When I heard about what had happened, I was appalled. I did not bother leveling toons before so I wasn't really affected, but my god, just taking away the points with no attempt to even ask or explain? the height of arrogance! Well, hopefully the devs have learned a lesson, but before I invest any time or effort into this new system, I'll wait and see if that's really the case.
It takes a lot of courage to admit that you're wrong, and coming from the EP of the company. Good show!
Some communication is always better than no communication.
I would also like to thank the CS team for responding to my tickets in a timely manner., and Borticus, for still doing your job and staying professional, while the walls were falling around you.
This is a wonderful first step in the right direction, keep up the great work!
I think this is one of the best things I have seen in quite a while to mend broken fences with a lot of the player base. Good for you Mr. D'Angelo I hope you keep this up.
So the exploiters go unpunished because Cryptic couldn't implement punishment correctly! Wow , just freaking wow! So it's the vast majority of players that are getting punished , they loose out on the dilithium reward, and have to spend months grinding for their specialization points when these exploiters maxed out in a couple of days. Cryptic you have totally lost my respect. I will still play STO but this is my last post on these forums. It's clear that the needs of the few, outweigh the needs of the many. :(:(
I would like to thank the players who took the time to report problems with the Specialization Point removal last Thursday through the Customer Service ticket system. It really helped in being able to track and take care of everyone.
In the process of reviewing each persons ticket, we did indeed find that there were a few customers who did not take advantage of the power-leveling bug and yet had Specialization Points removed. There were also a few who managed to use the bug and were not penalized.
After considering the situation, we have decided that rather than doing another round of corrections a week after the problem event, that we will restore the points to all characters that had them removed. As of the time of this posting, all characters should have had their missing points restored.
I sincerely apologize on behalf of the Star Trek Online team for both the original bugs and the error of penalizing some customers incorrectly.
Stephen DAngelo
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online
This is only the beginning of rebuilding trust with the player base. Trust must be earned, it is not given nilly willy. Thanks for admitting some blame in this matter. I hope this is the beginning of healing this game.
Looking for more info on Dilithium Rising? Click on the link below:
Only if you knew due to association and exploited. I clearly did not finish and dropped what I was saying because it doesn't matter. Now let's make the best of it and have fun.
Took you a whole week to realize the primary TRIBBLE up in this was on the Dev team's end and not the players,
who were doing nothing more than playing the game in a manner which was allowed.
Some of who brought this potential problem to your attention during DR testing on Tribble.
All of whose integrity, responsibility and accountability you publicly besmirched without offering any proof.
Nice reaction time...said no one ever.
If you worked for me, and put my revenue stream in this much danger for one business week, this public almost apology would have come much faster and you'd be pink slipped immediately afterwards. pour encourager l'autres.
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
That's a heartless apology when the game wide punishments of xp loss and dilithium gain are still in effect.
It is a step in the right direction, and while I don't support the other issues in the game (xp and dil nerfs, costs of upgrades etc) at least something has now been done right. Just goes to show the doubters that standing your ground when your in the right is worth the effort.
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.
Wow Stephen, that took guts. I applaud you guys for realizing that there was collateral damage against innocent* players when you took punitive action. It really didn't help your image to execute such a knee-jerk reaction. This won't fully rectify the issue but it's a step in the right direction. Sometimes being humble and admitting fault is the right course of action.
*I still disagree as to whether playing the content as-implemented can even be considered an exploit so distinguishing "innocent" players is a misnomer; I don't think it was fair to accuse players of cheating, essentially, when they didn't have access to the same data that you do to see major discrepancies. You might take that data for granted but players don't have those kinds of tools.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
lesson learned...cheat and exploit, then rage when are caught, and profit from it
Enjoy the specializations that you "earned"
This is the way it generally has always gone in MMO's. Exploiters exploit the pants off broken systems which gets the devs to notice it and 'fix' it so everybody else falls incredibly far behind the exploitee's. The power difference then allows the exploiter top-dogs to find the next exploit and benefit from it while everybody else is so far behind in power level that only they can utilise it.
It is the nature of an MMO until a dev team had the guts to actually give out punishments properly.
People here crying foul claiming that "the cheaters got away with it" need to just get off the high horse, every one of you have your own skeletons hidden away in the closet and you know it, all this indignation is just way too hypocritical.
It's time to stop talking about this and get over it, there are much more important issues that need to be addressed. This issue would have never happen if they had not nerfed xp gain right into the toilet, that problem still remains, a handful of spec points is a piffling matter to get upset about when compared to an entire game that's been broken with this expansion.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
This issue would have never happen if they had not nerfed xp gain right into the toilet
That and the blasted scaling issues in missions and STF's. I've run into a bug that varies the difficulty levels in one mission. One batch of mobs are made of wet toilet paper, the next batch are juggernauts; same mobs, just different difficulties and xp gains=seriously borked to bloody hell.
People here crying foul claiming that "the cheaters got away with it" need to just get off the high horse, every one of you have your own skeletons hidden away in the closet and you know it, all this indignation is just way too hypocritical.
It's time to stop talking about this and get over it, there are much more important issues that need to be addressed. This issue would have never happen if they had not nerfed xp gain right into the toilet, that problem still remains, a handful of spec points is a piffling matter to get upset about when compared to an entire game that's been broken with this expansion.
But why ?
If you've been keeping up with this thread you'de notice the only issues that get fixed in a timely manner are the ones players rage about.
People here crying foul claiming that "the cheaters got away with it" need to just get off the high horse, every one of you have your own skeletons hidden away in the closet and you know it, all this indignation is just way too hypocritical.
.
Yup there you have it "everybody cheats" LoL
It might suprise you but no not everyone cheats. Anyhow this particular incident solidified my feelings of how a great many people play games. :P
right choice sir
now you need to higher the DIL rewards again
and make normal difficulty so that you can do it with 2k DPS
so casual players have fun playn the game
AND
remove:
"This forum requires that you wait 300 seconds between posts"
right choice sir
now you need to higher the DIL rewards again
and make normal difficulty so that you can do it with 2k DPS
so casual players have fun playn the game
I had one guy last night for the first time in a long time cut and paste a parse. I found it odd that it was on my new level 50 with green gear and a t4 ship. Possibly though he wanted to collect information for the devs I dont know I just found it odd that out of the 4 guys I was running through that one had the parse lol. Not the guys that could tank the entire instance or the guy that gets top dps each time. Hopefully it was for a good cause.
what they need to do is make the advanced doable by higher dps ships right now it pretty much requires as much gear as the elite from what I can tell. I dont go in them very often with my higher dps guys because I find them unpleasant and the 'optionals' are not optional which is .. well dumb. I wont touch the elite I dont find these q's fun like this. This is pretty much my main complaint of the game is this botched q system.
They made the right call giving back points that should never have be taken away.
The simple fact is the game was just patched after the expansion release.
Cryptic should be in control of what they want players to do and the rewards they get.
This was one clearly defined time Cryptic expected people to notice it was not working as intended.
They expected people who wanted to level up quickly to not to because players should know it was an exploit.
Just don't see how clicking "Enter Patrol"was an exploit.
Now players did exploit the situation that leveling was easier in the patrols.
But that's not a bad thing when the objective is to level your character up anyway.
Part of the problem was people enjoying the Romulan expansion.
In that expansion you could play from one story mission to another.
With DR you could not so naturally people are going to seek the easy less frustrating route.
They will want to level up first to 60 then go play through all the story missions.
Maybe it would have been better to have more story's missions or required you to be level 60 before even starting DR.
Hopefully this has been a learning experience for all.
The Raging
The way people attack called names and insulted other players to punish Cryptic was shameful.
Hurting our player base is by no means to best way help the game or the best way to get something changed.
We lost people and that's not cool because someone wanted their points back does not mean...
If you can NOT have it then nobody needs to play the game.
This is business that can be reasoned with, they do want to make money.
Any of you who was part of the rage shame on you for hurting our player base for selfish reasons.
The was no other reason besides being a selfish one.
75% of Everyone Does Not Like Change
Most people do not like change, what's does that mean.
When you add any expansion or new content you do NOT go and change the entire game.
That means you really don't go and change peoples most favorite content.
People had a huge dependency on the STF for group play and making dilithium.
This has been another huge source of rage and leaving the game posts.
DPS
Changing the STFs at first to require super high DPS was showing that you didn't know what or how people like to play.
You allowed a group to think the DEVs changed the game for them.
This had an entire group to think their play style was the only way.
Its pretty obvious you cannot force people to play one way or another.
What's not cool is this one group thinks they are the only ones who have knowledge.
Responsibility
The current issues is everyones fault hopefully next time there will be a better way.
More open doors from Cryptic to get feedback from a wider player base who do listen.
Constructive feedback from the players and nothing in a form that hurts our player base.
Hard Work
For goodness sakes DEVs do realize we work hard to keep people playing in our groups.
Don't go changing the game so much that it upsets people.
It might suprise you but no not everyone cheats. Anyhow this particular incident solidified my feelings of how a great many people play games. :P
Yep. It's usually the people who scream the loudest for more difficulty who are the first to exploit their way around any new difficulty they get, just as in this case.
The only thing players "exploited" was Cryptic's lack of imagination and effort, trying to pass off grinding experience as content.
"Hey, we need something to keep players logging in."
"How about we make leveling a long and tedious grind?"
"Genius! Design so that it takes months so we can take a three month long vacation."
How about Cryptic either lower the experience requirements (I think it is 50,000 experience for a level past level 60) or change the experience rate past level 50+ so I can see some actual progress being made leveling.
It might suprise you but no not everyone cheats. Anyhow this particular incident solidified my feelings of how a great many people play games. :P
To which I call BS, the fact is nobody is looking to "cheat" and whether it is this or the Voth ground zone or any of several other areas, players are going to look for anyplace that is going to give them the best chances of getting ahead while feeling the least like hamsters running in a wheel desperately trying to reach a stale piece of cheese, anyone who says they aren't doing this is not being honest, but if they can't own up to that, the very least they can do is not be hypocrites pointing fingers at others. Every time I see someone posting "the cheaters got away with it" it disgusts me, because Cryptic in their infinite stupidity have driven a wedge in the community that some people just refuse to let go of in spite of the fact that they themselves are probably doing things that might not bear close scrutiny.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
Looks like some Homunculii snatched 8+ points away during the "restoration" process. And support is back to the brick wall stage. Noted with all due patience and understanding of course! Just not in the mood for another monologue in one of those ticket entries.
To which I call BS, the fact is nobody is looking to "cheat" and whether it is this or the Voth ground zone or any of several other areas, players are going to look for anyplace that is going to give them the best chances of getting ahead while feeling the least like hamsters running in a wheel desperately trying to reach a stale peace of cheese, anyone who says they aren't doing this is not being honest, but if they can't own up to that, the very least they can do is not be hypocrites pointing fingers at others. Every time I see someone posting "the cheaters got away with it" it disgusts me, because Cryptic in their infinite stupidity have driven a wedge in the community that some people just refuse to let go of in spite of the fact that they themselves are probably doing things that might not bear close scrutiny.
errm i was quoting you and you said "everyone has skeletons in their closet" I didnt say it you did I was just pointing out.
I play fps as well and you aint seen nothing till you have seen the crud that happens in a multiplayer fps just so a guy can win lol. Still doesnt make it right. Gaming is basically a wild west mentality. Its fine, but I wont ever be agreeing with what I see.
I really dont care if people get punished or not, but no.. I have no skeletons in my closet although I am sorely tempted right now to put some in there but I probably wont cause I have fun as things are now..
People here crying foul claiming that "the cheaters got away with it" need to just get off the high horse, every one of you have your own skeletons hidden away in the closet and you know it, all this indignation is just way too hypocritical.
I didn'T have much time to "exploit" this bug, but I think I benefitted from it. But I wouldn't have cried if my specialization points had been taken away. That is just part of the risk of doing something questionable - sometimes you don't go unnoticed.
I suppose this was however still the better choice for Cryptic, giving all the anger they generated. Though the real problem will not be that they gave spec points back - the real problem is the changes to the skill point rewards, and that is not going away just because a minority of players got their spec points back. But if it fans the flames and generates sales...
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Tis a good first move, and I do applaud the effort and intent of a public apology on this matter. Hopefully this is the beginning of a conversation that ends with the other player concerns relating to DR getting addressed.
I will be very interested to see what happens in the next week or so.
I concur....
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
Comments
It takes a lot of courage to admit that you're wrong, and coming from the EP of the company. Good show!
Some communication is always better than no communication.
I would also like to thank the CS team for responding to my tickets in a timely manner., and Borticus, for still doing your job and staying professional, while the walls were falling around you.
This is a wonderful first step in the right direction, keep up the great work!
Hopefully, we all take away the right lessons from the past week.
This is only the beginning of rebuilding trust with the player base. Trust must be earned, it is not given nilly willy. Thanks for admitting some blame in this matter. I hope this is the beginning of healing this game.
[SIGPIC]Click here to visit my STO YouTube channel[/SIGPIC]
Ah who cares. Just release the scooby dooby dance disco ball. We have work to do.
Click to Join armadafleet.org/
Guilty by association?! Let's not even go there!
Only if you knew due to association and exploited.
Click to Join armadafleet.org/
who were doing nothing more than playing the game in a manner which was allowed.
Some of who brought this potential problem to your attention during DR testing on Tribble.
All of whose integrity, responsibility and accountability you publicly besmirched without offering any proof.
Nice reaction time...said no one ever.
If you worked for me, and put my revenue stream in this much danger for one business week, this public almost apology would have come much faster and you'd be pink slipped immediately afterwards. pour encourager l'autres.
It is a step in the right direction, and while I don't support the other issues in the game (xp and dil nerfs, costs of upgrades etc) at least something has now been done right. Just goes to show the doubters that standing your ground when your in the right is worth the effort.
*I still disagree as to whether playing the content as-implemented can even be considered an exploit so distinguishing "innocent" players is a misnomer; I don't think it was fair to accuse players of cheating, essentially, when they didn't have access to the same data that you do to see major discrepancies. You might take that data for granted but players don't have those kinds of tools.
Joined January 2009
Enjoy the specializations that you "earned"
This is the way it generally has always gone in MMO's. Exploiters exploit the pants off broken systems which gets the devs to notice it and 'fix' it so everybody else falls incredibly far behind the exploitee's. The power difference then allows the exploiter top-dogs to find the next exploit and benefit from it while everybody else is so far behind in power level that only they can utilise it.
It is the nature of an MMO until a dev team had the guts to actually give out punishments properly.
Still waiting to be able to use forum titles
It's time to stop talking about this and get over it, there are much more important issues that need to be addressed. This issue would have never happen if they had not nerfed xp gain right into the toilet, that problem still remains, a handful of spec points is a piffling matter to get upset about when compared to an entire game that's been broken with this expansion.
That and the blasted scaling issues in missions and STF's. I've run into a bug that varies the difficulty levels in one mission. One batch of mobs are made of wet toilet paper, the next batch are juggernauts; same mobs, just different difficulties and xp gains=seriously borked to bloody hell.
But why ?
If you've been keeping up with this thread you'de notice the only issues that get fixed in a timely manner are the ones players rage about.
The squeeky wheel gets the grease.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Yup there you have it "everybody cheats" LoL
It might suprise you but no not everyone cheats. Anyhow this particular incident solidified my feelings of how a great many people play games. :P
now you need to higher the DIL rewards again
and make normal difficulty so that you can do it with 2k DPS
so casual players have fun playn the game
AND
remove:
"This forum requires that you wait 300 seconds between posts"
I had one guy last night for the first time in a long time cut and paste a parse. I found it odd that it was on my new level 50 with green gear and a t4 ship. Possibly though he wanted to collect information for the devs I dont know I just found it odd that out of the 4 guys I was running through that one had the parse lol. Not the guys that could tank the entire instance or the guy that gets top dps each time. Hopefully it was for a good cause.
what they need to do is make the advanced doable by higher dps ships right now it pretty much requires as much gear as the elite from what I can tell. I dont go in them very often with my higher dps guys because I find them unpleasant and the 'optionals' are not optional which is .. well dumb. I wont touch the elite I dont find these q's fun like this. This is pretty much my main complaint of the game is this botched q system.
The simple fact is the game was just patched after the expansion release.
Cryptic should be in control of what they want players to do and the rewards they get.
This was one clearly defined time Cryptic expected people to notice it was not working as intended.
They expected people who wanted to level up quickly to not to because players should know it was an exploit.
Just don't see how clicking "Enter Patrol"was an exploit.
Now players did exploit the situation that leveling was easier in the patrols.
But that's not a bad thing when the objective is to level your character up anyway.
Part of the problem was people enjoying the Romulan expansion.
In that expansion you could play from one story mission to another.
With DR you could not so naturally people are going to seek the easy less frustrating route.
They will want to level up first to 60 then go play through all the story missions.
Maybe it would have been better to have more story's missions or required you to be level 60 before even starting DR.
Hopefully this has been a learning experience for all.
The Raging
The way people attack called names and insulted other players to punish Cryptic was shameful.
Hurting our player base is by no means to best way help the game or the best way to get something changed.
We lost people and that's not cool because someone wanted their points back does not mean...
If you can NOT have it then nobody needs to play the game.
This is business that can be reasoned with, they do want to make money.
Any of you who was part of the rage shame on you for hurting our player base for selfish reasons.
The was no other reason besides being a selfish one.
75% of Everyone Does Not Like Change
Most people do not like change, what's does that mean.
When you add any expansion or new content you do NOT go and change the entire game.
That means you really don't go and change peoples most favorite content.
People had a huge dependency on the STF for group play and making dilithium.
This has been another huge source of rage and leaving the game posts.
DPS
Changing the STFs at first to require super high DPS was showing that you didn't know what or how people like to play.
You allowed a group to think the DEVs changed the game for them.
This had an entire group to think their play style was the only way.
Its pretty obvious you cannot force people to play one way or another.
What's not cool is this one group thinks they are the only ones who have knowledge.
Responsibility
The current issues is everyones fault hopefully next time there will be a better way.
More open doors from Cryptic to get feedback from a wider player base who do listen.
Constructive feedback from the players and nothing in a form that hurts our player base.
Hard Work
For goodness sakes DEVs do realize we work hard to keep people playing in our groups.
Don't go changing the game so much that it upsets people.
Yep. It's usually the people who scream the loudest for more difficulty who are the first to exploit their way around any new difficulty they get, just as in this case.
"Hey, we need something to keep players logging in."
"How about we make leveling a long and tedious grind?"
"Genius! Design so that it takes months so we can take a three month long vacation."
How about Cryptic either lower the experience requirements (I think it is 50,000 experience for a level past level 60) or change the experience rate past level 50+ so I can see some actual progress being made leveling.
errm i was quoting you and you said "everyone has skeletons in their closet"
I play fps as well and you aint seen nothing till you have seen the crud that happens in a multiplayer fps just so a guy can win lol. Still doesnt make it right. Gaming is basically a wild west mentality. Its fine, but I wont ever be agreeing with what I see.
I really dont care if people get punished or not, but no.. I have no skeletons in my closet although I am sorely tempted right now to put some in there but I probably wont cause I have fun as things are now..
:P
I suppose this was however still the better choice for Cryptic, giving all the anger they generated. Though the real problem will not be that they gave spec points back - the real problem is the changes to the skill point rewards, and that is not going away just because a minority of players got their spec points back. But if it fans the flames and generates sales...
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè