Sometimes it's hard to not reply to senseless, not constructive or worse revvies...
I am not vengeful but.... lastly I got some 2 stars and 1 star... wrote email to every 1 of them...
2 star revvie One... despite my final dialog (which is sticky at the end of my missions) explaining that english is NOT my mother tongue, and calling all the indulgence for it in the rev... the story was ok, almost all the problems was in grammar and/or writing style, so rude and on and on... I blessed the guy for having played my mission, and said that I was sooo happy that he was so indulgent with my english...
The other 2 star revvie was a real facepalmer... the guy complained about how dense of stuff was Shadows of Methuselah...lags and so on... I politely pointed out that I cannot be accounted for upgrading his own PC hardware...
The last 1 star was a guy who cannot find a mission objective, in the map a transwarp ring which has a dialog hook. I cannot help but treat him harsh... certainly not my fault if he does not use the minimap to orient... I must have hit some spot because he cancelled the review....
I often get a lot of reviews that while high in rating, make me scratch my head sometimes.
These reviews are generally, "Very good mission, but a few typos/sentences need work.'"
Okay, that's great. Thanks for telling me. But how can I fix something that I do not even know the location of?
Sometimes, details would really be nice.
I tried that once, but ran into the (ridiculously low) character limit on the comment field when leaving a rating. Is there a way to e.g. PM people who leave reviews for authors (I only just started making my first mission, so have no clue how the review side of things looks yet).
I played a mission where the author assumed you were male, human (character, not me, obviously), and believed in God. I played the mission with my Betazoid, female. That was awkward.
In such extreme, where a mission is "white male from USA in space", without any lore reason behind, I might drop a star. It might seems extreme, but then, one of the big strength of Star Trek, something that you can see pretty much everywhere in any ST show, and was really important, is the cultural diversity. Discarding it would be like discarding the Federation. Also, I'm speaking an extreme, and the mission will feel weird to me.
Not to mention that it's just sloppy game design. If your engine permits choosing a gender and skin color (and even alien race) for your character, you better write your prose and plot your story so it works with all variations.
Though I personally would mention it but wouldn't deduct points for the simple reason that the Foundry doesn't let you conditionalize on such characteristics. I.e. if you're playing the Spectres mission on that past Drozana Station, there was a "I've never seen one like you before" when I played it as an Alien, which I'd want to do in one of my missions. Similarly, I'm doing a Vulcan-centric mission, and would love if I could pick Boffs by their characteristics, i.e. saying <Vulcan Boff asks for the mission> or whatever.
An author is never going to be able to find every error. It is up to the players to help as well. There is also a thing called email.
So the review character limit cannot really be used as an appropriate excuse.
Personally, as a player, I write the review best I can in the limited characters. I don't know how old a mission is, and if the author is even still logging into STO. So why write a huge detailed review e-mail that I don't know anyone will ever read? If my review lacks details and the author can't find the spots I criticized, I'd expect the author to contact me back and ask for clarification.
Though I personally would mention it but wouldn't deduct points for the simple reason that the Foundry doesn't let you conditionalize on such characteristics.
I would. If you want a story revolving around a specific race and sex, write them as a character in the mission, don't assume my character fits the profile. It's okay for the player character to take a back seat in the story. I'd rather my character be relatively unimportant than written wrong.
One of my absolute favorite things foundry missions do that the official missions often completely neglect (despite being able to detect it directly, as you point out) are dialogue choices for different races and genders. You don't need to give them for every single option, but they're fun for players and very easy to work into a mission's script, can even give some minor changes to the mission events.
I would. If you want a story revolving around a specific race and sex, write them as a character in the mission, don't assume my character fits the profile. It's okay for the player character to take a back seat in the story. I'd rather my character be relatively unimportant than written wrong.
This. Or, if you really want to (I've seen it at least in 1 mission), add race specific optional answer/dialogue. For example, you can either answer a generic answer to a NPC, or have a [Vulcan]answer, that will lead to a specific and unique dialogue.
You can have several race specific dialogues (Vulcan, Ferengi, Betazoid...), or if you want to focus on a specific race, you can also mention it in the description of the mission ("this mission will add more dialogues if your character is Vulcan" or something).
Comments
I've done an Orion, a Klingon, several Vorta, a variety of Boslic, a Tholian, and some random aliens.
My character Tsin'xing
I am not vengeful but.... lastly I got some 2 stars and 1 star... wrote email to every 1 of them...
2 star revvie One... despite my final dialog (which is sticky at the end of my missions) explaining that english is NOT my mother tongue, and calling all the indulgence for it in the rev... the story was ok, almost all the problems was in grammar and/or writing style, so rude and on and on... I blessed the guy for having played my mission, and said that I was sooo happy that he was so indulgent with my english...
The other 2 star revvie was a real facepalmer... the guy complained about how dense of stuff was Shadows of Methuselah...lags and so on... I politely pointed out that I cannot be accounted for upgrading his own PC hardware...
The last 1 star was a guy who cannot find a mission objective, in the map a transwarp ring which has a dialog hook. I cannot help but treat him harsh... certainly not my fault if he does not use the minimap to orient... I must have hit some spot because he cancelled the review....
I tried that once, but ran into the (ridiculously low) character limit on the comment field when leaving a rating. Is there a way to e.g. PM people who leave reviews for authors (I only just started making my first mission, so have no clue how the review side of things looks yet).
-- Uli
Not to mention that it's just sloppy game design. If your engine permits choosing a gender and skin color (and even alien race) for your character, you better write your prose and plot your story so it works with all variations.
Though I personally would mention it but wouldn't deduct points for the simple reason that the Foundry doesn't let you conditionalize on such characteristics. I.e. if you're playing the Spectres mission on that past Drozana Station, there was a "I've never seen one like you before" when I played it as an Alien, which I'd want to do in one of my missions. Similarly, I'm doing a Vulcan-centric mission, and would love if I could pick Boffs by their characteristics, i.e. saying <Vulcan Boff asks for the mission> or whatever.
-- Uli
Personally, as a player, I write the review best I can in the limited characters. I don't know how old a mission is, and if the author is even still logging into STO. So why write a huge detailed review e-mail that I don't know anyone will ever read? If my review lacks details and the author can't find the spots I criticized, I'd expect the author to contact me back and ask for clarification.
-- Uli
I would. If you want a story revolving around a specific race and sex, write them as a character in the mission, don't assume my character fits the profile. It's okay for the player character to take a back seat in the story. I'd rather my character be relatively unimportant than written wrong.
One of my absolute favorite things foundry missions do that the official missions often completely neglect (despite being able to detect it directly, as you point out) are dialogue choices for different races and genders. You don't need to give them for every single option, but they're fun for players and very easy to work into a mission's script, can even give some minor changes to the mission events.
You can have several race specific dialogues (Vulcan, Ferengi, Betazoid...), or if you want to focus on a specific race, you can also mention it in the description of the mission ("this mission will add more dialogues if your character is Vulcan" or something).