. Not unlike Trevor and Trendy.
I don't like to settle for less if I don't have to. I will compromise (and have compromised) on plenty, but if I want quality... this unrealistic expectation is the only way I can see it happening.
If we're going to talk about 'realistic' changes however, I would argue any change to the current Foundry set-up is unrealistic. You know more than I do about how very little has actually improved on the Foundry. So any change at all at this point should be flagged as 'unrealistic' in terms of viability.
What makes your 'Next' button on the UI more realistic than my idea of paying someone for the non-technical skill of rubberstamping Foundry missions?
Possible. But you would still have the accountability of that on Cryptic's shoulders -- not a nameless IP address or @handle. You have a name and you have a clear direction of where to point fingers if something is wrong. And to me that is more important.
I'm fine with that. As long as it's somebody or a team that has rules for vetting, according to some specific and communicated standards, it would work.
Definately.
:rolleyes:
We've had several useful suggestions already as to how an exploration component could be developed, within the constraints of existing technologies. Cryptic, frankly, ought to be exploring some of those options. And if that means binning their next tedious alien-shooting grind zone, so much the better.
If I want to mow down alien hordes in a gratuitous blood-bath, there are better games than this to do it in. I'm prepared to accept combat as part of the game - probably, of necessity, a big part - but it should not be all there is to it. We need exploration and diplomacy, not as some optional add-on (and certainly not as something knocked together by unpaid volunteers in their spare time); we need it at the heart of the game.
Assuming that your join date is an accurate reflection of your time with the game, you might like the story about diplomacy. When this game launched there was almost nothing to do but shoot first and ask questions later or ask no questions at all. Well, there was a quiz about miners and their broken holodeck. I remember so many folks screaming about the need for diplomacy. Cryptic listened and added 5 or 6 non-combat missions. I remember liking the one about a murder mystery, but otherwise, they were fetch quests.
Then there were the aid the planet missions where diplomacy consisted of flying back and forth between vendors and storyless planets, before we could just replicate the stuff.
And every new story content added to the game since that time has been put in to create a justification for a new ship, feature, adventure zone, where the goal is to slaughter dinosaurs or Undine space monsters.
IMO, it's unreasonable to expect this game to live up to your expectations. The game is a MMO. Pew pew. Look, new ship. Wanna fly a Borg cube? $$$. Look at the overall design.
There are few moments when I feel like the game is Star Trek. I have those moments in some Cryptic made feature episodes. But, more often than not, I experience them in a foundry mission. Play the Purity series, for example.
The stuff "knocked together by unpaid volunteers" often captures that "Trek feeling" better than dev made content, particularly if we're talking about Dinos with lazers.
Edit PS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfbsZRbwbJ4
---
Unfortunately, with their track record Cryptic has basically trained the players to expect faliure. People really don't expect Cryptic to do something competent any more. They expect them to fail.
Now, the funny thing here for me is that Cryptic seem to be perfectly comfortable with that. They behave like they're happy and relieved that the players' expectations are on such a low level that many of them don't expect anything substantial to ever come out of the studio. I guess they're happy to be the clowns of the industry.
If yelling at Cryptic can produce even some movement towards the provision of exploration and diplomacy, I will continue to yell. These things are feasible (and I don't know, by the way, why a "fetch quest" should be any more boring than a "pew-pew-shoot-everything quest"), and I will continue to agitate for them.
And I'll continue too, to support the idea of the Foundry, as a useful addition to the core elements of the game which it is Cryptic's job to provide.
And your YouTube clip kind of proves my point, doesn't it? All this shooty stuff is the exact opposite of what Star Trek's about. The mirror image, in fact.
I have to agree with everything you say about this game not living up to our expectations on trek themed exploration and diplomacy. My question is why hasn't the procedurally generated exploration we have been revamped? The devs have had 4 years to come up with something innovative and still no cigar. Why can't the devs start with something small and build into it? Give us procedurally generated worlds with a sprinkle of doff missions here and there. Make a concerted effort to ensure that endings are always random. Is this too much to ask?
Some were uncompletable; several had flickering starfields that wrecked immersion. The missions were all basically the same.
That said, I think that the IDEA of exploration is something that really needs to be kept in STO. I HOPE that exploration will be revamped for expansion 2, and last I checked the wiki said that a full revamp was on the devs' radar.
A set of real, in-depth exploration missions that have little to no pewpew and require actual THINKING (sort of like that Acamar system patrol mission in the Tau Dewa sector) could be a metric buttload of fun. Sure, DPS fanbois would be upset, but the game is made up of more than DPS fanbois.
Just my 2 cents.
It's like folks only listened to the Space speech and neglected to pay attention to anything else that was going on.
What are some of the exploration/diplomacy episodes they enjoyed from the shows or what movies stirred up these expectations?
Star Trek...is in the episodes and the Foundry. Not these atrocious missions that are an insult both to Star Trek and us...
:rolleyes:
/10chars.
concept 1: refined version of auto generated content with a prevision that only 1 out of 4 systems have combat in them for a more "Star trek feel"
concept 2: more of the old 'patrol' missions with a random matrix generator like in "A step between stars"
Concept 3: Each system in the cluster when you click "enter system" sends you into a foundry mission at random
What do you think?
Fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise. Something about a pair of episodes where the intro was replaced with a whole different deal...
Yeah, the exact words "to massacre lots of aliens" weren't said, but the attitude (shotgun reconstruction of First Contact scene) sure was there...
And on the question of "Dev Vetted Foundry Content" - isn't that the spotlight series?
Still, nobody caught on to my earlier allusion - I'm getting a bit "sick and tired" of Cryptic deciding on what award goes where, shoehorning players into specific areas. As it sits right now, you have the various "mark areas", dilithium is "concentrated" primarily in E-STFs and the Dyson battlezone, and now we're gonna have the rare crafting materials coming from - insert guess here, most likely places like SB24 / Big Dig / other random queue that has zero or extremely low participation rate...
And actually, outside of the Dyson Battlezone and Pi Canis dailies for KDF - you don't even have to travel to the various mark (and potential crafting) areas. just click on queue and off you go...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Name a single episode from any of the series...I'm curious - where the expectation has come from. Seriously...I've been sitting here off and on for a few days looking at episodes from each of the series trying to find where folks got the idea from - that the cluster missions have anything to do with Star Trek and aren't just generic random missions that you could drop in the middle of any game.
No. I do not think Cryptic should relying upon amateurs to create content.
Players 'pay' Cryptic to generate content.
The spotlights all start in non cluster locations, and they are usually long missions. The general intent, I believe, would be for exploration of the unknown to be the goal of short missions. So playing them random would feel like exploring an unknown region, kind of like a rinse and repeat version of Voy's format.
Spotlights are like the player-made version of a Cryptic-made "episode."
Vetted Foundry exploration missions would be the player-made version of the auto-generated stuff.
At least, that is how I envision it.
I've been brainstorming examples of the types of missions I'd like to create for a cluster.
A first contact where you have to choose a piece of fruit, and it means you've agreed to marry a leader's daughter. How do you resolve that diplomatically, when it's a time-honored tradition among their people?
A mission where you accidentally come upon a "rover" on an uninhabited world next to a pre-warp, but spacefaring civilization. The image of you is now that planet's discovery of alien life on their neighboring world, which was thought to be uninhabited.
A mission to discover the cultural impact of a misfired torpedo that hit a pre-warp civilization. They believed it was a sign from god or something.
Just a few ideas floating around...
First ten episodes of the original series, by broadcast order:
The Man Trap
Charlie X
Where No Man Has Gone Before
The Naked Time
The Enemy Within
Mudd's Women
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Miri
Dagger of the Mind
The Corbomite Maneuver
Combat isn't even a factor in several of them; in others, it's a last resort when non-violent solutions fail; in others, the non-violent solution doesn't fail, where violence would be futile.
And that's from the original series, not Next Generation, where it got really preachy.
Even in the Dominion War arc of DS9, which is the closest the show got to pure military SF, a lot of the emphasis was on out-thinking the enemy and finding clever solutions, not merely killing everything in sight.
Yeah, and even the dominion war had like 3 seasons of story building up to the battles. I'm not sure what he/she is trying to prove. Sure, there was always some form of struggle, but it was based around a story that explored a culture or an issue.
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Um...what? A thriller - murder mystery...with multiple deaths - including the murderer at the end, is your first example of a diplomatic/exploration episode that led to an expectation of having those cluster missions?
I think that's coming across as the biggest issue in these various threads - folks have woefully different opinions of what's diplomatic/exploration.
If you've been watching Star Trek episodes to find out where the expectation for exploration and diplomacy comes from, and still asking me then either:
A. You haven't been paying attention at all
B. You're flat out lying
^This refers to your previous post where you expressed confusion about people expecting these things in Star Trek.
If you're refering about the quality of the cluster missions, that you mentioned just now, I really hope that by now it's perfectly clear that noone is praising the cluster missions for their extraordinary level of quality. No, they don't really convey exploration & diplomacy as in Star Trek, but they were the closest damn thing we had to that and now it's getting removed with no substitute announced besides a rather vague whisper that sounded like "we're completely leaving exploration in the hands of the foundry authors".
And all of this has been said at least 100 times in this thread alone - that noone is outraged because content of extraordinary quality is being removed, but because it's content being removed without a replacement and without anything with similar profile in the game currently.
I'm not sure how some of you guys still behave like you're confused and don't understand this, by now it seems pretty much like trolling.
If I'm holding an apple and somebody calls it an orange, yeah - I'm going to be confused. Like I said in my last post, and if you go back and look through many of the wtf moments by various sides in the discussion - folks are looking at the same thing and seeing something different.
If you have no idea how an apple or an orange looks like, yeah, you're going to be confused alright.
Thus, asking people what on Earth they're talking about...
Given the only thing resembling exploration in the game are the clusters... yeah.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the removal of the clusters. However, I do think they shouldn't be removed without adding some alternative that at least has a feel of exploration.
I only did a few of these early on (thinking I had to for the storyline mission) and gave up fast. Maybe there's more than what I experienced, but what I found was:
1. Multiple times scan points would be buried underneath a terrain object, making it virtually impossible to scan unless you could find just the right indentation to stand on.
2. The HUD couldn't seem to deal with topography.
3. The Borg have taken Seven of Nine's advice to try to elicit assimilation volunteers - now they're apparently trying to rig elections and make people want to side with them instead of the Federation.
4. The Jem'Hadar are weaker than the scorpions on Nimbus.
When I ran through those way back when, it definitely FELT like this was a left-over beta part of the game, so I can understand the desire to simply remove it instead of spending the probably significant amount of time needed to fix/correct it.
Still, without some form of exploration, it definitely feels more like any generic space shooter and not Star Trek at all. Maybe that's what they're going for, I don't know, it just feels like there needs to be something to incentivize exploration, at least on the Federation side.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. They explore it, film it, take notes, map it, etc, etc, etc. They return. The end...exploration.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. A typhoon comes in, trapping them underground. It becomes a fight for survival - man vs. nature. It's no longer just exploration.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. They disturb a crypt of ancient vampires that start killing them off. It becomes a horror story - a fight for survival vs. evil. It's no longer just exploration.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. Two of them have undisclosed feelings for each other, and during the course of the story they admit their feelings. It's a romance. It's no longer just exploration. Add in some bumbling, make one of the folks undecided, add in a second interest - you can go with a romantic comedy.
A group of folks head off to explore an underground cave. One of them believes there is buried treasure there and is intent on grabbing it for themselves. It's a thriller/adventure. It's no longer just exploration. Replace treasure with drugs, stolen money, or whatever. All sorts of stories to be told there.
The gist is...exploration is just the backdrop for the countless stories that have been told in all the episodes/movies. What episode was just...they go somewhere, they take some notes, and they move on? All the episodes included some form of conflict, action, drama...there was always more to them. Exploration was just the backdrop - the reason that they were out there so they could go on all the grand adventures - that all the various stories could be told. We didn't have 45 minutes of the crew looking at rock samples...stuff happened.
edit: It's why some folks will point to the episodes and Foundry...cause...what's happening there is what happened in Star Trek. The repetitive grind and wholesale slaughter of folks that takes place in much of the game - not so much. But hitting up episodes or hitting up the Foundry...there you go.