You're very welcome. IMO demonizing not only tends not to get anywhere, but is only really true in a minority of cases--and I am even referring to *major* catastrophes IRL on far larger and more serious scales than anything an MMO could ever touch. Even some catastrophic failures that have cost lives have been the result not of anyone's bad intentions IMO but instead the fault of a cascading system failure that led to collapse.
To point to two less controversial "textbook cases," I would point to the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Almost every management and organizational psychology course will have covered the Challenger disaster. The people who were making all of those bad decisions were not bad people and they did not want to kill that shuttle crew. No mens rea. But they allowed themselves to get sucked in by bad assumptions, bad group dynamics, and logical fallacies, and the result is something that even people too young to remember the accident cannot forget the footage of.
But in the era of the less-than-24-hour social media cycle no one stops to consider this anymore and jumps right into the flaming. I don't even think the most unpopular people at Cryptic--Geko and D'Angelo--are *bad people.* I think they are making *bad decisions* and that very likely there are some financially dangerous organizational psychologies going around Cryptic that must break quickly before they break the game. I even was part of an exchange recently that led to Geko seeming to understand that he said something that he shouldn't have to a player, and while I cannot claim "credit" for the apology what I feel confident in saying is that it might not have happened if myself and a few others had not *immediately* posted in a manner that addressed the *content* of what he said and how it did not fit his desired objective (a hard data discussion), as opposed to going off on him and calling names.
As I said in that thread while yes, the onus IS on Cryptic, it also does not hurt to model the behavior that you want to see.
Thank you for your KDF perspective. My problems with the KDF actually go back way before LOR. I did not get out of the first Federation mission arc before being so disgusted at the actions I was forced into (partly that I could not act as a non-Klingon KDF officer and also that I saw nothing even remotely honorable about torturing a man and not being able to allow my toon to duel with him as a gentleman and an officer). I sidelined my one KDF toon within weeks of starting him--permanently. There was no question, even despite the mission's attempt to press a KDF alignment for Romulans, that I was going to take my Reman Federation. (Plus why a Reman should knowingly sign up to be a *subject race* and *second class citizen* again is beyond me.)
The funny thing is, though...I was actually just as dissatisfied with several missions in Delta Rising from a Starfleet perspective. While Starfleet often acts more belligerently in the game than most of the series (to me the tone comes closest to DS9 in the Dominion War and I have a much higher tolerance of militarism than most Trek fans because I believe STO's Starfleet did *right* to become military first, exploration second given the threats they faced), with being forced into patrols with so little plot development that were just blatant shallow shells for "kill five waves," I really had a problem.
As a Starfleet admiral I am in the sector to clean up Janeway's mess. There is a *reason,* even if not stated so boldly, that I am in charge and Janeway herself was not sent back in. I am supposed to be a new face for Starfleet, and to try to be more sensitive to the situation and not just go in running and gunning and making more messes before I take the time to find out about the situation and make a more solid judgment call than Janeway did in her singleminded focus on getting home without regard to the costs to anyone else.
I actually came out of the patrols feeling that the options were often severely inappropriate and OOC for the Federation (or should have at least offered the *option* to progress diplomatically in at least some cases *without* massively ripping the player off on XP for using their heads instead of their guns), and were far more appropriate for KDF and Romulans, who lack such strictures.
Obviously that particular concern is not a concern for you since shoot-em-up is appropriate for KDF and you also would not be saddled with the political fallout that a Starfleet admiral must consider thanks (or no thanks) to Janeway.
But it is *very* interesting that aspects of the same plotline should manage to make both KDF *and* Feds feel forced out of character and that we are acting severely inappropriately for our factions *at the same time.* I am curious if you have given any thought to that?
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I have, actually . I am a big Klingon fan but not exclusively so.
STO is generally too "shoot first, ask questions later" for even a wartime starfleet. The so what is that my original Starfleet character - one themed around the ENT era - has been retired in favour of the aforementioned Starfleet-Klingon. This was not always the case; the pre-F2P missions are actually quite balanced for my taste - but it's become the norm with the emphasis on replayed combat missions. Now, that was just about acceptable when the adversary was the endlessly-respawning Borg but it feels wrong with others.
A Fed-Klingon such as M'yarg is probably Starfleet's ideal man for the current environment - while he has the respect for Starfleet discipline to do all of the running around after Talaxians required, he also brings the "necessary" brutality for constant combat. Hence, he's become the one alt I will aim to do the whole of DR with as he's the only character it actually fits. The character is actually a slightly tongue-in-cheek response to the state of STO Fedside; while a Starfleet officer, he has a crew that principally comprises Klingons, Jem'hadar and Acamarians. Oh, and his usual ship is a Hirogen hunter. In theory the whole thing is a "plausible deniability" scenario for Starfleet Intelligence who can write off the actions of a Klingon marauder...
So what? Well, I think DR seems to be falling into a "worst of both worlds" scenario in that regard. The missions are too quick to reach for a military solution for the traditional Starfleet most of us still have a soft spot for, but are still so heavily couched in that setting that it feels wrong playing through as a Klingon (or, I suspect, a Romulan) who doesn't have the ideological baggage of respect for Voyager.
The irony is that this has all come after the excellent Undine season, which managed some genuinely multi-faction missions and has an event that actually *requires* players to ask questions first and shoot later (Undine Infilitration).
I'm inclined to agree with the previous poster who considered that, in an ideal world, we would have had parallel runthroughs of the DR storyline for the Klingons and Romulans.
STO is generally too "shoot first, ask questions later" for even a wartime starfleet.
See, this raises an interesting point I didn't anticipate back in my days of calling for faction mergers and/or an end to the war. It's something I've wanted to comment on in some reviews of DR that mention "wartime Starfleet".
While the game continues to be an action MMO, one odd wrinkle is that we no longer have a wartime Starfleet.
The Klingons and Federation are at peace.
Peace has been restored to Nimbus.
The Tal Shiar's leaders have been defeated.
The Mirror Universe remains a threat but its portal-generating capability has been hindered.
The True Way has been dismantled.
The Dominion are now tense allies.
The Borg have been driven back from the Alpha Quadrant and are faltering to a point where they are relying on reassimilating the cooperative for support.
The Undine have been exposed and driven back.
We're not really at war. Most of what we do in the Delta Quadrant is closer to a policing action or providing key assistance to a war other people are fighting.
So we're NOT a wartime Starfleet anymore and the idea that we're "at war" is losing capital as a justification in plots going forward. Overall, this meshes fairly well with the Romulans. But the Klingons are a different story.
If I got to sit in on Expansion 3 discussions, I would say that what needs badly addressed going forward in the next expansion are:
The Mirror Universe (the only ones we're still at war with and the ones currently least tied to the game's meta-plot)
The Tholians (what are they up to?)
The Klingons (how do we make sense of their role?)
Now... This may sound odd but I think what would make the most sense going forward would also be going backward a bit.
1) I think it makes sense to target a DS9 revamp next time.
2) Position Mirror Terok Nor as our forward base in the Mirror Universe, with DS9's wormhole serving primarily as our gateway to the Mirror Universe (rather than its role as a gateway to the Gamma Quadrant).
3) Make the Tholians and Terrans a big part of things. Flesh out the Klingon Cardassian Alliance while enhancing their enemy groups to include unique boss mobs like Bajoran Intendants and the like. There's three enemy groups.
4) Use this to really make sense of the Klingons. I feel like the loss of Martok is something that feels inadequate. I also think J'mpok's plot feels incomplete, like there was hinted treachery there.
5) Sorting out the identity of the factions and choice mechanics is tricky but the Mirror Universe could accomplish a lot of this. Because the focus, thematically and mechanically, would help define Federation and Klingon methods by offering a contrast.
6) Mirror Universe would allow for more of a hodge podge of Trek actors, which I think is called for if they continue with heavy voice acting. Because so many different facets of the game need addressed. I would like to see Mirror Martok and Worf be strong anchors though. You might get regular Riker and Troi leading the allied forces into the mirror, which would provide for some nice Admiral Riker vs. Regent Worf fun. You'd have chemistry between our allied contact and our chief enemy (I imagine Regent Worf as a big bad).
7) Mirror Romulus. Is it there? What's its Tal Shiar like? Is it possibly intact and like the Romulus we lost?
There are questions of methods, faction ideals, and mechanics (ie. non-combat mechanics, science DPS) that need addressed.
The more I ponder it, the more the Mirror Universe seems like the place to do that.
So what? Well, I think DR seems to be falling into a "worst of both worlds" scenario in that regard. The missions are too quick to reach for a military solution for the traditional Starfleet most of us still have a soft spot for, but are still so heavily couched in that setting that it feels wrong playing through as a Klingon (or, I suspect, a Romulan) who doesn't have the ideological baggage of respect for Voyager.
Haha, I never said I respected VOY as a show. Honestly, I consider VOY the worst the Trek franchise had to offer. Still, there had at least been something to the idea, playing a Starfleet officer, of imagining that I had been tasked to clean up Janeway's mess. The patrols really ruined that, though, in most cases (though as an exception, I am not going to hesitate to shoot at Vaadwaur who are shooting at hospital ships. I WILL shoot first and ask questions later in a scenario like that.
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Personally I feel that the Jalprigate kerfuffle is the millstone around Delta Rising's neck. DR has its problems to be sure, but nothing I don't think can't be worked through with time and patience. But that incident does seem to be where things really went off the rails and I think its tainted everything that has followed, justifiably or not.
Which brings me to a question I've wondered about since the whole thing broke: was Cryptic wrong to renege on level roll back?
<snip for space constraints>
I agree that Japorigate made everything that came after that much worse. SOME of the problems could be worked through without that, but there is still an ongoing nerfing pattern to contend with that would not go well regardless, IMO.
Personally...if what I suspect is right that Cryptic could not or would not follow up on a case-by-case basis as they seemed to think they could (resorting to a wide heuristic dragnet instead of individual analysis), I think they had no choice once they created a worse mess than what they originally had, but to back off of their rollback attempt.
See, this raises an interesting point I didn't anticipate back in my days of calling for faction mergers and/or an end to the war. It's something I've wanted to comment on in some reviews of DR that mention "wartime Starfleet".
While the game continues to be an action MMO, one odd wrinkle is that we no longer have a wartime Starfleet.
Hmmm...and this is where I think Starfleet would make a critical mistake in drawing down their forces. IMO Starfleet is and still should be on a war footing. We are in essence, as players, involved in a proxy war between the Federation (and sorry, KDF/Rom, make no mistake but it is the Federation that is the superpower here because it is the ability to unite peacefully that the Iconians fear the most) and the Iconians, and we must expect war to break out on more fronts as each previous front is dealt with.
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Hmmm...and this is where I think Starfleet would make a critical mistake in drawing down their forces. IMO Starfleet is and still should be on a war footing. We are in essence, as players, involved in a proxy war between the Federation (and sorry, KDF/Rom, make no mistake but it is the Federation that is the superpower here because it is the ability to unite peacefully that the Iconians fear the most) and the Iconians, and we must expect war to break out on more fronts as each previous front is dealt with.
Mistakes are interesting in fiction.
Any thoughts on the idea of a mirror expansion as an excuse to:
- Shore up the Klingon story/methods and provide a more satisfactory Martok ending
- Revamp DS9 (since it could be the foreward base)
- Revisit Romulan longing for the lost world of Romulus (which might not only exist there but which might have the same culture/beliefs as the Prime Romulus)
- Address mechanics, emphasizing moral alignment as a game system and possibly militarized science (which the MU would have more of a tendency towards)
The big advantage I can see is that it would redouble focus on the existing factions and maps as a natural part of designing their counterparts. Also, any actors recruited could have double roles.
Plus, I think it's probably one of the more solidly established bits of broad level Trek lore that would appeal to people not already STO. Romulans were probably a big draw as they are featured in every series. I think an expansion benefits from being broadly themed around something even non-fans have some familiarity with.
I can see where you're headed with it. If we were taking strictly TOS or ENT I would be more comfortable...but I may be in the minority of considering the MU stuff to be some of Deep Space Nine's weakest material and a very shaky foundation to build a story on. I fear we could get from Cryptic something that's Emperor's New Cloak bad...and have to blame it on that episode being canon.
I do fear *some* of what went wrong with DR's storyline when it went wrong was Cryptic taking the player vote for VOY to think people liked the things about that series that were just bad, and then doubling down on some of that bad (though indeed mixed in with some very good stuff). I'd be concerned about what part of the MU Cryptic would play up...and IMO the DS9 stuff is not the good part.
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I can see where you're headed with it. If we were taking strictly TOS or ENT I would be more comfortable...but I may be in the minority of considering the MU stuff to be some of Deep Space Nine's weakest material and a very shaky foundation to build a story on. I fear we could get from Cryptic something that's Emperor's New Cloak bad...and have to blame it on that episode being canon.
I do fear *some* of what went wrong with DR's storyline when it went wrong was Cryptic taking the player vote for VOY to think people liked the things about that series that were just bad, and then doubling down on some of that bad (though indeed mixed in with some very good stuff). I'd be concerned about what part of the MU Cryptic would play up...and IMO the DS9 stuff is not the good part.
One advantage is that it opens up villains. Like, say...
Dukat?
Dukat, Regent Worf, and a beleaguered Terran Admiral Riker.
One thing I was just playing with in another thread is to mix things up so that we get to see the reforged Terran Starfleet mixing it up with the Klingon Cardassian Alliance.
We're fairly limited in terms of Klingon and Cardassian villains for endgame content in STO but substantially less limited in the Mirror Universe.
Taken from a storyline perspective, the KDF no longer has a solid reason to exist. That is the cold truth. In my case, I would not care one bit if the KDF disappeared tomorrow and would actually be happy about it if that remaining dev time given to them could be given over to doing the Fed side properly, with full development and QA efforts. But I know that to some people the KDF is a big deal.
I would agree that if replayability of storyline is a goal, increased flexibility in storyline choices is very helpful.
The Foundry toolset (think that's what you meant with "Tribble") is indeed limited, though I have seen Foundry authors successfully bodge together something that makes you feel like you made a choice even though in the Foundry, you cannot (except with the trick of using numbered dialogue options) make choices carry over from map to map there.
One critical thing as a Fed player that I would want to be sure of is that if more diplomatic options are added, that we do not get ripped off of XP for making the diplomatic choice. If Cryptic feels like that would make such missions easier to farm, then here's a simple solution: don't make more patrols. Make full-fledged missions that take longer to do, even with the diplomatic choice, but that are interesting and engaging for that whole time it takes to do them. The Foundry has some really great examples of that.
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Diplomacy should get its own mechanical system as an expansion level feature.
The game is ground and space.
The game probably ought to be:
Ground Combat, Space Combat, and Diplomacy.
If Diplomacy had skills, gear, animations, and its own action bar, Diplomacy content wouldn't have to be reading.
I've said this for quite awhile that pigeonholing diplomacy as reading limits the appeal and makes it costly to develop centrally (in time and skill).
A non-combat combat system.
Effectively things like alignment and bluff/charm/inspire/intimidate rolls. Handled as an active gameplay system rather than as a detour from gameplay.
I also think scanning, mining, and console hacking should be folded into that.
This is how you get beyond "press F" and "read a wall of text". This is also how you monetize that type of gameplay because its own gear means its own crafting, upgrades, C-Store packs, etc.
Granted, it wouldn't be called Diplomacy. Both because that's used and because that's not a full picture of what it would do, particularly for KDF.
But this non-combat combat system could be a major part of how factions or even species get better differentiated in STO.
In theory, anybody can acquire any ship or weapons system or bridge officer or hand weapon in the Star Trek universe, even if some are rarer combos than others. We have seen, even in the shows and movies, things like Dukat's personal Klingon Bird of Prey or experimental Voyager weapons systems.
What makes someone unique is their problem solving toolset and modeling that abstractly as a game system would do a lot.
I think the only other person I've heard suggest anything similar was Zinc, though. I bet Thomas the Cat would be a great asset in this though.
Well, here you share an opinion expressed by the Lead Developer of the game-Rivera doesn't want the KDF here either, which suggests it still exists because either the coding is too arcane to delete, or there's a contractual requirement with CBS that prevents deletion.
Either way, 98% or so of the development's already going to the Federation-it's just a matter of shoddy work actually being done.
Although if Geko has said the KDF needs to go, I DO share his level of dislike for the faction, the difference is that I recognize that once Cryptic made the decision to take the KDF side beyond a PvP-only faction, it made a commitment to a certain set of players who do want to play in that faction and now see it as an expectation. I would warn him that he would need to be very careful in how he handled any sort of rollup of the faction considering the effect it would likely have on the game's already-flagging population numbers.
See, I agree here, for Fed players, the option NOT to fight shouldn't be punishing, and it should be there...
Some situations should be shoot first, ask questions later no matter what--but a decent diplomatic option for at least some of the missions would be nice for sure.
Remember Roxy at DS9? remember how active and social that place was? nowadays, everyone hangs out by the exchange or the bank, isolated in their own little world of grinding-if they're even there at all.
Don't forget DOFFing...that's the other big draw to DS9.
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Taken from a storyline perspective, the KDF no longer has a solid reason to exist. That is the cold truth. In my case, I would not care one bit if the KDF disappeared tomorrow and would actually be happy about it if that remaining dev time given to them could be given over to doing the Fed side properly, with full development and QA efforts. But I know that to some people the KDF is a big deal.
I would disagree with the storyline part because it is *not* a self evident truth; while the Fed-Klingon war has been resolved, the KDF and Romulan Republic remain useful vehicles to cover storlyines that could, or more accurately should, not be covered by Starfleet. The Fek'lhri saga is a good example - from back when Cryptic were willing to introduce a new NPC faction so that the Klingons had an adversary that they did not share with the Federation - a mythological storyline that could never work with a Fed alt. The same for the Shakespeareian tragedy of the Klingon L1-10 arc. To say there is no narrative merit to the non-Federation factions is to miss a trick (although this appears to be Cryptic's view). They could still have done more with DR; for example, at the point at which a Federation crew would head off to see the Talaxians, a Klingon PC could be detailed to go and check up on the crew of the Vor'kang. You could almost run the same mission, but I think most KDF players would feel more comfortable aiding a stranded Klingon colony than a bunch of Talaxians.
Now, that brings us back to whether developing such material (for the 18% of the player base who have Klingon alts, or whatever the figure is these days...) is a worthwhile use of resources. Looking at what has happened for the Klingons and Romulans since LoR's launch, I don't think that even a charge of being a drain on resources is valid. I can't believe the effort put into generating 4 ships for DR would have made that much difference to the Fed side of the expansion...
I also slightly struggle to believe that Cryptic are inherently anti-other faction. The entirety of LoR was built around introducing a third faction, with a lot of excellent work put into filling out the Klingon mission list (Yes there's a lot of copypaste filler, but also high quality stuff). Geko may think that, though I'd be curious to see where he actually came out and said so, but he's not the only man in the company.
I am sure it had some interesting things before "Surface Tension," and that's not to say all of that was worthless even though I personally had no use for it.
What happened with "Surface Tension" is that it invalidated the reason for the KDF to exist as a separate faction by ending the war. The PvP arenas become nonsensical because they'd represent a treaty violation and restart a war that your character just put in time to help end. With so much of what is seen in game invalidated in this way...that's where I think Cryptic is now in a position where the KDF faction no longer has storyline justification to exist, and this may be intentional.
To some extent, placing the Feds and the KDF on the same side now reduces some of the difference needed between missions: you're playing to rules dictated by an alliance rather than just your faction.
Some of it was executed badly as we've discussed and still makes people feel like they are playing the wrong faction...but that in my mind may be that trying to execute a decision like this halfway is going to be problematic. And the result wound up being a Starfleet that takes the militarism SO far in some missions that it feels KDF, and a KDF that sometimes shows more patience and diplomacy than what seems in character.
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I am sure it had some interesting things before "Surface Tension," and that's not to say all of that was worthless even though I personally had no use for it.
What happened with "Surface Tension" is that it invalidated the reason for the KDF to exist as a separate faction by ending the war. The PvP arenas become nonsensical because they'd represent a treaty violation and restart a war that your character just put in time to help end. With so much of what is seen in game invalidated in this way...that's where I think Cryptic is now in a position where the KDF faction no longer has storyline justification to exist, and this may be intentional.
To some extent, placing the Feds and the KDF on the same side now reduces some of the difference needed between missions: you're playing to rules dictated by an alliance rather than just your faction.
Some of it was executed badly as we've discussed and still makes people feel like they are playing the wrong faction...but that in my mind may be that trying to execute a decision like this halfway is going to be problematic. And the result wound up being a Starfleet that takes the militarism SO far in some missions that it feels KDF, and a KDF that sometimes shows more patience and diplomacy than what seems in character.
It really depends on how you're defining factions. Even in games with multiple factions, about 75% of the content is identical.
Oddly enough, the big exception was City of Heroes. And I gather it didn't increase revenue substantially.
Now, you could define a faction not by its opposition to factions but by its unique contribution.
And in that case, you have some of that with raiders vs. singularity vs. science ships but more could be done on that front to technically distinguish factions, such as having faction unique specializations, kits, and bridge officer powers (and maybe different optionals), such that the factions differ in their contributions.
To me the KDF faction has always been a lot more alluring than the FED side has ever been. The Federation for me has always felt very sterile and pathetic, not so much following their morals but the prime directive which half the time felt more like an excuse not to do the right thing.
For me the KDF was the full representation of following ones heart. Sure they have a code of honour, but it doesn't prevent them doing what they feel is 'right' at any given time, in other words their hands are not tied like the Federations are.
Which is why my main character is KDF, and I also feel the KDF are a far undervalued resource even now, because they add an aspect that the Federation simply cannot do. Like why don't we have different plot-lines now that actually take the mick out of each other? For example the Feds could be performing a stealth mission based on infiltration, while the KDF do the distractions but also have their own mission, so story wise you have the same episode, however while the Feds beam to the planet the KDF provide the distraction and low and behold the KDF board a ship and steal data from the ships computer as a supplement to the mission.
By the time the Feds get back it would be the appropriate time to join the dialogue back up and say "Trust the Klingons to go boarding ships and stealing computer cores while we were gone" while the KDF would retort by saying something like "Bah! You Federation (insert Klingon insult here), always over complicating the simplest of tasks!"
In other words, I don't feel the missions take full advantage of the diversity the factions ought to offer, and that has always been a weak point of the writing for this game, both from a story and game mechanic perspective.
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.
If you are talking about TNG's Starfleet, then I agree with the "sterile and pathetic" description. That said, I think STO's Starfleet is the heir to the Dominion War Starfleet seen in DS9, and like that version of Starfleet, is sometimes on the border of becoming a much darker force. Like on DS9, I am not so sure the Prime Directive or the old Starfleet's exploration mandates are in the front seat anymore, though I do not think they are quite forgotten. Sometimes the game mechanics do make it go TOO far, but given the choice between TNG and STO's versions of Starfleet, I will take STO.
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The Golden Ratio: Time, Effort, and Money Versus Reward
One of the most important things for a player, who is considering putting their time, their effort, and their money in, is how much they are going to get back for it.
I recently had an interesting discussion with someone about the idea that the money you spend on in-game items is an investment. This is a bit of an unconventional view of mine, given that as he rightly pointed out, when the end of the game comes, you have nothing to show for what you spent except the memories, maybe some screenshots, and for a few of us, our fanfic, to preserve what was. But when I framed it this way, it cast a new light on it...
Basically, when I spent money in-game, I was investing with the expectation of a certain amount of useful life to what I've purchased. Take my Vesta pack, for instance. When I bought that, I had a pretty fair assurance that the game would continue for a reasonable length of time, and that it would remain fairly competitive for the purposes I had in mind for it (crowd control ship, not DPS role). Same thing, even, when I got my Dromias cruiser.
Yes, I opened lock boxes for Lobi back in the days before DR, and I am not embarrassed to admit that. The thing was, though, going for a lockbox was completely optional and not necessary for endgame experience. There was no need for those who didn't like them to participate. And if you placed value on other things besides the ships and didn't go in with the expectation that ship was just going to conveniently pop out of the box for you, you could use them to other ends like beefing up a DOFF system fast, getting a full MK XII purple weapons set quickly, or getting EC by selling off unused items, some of which did quite well on the Exchange.
In my case what I got out of those lockboxes wasn't just the Lobi to buy the Dromias (some of which I'd come by from the occasional other lockbox, or from in-game events, not all from that final "burst" when I decided on the ship I wanted)...it was a full weapons set that was canon-accurate for my ship, a console that, along with the one that came with the ship, allowed it to match in-game behavior for the Dromias, and enough EC from selling off other items that I could buy just about everything at near maximum levels (MK XI or MK XII purple) that I needed to build my ship and be ready to fly it into most content right away. And for me there was also the added value--though I recognize this would not be important to all players--of getting to play around in the unique interior environment of the ship, which is going to be preserved in my writing as well as in screenshots and memories.
But at the time I made my purchase, I still had a fair degree of confidence in the investment I had chosen to make.
(You'll see more about the lockbox topic later, when I tackle the upgrade system...but moving on for now...)
When I talk about an investment, I realize very well that I am not investing in some sort of fixed asset (other than the aforementioned memories, screenshots, and in my case, fanfics that are likely to well outlast the game and may even remain an ongoing series after the game shuts down). But what I do expect in return is an enjoyable gaming experience for a certain amount of time. If the risk associated with that return--that either my equipment will be nerfed into oblivion or obsoleted quickly, or that the game will fold before I get what feels to me like an acceptable amount of play time on my investment...or if for any other reason the game ceases to be enjoyable enough for me to want to use my purchased toys...then I hold back from investing.
That is even more so if I feel that not only am I up against a time constraint, but that in effect, the "credit rating" of STO and Cryptic/PWE has dropped too low to trust that I can make any sort of reasonable estimate--particularly if I don't even feel that dev statements and promotional materials are going to be a solid enough indicator.
Without any sort of personal animus I say that is the point we have reached, and while there are other examples as well (particularly having to do with statements about buffs and nerfs clearly not lining up with the reality), I am going to single one out because of the game impact it has. And that is...
The PvE Queues
We've all heard it said. The PvE queues are dead.
Even the event I enjoy playing the most, and that even in Delta Rising remained fairly functional despite a bug that may if we are lucky only be getting fixed in this coming patch has clearly suffered by association with everything else in Delta Rising: and that is Undine Infiltration Advanced and Elite. I am finding it takes a long time to get queued for this ground STF...and when even Infiltration is suffering, you know something is up. And sadly, in the case of UIA/UAE, it appears to be a sort of guilt-by-association with so many other things in the PvE queues that are just wrong.
How did it get this way?
When Delta Rising was first announced, we were told something along these lines: the Normal queues were not going to be far from what they were pre-DR--training missions to get you used to the map, not too difficult. Advanced would be the equivalent of pre-DR Elite, playable from levels 50-60. (And that is a critical statement to remember given what else it implies about how a toon should be geared at that stage.) And Elite would be for the top tier of players, with extra objectives.
Unfortunately, with a few exceptions--like my beloved Undine Infiltration, which despite an annoying bug otherwise delivered exactly as described above--this is not what we got. And even after one (arguably two) balance passes on NPC scaling, the fundamental problems with most of the STF's still remain.
In most places, the so-called Advanced "optionals" became not optionals, but absolute fail conditions. And the difficulty increase was well out of proportion with what you would expect for a ship that has not completed the upgrading process...which is automatically implied in the fact that toons that have not fully leveled to 60 may enter and enjoy at least a reasonable chance of success. This meant that toons that were leveling or not fully upgraded do not have the kind of shot in Advanced that they once did in Elite--which is flatly against what was described.
Right now the only STF where I am almost all the way on board with the fail condition (seen in Elite mode) is...you guessed it...Undine Infiltration, and in that case I would not mind carrying it back to Advanced--as long as it was changed so that the individual who mishandles an interrogation takes the full penalty but the rest of the team gets no cooldown, given that in the unique case of UIA/UIE, the failure should be able to be pinpointed to the exact player who caused it. It's not a teamwork failure in that case. It's an individual error, and should be treated as such.
Still, the critical difference with UIA/UIE is that from my long experience playing it, it was clear that the Advanced mode was fully equivalent to the old Elite in terms of difficulty, and UIE presented the additional challenge that you must get the interrogations exactly right, which I consider generally reasonable (with the caveat above) for someone who ought to have long experience with the mission before entering at this level. I believe that any reasonable person reading the pre-DR material, and playing UIA/UIE would feel that what was promised was delivered.
But what happened on the space STF's was that a massive increase in hitpoints--out of proportion with players' leveling as well as simply making fights longer and more boring as opposed to providing a more interesting challenge--and added fail conditions put the Advanced queues out of reach. This is not what we were promised.
And worse, the effects on the attainability of rewards, specifically crafting materials, items needed for rep advancement (such as Borg Neural Processors) was put behind that Advanced barrier. There is no way for many players to get what they need just by working through Normal, unless they are lucky enough to be working with a rep system such as the Voth or Undine that has a reasonable way to acquire the needed materials to gear up.
Or at least...to the point that reputation gear allows, which is not endgame quality anymore.
Which means that to get anywhere, you need dilithium. Lots of it. Which an STF is supposed to deliver from two places: the end-of mission rewards, and the reputation materials if you choose to convert them to dilithium instead of slotting them into a gear project. But if you're stuck behind a difficulty wall without the requisite rewards to surpass it (i.e. stuck running Normals yet not able to get the materials you need to gear up and upgrade), it's enough to make people give up.
Add to that, that the end-mission dilithium rewards were nerfed...and still not restored back to what they were before...and what is the incentive to do most of these missions, which were once the lifeblood of the endgame?
And that seems to be what has happened with the queues...the numbers have dropped significantly.
As some have said before, adding a third difficulty was not a bad idea. And had we actually gotten what was promised in all of the queues, it could have worked extremely well. But what we have now is unfortunately dragging the game down instead of livening up the experience.
Especially when we need all that dilithium...
NEXT POST: The Upgrade System, and if I have time to get to it in the same post, some thoughts on what the troubles with the game could mean on the back end.
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.
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
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.
At least if you go T5U or T6, you know what you're getting, and for exactly how much. Whether or not you like the ship level increase, you at least know what that upgrade will cost, what your exact stats will be once you make the upgrade, and you can have it immediately.
But here is where it all comes together--or falls apart: with the R & D system, which is responsible for crafting and upgrades on every single other item you put onto your ship or onto your toon on the ground.
Before we delve too deep into this, let's take a moment to recap all of the places prior to Delta Rising where dilithium had to be spent, or could be spent, and also remember that unless you got lifetime veteran status, or a fleet dilithium mine up to Tier III, you won't see an increase from the dilithium refining cap of 8000 that existed at the very start of Free-to-Play--meaning that no matter what you do, you cannot build your supply of refined dilithium any faster than a limit put into place when there were far fewer places where you had to think about spending that dilithium.
Except for...spending money. And even if we don't take the problems inherent in the upgrade system into account, that's something that as I discussed above, some players are already feeling a trust deficit that makes them reluctant to spend.
So...what did we have before Delta Rising, that you have to spend dilithium on in order to get anywhere?
--Dilithium-to-Zen conversion for the C-Store if you do not want to buy Zen directly
--Reputation Store Gear (NOTE: Reps other than Omega do pay out dilithium at the end, which helps some...I have to give Cryptic credit, the overhaul on the reps was a good move.)
--Dilithium Store Gear (not important these days for many things, but useful for a few specialty items like a few extra spiral wave disruptors if you own a Galor)
--Fleet Holdings (Starbase, Embassy, Dilithium Mine, and Spire)
--Fleet Provisions
--Fleet Store (Fleet gear, uniforms, etc.)
That's a pretty large list there...especially if you are a fleet member, and I'm sure everyone was feeling the pinch early into the Fleet Holdings system. Obviously this is intentional on Cryptic's part: make it harder to grind out enough dilithium to meet your needs on strict Free-to-Play, and the more likely they believe you are to spend cash. And before Delta Rising...although the model was flawed, in my experience I would say the game economics did reach some sort of equilibrium although not where the playerbase would have liked to see it.
Before Delta Rising, there was one notable instance where Cryptic did show some potential interest in making things better for the players--and that was the process of leveling up in the Reputation system. When rep first rolled out, it became an increasingly brutal drain on resources the further you went into it, and with little at the end but the chance to grind some more for gear, despite the system having promise for putting what was then high-quality gear into the hands of more players, it wasn't exactly the most inviting or rewarding thing to do.
The system later got rebalanced so that the severe EC drain was undone, and instead, you stood the chance of making a bit in EC on each round, and except for Omega rep, you get something else critical at the end for making players want to do the reputation system: the opportunity for easy-to-get sponsorship tokens to make the system more alt-friendly...and a decent dilithium payout, that makes players feel like they have been genuinely rewarded for the work that they put in.
And when you do things like that, you keep the players happy and make them consider looking at other things too, like, say, that ship pack in the C-Store or that Lobi ship. And when the players are feeling good about the game and its prospects to survive and their purchases to have a good useful lifespan, they may be willing to kick in some money on top of what you just gave them in dilithium, and feel like they're getting a bit of a bargain in the process.
Now that we've looked at the state of the dilithium economy before Delta Rising, and what I consider (though I realize not everyone will agree) of Cryptic listening to feedback and doing something that really benefitted the players and that also stood to benefit their bottom line, we're going to look at what happens when you increase demand on a commodity drastically without increasing its supply, in an already-tight market, AND on top of that impose a substantially higher element of market risk.
Unless a significant rebalancing for the benefit of the players comes along...could this turn out to be Cryptic's "bridge too far"?
An Upgrade--Or Not
On the surface, the R & D system didn't seem all that terrible...but once players got into it, the extreme costs, beyond anything else the game has ever seen, really became apparent, both in dilithium and EC. Even if you do as I have done on the limited number of upgrades that I've done, and never pay to pass a timegate (the dilithium cost of which is incredibly high), upgrading your existing equipment is daunting to say the least...and God forbid you try to upgrade a weapon without considering what the price of that is really going to be.
Others have done detailed number crunching to demonstrate just how hard the upgrade system will be on your resources--but I can say anecdotally that it is indeed a massive drain on resources far beyond the reputation system in its worst days. Combined with the existing dilithium sinks above, it's absolutely crushing for a player to consider, even if they take the advice even one of the devs provided (sorry, I can't remember who it was) not to rush, and to take it one little piece at a time.
Obviously Cryptic needs to take in cash to keep going--but when you raise the costs so high as to be demoralizing, especially when you account for the fact that many players prior to DR enjoyed having alts (a practice that has now had to be either severely curtailed or lain completely by the wayside), it's enough that only a few will pay. And I think by now we have all seen the Extra Credit and Freemium Is Not Free videos to know where that's very likely to wind up as people realize that they are either facing an exorbitant bill for their upgrades, or an extremely, extremely long wait time and a lot of grinding to make even the slightest headway. And that once they have done it, they are locked into a build by the investment needed to bring another build up to speed.
Maybe even this would have been slightly tolerable...if there had been the certainty as to the type of reward you would get at the end.
And now, as promised in the previous section, we're back to the lock boxes.
I am ready to get a lot of hate for this, but I know that a lot of people despised the lock boxes with a vengeance, and considered them (to borrow some wording from the new Battlestar Galactica) to be "the harbinger of death" as far as Star Trek: Online was concerned.
I don't think they were. Even now, I still do not think the lock boxes should be blamed because while yes, they were a gamble if you were not smart about what you were doing and didn't consider how to use them to fund the EC ship purchase route or accomplish other goals simultaneous to getting a ship, especially once the Lobi ship option was added, you could know to a fair degree of precision when you were eventually going to get something you either wanted or could trade for a major boost up to what you did want.
And you did not have to participate to have decent quality of play, if for any reason you did not wish to participate.
There were plenty of alternate routes to get some nice, sure-bet ships from the C-Store, some of which were as nice or nicer than a given lock box ship, particularly in the hands of a skilled player.
On the two occasions I went in for a lockbox (Cardassian and Undine), it was specifically because I wanted that species' ship. The Cardassian ship was for roleplay for my Cardassian toon (yes, I know, expensive RP ship but consider how much healthier the game looked back then and the fact that I had a reasonable expectation that I'd get a long time of enjoyment for my money--and since it's RP, that means all the way to the end of the game), and the Undine ship was...well, I know what many thought about the idea of Undine ships in game, but I really adore the design and abilities of the Undine vessels, and the lock boxes also offered the opportunity to gear one in a way that came very close to mimicking in-game behavior. In this case I also had the option to gear the ship quite powerfully very quickly. So again, there was a specific fun factor in there and in this case the usefulness I knew I was going to get by actually making it that toon's combat ship.
I did not, and still do not have an objection to that as long as the player is smart about recognizing exactly what the necessary outlay is, does not go into it with unreasonable expectations that a ship is just going to jump out of the box, and attaches sufficient value to and/or has a strong sales plan for the other items that come out of the boxes to make them into something he or she values, because the reasonable expectation is that what you are really paying for is to convert currency (or dilithium) into EC at a very high rate and you value and control your activities according to that realistic expectation.
But again, you did not have to take that route and grind those resources or spend that money for one of those ships, if you did not want to. It was a true optional because you could still do very well on endgame content without it.
But now, if you want the very best gear in the game, you have NO option--repeat, NO option--but to gamble.
And it's that aspect of the upgrade system that I find the most odious. You have very, very little way (unlike the lockboxes) if you want epic gear, to get around this outrageous gamble, and no way to predict exactly, as you could with the Lobi option for lockboxes, exactly when you would be guaranteed enough to get yourself a high-value ship (assuming you weren't one of the rare few to be lucky enough to have a ship jump out of a box early into your spending push), except to assume a mathematical worst-case scenario that is pretty resources/financially horrifying when you think about it.
In my case I have made the exact decision that Cryptic should not want a player to make.
That is, that I will not spend money on it, what I do through dilithium and EC, I will do very slowly and piecemeal, and that all efforts and resources will stop going into an item once it hits Mk XIV, regardless of its quality on the final upgrade. I will make no upgrade that I do not know to have absolute, 100% certainty of improving the stats on an item. Period. And I know that I cannot be anywhere near the only player to be making that decision.
But let me tell you something from a "player happiness" standpoint.
It is not fun to have to reconcile yourself to knowing you will always have what will very soon be substandard gear, because the alternative is just too financially insane to think about. It is demoralizing.
And let's not forget...Cryptic has not increased the dilithium supply or refining cap to relieve the burden enough to where if you do pay, you just might feel like the game gave you a bit of a helping hand to get to that point.
Worse...Cryptic has nerfed dilithium rewards in STF's and also made it much harder to complete the STF's that reward what the old ones used to.
So...what happens when you increase demand and constrict supply? Eventually there comes a point when people leave or stop contributing money and the revenue shrinks drastically. When you combine the other factors in the game--EC sinks that go with this system as well, bugs, and customer service failures as well...unfortunately, things are now set up to potentially head in a very bad direction for all of us, players and employees alike. And it may be that upgrade system, on top of everything else that has already happened, could be the thing that well and truly breaks the game economy and breaks the player base.
This only becomes more critical when we look at some possibilities as to what could be going on on the back end, in the real-life economics. Not all of the things I delve into in the next section are necessarily happening, and I want to go ahead and get that disclaimer out of the way right now. But some of those "not happening nows" may be the ghosts of Christmas Present, yes, but others may be the ghosts of Christmas Future, assuming the game gets that far to have a Winter Wonderland Future, that Cryptic/PWE needs to take warning and watch out for...
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.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the Delta Rising Expansion. It was an interesting read and made me want to revisit some parts of the game I rushed through (Kobali).
To be honest, I will always look fondly at Voyager (the show). While some of you may find it to be the worst Trek show, Voyager was the show that got me into Star Trek, and that is why I will always love it even with its faults and occassional shoddy writing. That's why when Delta Rising was announced, the allure of the opportunity to revisit some of the places in the show and to roam Voyager's corridors and rooms was enough to get me to sign-up for STO.
Before I share my thoughts about Delta Rising's content, I'd like to touch upon one of the biggest player complaints about the update - levelling to 60 and the spec points that follow it.
As a new player (I joined in October), I don't find it that bad. I got to level 50 before I even got to the DR content. And that was without doing any of the Patrols, STFs or Red Alerts. I essentially played through most of this MMO in single-player mode. I did DOff constantly, not because I knew it was a good source of XP or EC (I didn't know it then), but because it was there and having free slots or playable DOff missions available irked me so I took every mission I can just because it felt good to do so. I also replayed some of the missions to get some set items (Solanae Space Set and Environmental Suits).
I started trying to earn reputation marks at my early 50's. I unlocked the Dyson Sphere and played quite a bit of the aerial missions there because I found it to be a good break from the dark bleakness of space. Playing through the Mirror Universe event also helped a lot (even if I managed to only get 13 of the 14 Transporters). Exploring new parts of space, new missions (STFs and storylines) kept the game fresh for me and I was level 56 (or 57 I can't remember exactly) when I finished all of the pre-DR missions.
When I was done with the pre-DR content, I was faced with the decision to start Delta Rising or to try to gain more levels. I was so close to 60 after all. I decided to finally try out the Patrols. I actually liked some of the Patrols. They had relatively quick XP gains (some of them involved merely scanning stuff for some good XP). I got my toon up to 58 on Patrols and DOffs. I didn't do all of the patrols either. I only played through the Sirius Block once and a couple of other patrols I stumbled along the way while roaming space. I never even did any of the Tau Dewa petrols (even now that I am 60).
At level 58, I decided that it was safe to start the Delta missions and play through them without interruption. True enough, I got to 60 well before I finished all of Delta Rising's storylines.
Past 60 and having done all of the missions, getting experienced slowed somewhat, but not to a crawl. I'm still working on the reputation system, so I get a ton of XP from doing STFs while trying to earn much needed marks. I'm currently playing through normal space queues (Borg Disconnected, Azure Nebula Rescue, Fleet Blockade and Infected Space). Between mission cooldowns I spend my time selling stuff at the exchange (I leveled so fast I was both a noob skillwise and financially poor) to gain EC, doing DOff missions, setting up R&D tasks and working on the hourly rep projects (my only source of the rep-specific crafting materials). Overall I'm gaining 2-3 spec points per week and I am fine with that pace. I am also able to get to my maximum daily Dil cap just by doing the above.
My experience as a new player makes me think that Cryptic balanced the XP curve for players starting at level 1 rather than 50. The problem for the vets is that they are starting the DR content at level 50, and there is not enough content to level from 50 to 60 with just DR's content. However, it was enough for me to play through the entire arc without interruption because I was boosted past 50 by previous missions/episodes. They don't have rep-gear and traits to work on too. They are basically left with trying to gain levels and spec points through grinding patrols or doing STFs that are no longer essential to them. New players have a ton of options and stuff to do, but old players don't. Unfortunately, that is a problem the majority of the playerbase have to face since new players like me are the minority, and many of the experienced players here had maxed out the characters and finished all of the prior content.
That is the main problem raising a level cap without enough content to ease the levelling pains introduces.
As for Delta Rising itself, it was really fun to hear the familiar voices of characters I enjoyed watching years back. A few weeks before starting STO I began re-watching all of the VOY episodes. The characters in the game sounded exactly like they did on the show. Except for Harry Kim. His voice sounded deeper, more projected. Sometimes unnaturally so to me. It just sounded to me like Garrett Wang was a bit conscious of the microphone so he spoke a bit more forcefully making his dialog sound like it was being delivered rather than being spoken naturally by the character. I agree that Neelix and Tuvok were standouts. Seven was still Seven, which should have been OK except that after 30 years, you'd have expected her to have changed a bit. She did gain some personality in the few years she was on Voyager. 30 years should have had more growth in her character. She should have been Annika by now.
I mentioned earlier that I breezed through Kobali, that's because I never really enjoyed ground combat in STO. To me it was one of the weaker parts of the game. So I hurried through the Kobali stuff just to get back to my space missions. I left out a ton of content back at Kobali. If I remember right, I just discovered the anti-virus the Vaadwaur were making when I quit the ground stuff and went back to space. After reading your review, I'll definitely finish that arc.
I'm ok with doing patrol missions but some of the patrol missions in DR just felt wrong for my FED character. I mean, no respectable Starfleet officer would help the Hirogen hunt down another species for sport just because they happened to be enemies of the Federation. There were other patrols where I felt that diplomacy was a better solution but the game gave me no other choice but to fire first.
While that may be a widespread problem in STO (for both ground and space missions, I mean Starfleet officers would generally set their phasers to stun rather than vaporize someone), it felt a bit more apparent in the Delta Quadrant. This was probably because we weren't in our territory to begin with. It almost felt like we were there as an invasion force intent on forcing our ideals to another species while masquerading as a police/peacekeeping group of explorers.
In a nutshell, I came into Delta Rising hoping that it would tie-up some loose ends Voyager left and allow us to correct some of the mistakes Janeway did. STO fell a bit short on that, and personally I prefer the way the story progressed in the books. I generally enjoyed playing through them though but it left me wanting for a little more out of the story. Maybe that would be addressed in future missions/additions whenever they may come.
On the surface, the R & D system didn't seem all that terrible...but once players got into it, the extreme costs, beyond anything else the game has ever seen, really became apparent, both in dilithium and EC. Even if you do as I have done on the limited number of upgrades that I've done, and never pay to pass a timegate (the dilithium cost of which is incredibly high), upgrading your existing equipment is daunting to say the least...and God forbid you try to upgrade a weapon without considering what the price of that is really going to be.
Others have done detailed number crunching to demonstrate just how hard the upgrade system will be on your resources--but I can say anecdotally that it is indeed a massive drain on resources far beyond the reputation system in its worst days. Combined with the existing dilithium sinks above, it's absolutely crushing for a player to consider, even if they take the advice even one of the devs provided (sorry, I can't remember who it was) not to rush, and to take it one little piece at a time.
Obviously Cryptic needs to take in cash to keep going--but when you raise the costs so high as to be demoralizing, especially when you account for the fact that many players prior to DR enjoyed having alts (a practice that has now had to be either severely curtailed or lain completely by the wayside), it's enough that only a few will pay. And I think by now we have all seen the Extra Credit and Freemium Is Not Free videos to know where that's very likely to wind up as people realize that they are either facing an exorbitant bill for their upgrades, or an extremely, extremely long wait time and a lot of grinding to make even the slightest headway. And that once they have done it, they are locked into a build by the investment needed to bring another build up to speed.
Maybe even this would have been slightly tolerable...if there had been the certainty as to the type of reward you would get at the end.
And now, as promised in the previous section, we're back to the lock boxes.
I am ready to get a lot of hate for this, but I know that a lot of people despised the lock boxes with a vengeance, and considered them (to borrow some wording from the new Battlestar Galactica) to be "the harbinger of death" as far as Star Trek: Online was concerned.
I don't think they were. Even now, I still do not think the lock boxes should be blamed because while yes, they were a gamble if you were not smart about what you were doing and didn't consider how to use them to fund the EC ship purchase route or accomplish other goals simultaneous to getting a ship, especially once the Lobi ship option was added, you could know to a fair degree of precision when you were eventually going to get something you either wanted or could trade for a major boost up to what you did want.
And you did not have to participate to have decent quality of play, if for any reason you did not wish to participate.
There were plenty of alternate routes to get some nice, sure-bet ships from the C-Store, some of which were as nice or nicer than a given lock box ship, particularly in the hands of a skilled player.
On the two occasions I went in for a lockbox (Cardassian and Undine), it was specifically because I wanted that species' ship. The Cardassian ship was for roleplay for my Cardassian toon (yes, I know, expensive RP ship but consider how much healthier the game looked back then and the fact that I had a reasonable expectation that I'd get a long time of enjoyment for my money--and since it's RP, that means all the way to the end of the game), and the Undine ship was...well, I know what many thought about the idea of Undine ships in game, but I really adore the design and abilities of the Undine vessels, and the lock boxes also offered the opportunity to gear one in a way that came very close to mimicking in-game behavior. In this case I also had the option to gear the ship quite powerfully very quickly. So again, there was a specific fun factor in there and in this case the usefulness I knew I was going to get by actually making it that toon's combat ship.
I did not, and still do not have an objection to that as long as the player is smart about recognizing exactly what the necessary outlay is, does not go into it with unreasonable expectations that a ship is just going to jump out of the box, and attaches sufficient value to and/or has a strong sales plan for the other items that come out of the boxes to make them into something he or she values, because the reasonable expectation is that what you are really paying for is to convert currency (or dilithium) into EC at a very high rate and you value and control your activities according to that realistic expectation.
But again, you did not have to take that route and grind those resources or spend that money for one of those ships, if you did not want to. It was a true optional because you could still do very well on endgame content without it.
But now, if you want the very best gear in the game, you have NO option--repeat, NO option--but to gamble.
And it's that aspect of the upgrade system that I find the most odious. You have very, very little way (unlike the lockboxes) if you want epic gear, to get around this outrageous gamble, and no way to predict exactly, as you could with the Lobi option for lockboxes, exactly when you would be guaranteed enough to get yourself a high-value ship (assuming you weren't one of the rare few to be lucky enough to have a ship jump out of a box early into your spending push), except to assume a mathematical worst-case scenario that is pretty resources/financially horrifying when you think about it.
In my case I have made the exact decision that Cryptic should not want a player to make.
That is, that I will not spend money on it, what I do through dilithium and EC, I will do very slowly and piecemeal, and that all efforts and resources will stop going into an item once it hits Mk XIV, regardless of its quality on the final upgrade. I will make no upgrade that I do not know to have absolute, 100% certainty of improving the stats on an item. Period. And I know that I cannot be anywhere near the only player to be making that decision.
But let me tell you something from a "player happiness" standpoint.
It is not fun to have to reconcile yourself to knowing you will always have what will very soon be substandard gear, because the alternative is just too financially insane to think about. It is demoralizing.
And let's not forget...Cryptic has not increased the dilithium supply or refining cap to relieve the burden enough to where if you do pay, you just might feel like the game gave you a bit of a helping hand to get to that point.
Worse...Cryptic has nerfed dilithium rewards in STF's and also made it much harder to complete the STF's that reward what the old ones used to.
So...what happens when you increase demand and constrict supply? Eventually there comes a point when people leave or stop contributing money and the revenue shrinks drastically. When you combine the other factors in the game--EC sinks that go with this system as well, bugs, and customer service failures as well...unfortunately, things are now set up to potentially head in a very bad direction for all of us, players and employees alike. And it may be that upgrade system, on top of everything else that has already happened, could be the thing that well and truly breaks the game economy and breaks the player base.
This only becomes more critical when we look at some possibilities as to what could be going on on the back end, in the real-life economics. Not all of the things I delve into in the next section are necessarily happening, and I want to go ahead and get that disclaimer out of the way right now. But some of those "not happening nows" may be the ghosts of Christmas Present, yes, but others may be the ghosts of Christmas Future, assuming the game gets that far to have a Winter Wonderland Future, that Cryptic/PWE needs to take warning and watch out for...
Personally I am fine with the current upgrade system and the difficulty in attaining Ultra Rare or Epic items out of it. They are Ultra Rare and Epic after all, the names themselves should indicate
they are very difficult to acquire.
Here are my reasons:
So far, I've read that most experienced players agree that you can succeed in STFs without uber gear. That implies very rare and epic gear are less of a necessity and more of a player want. If they really want it, they should work for it IMO.
The mark upgrades to Mk XIV are guaranteed successes. From what I've read so far, that is all you need to succeed in the game.
Making it difficult to attain ultra rare and epic items at Mk XIV will eventually lessen the power gap in my opinion. More players will play using Rare Mk XIV items and succeed with them. There will always be super ships out there but it will be substantially harder to make them making a healthy curve where there are few elite ships, a large number of good enough ships and few weak ships. That in my opinion is a good thing.
I've only started on the upgrade and crafting process myself and I've only upgraded one of my items to Mk XIV. I stopped there since I am planning to get all of my gear first to Mk XIV before even starting to consider upgrading the rarity of the item. An upgrade in rarity is a bonus, but it is something in my opinion something that I don't need to fully enjoy the game.
In the same way you treated lockboxes, the upgrade process can be a good thing if you spend wisely on it. It is a Dilithium sink for sure, but a manageable one if you don't rush it in my opinion.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts...I'd like to spend some time to address these in detail. Please bear in mind that I don't think Delta Rising--or the feedback you have provided here--is without some valid points. Also, my end goal with this series is to spark discussion, with an off chance of even reaching some devs with it, as to what might help to fix the mess that Cryptic has gotten itself into here. And unfortunately it is a mess.
The new-player perspective is also an interesting piece and allows me to address something that I might not have had the time to get into otherwise. Before I say this, I want to make it clear that I do not begrudge anybody joining the game with Delta Rising. If this game is going to survive it will need new players as much as it will old ones.
But the piece that it does make me wonder about, though, when I see how much more accepting new players are of what's going on, compared to old players, is whether Cryptic/PWE is banking on using new players to make up for an *expected* serious loss of old players and if some there have decided that the business of old customers is not important. Now, I am NOT saying every Cryptic employee thinks this way as an individual. We do know Tacofangs is on record stating that he does not want to see a player exodus. But somewhere at Cryptic I do wonder if this is the business strategy: to assume that by replacing older customers with new ones who are easily "trained" to spend in a way that Cryptic wants them to, they will do better.
This is a maneuver that I think will backfire, but it does really beg the question of how much new players are being rather cynically *used* as a part of Cryptic's business strategy, and I think you should keep that in mind when reading this review. Without a frame of reference for when things were better balanced, can a new player be sure of whether they are getting a good deal? Even more true (though I have no idea of your gaming history) if a new customer has never played another MMO. Or worse, has only played freemium cell phone games.
The other thing to remember with your leveling experience versus a legacy player is that those of us who have been here have, most often, completed all of our pre-DR missions before ever stepping foot in the Delta Quadrant, and at that time, our SP after 50 didn't go anywhere. It just vanished into the ether. So that nice Skill Point boost you're getting for *every* mission's first play through...the majority of us are NOT getting. Which means the ONLY thing awarding first-time playthrough ASAP that we can use to get us from 50 to 60 and beyond, unless we want to do a lot more mindless grinding, is the Delta Rising missions, and they are *nowhere* even remotely close to enough.
In my opinion it is a poor, if not disrespectful move to existing customers to essentially *punish* them for longtime playing, for loyalty, and for investing into multiple toons.
Again, that does not mean your perspective is invalid, but I do think it misses the bigger picture. Even so I do not begrudge you for being here because if we are going to get out of this, it will take all of us.
I will address your points about the upgrade system in another post after I get home from work. I can see where you are going and some of these are points I considered as well, but I think there are some specific, important areas where the comparison that you made to the lockboxes breaks down, and I would like to address them in depth.
Thank you again for taking the time to provide such detailed replies.
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There are a few important reasons why the lockboxes and the upgrades don't compare as closely as you hope they do.
The first reason is that with the lockboxes, as long as you are not treating them as though the ship is the only valuable thing to come out of them, EVERY time you open a lockbox, something jumps out that can help you in some way--whether it be something you sell for EC, a useful weapon or console, a DOFF pack (some of which have some very high-value DOFFs), dilithium mining claims, boosts to make your grinding easier, etc. You ALWAYS benefit even if just a little.
Once you hit Mk XIV on upgrades, you don't just have diminishing returns--you have a flat-out returns nose dive. If every action you took in the upgrade system rewarded you just a little (another good comparison is the rep system, for a system that rewards you a little every step of the way), then I could make the lockbox comparison more easily. As it is, though, I do not feel that comparison is justified.
The other reason I don't think you can compare the two is that with the lockboxes, you can calculate exactly what amount you have to put in to get the guaranteed high-value ship (that is, the Lobi store). That option is very, very predictable and stable, and easy to plan for to determine how much you want to finance by EC, how much by dilithium grinding, and how much by cash. The upgrade system, in contrast, is incredibly volatile...and let's not even talk about how you can't predict the mods you're going to get, whereas in comparison when you're going for a Lobi ship, you can see exactly what the base stats on that ship are before you even start. You know in advance exactly what that Lobi ship is worth to you whereas your modifiers in the upgrade are so unpredictable that you really have no idea whether what you're getting will be a truly beneficial ultra-rare or epic. Because some mods really are better than others, and getting stuck with a substandard one and having to start all over is just not worth it.
Those two I think destroy the comparison right away.
To address a few more specific points: I think you're too optimistic about the way the in-game power disparity is really going to be, and the Extra Credit F2P video people have been posting goes a long way towards explaining what the real effect on the economy and playerbase is, and how that can end up doing the exact opposite to what you predict and driving players away. Lockboxes didn't cause this so much because while some of the ships you get through that system are outstanding, some of the ones in the C-store are equally so.
The other point you raise about "keeping rare gear rare"...I think most people, myself included, would not be so bothered about that if there were an alternate route to get that ultra-rare/epic gear that was skill, accolade, or level-based. It could be made very challenging, much like it used to be to get gear through the STF's, but I think that would have been a far better way to enforce rarity than putting it behind an insane paywall.
And as I pointed out in my other post...a business strategy based on luring people in without a frame of reference as to how far costs have gotten out of control and considering legacy players to be acceptable losses is not a respectful strategy at all towards those who have put a great deal of time and sometimes money into the game.
None of this is to say you should not speak up--but since this thread is about discussing reasons behind things so that players and devs have a chance to see all of this in one convenient place, please don't be upset at my expressing such strong disagreement. It betters the thread that you challenged me to get all of this out here when I may not have thought about it before.
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(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
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DISCLAIMER: What I am about to say in this section is speculation. I do not claim to have any insider knowledge or to be able to say that this stuff is all actually happening. Some of it may be happening now, and some of it may be soon to come. Some of it may not occur (especially if we get a turnaround), but these are things that Cryptic should at the least take seriously as potential "Ghosts of Winter Wonderland Future," that could be very bad for all of us, players and Cryptic staff alike, if they are allowed to continue.
Crypticonomics: Speculations on Market and Social Forces
Now that we've had a good look at the mechanics of the game and some of the in-game economic forces, it's time to use our imaginations a bit and think about what might be going on on the back end, or what has the potential to occur if the current situation continues without significant overhauls. The point of this section is essentially to illustrate what's at stake.
One note about this section before I start...as my objectives here have changed even between posting the last section and actually starting into this one.
After I started this review series, many of the things from an economic standpoint that I would have covered in greater depth in this section ended up being wonderfully (and sometimes very bitingly) addressed in the South Park "Freemium Is Not Free" episode and the Extra Credits "Doing Free to Play Wrong" video, which I highly, highly recommend (note that STO fits the second model in the Extra Credits video). So, what I'm going to try to do is address a few elements here that are not covered so much (or at all) in those two videos.
The Costs of Delta Rising--Two Looks at Possible Breaking Points
One of the first things to remember about Delta Rising is that five actual cast members as voice actors means that one of two things is likely to have occurred--both of which have the potential to severely backfire on Cryptic/PWE if the backlash against Delta Rising in all areas--story, mechanics, and in-game economics--continues to be as severe as it has been both in the game and forum environments, and now, as indicated by Massively's recent article, a reaction that is beginning to spread to the gaming press.
The first possible scenario is one in which on top of the sorts of high costs for dev, normal voiceover, and other staff time that undoubtedly went with Delta Rising, just as with Legacy of Romulus, going with so many high-powered voice actors has created a scenario where, if not causing outright debt, has significantly raised the break-even point for this expansion. This means that if player numbers are not sustained over time as they were with LoR, the pre-order/first-day flash in the pan is not going to be enough to sustain further development when viewing STO by itself as a single business unit, because Cryptic was betting on a much higher sustained amount of spending than what actually materialized.
This scenario, unfortunately, has the potential to generate a serious and rapid crash-and-burn, and IF it is in play, may be the hardest one for Cryptic to do damage control on because of the speed that would be required, and the fact that we are almost two months into DR at the time of this post and seeing no signs of serious changes in mechanics, story, or in-game economy to address the problem. There has been a lot of sacrificed time and with this much sustained bad blood generated between the players and Cryptic, the amount of sustained investment required to do the right kind of turnaround in terms of development and communication efforts increases steadily over time.
Cryptic--think of this as a reverse timegate, in which the longer you wait to push the button, the higher and higher the cost goes.
The second possible scenario, while perhaps easier for Cryptic to react to if the realization fully sinks in as to what STO has gotten into, is the more insidious one and harder to spot--and some of the reactions we have seen from certain staff make me suspect more and more that this is closer to the scenario we are in, due to the way logical and psychological fallacies play into it. In other words, while easier to correct theoretically, it is far harder to recognize the need for a correction until a much subtler point of no return than the one in the first scenario has been passed.
In this scenario, development efforts--whether for internal reasons or through an external push from PWE--have been pushed in a corner-cutting direction and while such things as the voice-over expenditures do not present an immediate threat of bringing down STO's revenue structure, the opportunity costs (that is, the opportunity that you lose out on by spending your money in one place, when it could have been spent elsewhere) will more slowly and less dramatically, but just as surely, bring down the game.
Note that I allow this "external influence" (or perhaps "divided team") possibility because I simply cannot believe that the whole dev team just has no pride in their work. And I have even seen evidence to the contrary from certain staff members...Tacofangs being the prime example of someone who has clearly put a lot of personal investment into his work, and reacts in every way, often for the better but on a few occasions for the worse, like what he creates is "his baby." The degree of personal care for what he does is unmistakable, both when he shows his work off with obvious pride and engages the players to talk about it (sometimes discussing suggestions for further growth or improvement), and when he shows what read to me as clear, genuine hurt when some players used his excellent work on Club 47 as a scapegoat. As someone who writes extensively, and has dabbled in other art forms, I personally empathized with Taco because I have been in situations like that and I know how deeply it stings, no matter how hard you try to hide it. But it doesn't sting like that if you don't care.
(Note that art devs DO NOT have the skill sets to address the issues that I have discussed elsewhere in this review, except for the aforementioned Seven of Nine error. Their job does not and is not supposed to require anything more than the ability to be aware of the skill sets that others have and know how to communicate effectively with those responsible for other areas of the game to get the art job done. This makes expressing frustration towards the art team itself a case of truly misdirected anger when the most one can do reasonably is express frustration at management for mistiming and mismarketing the promotion of Club 47. But that does not negate the fact that once you get into the club, it is outstanding work.)
I would not be surprised if this attitude of real pride in craftsmanship extends to the entire art team that we have not spoken so much to, and those responsible in all ways for pulling off the look of a mission, a ship, a character, or an environment, based on the fact that out of all elements of the game, we have seen a general consistent trend of improvement and growth over time. Art for each expansion or new mission almost always tops the previous one, and when it fails to impress (Seven of Nine), the anomaly is notable exactly because of the stellar background it stands out so jarringly against.
I am willing to believe that there are others on the dev team who do other parts of the game, who care about their work. Some of those may even be the very same individuals who are coming under pressure from various sources, even if we do not see it...either because the individual is not posting, or because they are being required to hold to the party line. Or in the most insidious case, the one that sets up this particular failure scenario, because of getting into a bunker mentality of defensiveness, which could come as a direct result of being attacked, or from other sources such as fear of being the one to take the fall or even fear of unemployment. Some people toss that threat around casually but those fears are real, they are NOT fun at all for the people going through them. Believe me, I know. I've been on the wrong end of a restructuring before and even with a six-month lead time to find another position, it is still one of the most awful, nerve-wracking feelings. And as we hear in Dune, "Fear is the mind killer." It only accelerates the oncoming storm.
In this second scenario, therefore, Cryptic/PWE may have budgeted adequately to cover its costs for the expansion--but decisions to cut costs and even cut corners in some areas (particularly in knowingly pushing things like the upgrade and storyline out the door half-finished to meet a deadline that in my opinion was far too aggressive) due to opting for things like having five higher-paid voice actors, will cause STO to suffer over time as players revolt because of the unfinished, ill-conceived, and rushed aspects of the expansion.
And in these kinds of "slow burn" scenarios, exactly because the worst consequences do not materialize immediately and in some cases are outright masked by short-term bursts in profitability and selected metrics that are likely very gratifying for those in charge, it becomes very easy to believe that...well...to borrow the meme, that "everything is awesome." And as the game and dev team comes more and more under siege, this causes all sorts of counterproductive and sometimes even outright destructive reactions both in changing the game itself, and in communicating with the playerbase, which is unfortunately up in arms.
That, needless to say, makes it much harder for them (by this I mean Cryptic as a whole, not any specific individuals) to receive feedback and to correct what's gone wrong. And the longer this goes on, the more those opportunity costs we discussed earlier come back to bite Cryptic. And the next expansion--if STO survives long enough--is at even greater risk of overpromising and underdelivering because the resources haven't been able to expand proportionate to ambition, and the pressures on the Cryptic team to turn a profit have become that much more intense. Imagine an even more severe backlash than Delta Rising. And try to imagine STO surviving that.
It's not a pretty picture.
An afterword for this section...
I am sure there are some who will think that by bringing a human element into this discussion and looking at how these potential scenarios can happen without automatically assuming that the devs must harbor a universal burning hatred for the player, don't give a damn about their work, or otherwise enjoy pissing people off, that I am "making excuses" for them. While it is always possible individuals could fit those bad traits, I don't see what is accomplished by making those assumptions other than stoking one's anger further. It also makes us (in my opinion) less likely to come to a solution if we do not attempt to understand even slightly, where the other side is coming from and recognizing that sometimes the road to hell, or at least a hellish scenario for all involved, is paved with good intentions or at least not paved with the intentions of doing something horrible.
I could still have all of this wrong, as I can't read minds, yet I think even the attempt to look at it from a less personally-accusatory standpoint means something.
Which ties very nicely into the next review topic...and the last one I have left to discuss, before moving into the final conclusion and "in a nutshell" suggestions as to how Cryptic could accomplish a turnaround on Delta Rising (and STO as a whole) before it becomes too late for all of us.
Now that we have seen what could be at stake, we will look at the attempts to manage the crisis and try to come to grips with the most human element of this whole thing.
"All we need to do...is make sure...we keep talking."
NEXT POST: Customer Relations and Crisis Management. As a note, I WILL be referring to old material in the upcoming section, from previously-written posts of mine, and possibly even editing it into a form appropriate for this review series.
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That, needless to say, makes it much harder for them (by this I mean Cryptic as a whole, not any specific individuals) to receive feedback and to correct what's gone wrong. And the longer this goes on, the more those opportunity costs we discussed earlier come back to bite Cryptic. And the next expansion--if STO survives long enough--is at even greater risk of overpromising and underdelivering because the resources haven't been able to expand proportionate to ambition, and the pressures on the Cryptic team to turn a profit have become that much more intense. Imagine an even more severe backlash than Delta Rising. And try to imagine STO surviving that.
It's not a pretty picture.
been there, seen that on april 2010.
I think there is more than enough feedback coming in. Not talking about a wave of forum rants, but they chould have noticed it in their often-quoted metrics.
Problem is - as always: the path between the guy who reads the metrics and the guy who makes decisions.
But the piece that it does make me wonder about, though, when I see how much more accepting new players are of what's going on, compared to old players, is whether Cryptic/PWE is banking on using new players to make up for an *expected* serious loss of old players and if some there have decided that the business of old customers is not important. Now, I am NOT saying every Cryptic employee thinks this way as an individual. We do know Tacofangs is on record stating that he does not want to see a player exodus. But somewhere at Cryptic I do wonder if this is the business strategy: to assume that by replacing older customers with new ones who are easily "trained" to spend in a way that Cryptic wants them to, they will do better.
This is a maneuver that I think will backfire, but it does really beg the question of how much new players are being rather cynically *used* as a part of Cryptic's business strategy, and I think you should keep that in mind when reading this review. Without a frame of reference for when things were better balanced, can a new player be sure of whether they are getting a good deal? Even more true (though I have no idea of your gaming history) if a new customer has never played another MMO. Or worse, has only played freemium cell phone games.
No I do not believe that Cryptic would intentionally alienate their current player base. It was just an unfortunate result of raising the level cap with a relative lack of content for those coming from level 50 onwards.
Usually, the progression in games such as this is balanced based on player progress from start to finish. Basically, you'd want to plan your content so that at the bare minimum, a player starting from level 1 can get to the level cap by playing through your designed content (missions/quests) and other game activities.
The other thing to remember with your leveling experience versus a legacy player is that those of us who have been here have, most often, completed all of our pre-DR missions before ever stepping foot in the Delta Quadrant, and at that time, our SP after 50 didn't go anywhere. It just vanished into the ether. So that nice Skill Point boost you're getting for *every* mission's first play through...the majority of us are NOT getting. Which means the ONLY thing awarding first-time playthrough ASAP that we can use to get us from 50 to 60 and beyond, unless we want to do a lot more mindless grinding, is the Delta Rising missions, and they are *nowhere* even remotely close to enough.
In my opinion it is a poor, if not disrespectful move to existing customers to essentially *punish* them for longtime playing, for loyalty, and for investing into multiple toons.
Yes as I stated, it was a consequence of the lack of content for those starting at "base" level 50. While new players such as I are boosted by the existing content and episodes, older players do not have that advantage. I do not think it was deliberate. The lack of content was probably the result of any of the following:
To satisfy a deadline imposed by the owner of the IP (CBS?). This actually happens a lot.
To satisfy a deadline imposed by their publisher (it can be any one of their international publishers).
To satisfy deadlines imposed upon by the company's shareholders or management.
They are using agile management/lean startup methods, which means releasing a minimum viable product, to allow an additional influx of income to create newer content down the line. This is actually a widespread practice and could work great for the company and its customers in the long run. However, it involves constant incremental improvements to address issues this accelerated development process creates.
They misjudged their player demographics and thought the resulting grind was at an acceptable level, just enough for players to slug through or just enough to encourage XP boost sales.
They had to freeze content creation to a certain number of missions/activities because doing more would go over their budget.
They are simply lazy.
Of course there could be more reasons unique to their situation, or reasons that I didn't think of right now (posting in a rush).
I've worked on other games in the past (IP based MMOs, single-player PC games, online browser games and mobile games) and these are some of the common problems why something may be released half baked. Often times, we'd start with a really nice list of features and activities that get crossed-off over the development cycles so that we can make our deadlines. Again one can argue that they should have just released later, but sometimes that decision is above the developer's power, or even out of the company's hands.
There are a few important reasons why the lockboxes and the upgrades don't compare as closely as you hope they do....
Those were some very valid points. The upgrade system is really more of a gamble than the lockboxes. It's not something every player needs to do though. If a player wants to rise above the ranks of average players, then they could go for it. However, they should weigh the costs of upgrades (there are spreadsheets out there) plus the uncertainty of the finished product vs simply buying a finished item close to their needs/wants in the Exchange.
An upgrade in rarity isn't a total stab in the dark either. If this post is correct, then there is a maximum worst-case scenario cost. Although you are right, the modifier you'll get can still be the random joker.
To address a few more specific points: I think you're too optimistic about the way the in-game power disparity is really going to be, and the Extra Credit F2P video people have been posting goes a long way towards explaining what the real effect on the economy and playerbase is, and how that can end up doing the exact opposite to what you predict and driving players away. Lockboxes didn't cause this so much because while some of the ships you get through that system are outstanding, some of the ones in the C-store are equally so.
Some valid points there. Being new here, I am not thoroughly familiar with the community and how they can react to changes, especially those that affect their power in the game. But I've seen so many doom and gloom threads in other games too, some with compelling evidence and commentary that proved to be ultimately premature. Hck even Facebook gets a lot of "I quit" and user rant posts when changes roll out but it's' still the top social network in terms of numbers.
The onus is on Crpytic now. They have to filter out the viable responses in the forums (constructive posts, not just player rants) and weigh that against their metrics, targets and projections. Then they should act accordingly.
The other point you raise about "keeping rare gear rare"...I think most people, myself included, would not be so bothered about that if there were an alternate route to get that ultra-rare/epic gear that was skill, accolade, or level-based. It could be made very challenging, much like it used to be to get gear through the STF's, but I think that would have been a far better way to enforce rarity than putting it behind an insane paywall.
I think they should diversify player opportunities, and not put all of their eggs in one basket. The current upgrade system is one way to do it, something that could work. However, they should add other ways to gain really good Mk XIV items, preferably an activity that encourages players to play in group activities, rather than sit on a timer. Multiple ways to gain good gear will be more fun I would think. If you do not want the paywall from the upgrade system, you can perhaps play through a reputation style system to build new gear, or you can grind for awesome gear drops (equal to the best gear that can be crafted). It serves different playstyles and can keep things fresh for the player.
And as I pointed out in my other post...a business strategy based on luring people in without a frame of reference as to how far costs have gotten out of control and considering legacy players to be acceptable losses is not a respectful strategy at all towards those who have put a great deal of time and sometimes money into the game.
Again, I do not think that was their strategy. I've only come across one project that had a strategy close to what you are saying. As expected, it sold at first, then failed when players wisened up. It's a short-term strategy that is only viable on something you intend to drop in the very near future.
None of this is to say you should not speak up--but since this thread is about discussing reasons behind things so that players and devs have a chance to see all of this in one convenient place, please don't be upset at my expressing such strong disagreement. It betters the thread that you challenged me to get all of this out here when I may not have thought about it before.
I appreciate your opinions. You make very good, level-headed points. Unlike some posts around the forums that merely complain, you present solutions and constructive feedback. If I were part of the community management team here, your review of the expansion would be one of the threads I'd shortlist to evaluate the player feedback about the expansion.
Comments
To point to two less controversial "textbook cases," I would point to the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Almost every management and organizational psychology course will have covered the Challenger disaster. The people who were making all of those bad decisions were not bad people and they did not want to kill that shuttle crew. No mens rea. But they allowed themselves to get sucked in by bad assumptions, bad group dynamics, and logical fallacies, and the result is something that even people too young to remember the accident cannot forget the footage of.
But in the era of the less-than-24-hour social media cycle no one stops to consider this anymore and jumps right into the flaming. I don't even think the most unpopular people at Cryptic--Geko and D'Angelo--are *bad people.* I think they are making *bad decisions* and that very likely there are some financially dangerous organizational psychologies going around Cryptic that must break quickly before they break the game. I even was part of an exchange recently that led to Geko seeming to understand that he said something that he shouldn't have to a player, and while I cannot claim "credit" for the apology what I feel confident in saying is that it might not have happened if myself and a few others had not *immediately* posted in a manner that addressed the *content* of what he said and how it did not fit his desired objective (a hard data discussion), as opposed to going off on him and calling names.
As I said in that thread while yes, the onus IS on Cryptic, it also does not hurt to model the behavior that you want to see.
Thank you for your KDF perspective. My problems with the KDF actually go back way before LOR. I did not get out of the first Federation mission arc before being so disgusted at the actions I was forced into (partly that I could not act as a non-Klingon KDF officer and also that I saw nothing even remotely honorable about torturing a man and not being able to allow my toon to duel with him as a gentleman and an officer). I sidelined my one KDF toon within weeks of starting him--permanently. There was no question, even despite the mission's attempt to press a KDF alignment for Romulans, that I was going to take my Reman Federation. (Plus why a Reman should knowingly sign up to be a *subject race* and *second class citizen* again is beyond me.)
The funny thing is, though...I was actually just as dissatisfied with several missions in Delta Rising from a Starfleet perspective. While Starfleet often acts more belligerently in the game than most of the series (to me the tone comes closest to DS9 in the Dominion War and I have a much higher tolerance of militarism than most Trek fans because I believe STO's Starfleet did *right* to become military first, exploration second given the threats they faced), with being forced into patrols with so little plot development that were just blatant shallow shells for "kill five waves," I really had a problem.
As a Starfleet admiral I am in the sector to clean up Janeway's mess. There is a *reason,* even if not stated so boldly, that I am in charge and Janeway herself was not sent back in. I am supposed to be a new face for Starfleet, and to try to be more sensitive to the situation and not just go in running and gunning and making more messes before I take the time to find out about the situation and make a more solid judgment call than Janeway did in her singleminded focus on getting home without regard to the costs to anyone else.
I actually came out of the patrols feeling that the options were often severely inappropriate and OOC for the Federation (or should have at least offered the *option* to progress diplomatically in at least some cases *without* massively ripping the player off on XP for using their heads instead of their guns), and were far more appropriate for KDF and Romulans, who lack such strictures.
Obviously that particular concern is not a concern for you since shoot-em-up is appropriate for KDF and you also would not be saddled with the political fallout that a Starfleet admiral must consider thanks (or no thanks) to Janeway.
But it is *very* interesting that aspects of the same plotline should manage to make both KDF *and* Feds feel forced out of character and that we are acting severely inappropriately for our factions *at the same time.* I am curious if you have given any thought to that?
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STO is generally too "shoot first, ask questions later" for even a wartime starfleet. The so what is that my original Starfleet character - one themed around the ENT era - has been retired in favour of the aforementioned Starfleet-Klingon. This was not always the case; the pre-F2P missions are actually quite balanced for my taste - but it's become the norm with the emphasis on replayed combat missions. Now, that was just about acceptable when the adversary was the endlessly-respawning Borg but it feels wrong with others.
A Fed-Klingon such as M'yarg is probably Starfleet's ideal man for the current environment - while he has the respect for Starfleet discipline to do all of the running around after Talaxians required, he also brings the "necessary" brutality for constant combat. Hence, he's become the one alt I will aim to do the whole of DR with as he's the only character it actually fits. The character is actually a slightly tongue-in-cheek response to the state of STO Fedside; while a Starfleet officer, he has a crew that principally comprises Klingons, Jem'hadar and Acamarians. Oh, and his usual ship is a Hirogen hunter. In theory the whole thing is a "plausible deniability" scenario for Starfleet Intelligence who can write off the actions of a Klingon marauder...
So what? Well, I think DR seems to be falling into a "worst of both worlds" scenario in that regard. The missions are too quick to reach for a military solution for the traditional Starfleet most of us still have a soft spot for, but are still so heavily couched in that setting that it feels wrong playing through as a Klingon (or, I suspect, a Romulan) who doesn't have the ideological baggage of respect for Voyager.
The irony is that this has all come after the excellent Undine season, which managed some genuinely multi-faction missions and has an event that actually *requires* players to ask questions first and shoot later (Undine Infilitration).
I'm inclined to agree with the previous poster who considered that, in an ideal world, we would have had parallel runthroughs of the DR storyline for the Klingons and Romulans.
See, this raises an interesting point I didn't anticipate back in my days of calling for faction mergers and/or an end to the war. It's something I've wanted to comment on in some reviews of DR that mention "wartime Starfleet".
While the game continues to be an action MMO, one odd wrinkle is that we no longer have a wartime Starfleet.
The Klingons and Federation are at peace.
Peace has been restored to Nimbus.
The Tal Shiar's leaders have been defeated.
The Mirror Universe remains a threat but its portal-generating capability has been hindered.
The True Way has been dismantled.
The Dominion are now tense allies.
The Borg have been driven back from the Alpha Quadrant and are faltering to a point where they are relying on reassimilating the cooperative for support.
The Undine have been exposed and driven back.
We're not really at war. Most of what we do in the Delta Quadrant is closer to a policing action or providing key assistance to a war other people are fighting.
So we're NOT a wartime Starfleet anymore and the idea that we're "at war" is losing capital as a justification in plots going forward. Overall, this meshes fairly well with the Romulans. But the Klingons are a different story.
If I got to sit in on Expansion 3 discussions, I would say that what needs badly addressed going forward in the next expansion are:
The Mirror Universe (the only ones we're still at war with and the ones currently least tied to the game's meta-plot)
The Tholians (what are they up to?)
The Klingons (how do we make sense of their role?)
Now... This may sound odd but I think what would make the most sense going forward would also be going backward a bit.
1) I think it makes sense to target a DS9 revamp next time.
2) Position Mirror Terok Nor as our forward base in the Mirror Universe, with DS9's wormhole serving primarily as our gateway to the Mirror Universe (rather than its role as a gateway to the Gamma Quadrant).
3) Make the Tholians and Terrans a big part of things. Flesh out the Klingon Cardassian Alliance while enhancing their enemy groups to include unique boss mobs like Bajoran Intendants and the like. There's three enemy groups.
4) Use this to really make sense of the Klingons. I feel like the loss of Martok is something that feels inadequate. I also think J'mpok's plot feels incomplete, like there was hinted treachery there.
5) Sorting out the identity of the factions and choice mechanics is tricky but the Mirror Universe could accomplish a lot of this. Because the focus, thematically and mechanically, would help define Federation and Klingon methods by offering a contrast.
6) Mirror Universe would allow for more of a hodge podge of Trek actors, which I think is called for if they continue with heavy voice acting. Because so many different facets of the game need addressed. I would like to see Mirror Martok and Worf be strong anchors though. You might get regular Riker and Troi leading the allied forces into the mirror, which would provide for some nice Admiral Riker vs. Regent Worf fun. You'd have chemistry between our allied contact and our chief enemy (I imagine Regent Worf as a big bad).
7) Mirror Romulus. Is it there? What's its Tal Shiar like? Is it possibly intact and like the Romulus we lost?
There are questions of methods, faction ideals, and mechanics (ie. non-combat mechanics, science DPS) that need addressed.
The more I ponder it, the more the Mirror Universe seems like the place to do that.
Haha, I never said I respected VOY as a show.
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I agree that Japorigate made everything that came after that much worse. SOME of the problems could be worked through without that, but there is still an ongoing nerfing pattern to contend with that would not go well regardless, IMO.
Personally...if what I suspect is right that Cryptic could not or would not follow up on a case-by-case basis as they seemed to think they could (resorting to a wide heuristic dragnet instead of individual analysis), I think they had no choice once they created a worse mess than what they originally had, but to back off of their rollback attempt.
Hmmm...and this is where I think Starfleet would make a critical mistake in drawing down their forces. IMO Starfleet is and still should be on a war footing. We are in essence, as players, involved in a proxy war between the Federation (and sorry, KDF/Rom, make no mistake but it is the Federation that is the superpower here because it is the ability to unite peacefully that the Iconians fear the most) and the Iconians, and we must expect war to break out on more fronts as each previous front is dealt with.
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Mistakes are interesting in fiction.
Any thoughts on the idea of a mirror expansion as an excuse to:
- Shore up the Klingon story/methods and provide a more satisfactory Martok ending
- Revamp DS9 (since it could be the foreward base)
- Revisit Romulan longing for the lost world of Romulus (which might not only exist there but which might have the same culture/beliefs as the Prime Romulus)
- Address mechanics, emphasizing moral alignment as a game system and possibly militarized science (which the MU would have more of a tendency towards)
The big advantage I can see is that it would redouble focus on the existing factions and maps as a natural part of designing their counterparts. Also, any actors recruited could have double roles.
Plus, I think it's probably one of the more solidly established bits of broad level Trek lore that would appeal to people not already STO. Romulans were probably a big draw as they are featured in every series. I think an expansion benefits from being broadly themed around something even non-fans have some familiarity with.
I do fear *some* of what went wrong with DR's storyline when it went wrong was Cryptic taking the player vote for VOY to think people liked the things about that series that were just bad, and then doubling down on some of that bad (though indeed mixed in with some very good stuff). I'd be concerned about what part of the MU Cryptic would play up...and IMO the DS9 stuff is not the good part.
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One advantage is that it opens up villains. Like, say...
Dukat?
Dukat, Regent Worf, and a beleaguered Terran Admiral Riker.
One thing I was just playing with in another thread is to mix things up so that we get to see the reforged Terran Starfleet mixing it up with the Klingon Cardassian Alliance.
We're fairly limited in terms of Klingon and Cardassian villains for endgame content in STO but substantially less limited in the Mirror Universe.
I would agree that if replayability of storyline is a goal, increased flexibility in storyline choices is very helpful.
The Foundry toolset (think that's what you meant with "Tribble") is indeed limited, though I have seen Foundry authors successfully bodge together something that makes you feel like you made a choice even though in the Foundry, you cannot (except with the trick of using numbered dialogue options) make choices carry over from map to map there.
One critical thing as a Fed player that I would want to be sure of is that if more diplomatic options are added, that we do not get ripped off of XP for making the diplomatic choice. If Cryptic feels like that would make such missions easier to farm, then here's a simple solution: don't make more patrols. Make full-fledged missions that take longer to do, even with the diplomatic choice, but that are interesting and engaging for that whole time it takes to do them. The Foundry has some really great examples of that.
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Diplomacy should get its own mechanical system as an expansion level feature.
The game is ground and space.
The game probably ought to be:
Ground Combat, Space Combat, and Diplomacy.
If Diplomacy had skills, gear, animations, and its own action bar, Diplomacy content wouldn't have to be reading.
I've said this for quite awhile that pigeonholing diplomacy as reading limits the appeal and makes it costly to develop centrally (in time and skill).
A non-combat combat system.
Effectively things like alignment and bluff/charm/inspire/intimidate rolls. Handled as an active gameplay system rather than as a detour from gameplay.
I also think scanning, mining, and console hacking should be folded into that.
This is how you get beyond "press F" and "read a wall of text". This is also how you monetize that type of gameplay because its own gear means its own crafting, upgrades, C-Store packs, etc.
Granted, it wouldn't be called Diplomacy. Both because that's used and because that's not a full picture of what it would do, particularly for KDF.
But this non-combat combat system could be a major part of how factions or even species get better differentiated in STO.
In theory, anybody can acquire any ship or weapons system or bridge officer or hand weapon in the Star Trek universe, even if some are rarer combos than others. We have seen, even in the shows and movies, things like Dukat's personal Klingon Bird of Prey or experimental Voyager weapons systems.
What makes someone unique is their problem solving toolset and modeling that abstractly as a game system would do a lot.
I think the only other person I've heard suggest anything similar was Zinc, though. I bet Thomas the Cat would be a great asset in this though.
Although if Geko has said the KDF needs to go, I DO share his level of dislike for the faction, the difference is that I recognize that once Cryptic made the decision to take the KDF side beyond a PvP-only faction, it made a commitment to a certain set of players who do want to play in that faction and now see it as an expectation. I would warn him that he would need to be very careful in how he handled any sort of rollup of the faction considering the effect it would likely have on the game's already-flagging population numbers.
Some situations should be shoot first, ask questions later no matter what--but a decent diplomatic option for at least some of the missions would be nice for sure.
Don't forget DOFFing...that's the other big draw to DS9.
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I would disagree with the storyline part because it is *not* a self evident truth; while the Fed-Klingon war has been resolved, the KDF and Romulan Republic remain useful vehicles to cover storlyines that could, or more accurately should, not be covered by Starfleet. The Fek'lhri saga is a good example - from back when Cryptic were willing to introduce a new NPC faction so that the Klingons had an adversary that they did not share with the Federation - a mythological storyline that could never work with a Fed alt. The same for the Shakespeareian tragedy of the Klingon L1-10 arc. To say there is no narrative merit to the non-Federation factions is to miss a trick (although this appears to be Cryptic's view). They could still have done more with DR; for example, at the point at which a Federation crew would head off to see the Talaxians, a Klingon PC could be detailed to go and check up on the crew of the Vor'kang. You could almost run the same mission, but I think most KDF players would feel more comfortable aiding a stranded Klingon colony than a bunch of Talaxians.
Now, that brings us back to whether developing such material (for the 18% of the player base who have Klingon alts, or whatever the figure is these days...) is a worthwhile use of resources. Looking at what has happened for the Klingons and Romulans since LoR's launch, I don't think that even a charge of being a drain on resources is valid. I can't believe the effort put into generating 4 ships for DR would have made that much difference to the Fed side of the expansion...
I also slightly struggle to believe that Cryptic are inherently anti-other faction. The entirety of LoR was built around introducing a third faction, with a lot of excellent work put into filling out the Klingon mission list (Yes there's a lot of copypaste filler, but also high quality stuff). Geko may think that, though I'd be curious to see where he actually came out and said so, but he's not the only man in the company.
What happened with "Surface Tension" is that it invalidated the reason for the KDF to exist as a separate faction by ending the war. The PvP arenas become nonsensical because they'd represent a treaty violation and restart a war that your character just put in time to help end. With so much of what is seen in game invalidated in this way...that's where I think Cryptic is now in a position where the KDF faction no longer has storyline justification to exist, and this may be intentional.
To some extent, placing the Feds and the KDF on the same side now reduces some of the difference needed between missions: you're playing to rules dictated by an alliance rather than just your faction.
Some of it was executed badly as we've discussed and still makes people feel like they are playing the wrong faction...but that in my mind may be that trying to execute a decision like this halfway is going to be problematic. And the result wound up being a Starfleet that takes the militarism SO far in some missions that it feels KDF, and a KDF that sometimes shows more patience and diplomacy than what seems in character.
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It really depends on how you're defining factions. Even in games with multiple factions, about 75% of the content is identical.
Oddly enough, the big exception was City of Heroes. And I gather it didn't increase revenue substantially.
Now, you could define a faction not by its opposition to factions but by its unique contribution.
And in that case, you have some of that with raiders vs. singularity vs. science ships but more could be done on that front to technically distinguish factions, such as having faction unique specializations, kits, and bridge officer powers (and maybe different optionals), such that the factions differ in their contributions.
For me the KDF was the full representation of following ones heart. Sure they have a code of honour, but it doesn't prevent them doing what they feel is 'right' at any given time, in other words their hands are not tied like the Federations are.
Which is why my main character is KDF, and I also feel the KDF are a far undervalued resource even now, because they add an aspect that the Federation simply cannot do. Like why don't we have different plot-lines now that actually take the mick out of each other? For example the Feds could be performing a stealth mission based on infiltration, while the KDF do the distractions but also have their own mission, so story wise you have the same episode, however while the Feds beam to the planet the KDF provide the distraction and low and behold the KDF board a ship and steal data from the ships computer as a supplement to the mission.
By the time the Feds get back it would be the appropriate time to join the dialogue back up and say "Trust the Klingons to go boarding ships and stealing computer cores while we were gone" while the KDF would retort by saying something like "Bah! You Federation (insert Klingon insult here), always over complicating the simplest of tasks!"
In other words, I don't feel the missions take full advantage of the diversity the factions ought to offer, and that has always been a weak point of the writing for this game, both from a story and game mechanic perspective.
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One of the most important things for a player, who is considering putting their time, their effort, and their money in, is how much they are going to get back for it.
I recently had an interesting discussion with someone about the idea that the money you spend on in-game items is an investment. This is a bit of an unconventional view of mine, given that as he rightly pointed out, when the end of the game comes, you have nothing to show for what you spent except the memories, maybe some screenshots, and for a few of us, our fanfic, to preserve what was. But when I framed it this way, it cast a new light on it...
Basically, when I spent money in-game, I was investing with the expectation of a certain amount of useful life to what I've purchased. Take my Vesta pack, for instance. When I bought that, I had a pretty fair assurance that the game would continue for a reasonable length of time, and that it would remain fairly competitive for the purposes I had in mind for it (crowd control ship, not DPS role). Same thing, even, when I got my Dromias cruiser.
Yes, I opened lock boxes for Lobi back in the days before DR, and I am not embarrassed to admit that. The thing was, though, going for a lockbox was completely optional and not necessary for endgame experience. There was no need for those who didn't like them to participate. And if you placed value on other things besides the ships and didn't go in with the expectation that ship was just going to conveniently pop out of the box for you, you could use them to other ends like beefing up a DOFF system fast, getting a full MK XII purple weapons set quickly, or getting EC by selling off unused items, some of which did quite well on the Exchange.
In my case what I got out of those lockboxes wasn't just the Lobi to buy the Dromias (some of which I'd come by from the occasional other lockbox, or from in-game events, not all from that final "burst" when I decided on the ship I wanted)...it was a full weapons set that was canon-accurate for my ship, a console that, along with the one that came with the ship, allowed it to match in-game behavior for the Dromias, and enough EC from selling off other items that I could buy just about everything at near maximum levels (MK XI or MK XII purple) that I needed to build my ship and be ready to fly it into most content right away. And for me there was also the added value--though I recognize this would not be important to all players--of getting to play around in the unique interior environment of the ship, which is going to be preserved in my writing as well as in screenshots and memories.
But at the time I made my purchase, I still had a fair degree of confidence in the investment I had chosen to make.
(You'll see more about the lockbox topic later, when I tackle the upgrade system...but moving on for now...)
When I talk about an investment, I realize very well that I am not investing in some sort of fixed asset (other than the aforementioned memories, screenshots, and in my case, fanfics that are likely to well outlast the game and may even remain an ongoing series after the game shuts down). But what I do expect in return is an enjoyable gaming experience for a certain amount of time. If the risk associated with that return--that either my equipment will be nerfed into oblivion or obsoleted quickly, or that the game will fold before I get what feels to me like an acceptable amount of play time on my investment...or if for any other reason the game ceases to be enjoyable enough for me to want to use my purchased toys...then I hold back from investing.
That is even more so if I feel that not only am I up against a time constraint, but that in effect, the "credit rating" of STO and Cryptic/PWE has dropped too low to trust that I can make any sort of reasonable estimate--particularly if I don't even feel that dev statements and promotional materials are going to be a solid enough indicator.
Without any sort of personal animus I say that is the point we have reached, and while there are other examples as well (particularly having to do with statements about buffs and nerfs clearly not lining up with the reality), I am going to single one out because of the game impact it has. And that is...
The PvE Queues
We've all heard it said. The PvE queues are dead.
Even the event I enjoy playing the most, and that even in Delta Rising remained fairly functional despite a bug that may if we are lucky only be getting fixed in this coming patch has clearly suffered by association with everything else in Delta Rising: and that is Undine Infiltration Advanced and Elite. I am finding it takes a long time to get queued for this ground STF...and when even Infiltration is suffering, you know something is up. And sadly, in the case of UIA/UAE, it appears to be a sort of guilt-by-association with so many other things in the PvE queues that are just wrong.
How did it get this way?
When Delta Rising was first announced, we were told something along these lines: the Normal queues were not going to be far from what they were pre-DR--training missions to get you used to the map, not too difficult. Advanced would be the equivalent of pre-DR Elite, playable from levels 50-60. (And that is a critical statement to remember given what else it implies about how a toon should be geared at that stage.) And Elite would be for the top tier of players, with extra objectives.
Unfortunately, with a few exceptions--like my beloved Undine Infiltration, which despite an annoying bug otherwise delivered exactly as described above--this is not what we got. And even after one (arguably two) balance passes on NPC scaling, the fundamental problems with most of the STF's still remain.
In most places, the so-called Advanced "optionals" became not optionals, but absolute fail conditions. And the difficulty increase was well out of proportion with what you would expect for a ship that has not completed the upgrading process...which is automatically implied in the fact that toons that have not fully leveled to 60 may enter and enjoy at least a reasonable chance of success. This meant that toons that were leveling or not fully upgraded do not have the kind of shot in Advanced that they once did in Elite--which is flatly against what was described.
Right now the only STF where I am almost all the way on board with the fail condition (seen in Elite mode) is...you guessed it...Undine Infiltration, and in that case I would not mind carrying it back to Advanced--as long as it was changed so that the individual who mishandles an interrogation takes the full penalty but the rest of the team gets no cooldown, given that in the unique case of UIA/UIE, the failure should be able to be pinpointed to the exact player who caused it. It's not a teamwork failure in that case. It's an individual error, and should be treated as such.
Still, the critical difference with UIA/UIE is that from my long experience playing it, it was clear that the Advanced mode was fully equivalent to the old Elite in terms of difficulty, and UIE presented the additional challenge that you must get the interrogations exactly right, which I consider generally reasonable (with the caveat above) for someone who ought to have long experience with the mission before entering at this level. I believe that any reasonable person reading the pre-DR material, and playing UIA/UIE would feel that what was promised was delivered.
But what happened on the space STF's was that a massive increase in hitpoints--out of proportion with players' leveling as well as simply making fights longer and more boring as opposed to providing a more interesting challenge--and added fail conditions put the Advanced queues out of reach. This is not what we were promised.
And worse, the effects on the attainability of rewards, specifically crafting materials, items needed for rep advancement (such as Borg Neural Processors) was put behind that Advanced barrier. There is no way for many players to get what they need just by working through Normal, unless they are lucky enough to be working with a rep system such as the Voth or Undine that has a reasonable way to acquire the needed materials to gear up.
Or at least...to the point that reputation gear allows, which is not endgame quality anymore.
Which means that to get anywhere, you need dilithium. Lots of it. Which an STF is supposed to deliver from two places: the end-of mission rewards, and the reputation materials if you choose to convert them to dilithium instead of slotting them into a gear project. But if you're stuck behind a difficulty wall without the requisite rewards to surpass it (i.e. stuck running Normals yet not able to get the materials you need to gear up and upgrade), it's enough to make people give up.
Add to that, that the end-mission dilithium rewards were nerfed...and still not restored back to what they were before...and what is the incentive to do most of these missions, which were once the lifeblood of the endgame?
And that seems to be what has happened with the queues...the numbers have dropped significantly.
As some have said before, adding a third difficulty was not a bad idea. And had we actually gotten what was promised in all of the queues, it could have worked extremely well. But what we have now is unfortunately dragging the game down instead of livening up the experience.
Especially when we need all that dilithium...
NEXT POST: The Upgrade System, and if I have time to get to it in the same post, some thoughts on what the troubles with the game could mean on the back end.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
INTRODUCTION
THE STORY
Disclaimer
Background
The Space Mission Arc
The Space Patrols
The Kobali Ground Arc
Character Development
Story Progression and Verdict
QUALITY ASSURANCE, MECHANICS, AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS
Testing and QA
Progression--The Mechanics Side, SpecGate/SPGate
The Golden Ratio: Time, Effort, and Money Versus Reward
The PvE Queues
(And more to come!)
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A Dilithium Sink Too Far
At least if you go T5U or T6, you know what you're getting, and for exactly how much. Whether or not you like the ship level increase, you at least know what that upgrade will cost, what your exact stats will be once you make the upgrade, and you can have it immediately.
But here is where it all comes together--or falls apart: with the R & D system, which is responsible for crafting and upgrades on every single other item you put onto your ship or onto your toon on the ground.
Before we delve too deep into this, let's take a moment to recap all of the places prior to Delta Rising where dilithium had to be spent, or could be spent, and also remember that unless you got lifetime veteran status, or a fleet dilithium mine up to Tier III, you won't see an increase from the dilithium refining cap of 8000 that existed at the very start of Free-to-Play--meaning that no matter what you do, you cannot build your supply of refined dilithium any faster than a limit put into place when there were far fewer places where you had to think about spending that dilithium.
Except for...spending money. And even if we don't take the problems inherent in the upgrade system into account, that's something that as I discussed above, some players are already feeling a trust deficit that makes them reluctant to spend.
So...what did we have before Delta Rising, that you have to spend dilithium on in order to get anywhere?
--Dilithium-to-Zen conversion for the C-Store if you do not want to buy Zen directly
--Reputation Store Gear (NOTE: Reps other than Omega do pay out dilithium at the end, which helps some...I have to give Cryptic credit, the overhaul on the reps was a good move.)
--Dilithium Store Gear (not important these days for many things, but useful for a few specialty items like a few extra spiral wave disruptors if you own a Galor)
--Fleet Holdings (Starbase, Embassy, Dilithium Mine, and Spire)
--Fleet Provisions
--Fleet Store (Fleet gear, uniforms, etc.)
That's a pretty large list there...especially if you are a fleet member, and I'm sure everyone was feeling the pinch early into the Fleet Holdings system. Obviously this is intentional on Cryptic's part: make it harder to grind out enough dilithium to meet your needs on strict Free-to-Play, and the more likely they believe you are to spend cash. And before Delta Rising...although the model was flawed, in my experience I would say the game economics did reach some sort of equilibrium although not where the playerbase would have liked to see it.
Before Delta Rising, there was one notable instance where Cryptic did show some potential interest in making things better for the players--and that was the process of leveling up in the Reputation system. When rep first rolled out, it became an increasingly brutal drain on resources the further you went into it, and with little at the end but the chance to grind some more for gear, despite the system having promise for putting what was then high-quality gear into the hands of more players, it wasn't exactly the most inviting or rewarding thing to do.
The system later got rebalanced so that the severe EC drain was undone, and instead, you stood the chance of making a bit in EC on each round, and except for Omega rep, you get something else critical at the end for making players want to do the reputation system: the opportunity for easy-to-get sponsorship tokens to make the system more alt-friendly...and a decent dilithium payout, that makes players feel like they have been genuinely rewarded for the work that they put in.
And when you do things like that, you keep the players happy and make them consider looking at other things too, like, say, that ship pack in the C-Store or that Lobi ship. And when the players are feeling good about the game and its prospects to survive and their purchases to have a good useful lifespan, they may be willing to kick in some money on top of what you just gave them in dilithium, and feel like they're getting a bit of a bargain in the process.
Now that we've looked at the state of the dilithium economy before Delta Rising, and what I consider (though I realize not everyone will agree) of Cryptic listening to feedback and doing something that really benefitted the players and that also stood to benefit their bottom line, we're going to look at what happens when you increase demand on a commodity drastically without increasing its supply, in an already-tight market, AND on top of that impose a substantially higher element of market risk.
Unless a significant rebalancing for the benefit of the players comes along...could this turn out to be Cryptic's "bridge too far"?
An Upgrade--Or Not
On the surface, the R & D system didn't seem all that terrible...but once players got into it, the extreme costs, beyond anything else the game has ever seen, really became apparent, both in dilithium and EC. Even if you do as I have done on the limited number of upgrades that I've done, and never pay to pass a timegate (the dilithium cost of which is incredibly high), upgrading your existing equipment is daunting to say the least...and God forbid you try to upgrade a weapon without considering what the price of that is really going to be.
Others have done detailed number crunching to demonstrate just how hard the upgrade system will be on your resources--but I can say anecdotally that it is indeed a massive drain on resources far beyond the reputation system in its worst days. Combined with the existing dilithium sinks above, it's absolutely crushing for a player to consider, even if they take the advice even one of the devs provided (sorry, I can't remember who it was) not to rush, and to take it one little piece at a time.
Obviously Cryptic needs to take in cash to keep going--but when you raise the costs so high as to be demoralizing, especially when you account for the fact that many players prior to DR enjoyed having alts (a practice that has now had to be either severely curtailed or lain completely by the wayside), it's enough that only a few will pay. And I think by now we have all seen the Extra Credit and Freemium Is Not Free videos to know where that's very likely to wind up as people realize that they are either facing an exorbitant bill for their upgrades, or an extremely, extremely long wait time and a lot of grinding to make even the slightest headway. And that once they have done it, they are locked into a build by the investment needed to bring another build up to speed.
Maybe even this would have been slightly tolerable...if there had been the certainty as to the type of reward you would get at the end.
And now, as promised in the previous section, we're back to the lock boxes.
I am ready to get a lot of hate for this, but I know that a lot of people despised the lock boxes with a vengeance, and considered them (to borrow some wording from the new Battlestar Galactica) to be "the harbinger of death" as far as Star Trek: Online was concerned.
I don't think they were. Even now, I still do not think the lock boxes should be blamed because while yes, they were a gamble if you were not smart about what you were doing and didn't consider how to use them to fund the EC ship purchase route or accomplish other goals simultaneous to getting a ship, especially once the Lobi ship option was added, you could know to a fair degree of precision when you were eventually going to get something you either wanted or could trade for a major boost up to what you did want.
And you did not have to participate to have decent quality of play, if for any reason you did not wish to participate.
There were plenty of alternate routes to get some nice, sure-bet ships from the C-Store, some of which were as nice or nicer than a given lock box ship, particularly in the hands of a skilled player.
On the two occasions I went in for a lockbox (Cardassian and Undine), it was specifically because I wanted that species' ship. The Cardassian ship was for roleplay for my Cardassian toon (yes, I know, expensive RP ship but consider how much healthier the game looked back then and the fact that I had a reasonable expectation that I'd get a long time of enjoyment for my money--and since it's RP, that means all the way to the end of the game), and the Undine ship was...well, I know what many thought about the idea of Undine ships in game, but I really adore the design and abilities of the Undine vessels, and the lock boxes also offered the opportunity to gear one in a way that came very close to mimicking in-game behavior. In this case I also had the option to gear the ship quite powerfully very quickly. So again, there was a specific fun factor in there and in this case the usefulness I knew I was going to get by actually making it that toon's combat ship.
I did not, and still do not have an objection to that as long as the player is smart about recognizing exactly what the necessary outlay is, does not go into it with unreasonable expectations that a ship is just going to jump out of the box, and attaches sufficient value to and/or has a strong sales plan for the other items that come out of the boxes to make them into something he or she values, because the reasonable expectation is that what you are really paying for is to convert currency (or dilithium) into EC at a very high rate and you value and control your activities according to that realistic expectation.
But again, you did not have to take that route and grind those resources or spend that money for one of those ships, if you did not want to. It was a true optional because you could still do very well on endgame content without it.
But now, if you want the very best gear in the game, you have NO option--repeat, NO option--but to gamble.
And it's that aspect of the upgrade system that I find the most odious. You have very, very little way (unlike the lockboxes) if you want epic gear, to get around this outrageous gamble, and no way to predict exactly, as you could with the Lobi option for lockboxes, exactly when you would be guaranteed enough to get yourself a high-value ship (assuming you weren't one of the rare few to be lucky enough to have a ship jump out of a box early into your spending push), except to assume a mathematical worst-case scenario that is pretty resources/financially horrifying when you think about it.
In my case I have made the exact decision that Cryptic should not want a player to make.
That is, that I will not spend money on it, what I do through dilithium and EC, I will do very slowly and piecemeal, and that all efforts and resources will stop going into an item once it hits Mk XIV, regardless of its quality on the final upgrade. I will make no upgrade that I do not know to have absolute, 100% certainty of improving the stats on an item. Period. And I know that I cannot be anywhere near the only player to be making that decision.
But let me tell you something from a "player happiness" standpoint.
It is not fun to have to reconcile yourself to knowing you will always have what will very soon be substandard gear, because the alternative is just too financially insane to think about. It is demoralizing.
And let's not forget...Cryptic has not increased the dilithium supply or refining cap to relieve the burden enough to where if you do pay, you just might feel like the game gave you a bit of a helping hand to get to that point.
Worse...Cryptic has nerfed dilithium rewards in STF's and also made it much harder to complete the STF's that reward what the old ones used to.
So...what happens when you increase demand and constrict supply? Eventually there comes a point when people leave or stop contributing money and the revenue shrinks drastically. When you combine the other factors in the game--EC sinks that go with this system as well, bugs, and customer service failures as well...unfortunately, things are now set up to potentially head in a very bad direction for all of us, players and employees alike. And it may be that upgrade system, on top of everything else that has already happened, could be the thing that well and truly breaks the game economy and breaks the player base.
This only becomes more critical when we look at some possibilities as to what could be going on on the back end, in the real-life economics. Not all of the things I delve into in the next section are necessarily happening, and I want to go ahead and get that disclaimer out of the way right now. But some of those "not happening nows" may be the ghosts of Christmas Present, yes, but others may be the ghosts of Christmas Future, assuming the game gets that far to have a Winter Wonderland Future, that Cryptic/PWE needs to take warning and watch out for...
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To be honest, I will always look fondly at Voyager (the show). While some of you may find it to be the worst Trek show, Voyager was the show that got me into Star Trek, and that is why I will always love it even with its faults and occassional shoddy writing. That's why when Delta Rising was announced, the allure of the opportunity to revisit some of the places in the show and to roam Voyager's corridors and rooms was enough to get me to sign-up for STO.
Before I share my thoughts about Delta Rising's content, I'd like to touch upon one of the biggest player complaints about the update - levelling to 60 and the spec points that follow it.
As a new player (I joined in October), I don't find it that bad. I got to level 50 before I even got to the DR content. And that was without doing any of the Patrols, STFs or Red Alerts. I essentially played through most of this MMO in single-player mode. I did DOff constantly, not because I knew it was a good source of XP or EC (I didn't know it then), but because it was there and having free slots or playable DOff missions available irked me so I took every mission I can just because it felt good to do so. I also replayed some of the missions to get some set items (Solanae Space Set and Environmental Suits).
I started trying to earn reputation marks at my early 50's. I unlocked the Dyson Sphere and played quite a bit of the aerial missions there because I found it to be a good break from the dark bleakness of space. Playing through the Mirror Universe event also helped a lot (even if I managed to only get 13 of the 14 Transporters). Exploring new parts of space, new missions (STFs and storylines) kept the game fresh for me and I was level 56 (or 57 I can't remember exactly) when I finished all of the pre-DR missions.
When I was done with the pre-DR content, I was faced with the decision to start Delta Rising or to try to gain more levels. I was so close to 60 after all. I decided to finally try out the Patrols. I actually liked some of the Patrols. They had relatively quick XP gains (some of them involved merely scanning stuff for some good XP). I got my toon up to 58 on Patrols and DOffs. I didn't do all of the patrols either. I only played through the Sirius Block once and a couple of other patrols I stumbled along the way while roaming space. I never even did any of the Tau Dewa petrols (even now that I am 60).
At level 58, I decided that it was safe to start the Delta missions and play through them without interruption. True enough, I got to 60 well before I finished all of Delta Rising's storylines.
Past 60 and having done all of the missions, getting experienced slowed somewhat, but not to a crawl. I'm still working on the reputation system, so I get a ton of XP from doing STFs while trying to earn much needed marks. I'm currently playing through normal space queues (Borg Disconnected, Azure Nebula Rescue, Fleet Blockade and Infected Space). Between mission cooldowns I spend my time selling stuff at the exchange (I leveled so fast I was both a noob skillwise and financially poor) to gain EC, doing DOff missions, setting up R&D tasks and working on the hourly rep projects (my only source of the rep-specific crafting materials). Overall I'm gaining 2-3 spec points per week and I am fine with that pace. I am also able to get to my maximum daily Dil cap just by doing the above.
My experience as a new player makes me think that Cryptic balanced the XP curve for players starting at level 1 rather than 50. The problem for the vets is that they are starting the DR content at level 50, and there is not enough content to level from 50 to 60 with just DR's content. However, it was enough for me to play through the entire arc without interruption because I was boosted past 50 by previous missions/episodes. They don't have rep-gear and traits to work on too. They are basically left with trying to gain levels and spec points through grinding patrols or doing STFs that are no longer essential to them. New players have a ton of options and stuff to do, but old players don't. Unfortunately, that is a problem the majority of the playerbase have to face since new players like me are the minority, and many of the experienced players here had maxed out the characters and finished all of the prior content.
That is the main problem raising a level cap without enough content to ease the levelling pains introduces.
As for Delta Rising itself, it was really fun to hear the familiar voices of characters I enjoyed watching years back. A few weeks before starting STO I began re-watching all of the VOY episodes. The characters in the game sounded exactly like they did on the show. Except for Harry Kim. His voice sounded deeper, more projected. Sometimes unnaturally so to me. It just sounded to me like Garrett Wang was a bit conscious of the microphone so he spoke a bit more forcefully making his dialog sound like it was being delivered rather than being spoken naturally by the character. I agree that Neelix and Tuvok were standouts. Seven was still Seven, which should have been OK except that after 30 years, you'd have expected her to have changed a bit. She did gain some personality in the few years she was on Voyager. 30 years should have had more growth in her character. She should have been Annika by now.
I mentioned earlier that I breezed through Kobali, that's because I never really enjoyed ground combat in STO. To me it was one of the weaker parts of the game. So I hurried through the Kobali stuff just to get back to my space missions. I left out a ton of content back at Kobali. If I remember right, I just discovered the anti-virus the Vaadwaur were making when I quit the ground stuff and went back to space. After reading your review, I'll definitely finish that arc.
I'm ok with doing patrol missions but some of the patrol missions in DR just felt wrong for my FED character. I mean, no respectable Starfleet officer would help the Hirogen hunt down another species for sport just because they happened to be enemies of the Federation. There were other patrols where I felt that diplomacy was a better solution but the game gave me no other choice but to fire first.
While that may be a widespread problem in STO (for both ground and space missions, I mean Starfleet officers would generally set their phasers to stun rather than vaporize someone), it felt a bit more apparent in the Delta Quadrant. This was probably because we weren't in our territory to begin with. It almost felt like we were there as an invasion force intent on forcing our ideals to another species while masquerading as a police/peacekeeping group of explorers.
In a nutshell, I came into Delta Rising hoping that it would tie-up some loose ends Voyager left and allow us to correct some of the mistakes Janeway did. STO fell a bit short on that, and personally I prefer the way the story progressed in the books. I generally enjoyed playing through them though but it left me wanting for a little more out of the story. Maybe that would be addressed in future missions/additions whenever they may come.
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Personally I am fine with the current upgrade system and the difficulty in attaining Ultra Rare or Epic items out of it. They are Ultra Rare and Epic after all, the names themselves should indicate
they are very difficult to acquire.
Here are my reasons:
I've only started on the upgrade and crafting process myself and I've only upgraded one of my items to Mk XIV. I stopped there since I am planning to get all of my gear first to Mk XIV before even starting to consider upgrading the rarity of the item. An upgrade in rarity is a bonus, but it is something in my opinion something that I don't need to fully enjoy the game.
In the same way you treated lockboxes, the upgrade process can be a good thing if you spend wisely on it. It is a Dilithium sink for sure, but a manageable one if you don't rush it in my opinion.
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The new-player perspective is also an interesting piece and allows me to address something that I might not have had the time to get into otherwise. Before I say this, I want to make it clear that I do not begrudge anybody joining the game with Delta Rising. If this game is going to survive it will need new players as much as it will old ones.
But the piece that it does make me wonder about, though, when I see how much more accepting new players are of what's going on, compared to old players, is whether Cryptic/PWE is banking on using new players to make up for an *expected* serious loss of old players and if some there have decided that the business of old customers is not important. Now, I am NOT saying every Cryptic employee thinks this way as an individual. We do know Tacofangs is on record stating that he does not want to see a player exodus. But somewhere at Cryptic I do wonder if this is the business strategy: to assume that by replacing older customers with new ones who are easily "trained" to spend in a way that Cryptic wants them to, they will do better.
This is a maneuver that I think will backfire, but it does really beg the question of how much new players are being rather cynically *used* as a part of Cryptic's business strategy, and I think you should keep that in mind when reading this review. Without a frame of reference for when things were better balanced, can a new player be sure of whether they are getting a good deal? Even more true (though I have no idea of your gaming history) if a new customer has never played another MMO. Or worse, has only played freemium cell phone games.
The other thing to remember with your leveling experience versus a legacy player is that those of us who have been here have, most often, completed all of our pre-DR missions before ever stepping foot in the Delta Quadrant, and at that time, our SP after 50 didn't go anywhere. It just vanished into the ether. So that nice Skill Point boost you're getting for *every* mission's first play through...the majority of us are NOT getting. Which means the ONLY thing awarding first-time playthrough ASAP that we can use to get us from 50 to 60 and beyond, unless we want to do a lot more mindless grinding, is the Delta Rising missions, and they are *nowhere* even remotely close to enough.
In my opinion it is a poor, if not disrespectful move to existing customers to essentially *punish* them for longtime playing, for loyalty, and for investing into multiple toons.
Again, that does not mean your perspective is invalid, but I do think it misses the bigger picture. Even so I do not begrudge you for being here because if we are going to get out of this, it will take all of us.
I will address your points about the upgrade system in another post after I get home from work. I can see where you are going and some of these are points I considered as well, but I think there are some specific, important areas where the comparison that you made to the lockboxes breaks down, and I would like to address them in depth.
Thank you again for taking the time to provide such detailed replies.
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There are a few important reasons why the lockboxes and the upgrades don't compare as closely as you hope they do.
The first reason is that with the lockboxes, as long as you are not treating them as though the ship is the only valuable thing to come out of them, EVERY time you open a lockbox, something jumps out that can help you in some way--whether it be something you sell for EC, a useful weapon or console, a DOFF pack (some of which have some very high-value DOFFs), dilithium mining claims, boosts to make your grinding easier, etc. You ALWAYS benefit even if just a little.
Once you hit Mk XIV on upgrades, you don't just have diminishing returns--you have a flat-out returns nose dive. If every action you took in the upgrade system rewarded you just a little (another good comparison is the rep system, for a system that rewards you a little every step of the way), then I could make the lockbox comparison more easily. As it is, though, I do not feel that comparison is justified.
The other reason I don't think you can compare the two is that with the lockboxes, you can calculate exactly what amount you have to put in to get the guaranteed high-value ship (that is, the Lobi store). That option is very, very predictable and stable, and easy to plan for to determine how much you want to finance by EC, how much by dilithium grinding, and how much by cash. The upgrade system, in contrast, is incredibly volatile...and let's not even talk about how you can't predict the mods you're going to get, whereas in comparison when you're going for a Lobi ship, you can see exactly what the base stats on that ship are before you even start. You know in advance exactly what that Lobi ship is worth to you whereas your modifiers in the upgrade are so unpredictable that you really have no idea whether what you're getting will be a truly beneficial ultra-rare or epic. Because some mods really are better than others, and getting stuck with a substandard one and having to start all over is just not worth it.
Those two I think destroy the comparison right away.
To address a few more specific points: I think you're too optimistic about the way the in-game power disparity is really going to be, and the Extra Credit F2P video people have been posting goes a long way towards explaining what the real effect on the economy and playerbase is, and how that can end up doing the exact opposite to what you predict and driving players away. Lockboxes didn't cause this so much because while some of the ships you get through that system are outstanding, some of the ones in the C-store are equally so.
The other point you raise about "keeping rare gear rare"...I think most people, myself included, would not be so bothered about that if there were an alternate route to get that ultra-rare/epic gear that was skill, accolade, or level-based. It could be made very challenging, much like it used to be to get gear through the STF's, but I think that would have been a far better way to enforce rarity than putting it behind an insane paywall.
And as I pointed out in my other post...a business strategy based on luring people in without a frame of reference as to how far costs have gotten out of control and considering legacy players to be acceptable losses is not a respectful strategy at all towards those who have put a great deal of time and sometimes money into the game.
None of this is to say you should not speak up--but since this thread is about discussing reasons behind things so that players and devs have a chance to see all of this in one convenient place, please don't be upset at my expressing such strong disagreement. It betters the thread that you challenged me to get all of this out here when I may not have thought about it before.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
INTRODUCTION
THE STORY
Disclaimer
Background
The Space Mission Arc
The Space Patrols
The Kobali Ground Arc
Character Development
Story Progression and Verdict
QUALITY ASSURANCE, MECHANICS, AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS
Testing and QA
Progression--The Mechanics Side, SpecGate/SPGate
The Golden Ratio: Time, Effort, and Money Versus Reward
The PvE Queues
The Upgrade System
(And more to come!)
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Crypticonomics: Speculations on Market and Social Forces
Now that we've had a good look at the mechanics of the game and some of the in-game economic forces, it's time to use our imaginations a bit and think about what might be going on on the back end, or what has the potential to occur if the current situation continues without significant overhauls. The point of this section is essentially to illustrate what's at stake.
One note about this section before I start...as my objectives here have changed even between posting the last section and actually starting into this one.
After I started this review series, many of the things from an economic standpoint that I would have covered in greater depth in this section ended up being wonderfully (and sometimes very bitingly) addressed in the South Park "Freemium Is Not Free" episode and the Extra Credits "Doing Free to Play Wrong" video, which I highly, highly recommend (note that STO fits the second model in the Extra Credits video). So, what I'm going to try to do is address a few elements here that are not covered so much (or at all) in those two videos.
The Costs of Delta Rising--Two Looks at Possible Breaking Points
One of the first things to remember about Delta Rising is that five actual cast members as voice actors means that one of two things is likely to have occurred--both of which have the potential to severely backfire on Cryptic/PWE if the backlash against Delta Rising in all areas--story, mechanics, and in-game economics--continues to be as severe as it has been both in the game and forum environments, and now, as indicated by Massively's recent article, a reaction that is beginning to spread to the gaming press.
The first possible scenario is one in which on top of the sorts of high costs for dev, normal voiceover, and other staff time that undoubtedly went with Delta Rising, just as with Legacy of Romulus, going with so many high-powered voice actors has created a scenario where, if not causing outright debt, has significantly raised the break-even point for this expansion. This means that if player numbers are not sustained over time as they were with LoR, the pre-order/first-day flash in the pan is not going to be enough to sustain further development when viewing STO by itself as a single business unit, because Cryptic was betting on a much higher sustained amount of spending than what actually materialized.
This scenario, unfortunately, has the potential to generate a serious and rapid crash-and-burn, and IF it is in play, may be the hardest one for Cryptic to do damage control on because of the speed that would be required, and the fact that we are almost two months into DR at the time of this post and seeing no signs of serious changes in mechanics, story, or in-game economy to address the problem. There has been a lot of sacrificed time and with this much sustained bad blood generated between the players and Cryptic, the amount of sustained investment required to do the right kind of turnaround in terms of development and communication efforts increases steadily over time.
Cryptic--think of this as a reverse timegate, in which the longer you wait to push the button, the higher and higher the cost goes.
The second possible scenario, while perhaps easier for Cryptic to react to if the realization fully sinks in as to what STO has gotten into, is the more insidious one and harder to spot--and some of the reactions we have seen from certain staff make me suspect more and more that this is closer to the scenario we are in, due to the way logical and psychological fallacies play into it. In other words, while easier to correct theoretically, it is far harder to recognize the need for a correction until a much subtler point of no return than the one in the first scenario has been passed.
In this scenario, development efforts--whether for internal reasons or through an external push from PWE--have been pushed in a corner-cutting direction and while such things as the voice-over expenditures do not present an immediate threat of bringing down STO's revenue structure, the opportunity costs (that is, the opportunity that you lose out on by spending your money in one place, when it could have been spent elsewhere) will more slowly and less dramatically, but just as surely, bring down the game.
Note that I allow this "external influence" (or perhaps "divided team") possibility because I simply cannot believe that the whole dev team just has no pride in their work. And I have even seen evidence to the contrary from certain staff members...Tacofangs being the prime example of someone who has clearly put a lot of personal investment into his work, and reacts in every way, often for the better but on a few occasions for the worse, like what he creates is "his baby." The degree of personal care for what he does is unmistakable, both when he shows his work off with obvious pride and engages the players to talk about it (sometimes discussing suggestions for further growth or improvement), and when he shows what read to me as clear, genuine hurt when some players used his excellent work on Club 47 as a scapegoat. As someone who writes extensively, and has dabbled in other art forms, I personally empathized with Taco because I have been in situations like that and I know how deeply it stings, no matter how hard you try to hide it. But it doesn't sting like that if you don't care.
(Note that art devs DO NOT have the skill sets to address the issues that I have discussed elsewhere in this review, except for the aforementioned Seven of Nine error.
I would not be surprised if this attitude of real pride in craftsmanship extends to the entire art team that we have not spoken so much to, and those responsible in all ways for pulling off the look of a mission, a ship, a character, or an environment, based on the fact that out of all elements of the game, we have seen a general consistent trend of improvement and growth over time. Art for each expansion or new mission almost always tops the previous one, and when it fails to impress (Seven of Nine), the anomaly is notable exactly because of the stellar background it stands out so jarringly against.
I am willing to believe that there are others on the dev team who do other parts of the game, who care about their work. Some of those may even be the very same individuals who are coming under pressure from various sources, even if we do not see it...either because the individual is not posting, or because they are being required to hold to the party line. Or in the most insidious case, the one that sets up this particular failure scenario, because of getting into a bunker mentality of defensiveness, which could come as a direct result of being attacked, or from other sources such as fear of being the one to take the fall or even fear of unemployment. Some people toss that threat around casually but those fears are real, they are NOT fun at all for the people going through them. Believe me, I know. I've been on the wrong end of a restructuring before and even with a six-month lead time to find another position, it is still one of the most awful, nerve-wracking feelings. And as we hear in Dune, "Fear is the mind killer." It only accelerates the oncoming storm.
In this second scenario, therefore, Cryptic/PWE may have budgeted adequately to cover its costs for the expansion--but decisions to cut costs and even cut corners in some areas (particularly in knowingly pushing things like the upgrade and storyline out the door half-finished to meet a deadline that in my opinion was far too aggressive) due to opting for things like having five higher-paid voice actors, will cause STO to suffer over time as players revolt because of the unfinished, ill-conceived, and rushed aspects of the expansion.
And in these kinds of "slow burn" scenarios, exactly because the worst consequences do not materialize immediately and in some cases are outright masked by short-term bursts in profitability and selected metrics that are likely very gratifying for those in charge, it becomes very easy to believe that...well...to borrow the meme, that "everything is awesome." And as the game and dev team comes more and more under siege, this causes all sorts of counterproductive and sometimes even outright destructive reactions both in changing the game itself, and in communicating with the playerbase, which is unfortunately up in arms.
That, needless to say, makes it much harder for them (by this I mean Cryptic as a whole, not any specific individuals) to receive feedback and to correct what's gone wrong. And the longer this goes on, the more those opportunity costs we discussed earlier come back to bite Cryptic. And the next expansion--if STO survives long enough--is at even greater risk of overpromising and underdelivering because the resources haven't been able to expand proportionate to ambition, and the pressures on the Cryptic team to turn a profit have become that much more intense. Imagine an even more severe backlash than Delta Rising. And try to imagine STO surviving that.
It's not a pretty picture.
An afterword for this section...
I am sure there are some who will think that by bringing a human element into this discussion and looking at how these potential scenarios can happen without automatically assuming that the devs must harbor a universal burning hatred for the player, don't give a damn about their work, or otherwise enjoy pissing people off, that I am "making excuses" for them. While it is always possible individuals could fit those bad traits, I don't see what is accomplished by making those assumptions other than stoking one's anger further. It also makes us (in my opinion) less likely to come to a solution if we do not attempt to understand even slightly, where the other side is coming from and recognizing that sometimes the road to hell, or at least a hellish scenario for all involved, is paved with good intentions or at least not paved with the intentions of doing something horrible.
I could still have all of this wrong, as I can't read minds, yet I think even the attempt to look at it from a less personally-accusatory standpoint means something.
Which ties very nicely into the next review topic...and the last one I have left to discuss, before moving into the final conclusion and "in a nutshell" suggestions as to how Cryptic could accomplish a turnaround on Delta Rising (and STO as a whole) before it becomes too late for all of us.
Now that we have seen what could be at stake, we will look at the attempts to manage the crisis and try to come to grips with the most human element of this whole thing.
"All we need to do...is make sure...we keep talking."
NEXT POST: Customer Relations and Crisis Management. As a note, I WILL be referring to old material in the upcoming section, from previously-written posts of mine, and possibly even editing it into a form appropriate for this review series.
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been there, seen that on april 2010.
I think there is more than enough feedback coming in. Not talking about a wave of forum rants, but they chould have noticed it in their often-quoted metrics.
Problem is - as always: the path between the guy who reads the metrics and the guy who makes decisions.
No I do not believe that Cryptic would intentionally alienate their current player base. It was just an unfortunate result of raising the level cap with a relative lack of content for those coming from level 50 onwards.
Usually, the progression in games such as this is balanced based on player progress from start to finish. Basically, you'd want to plan your content so that at the bare minimum, a player starting from level 1 can get to the level cap by playing through your designed content (missions/quests) and other game activities.
Yes as I stated, it was a consequence of the lack of content for those starting at "base" level 50. While new players such as I are boosted by the existing content and episodes, older players do not have that advantage. I do not think it was deliberate. The lack of content was probably the result of any of the following:
Of course there could be more reasons unique to their situation, or reasons that I didn't think of right now (posting in a rush).
I've worked on other games in the past (IP based MMOs, single-player PC games, online browser games and mobile games) and these are some of the common problems why something may be released half baked. Often times, we'd start with a really nice list of features and activities that get crossed-off over the development cycles so that we can make our deadlines. Again one can argue that they should have just released later, but sometimes that decision is above the developer's power, or even out of the company's hands.
I enjoyed reading your stuff too and I like your balanced and honest approach to assessing the current situation.
Those were some very valid points. The upgrade system is really more of a gamble than the lockboxes. It's not something every player needs to do though. If a player wants to rise above the ranks of average players, then they could go for it. However, they should weigh the costs of upgrades (there are spreadsheets out there) plus the uncertainty of the finished product vs simply buying a finished item close to their needs/wants in the Exchange.
An upgrade in rarity isn't a total stab in the dark either. If this post is correct, then there is a maximum worst-case scenario cost. Although you are right, the modifier you'll get can still be the random joker.
Some valid points there. Being new here, I am not thoroughly familiar with the community and how they can react to changes, especially those that affect their power in the game. But I've seen so many doom and gloom threads in other games too, some with compelling evidence and commentary that proved to be ultimately premature. Hck even Facebook gets a lot of "I quit" and user rant posts when changes roll out but it's' still the top social network in terms of numbers.
The onus is on Crpytic now. They have to filter out the viable responses in the forums (constructive posts, not just player rants) and weigh that against their metrics, targets and projections. Then they should act accordingly.
I think they should diversify player opportunities, and not put all of their eggs in one basket. The current upgrade system is one way to do it, something that could work. However, they should add other ways to gain really good Mk XIV items, preferably an activity that encourages players to play in group activities, rather than sit on a timer. Multiple ways to gain good gear will be more fun I would think. If you do not want the paywall from the upgrade system, you can perhaps play through a reputation style system to build new gear, or you can grind for awesome gear drops (equal to the best gear that can be crafted). It serves different playstyles and can keep things fresh for the player.
Again, I do not think that was their strategy. I've only come across one project that had a strategy close to what you are saying. As expected, it sold at first, then failed when players wisened up. It's a short-term strategy that is only viable on something you intend to drop in the very near future.
I appreciate your opinions. You make very good, level-headed points. Unlike some posts around the forums that merely complain, you present solutions and constructive feedback. If I were part of the community management team here, your review of the expansion would be one of the threads I'd shortlist to evaluate the player feedback about the expansion.
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