This entire mess is down to poor forward planning, poor QA and non-existent risk assessment.
Many of us have screamed about QA and its apparent absence in the past this, however, just throws that whole area into the spotlight.
Cryptic you should know the animal (monster?) that you have created. Good QA would surely have bought this problem into focus?
You've even forgotten the human aspect, as someone has already mentioned in one of the multiple threads on this, some people will always seek the least passage of resistance to progress onwards.
Poor design choices made that happen. I cant see this ending well.
EDIT: And I'll add in that the buck stops with D'Angelo. Free Lobi will not appease in this instance.
*Devnote: players were having fun in an area unrelated to newly released content. This conflicted with the experience we intended for players to have, and has been fixed.
I cant really see how it matters what way you level up, if that is the case they had best shut down every sector apart from delta and put a lock on doff missions.
I have levelled up a fair bit and have hardly touched the new content yet.
I can understand them putting a block on something if there is a glitch that causes a bigger reward then intended but otherwise it should be up to the player what they do to progress.
the one big thing I have always loved the most about this game is the freedom to play what you want when you want if they start putting a block on players freedom I would be most upset.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
They want us to play the game the game when, how and where they want us to do it themselves. This has been the practice ever since D'Angelo took over and that's why D'Angelo needs to go asap before he drives the entire game into the ground.
Not saying anyone should get fired, but they should remove him from the EP position - the man obviosuly lacks the talent, vision and competence to make this game thrive as a fun and engaging experience for the communtiy. The developments in STO this year of 2014 are more than enough proof about this.
QFT. Glad i'm not the only one feeling that way. Yes there were good things but lately grind in this game have been reaching rediculous levels. As a matter of fact i have returned to the game after 7 months of absence and now 2 weeks later i already question myslef if i did the right thing.
Wait, what ?! They closed ALL systems ?! Not just the evil patrol ones ? :eek:
I don't know about 'all' systems, but Neutral no more quest, the VERY quest you get in romulan faction AFTER choosing sides, requires Beta Thoridar System, and it is giving me the error. It is also one of the patrol systems. I am uncertain of whether it is intentional, or if they accidently forgot about maps also being used by their romulan faction episodes.
[...]nerfing Tau Dewa?! Sorry, Craptic, but this has got to be one of the lamest stunts you ever pulled! And yet, why am I Laughing Out Loud!? Probably because I soooo saw moves like this coming! Hahaha! So incredibly pathetic! Good thing I hastily leveled up, on Elite, fighting endless swarms of NPC's at DS9, before Craptic had a chance to wise up to people doing something as horrible as grinding their XP the way they choose!
Seriously, Cryptic, nerfing every and all ways to get EC, gear, and Dilithium, that was pretty lame already as it was. But I think y'all stooped to a new low, nerfing patrol missions, for the sole reason of having ppl play the new, harder content (read: so they'll buy the new ships out of frustration). Really, could youl sink any lower?! Maybe y'all should ask the Breen to build an Absolute Zero set from your latest decisions.
+1 here. To make it clear, I was not lvling at DS9, but the rest of meimeitoo's post nails it.
Since Season 9 its nerf-nerf-nerf. I wonder how soon we will have to grind for months for "free" bridge officer slots that are now given via leveling.
May 2013, automatic permanent ban for mentioning gold-seller sites pwebranflakes: this system is currently in place and working the way it should. moradum: I got banned for saying "I started my day with cutting off 3 MM off of the bottom of my cabinet"
Have I used Japori to grind?
Sure i did!
Would I do that again?
Of course, anytime again!
Why?
Because Cryptic is leaving us no other chance to have some fun in this game.
Heh, not trying to be mean but like I said yeah it ought to be insulting.
That's the whole thing about developer apologism I am trying to explain.
"Uncle tom" is another term for it but unfortunately very few people don't associate it with racism when what it's actually about is selling out your own people.
That is exactly what applies to developer apologist - people who sold out the other kids because maybe the other kids didn't wanna play and all that was left was that hall monitor badge?
That's 100% how I see forum moderators - additionally they do this for free which also takes away jobs - a double sell out.
Way I look at it is, they don't contribute - they actually take away from the game.
They'd never ask for improvments or want the game to get better.
And so we have to continue to do what we started out doing, isolate them socially so they can do as little damage as possible NOT that it's personal like I said it's like a species of parrots maybe a borg parrot race.
The borg parrot developer apologist collective?
So it's not one special person or unique individual it's flawed phenomenon that as a whole has to be looked down and if possibly removed entirely, dreaming here of course
/edit.
ps. where a parrot is an object that can mimic speech but with zero cognition
The fact that I'm not buying into the unwarranted assumptions and hysteria, having worked in the gaming industry for several years and knowing a little more than the average player does not make me "a developer apologist," nor does the rigorous application of the rules of inference. The right and wrong you claim to be concerned with should not involve the use of fallacies like Argumentum ad Hominem, which is, yeah, an incorrect inference form, and therefore wrong. In addition, a review of my posts will easily show that I have called for changes and improvement. Me saying "You're freaking out, making assumptions with no basis, and being hysterical" does not negate the reality that I also don't agree with everything any Development company does.
Obviously there are legitimate reasons for players to avoid levelling in the DQ, not least of which is the insane CPU lag from all the graphics issues in some of the DQ system zones, due in part to the Devs apparently (not certainly) coding for NVIDIA users only. But the post I acknowledged in the edit of my previous post in this thread did not give details of what the exploitative behavior is, and instead of taking a breath, most of you continued to make the same assumption, that this is about power levelling. Others are whining because no details were provided. Guess what? Game publishers seldom reveal details of how to exploit a glitch, with good reason, so they may eventually tell us what the end result of the exploiting was, but the likelihood of them ever telling us exactly how it was done are, at best, slim, and that's a good thing. The post in question does say, after all, that they will share more as soon as they have completed their investigation, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a revelation of the method(s) used to exploit.
protogoth, my biggest issue with this is that the developers are putting top priority to this issue, where some of my friends are unable to enter the game entirely.
Has it occured to you, that it is not your call to make where ppl do their patrols?
They already had a healthy populated zone like that: Tau Dewa, near Japori.
Also, forcing ppl to play your new expansion, by effectively locking/nerfing them out of other areas, that has got the be the lamest promo ever. If you want peeps to play your new expansion, make it GOOD.
In it they are telling players that traveling around New Eden will take a lot more time. This is essentially a nerf to the movement system ... and they are calling it as such. Why? Because they want to "force" how players move in the game. Yet the Devs also outline not only why they are doing it, but their expectations of player behavior because of it.
The blog is long ... but that is how it could (should?) be done.
The DR stories are buggy. Very much so. Sometimes enough to where it's a chore to get through them.
Even without the bugs, some of them are just annoying. For one, I thought helping the Kobali was pretty distasteful, and there's no way around it.
Everyone is Federation. I thought it hilarious how courteous and even tempered they made my Klingon character. And they didn't bother to take out "you and your Federation" nonsense in the story. Thanks?
A lot of the VO work doesn't match the text.
There are a few typos (that I noticed), which are glaringly obvious.
The new, shiny STF has a VO that stumbles on itself. It's like they just crammed the lines together, not caring that they were running together and on top of each other.
The numerous patrols they send you on in the DQ are on horribly laggy maps. If I want to fight lag, I'll connect via dialup.
Speaking of patrols, when running through with a friend, we both kept saying "More patrols? Wheres the story?"
10 new levels of content. what, 3 levels worth of xp? You HAVE to do alternate things. You just have to. Or not level, period.
Tau Dewa was getting all kinds of people together. Not clicking something and getting free stuff, shooting stuff together. Random people inviting anyone who asked, if they had room. No silly elitism. Playing with people whom you otherwise wouldn't notice exist.
It was fun, it was silly, there was no exclusivity.
I'm sorry, but anyone saying "derp they need to nerf powerleveling because I heart the devs, and whatever lame reason they give is good enough" is completely missing the point.
protogoth, my biggest issue with this is that the developers are putting top priority to this issue, where some of my friends are unable to enter the game entirely.
Don't get me wrong. I have personally reported many bugs, both with DQ and with older content. I have asked for things which one faction has that neither of the other two have and should have (and if anyone pulls the unoriginal "fraction" nonsense again, I'm going to simply disregard what they have to say on the matter, because it will be clear that they are incapable of independent thought and instead simply parrot something which they imagine to be cute). I agree that there are issues older and -- from the players' perspective -- more important.
But not knowing what exactly Cryptic and/or PWE is concerned about with this particular issue means that we also do not know exactly how important it is. One of the things which has been said is that "a small number of players" were involved. If this were truly about power levelling in Japori as some of the people in this thread have assumed, then "a small number of players" would be an extremely inaccurate description, because Tau Dewa around Japori was full of people in multiple instances.
Tau Dewa was getting all kinds of people together. Not clicking something and getting free stuff, shooting stuff together. Random people inviting anyone who asked, if they had room. No silly elitism. Playing with people whom you otherwise wouldn't notice exist.
It was fun, it was silly, there was no exclusivity.
But that's not how Cryptic wants you to play. They want you to spend hours on end playing the new patrol missions that take forever due to the hp of the enemies. If you're having fun, then you clearly aren't playing how they want you to. If someone's found a fun or efficient way of doing something, Cryptic has to shut it down and "fix" it.
The DR stories are buggy. Very much so. Sometimes enough to where it's a chore to get through them.
Even without the bugs, some of them are just annoying. For one, I thought helping the Kobali was pretty distasteful, and there's no way around it.
Everyone is Federation. I thought it hilarious how courteous and even tempered they made my Klingon character. And they didn't bother to take out "you and your Federation" nonsense in the story. Thanks?
A lot of the VO work doesn't match the text.
There are a few typos (that I noticed), which are glaringly obvious.
The new, shiny STF has a VO that stumbles on itself. It's like they just crammed the lines together, not caring that they were running together and on top of each other.
The numerous patrols they send you on in the DQ are on horribly laggy maps. If I want to fight lag, I'll connect via dialup.
Speaking of patrols, when running through with a friend, we both kept saying "More patrols? Wheres the story?"
10 new levels of content. what, 3 levels worth of xp? You HAVE to do alternate things. You just have to. Or not level, period.
Tau Dewa was getting all kinds of people together. Not clicking something and getting free stuff, shooting stuff together. Random people inviting anyone who asked, if they had room. No silly elitism. Playing with people whom you otherwise wouldn't notice exist.
It was fun, it was silly, there was no exclusivity.
I'm sorry, but anyone saying "derp they need to nerf powerleveling because I heart the devs, and whatever lame reason they give is good enough" is completely missing the point.
Using patrols to supplement content is, in my personal opinion, shoddy.
Even without the bugs, some of them are just annoying. For one, I thought helping the Kobali was pretty distasteful, and there's no way around it.
Everyone is Federation. I thought it hilarious how courteous and even tempered they made my Klingon character. And they didn't bother to take out "you and your Federation" nonsense in the story. Thanks?
A lot of the VO work doesn't match the text.
There are a few typos (that I noticed), which are glaringly obvious.
The new, shiny STF has a VO that stumbles on itself. It's like they just crammed the lines together, not caring that they were running together and on top of each other.
I also thought it odd that one of my options to reply to Harry Kim was to parrot the Prime Directive, when I was on my Main, a KDF-allied Romulan of the Republic. The Prime Directive to me is little more than a pseudo-ethical explanation for cowardice and non-action. At the same time, as a Republic Romulan, I oppose any and all forms of imperialism, including cultural imperialism ("Why are we allied with the Syndicate," some have asked me, "when they engage in slavery and you say 'Our chief governing passion is Freedom'?" and I always give the same answer: "Because I don't like imperialism any more than I like slavery, and the Syndicate is the true power in the Klingon Empire now, so we have little choice unless we want to pretend that dealing with the Klingons instead of the Orions will accomplish anything. We can influence over time through interaction and by example, and we can even liberate slaves so long as we do it covertly, but we're not going to start a war with our allies over this, in particular because the guise of slavery is used by them to attain their goals, and if they were to make slavery illegal, they would lose the one advantage they have, which advantage makes them very helpful in our Intel and Covert work.")
I would also point out that you neglected to mention the hideous mispronunciation of Rihan names and words by the voice actors. Seriously, Cryptic/PWE, if you need someone to give you the correct pronunciations of these words, I'll do it for nothing except the satisfaction of hearing Rihan being pronounced correctly.
But that's not how Cryptic wants you to play. They want you to spend hours on end playing the new patrol missions that take forever due to the hp of the enemies. If you're having fun, then you clearly aren't playing how they want you to. If someone's found a fun or efficient way of doing something, Cryptic has to shut it down and "fix" it.
I think you're wrong on that.
What they do not want you to do is power-level against Level 50 enemies with a Level 55 or Level 60 characters.
Tau Dewa enemies seem to not scale above 50. That's their problem.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
my main issue with this is most of the missions took an hour or more to complete they had some good points but mostly it was regurgitated plot from places they should not have pulled it.
then theres the fact that if your a new romulan you can no longer until they re enable the maps play. and i mean AT ALL romulan characters can not do their missions right now.
we are not getting a straight answer and to top it all off they didnt feel they should tag any one devs name on it.
if your going to bring that many systems down and make that many people suffer we deserve a complete answer not a deflection.
my main issue with this is most of the missions took an hour or more to complete they had some good points but mostly it was regurgitated plot from places they should not have pulled it.
then theres the fact that if your a new romulan you can no longer until they re enable the maps play. and i mean AT ALL romulan characters can not do their missions right now.
we are not getting a straight answer and to top it all off they didnt feel they should tag any one devs name on it.
if your going to bring that many systems down and make that many people suffer we deserve a complete answer not a deflection.
So let me get this straight. You're demanding that the company provide you with an explanation of how to exploit a glitch or bug? Am I reading this right, or are you simply asking for what the end result of the exploiting was? If the former, get used to disappointment. If the latter, they did say that they will share more as soon as they have completed their investigation, so I would suggest some patience. This isn't the drive-through window at your local fast food joint.
So let me get this straight. You're demanding that the company provide you with an explanation of how to exploit a glitch or bug? Am I reading this right, or are you simply asking for what the end result of the exploiting was? If the former, get used to disappointment. If the latter, they did say that they will share more as soon as they have completed their investigation, so I would suggest some patience. This isn't the drive-through window at your local fast food joint.
if they are fixing it they should tell us exactly what happened that they failed to see earlier other game companies do this.
now im not saying down to the nity grity details but the general gist of what they found to be an exploit a name to it.
now im just going to make a guess and say that if they are willing to stop all progression for the romulan faction that it must be something big.
thats the problem i have is if they cant catch that with tribble or redshirt. and i did not see so much as an apology to those romulans who cannot continue their progression so maybe thats what gets me miffed the most.
If anyone quitting over the loss of Japori patrols needs someone to send their stuff to, I am here for you.
Nope, but you could login and level all of my Toons to "Level 110" ... I'll even give you my MK XII Stuff after you upgraded everything else to MK XIV .. isn't that an tempting offer, cause you know ... playing the game is so much fun now ?
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
All of u qqers are using exploit by matching low lvl to get insanely large amount of exp in sector which are not designed for this. Ships there are weak and have low structure and damage even on elite difficulty. In a lot of other MMO ppl get ban for this.
Comments
system Lord Baal is dead
Many of us have screamed about QA and its apparent absence in the past this, however, just throws that whole area into the spotlight.
Cryptic you should know the animal (monster?) that you have created. Good QA would surely have bought this problem into focus?
You've even forgotten the human aspect, as someone has already mentioned in one of the multiple threads on this, some people will always seek the least passage of resistance to progress onwards.
Poor design choices made that happen. I cant see this ending well.
EDIT: And I'll add in that the buck stops with D'Angelo. Free Lobi will not appease in this instance.
I cant really see how it matters what way you level up, if that is the case they had best shut down every sector apart from delta and put a lock on doff missions.
I have levelled up a fair bit and have hardly touched the new content yet.
I can understand them putting a block on something if there is a glitch that causes a bigger reward then intended but otherwise it should be up to the player what they do to progress.
the one big thing I have always loved the most about this game is the freedom to play what you want when you want if they start putting a block on players freedom I would be most upset.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
QFT. Glad i'm not the only one feeling that way. Yes there were good things but lately grind in this game have been reaching rediculous levels. As a matter of fact i have returned to the game after 7 months of absence and now 2 weeks later i already question myslef if i did the right thing.
I don't know about 'all' systems, but Neutral no more quest, the VERY quest you get in romulan faction AFTER choosing sides, requires Beta Thoridar System, and it is giving me the error. It is also one of the patrol systems. I am uncertain of whether it is intentional, or if they accidently forgot about maps also being used by their romulan faction episodes.
+1 here. To make it clear, I was not lvling at DS9, but the rest of meimeitoo's post nails it.
Since Season 9 its nerf-nerf-nerf. I wonder how soon we will have to grind for months for "free" bridge officer slots that are now given via leveling.
pwebranflakes: this system is currently in place and working the way it should.
moradum: I got banned for saying "I started my day with cutting off 3 MM off of the bottom of my cabinet"
Nerf - chop - squash - okbiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii .... :cool:
Sure i did!
Would I do that again?
Of course, anytime again!
Why?
Because Cryptic is leaving us no other chance to have some fun in this game.
The fact that I'm not buying into the unwarranted assumptions and hysteria, having worked in the gaming industry for several years and knowing a little more than the average player does not make me "a developer apologist," nor does the rigorous application of the rules of inference. The right and wrong you claim to be concerned with should not involve the use of fallacies like Argumentum ad Hominem, which is, yeah, an incorrect inference form, and therefore wrong. In addition, a review of my posts will easily show that I have called for changes and improvement. Me saying "You're freaking out, making assumptions with no basis, and being hysterical" does not negate the reality that I also don't agree with everything any Development company does.
Obviously there are legitimate reasons for players to avoid levelling in the DQ, not least of which is the insane CPU lag from all the graphics issues in some of the DQ system zones, due in part to the Devs apparently (not certainly) coding for NVIDIA users only. But the post I acknowledged in the edit of my previous post in this thread did not give details of what the exploitative behavior is, and instead of taking a breath, most of you continued to make the same assumption, that this is about power levelling. Others are whining because no details were provided. Guess what? Game publishers seldom reveal details of how to exploit a glitch, with good reason, so they may eventually tell us what the end result of the exploiting was, but the likelihood of them ever telling us exactly how it was done are, at best, slim, and that's a good thing. The post in question does say, after all, that they will share more as soon as they have completed their investigation, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a revelation of the method(s) used to exploit.
It means "prejudice," the act of judging before knowing, and it's not a pretty thing.
Right on. Glad someone else gets it.
In it they are telling players that traveling around New Eden will take a lot more time. This is essentially a nerf to the movement system ... and they are calling it as such. Why? Because they want to "force" how players move in the game. Yet the Devs also outline not only why they are doing it, but their expectations of player behavior because of it.
The blog is long ... but that is how it could (should?) be done.
The DR stories are buggy. Very much so. Sometimes enough to where it's a chore to get through them.
Even without the bugs, some of them are just annoying. For one, I thought helping the Kobali was pretty distasteful, and there's no way around it.
Everyone is Federation. I thought it hilarious how courteous and even tempered they made my Klingon character. And they didn't bother to take out "you and your Federation" nonsense in the story. Thanks?
A lot of the VO work doesn't match the text.
There are a few typos (that I noticed), which are glaringly obvious.
The new, shiny STF has a VO that stumbles on itself. It's like they just crammed the lines together, not caring that they were running together and on top of each other.
The numerous patrols they send you on in the DQ are on horribly laggy maps. If I want to fight lag, I'll connect via dialup.
Speaking of patrols, when running through with a friend, we both kept saying "More patrols? Wheres the story?"
10 new levels of content. what, 3 levels worth of xp? You HAVE to do alternate things. You just have to. Or not level, period.
Tau Dewa was getting all kinds of people together. Not clicking something and getting free stuff, shooting stuff together. Random people inviting anyone who asked, if they had room. No silly elitism. Playing with people whom you otherwise wouldn't notice exist.
It was fun, it was silly, there was no exclusivity.
I'm sorry, but anyone saying "derp they need to nerf powerleveling because I heart the devs, and whatever lame reason they give is good enough" is completely missing the point.
Don't get me wrong. I have personally reported many bugs, both with DQ and with older content. I have asked for things which one faction has that neither of the other two have and should have (and if anyone pulls the unoriginal "fraction" nonsense again, I'm going to simply disregard what they have to say on the matter, because it will be clear that they are incapable of independent thought and instead simply parrot something which they imagine to be cute). I agree that there are issues older and -- from the players' perspective -- more important.
But not knowing what exactly Cryptic and/or PWE is concerned about with this particular issue means that we also do not know exactly how important it is. One of the things which has been said is that "a small number of players" were involved. If this were truly about power levelling in Japori as some of the people in this thread have assumed, then "a small number of players" would be an extremely inaccurate description, because Tau Dewa around Japori was full of people in multiple instances.
But that's not how Cryptic wants you to play. They want you to spend hours on end playing the new patrol missions that take forever due to the hp of the enemies. If you're having fun, then you clearly aren't playing how they want you to. If someone's found a fun or efficient way of doing something, Cryptic has to shut it down and "fix" it.
Using patrols to supplement content is, in my personal opinion, shoddy.
And my aren't they tedious!
I also thought it odd that one of my options to reply to Harry Kim was to parrot the Prime Directive, when I was on my Main, a KDF-allied Romulan of the Republic. The Prime Directive to me is little more than a pseudo-ethical explanation for cowardice and non-action. At the same time, as a Republic Romulan, I oppose any and all forms of imperialism, including cultural imperialism ("Why are we allied with the Syndicate," some have asked me, "when they engage in slavery and you say 'Our chief governing passion is Freedom'?" and I always give the same answer: "Because I don't like imperialism any more than I like slavery, and the Syndicate is the true power in the Klingon Empire now, so we have little choice unless we want to pretend that dealing with the Klingons instead of the Orions will accomplish anything. We can influence over time through interaction and by example, and we can even liberate slaves so long as we do it covertly, but we're not going to start a war with our allies over this, in particular because the guise of slavery is used by them to attain their goals, and if they were to make slavery illegal, they would lose the one advantage they have, which advantage makes them very helpful in our Intel and Covert work.")
I would also point out that you neglected to mention the hideous mispronunciation of Rihan names and words by the voice actors. Seriously, Cryptic/PWE, if you need someone to give you the correct pronunciations of these words, I'll do it for nothing except the satisfaction of hearing Rihan being pronounced correctly.
...reminds me of V1.0 (Feb 2010) where you had to do every patrol to gain your exp.
I've been calling it "The Japori Rising Incident". But Japorigate works too.
Mine Trap Supporter
I think you're wrong on that.
What they do not want you to do is power-level against Level 50 enemies with a Level 55 or Level 60 characters.
Tau Dewa enemies seem to not scale above 50. That's their problem.
then theres the fact that if your a new romulan you can no longer until they re enable the maps play. and i mean AT ALL romulan characters can not do their missions right now.
we are not getting a straight answer and to top it all off they didnt feel they should tag any one devs name on it.
if your going to bring that many systems down and make that many people suffer we deserve a complete answer not a deflection.
So let me get this straight. You're demanding that the company provide you with an explanation of how to exploit a glitch or bug? Am I reading this right, or are you simply asking for what the end result of the exploiting was? If the former, get used to disappointment. If the latter, they did say that they will share more as soon as they have completed their investigation, so I would suggest some patience. This isn't the drive-through window at your local fast food joint.
Can I get cheese on my nerfburger?
now im not saying down to the nity grity details but the general gist of what they found to be an exploit a name to it.
now im just going to make a guess and say that if they are willing to stop all progression for the romulan faction that it must be something big.
thats the problem i have is if they cant catch that with tribble or redshirt. and i did not see so much as an apology to those romulans who cannot continue their progression so maybe thats what gets me miffed the most.
Nope, but you could login and level all of my Toons to "Level 110" ... I'll even give you my MK XII Stuff after you upgraded everything else to MK XIV .. isn't that an tempting offer, cause you know ... playing the game is so much fun now ?
and you can stand their to the end of time waiting to
system Lord Baal is dead