What's amusing is that STO's devs are some of the most communicative out there.
That's just laughable. EVE has the most communicative devs I've ever witnessed and they are generally well-liked by the players. They also do a very good job of adhering to many of these "rules" the OP made. They have some of the best customer service I've ever experienced -- not once have I ever felt like they responded to me with a canned response. They do things right over there and it saddens me that a franchise as big as Star Trek can't have the same in STO.
That's just laughable. EVE has the most communicative devs I've ever witnessed and they are generally well-liked by the players.
I concur. The EvE Online Devs are awesome! They're always present, genuinely interested in what the community has to say, and willing to discuss things.
The STO Devs, OTOH, ignore almost every feedback (here and on Tribble); and then have their Community Manager post that there are only two 'known issues.'
It seems there have been some important lessons in PR thrown out the window by Cryptic/PWE in the past few days--and frankly these are problems in general, but no more is it obvious than in this most recent incident with the Tau Dewa sector. I've posted a few of these tips before, but I'm going to make one more last-ditch try in the hopes that someone will wake up and smell the coffee. I WANT this game to succeed, and I would be very sad to see it fail because of this, but fail it will if some better communications and decision-making skills are not adopted, pronto.
No, I am not a public relations expert but I have worked both in operations management and in the corporate world, and these things are quite obvious to li'l ol' me. Trust me--ignore these, Cryptic, at your own peril.
(Note: This is NOT a flame thread. In fact, a lot of this is good advice for people in all types of business, and even in personal life.)
after that point my eyes glazed over.. cryptic has their own plans and how they want to do things, they dont give out details unless they feel its needed. clearly people on this forum have been making entitlement claims for years and not one of these has gotten any attention from the devs, this one will probably be the same going by how they have acted about it over this time.
im sure a great many here wouldnt mind wanting the game to keep its success up, but our opinion has never mattered when they want to take the game in a specific direction. so i dont even try anymore.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Sometimes, replicating the problem is a difficult exercise. Take the following communication: "I'm sorry, but I am unable to duplicate the problem. Either it doesn't exist, or there must be information you are not giving me."
OMFG... that literally happened to me yesterday - verbatim. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read it. It sounded like something you would hear from some IT Manager who thinks all the employees can barely open an email and their issues interfere with his playing Skyrim.
It was insulting and condescending. If this had happened in meatspace I would have told the person that ITS YOUR JOB to figure it out, if you cant find someone who is better qualified to handle since you cant
Great tips. Unfortunately PWE/Cryptic is a corporate entity. Given a choice between a Quality of Product or Quantity of Profit, Profit will win every time. Any flack about the product, or the behavior of the company results in fingers in ears, eyes shut tight and loud repetitions of "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!
Mind you in the profit equation, If Quantity of Profit had gone up because of the whole miscoded mess in TD, they would not have bothered to nerf/fix it.
Not communicating also, right or wrong, makes one look guilty (like the spin doctors don't know how to talk themselves out of it). ALWAYS communicate. Defuse the frenzy (fed by your own silence on the matter).
Also, don't hide behind Q. That also, right or wrong, makes you look guilty (cuz you're sending off the vibe that no one dares take personal responsibility for the mess).
What we need is something like a Community Manager, who can liaison between PWE and the community... Oh wait.
Even the Q post wouldn't have been so bad if the thread wasn't immediately closed and there was more discussion on the subject. Of course by that point the damage was mostly done: it was hours after the fact and people were already getting annoyed.
Neverwinter is very far down the rabbit hole of Asian mmo. Its not all the way there yet, but its sprinting that direction.
Co and sto are very lucky by comparison.
That doesnt mean PWE and Cryptic isnt scheming to find a way to get us down that rabbit hole as well. DR very much feels like thats where all of these changes are leading us.
With the spec point loss a lot of players are facing (who didn't do any exploits), this becomes very relevant again. Seriously, Cryptic, your window to act is shrinking rapidly. Don't shoot yourselves in the foot again--get out and address the issue, and openly.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
With the spec point loss a lot of players are facing (who didn't do any exploits), this becomes very relevant again. Seriously, Cryptic, your window to act is shrinking rapidly. Don't shoot yourselves in the foot again--get out and address the issue, and openly.
^^ This.
In the immortal words of young John Conner: "Are we learning yet?!"
Given that they've actually posted some things lately, it seems like they must have briefly skimmed the OP, but they've clearly not taken it to heart as a whole.
Given that they've actually posted some things lately, it seems like they must have briefly skimmed the OP, but they've clearly not taken it to heart as a whole.
I will definitely be addressing this as my review series goes on. Communication beforehand helps but when not coupled with LISTENING, it goes nowhere. This has been a dangerous (financially) exercise in not listening.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I want to say, gulberat, that interacting with you on here these past couple of months has been one of the highlights of posting here over the past five years.
This thread is productive.
And based on my own dealings with developers, I will add:
If you feel that the advice gulberat provided here is condescending, insulting, or doesn't apply to the situation at Cryptic, you need to reflect on why you feel that.
If you believe that this advice doesn't apply to you because of facts that gulberat or the community do not have access to, I would urge you to consider the possibility that some advice is good regardless of the internal situation and that no amount of insight into your day to day patterns, whether they are horrible or happy, negates well meaning, good general business practices.
Your industry doesn't negate good general business practices. Pressure from management doesn't negate good general business practices. Operational threats, weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities don't negate good general business practices. Your workplace being nice and friendly and full of people who are good to one another doesn't negate good general business practices. There is no system of indulgences here. Saving an orphan from a speeding car or your co-worker giving you a kidney doesn't negate good general business practices.
I am going to offer something up and this is going to seem odd.
I think maybe Cryptic needs to look into a practices approach like Lean Six Sigma. I am not a fan of it entirely. It actually would involve some of the problems Cryptic already has because LSS encourages inflexible deadlines for product releases. But it's also a zero defects approach and in that regard it works. It also works in that companies that employ it see large absolute and measurable gains in revenue (although not always relative gains to the market). It tends to get results in terms of emphasizing customer value and minimizing defects even if Silicon Valley hates it and even if it might stifle innovation. It only works if you don't halfway do it and I'd be wary if PWE has some kind of adapted Six Sigma.
And if you're not willing to do it all the way, then you should avoid SS type approaches ENTIRELY and focus on creating customer value, accepting losses, budgeting generously for shrinkage, and brainstorming ways to create new market space by offering superior value for the money than your competitors offer. And your competitors have to include paid MMOs and even non-gaming entertainment for this to work. And it can't matter that your base product is free. You have to look at what you want the average spender to spend and make the value they get here proportional to what that money would get elsewhere.
Even something like Total Quality Management without going all the way down the Six Sigma or ISO compliance routes would be a big improvement as it would remind Cryptic first and always that it is the customer who defines what quality is, at all times. It is not the company--and if you produce Widget X with a big set of features the customer won't or can't use when what the customer wants as Widget Y with the following defined list of features working, you can make the "best Widget X" you can think of, but in the eyes of the customer, who matters the most, your "best Widget X" is in fact poor quality because it does not match their needs, wants, and expectations.
Customer-defined quality demands the soliciting *and acceptance and incorporation* of customer feedback. As long as that second piece isn't there, the situation won't get any better for us OR Cryptic's bottom line.
That is the situation we are now in and without a massive overhaul it will kill the product line...I mean game.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
While great advice, even moreso now with the latest fiasco, I firmly believe that they don't care what any of us think and they will not get the message until their own little world comes crashing down around them.
Yeah. The more difficulty thing, like many others, was just a vocal minority being really really loud on the forums.
Like a hundred or so players out of how many? In my fleet of 100 players, around 10 wanted harder difficulty.
OP's post is excellent as always... +1 from me.
Star Trek fans are a pushy lot, so as I've said before, they can certainly ask questions and find out what people think. The flipside to that is to dig deeper - people have a habit of realizing there's a problem, then thinking of a half-baked solution, and then insisting that the "problem" is that their "solution" is not in place. In the case of "difficulty", that points to something else, possibly "we find the missions so repetitive and consistent that there's no challenge anymore". Thinking in those terms has a habit of opening up a whole new horizon of opportunities.
EDIT: part of the problem is that they're communicative in precisely the wrong way. I thought that SpecGate shook them out of it but they're right back where they started: post-change top-down pronouncements from on high sprinkled with a liberal dose of snark and cheek while ignoring the problems. They treat us more like employees who should be grateful for our grindy "job" rather than as customers. The new guy seemed like a breath of fresh air but now he seems to have disappeared again, and we're back to "regular programming". Very disheartening.
A very well put together post, OP, although I wonder if you have given thought as to why none of this was implemented?
I find it curious that people blithely assume that Cryptic has no PR people in place. I guarantee you they do. I guarantee you said PR people have raised many if not all of the poiints you do.
Logic suggest that if someone is acting in a manner that makes no immediate discernable sense, there are two options: they are stupid, or we don't understand all the factors. I find it amusing that people assume the stupid option every time.
I, too, have spent far too long in the corporate world, and at what I suspect is a higher level to yours. I will provide why they are ignoring these things.
Rule #1: 'No Comment' IS a Comment. Any time that you do not reply to something, you are signaling that it is unimportant to you.
Legal Rule 1: If you don't say anything you cannot make it worse. This is the number one answer I hear from the lawyers when the PR guys try to push this. You are absolutely correct -- from a PR standpoint, saying nothing means the message is out of your hands. However, 95% of the time Cryptic actually formally goes 'no comment', they've fouled up somewhere.
When the execs have their damage control meeting, there's the legal guy, the finance guy, and the PR guy. God knows bigger companies have made this mistake by listening to the whining of the legal guy saying "If you say anything you could make it worse".
A corollary to this is that it does little good to say anything if your message is likely to be one no one wants to hear. More often that not, I suspect, Cryptic has no way to mitigate a situation and prefers to simply not engage in dialogue because nothing is going to change.
Rule #2: Ignoring It Will Not Make It Go Away. In the event of a crisis, the LAST thing you want to do is keep your mouth shut and hope things will just blow over.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Many companies have a tendency to assume that customers have very small attention spans. I've actually seen this in marketing, where the premise is appearantly that the customer is incapable of remembering anything, good or bad, for more than one week.
I think this is also a continuation of #1 -- depending on the size of the bruhaha, ignoring it seems safe until they can craft some kind of coherent response.
Rule #3: Communicate Early and Communicate Often. In the event of a crisis, keep the updates coming. OFTEN.
HA!
When a crisis strikes, all too often, people panic. They rarely have a prepared communications plan in place, and even if they do, some nut shoots his mouth off and they have deal with the fallout.
Cryptic doens't engage in this for the simple reason that we have rarely if ever seen who is actually in charge of their 'voice'. There is no one we can point to and say "if he says X, then X will happen". There's no Two Doctors like at Bioware. There's just a selection of assorted names that come and go and mean nothing.
Rule #4: If You Make a Mistake, Take Personal Ownership and Apologize. You may fear that apologizing or changing course will make you look weak.
Legal Rule 2: An apology is an admission of guilt. An admission of guilt is an admission of damages. Damages require compensation. Compensation requires money.
Ergo, Apologies cost money.
You laugh but this is EXACTLY the sort of twisted thinking that ends up happening at 1 AM when something blows up. It's why you have hilarious meltdowns when big companies foul something up and then the CEO gets on national TV and says TRIBBLE like "I'd like my life back".
Rule #5: If You Make a Promise, Keep It at All Costs. If You Cannot, Do Not Make a Promise. I don't care how big or how small the promise is. Promises must be kept or your word means nothing--and in a crisis especially, people will cut you far less slack than normal.
I think the more important rule here is "DO NOT MAKE PROMISES IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE POWER TO KEEP THEM."
What we've repeatedly seen is people promise something and then that get cut off at the knees. It strikes me that people saying this stuff are either operating in the dark and think they are actually promising something that will happen, or are foolish enough to believe that they can somehow control the trainwreck AFTER the train has already derailed.
There should only be one person making 'promises' and that should be someone with a title and a name, not 'PWfunnynameguy'. Promises from the former you can stick to them, promises to the latter end up being "Oh well, he misunderstood our current focus application and construed us moving in a direction that we were not actually going to undertake." Blah blah doublespeak.
Rule #6: Be Honest and Make It Right. This should be self-evident. But many times, ranging from the little white lie to a big one to make people feel safe or to placate them when they are angry, the tempting and easy route can be to engage in a cover-up.
Coverups happen for a reason.
You're right, it should be self-evident. Yet repeatedly companies and people do this, because of the maxim of avoidance.
I.E., "I won't get in as much trouble if no one knows the full scope of what I messed up."
It has the added effect of not admitting to doing anything wrong.
Rule #8: It's Not What You Meant, It's What They Heard. It doesn't matter if you know full well that they/we heard flat wrong. If people have been upset, if they are offended by what you have said or done, do not EVER make a statement like the following: "I am sorry that YOU have been offended."
This is where PR and Legal butt heads again.
The thing most people fail to understand is that reality is simple: Cryptic would rather lose a bunch of customers than leave themselves open to legal attack. Every bit of their language is going to conform to that rule FIRST, then to trying to do it right.
This means that when they pull completely shady TRIBBLE (like back in the day, outright LYING about the game never going to F2P while pushing a big sale on lifetime subs, then going F2P) that any message they put out is crafted first to avoid liability, not to demonstrate it.
I would love it if Cryptic took all of your advice to heart. They won't. Very , very few companies do. PR guys love pushing this line, but despite this you see very few companies actually doing this because of the (perceived) legal risks, as least in the US. Not sure about you guys in Yurop.
Great post but as far as honesty and promises goes, that ship sailed a long time ago. Back when the C-Store was first introduced, they claimed that "nothing would be put on sale in the C-Store that affects gameplay". Shortly after making the claim, ships were introduced and it started snowballing.
This goes beyond some basic (and well-written) rules on business, they are seriously in need of ethics textbooks and a sociologist to help them to understand the community they've created. Cryptic used to try to communicate, but they never understood how the community works and why it's different from a normal MMO community. Dealing with trekkers/trekkies is a different thing entirely and they never really got that either.
It will languish as a mediocre member of PWE's stable, but it will still linger on.
Cryptic has mishandled this IP since the beginning, actually posting about their financial woes in this forum while blaming their current owners for all the problems in the game.
Also, Cryptic is not a company per say, but a loose group of friends that cover for each other, thus there is no accountability there. Their game plan from the beginning has been to ride this horse as far as it goes, while a few passionate people there have submitted what they could on their own time.
This final catering to the L337 is most likely from one of the more outspoken devs overriding any good sense there. I think I know who.
So a positive change would be a major miracle at this point.
Most companies would do well to follow those rules, I still remember companies that did follow that more or less and they were known to be good companies. Problem is you are always going to have someone who thinks the approach Cryptic take is the way towards more profit, and in the end it usually just causes uncertainty at best, ruin at worse.
Even if they do fix their attitude with what the OP is saying I think we are way past the point where the game can be fixed to work the way it should do at this point, which is a real shame really.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
Comments
That's just laughable. EVE has the most communicative devs I've ever witnessed and they are generally well-liked by the players. They also do a very good job of adhering to many of these "rules" the OP made. They have some of the best customer service I've ever experienced -- not once have I ever felt like they responded to me with a canned response. They do things right over there and it saddens me that a franchise as big as Star Trek can't have the same in STO.
Firesworn Nation (@rswfire) - https://www.firesworn.com
I concur. The EvE Online Devs are awesome! They're always present, genuinely interested in what the community has to say, and willing to discuss things.
The STO Devs, OTOH, ignore almost every feedback (here and on Tribble); and then have their Community Manager post that there are only two 'known issues.'
after that point my eyes glazed over.. cryptic has their own plans and how they want to do things, they dont give out details unless they feel its needed. clearly people on this forum have been making entitlement claims for years and not one of these has gotten any attention from the devs, this one will probably be the same going by how they have acted about it over this time.
im sure a great many here wouldnt mind wanting the game to keep its success up, but our opinion has never mattered when they want to take the game in a specific direction. so i dont even try anymore.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
OMFG... that literally happened to me yesterday - verbatim. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read it. It sounded like something you would hear from some IT Manager who thinks all the employees can barely open an email and their issues interfere with his playing Skyrim.
It was insulting and condescending. If this had happened in meatspace I would have told the person that ITS YOUR JOB to figure it out, if you cant find someone who is better qualified to handle since you cant
Mind you in the profit equation, If Quantity of Profit had gone up because of the whole miscoded mess in TD, they would not have bothered to nerf/fix it.
Even the Q post wouldn't have been so bad if the thread wasn't immediately closed and there was more discussion on the subject. Of course by that point the damage was mostly done: it was hours after the fact and people were already getting annoyed.
That doesnt mean PWE and Cryptic isnt scheming to find a way to get us down that rabbit hole as well. DR very much feels like thats where all of these changes are leading us.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
^^ This.
In the immortal words of young John Conner: "Are we learning yet?!"
I will definitely be addressing this as my review series goes on. Communication beforehand helps but when not coupled with LISTENING, it goes nowhere. This has been a dangerous (financially) exercise in not listening.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
This thread is productive.
And based on my own dealings with developers, I will add:
If you feel that the advice gulberat provided here is condescending, insulting, or doesn't apply to the situation at Cryptic, you need to reflect on why you feel that.
If you believe that this advice doesn't apply to you because of facts that gulberat or the community do not have access to, I would urge you to consider the possibility that some advice is good regardless of the internal situation and that no amount of insight into your day to day patterns, whether they are horrible or happy, negates well meaning, good general business practices.
Your industry doesn't negate good general business practices. Pressure from management doesn't negate good general business practices. Operational threats, weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities don't negate good general business practices. Your workplace being nice and friendly and full of people who are good to one another doesn't negate good general business practices. There is no system of indulgences here. Saving an orphan from a speeding car or your co-worker giving you a kidney doesn't negate good general business practices.
I am going to offer something up and this is going to seem odd.
I think maybe Cryptic needs to look into a practices approach like Lean Six Sigma. I am not a fan of it entirely. It actually would involve some of the problems Cryptic already has because LSS encourages inflexible deadlines for product releases. But it's also a zero defects approach and in that regard it works. It also works in that companies that employ it see large absolute and measurable gains in revenue (although not always relative gains to the market). It tends to get results in terms of emphasizing customer value and minimizing defects even if Silicon Valley hates it and even if it might stifle innovation. It only works if you don't halfway do it and I'd be wary if PWE has some kind of adapted Six Sigma.
And if you're not willing to do it all the way, then you should avoid SS type approaches ENTIRELY and focus on creating customer value, accepting losses, budgeting generously for shrinkage, and brainstorming ways to create new market space by offering superior value for the money than your competitors offer. And your competitors have to include paid MMOs and even non-gaming entertainment for this to work. And it can't matter that your base product is free. You have to look at what you want the average spender to spend and make the value they get here proportional to what that money would get elsewhere.
Customer-defined quality demands the soliciting *and acceptance and incorporation* of customer feedback. As long as that second piece isn't there, the situation won't get any better for us OR Cryptic's bottom line.
That is the situation we are now in and without a massive overhaul it will kill the product line...I mean game.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
/10char
Would you recommend STO to a friend?
You mean the part where they shut down the servers but couldn't tell us why? ya ok.
OP's post is excellent as always... +1 from me.
Star Trek fans are a pushy lot, so as I've said before, they can certainly ask questions and find out what people think. The flipside to that is to dig deeper - people have a habit of realizing there's a problem, then thinking of a half-baked solution, and then insisting that the "problem" is that their "solution" is not in place. In the case of "difficulty", that points to something else, possibly "we find the missions so repetitive and consistent that there's no challenge anymore". Thinking in those terms has a habit of opening up a whole new horizon of opportunities.
EDIT: part of the problem is that they're communicative in precisely the wrong way. I thought that SpecGate shook them out of it but they're right back where they started: post-change top-down pronouncements from on high sprinkled with a liberal dose of snark and cheek while ignoring the problems. They treat us more like employees who should be grateful for our grindy "job" rather than as customers. The new guy seemed like a breath of fresh air but now he seems to have disappeared again, and we're back to "regular programming". Very disheartening.
I find it curious that people blithely assume that Cryptic has no PR people in place. I guarantee you they do. I guarantee you said PR people have raised many if not all of the poiints you do.
Logic suggest that if someone is acting in a manner that makes no immediate discernable sense, there are two options: they are stupid, or we don't understand all the factors. I find it amusing that people assume the stupid option every time.
I, too, have spent far too long in the corporate world, and at what I suspect is a higher level to yours. I will provide why they are ignoring these things.
Legal Rule 1: If you don't say anything you cannot make it worse. This is the number one answer I hear from the lawyers when the PR guys try to push this. You are absolutely correct -- from a PR standpoint, saying nothing means the message is out of your hands. However, 95% of the time Cryptic actually formally goes 'no comment', they've fouled up somewhere.
When the execs have their damage control meeting, there's the legal guy, the finance guy, and the PR guy. God knows bigger companies have made this mistake by listening to the whining of the legal guy saying "If you say anything you could make it worse".
A corollary to this is that it does little good to say anything if your message is likely to be one no one wants to hear. More often that not, I suspect, Cryptic has no way to mitigate a situation and prefers to simply not engage in dialogue because nothing is going to change.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Many companies have a tendency to assume that customers have very small attention spans. I've actually seen this in marketing, where the premise is appearantly that the customer is incapable of remembering anything, good or bad, for more than one week.
I think this is also a continuation of #1 -- depending on the size of the bruhaha, ignoring it seems safe until they can craft some kind of coherent response.
HA!
When a crisis strikes, all too often, people panic. They rarely have a prepared communications plan in place, and even if they do, some nut shoots his mouth off and they have deal with the fallout.
Cryptic doens't engage in this for the simple reason that we have rarely if ever seen who is actually in charge of their 'voice'. There is no one we can point to and say "if he says X, then X will happen". There's no Two Doctors like at Bioware. There's just a selection of assorted names that come and go and mean nothing.
Legal Rule 2: An apology is an admission of guilt. An admission of guilt is an admission of damages. Damages require compensation. Compensation requires money.
Ergo, Apologies cost money.
You laugh but this is EXACTLY the sort of twisted thinking that ends up happening at 1 AM when something blows up. It's why you have hilarious meltdowns when big companies foul something up and then the CEO gets on national TV and says TRIBBLE like "I'd like my life back".
I think the more important rule here is "DO NOT MAKE PROMISES IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE POWER TO KEEP THEM."
What we've repeatedly seen is people promise something and then that get cut off at the knees. It strikes me that people saying this stuff are either operating in the dark and think they are actually promising something that will happen, or are foolish enough to believe that they can somehow control the trainwreck AFTER the train has already derailed.
There should only be one person making 'promises' and that should be someone with a title and a name, not 'PWfunnynameguy'. Promises from the former you can stick to them, promises to the latter end up being "Oh well, he misunderstood our current focus application and construed us moving in a direction that we were not actually going to undertake." Blah blah doublespeak.
Coverups happen for a reason.
You're right, it should be self-evident. Yet repeatedly companies and people do this, because of the maxim of avoidance.
I.E., "I won't get in as much trouble if no one knows the full scope of what I messed up."
It has the added effect of not admitting to doing anything wrong.
This is where PR and Legal butt heads again.
The thing most people fail to understand is that reality is simple: Cryptic would rather lose a bunch of customers than leave themselves open to legal attack. Every bit of their language is going to conform to that rule FIRST, then to trying to do it right.
This means that when they pull completely shady TRIBBLE (like back in the day, outright LYING about the game never going to F2P while pushing a big sale on lifetime subs, then going F2P) that any message they put out is crafted first to avoid liability, not to demonstrate it.
I would love it if Cryptic took all of your advice to heart. They won't. Very , very few companies do. PR guys love pushing this line, but despite this you see very few companies actually doing this because of the (perceived) legal risks, as least in the US. Not sure about you guys in Yurop.
This goes beyond some basic (and well-written) rules on business, they are seriously in need of ethics textbooks and a sociologist to help them to understand the community they've created. Cryptic used to try to communicate, but they never understood how the community works and why it's different from a normal MMO community. Dealing with trekkers/trekkies is a different thing entirely and they never really got that either.
It will languish as a mediocre member of PWE's stable, but it will still linger on.
Cryptic has mishandled this IP since the beginning, actually posting about their financial woes in this forum while blaming their current owners for all the problems in the game.
Also, Cryptic is not a company per say, but a loose group of friends that cover for each other, thus there is no accountability there. Their game plan from the beginning has been to ride this horse as far as it goes, while a few passionate people there have submitted what they could on their own time.
This final catering to the L337 is most likely from one of the more outspoken devs overriding any good sense there. I think I know who.
So a positive change would be a major miracle at this point.
Even if they do fix their attitude with what the OP is saying I think we are way past the point where the game can be fixed to work the way it should do at this point, which is a real shame really.