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inkrunner
Member Posts: 407 Arc User
...aaaaaand we're back to pre-DR Steam player levels. Almost exactly a month later, even with all the events going on.
I know you're trying to do better, Cryptic (or at least I hope you are), but I fear what you've done so far in reparation of the several recent debacles might not be enough. I hope it is, though, because I have had fun in this game before - I believe you can help me, and others like me,to be able to do so again.
Suggestions:
-Ease crafting grind in some way - really anything in that vein would probably be welcomed by players.
-Ease XP leveling post-60 - leveling in this game has not historically been stressful; some relief from the typical grind here I think would go a long way towards bringing people back.
-Make the game more alt-friendly - you already did this with the Reputation System updates, and doing the above two things would go a long way towards fixing this as well.
Morale doesn't improve from continued beatings; loosen up our restrictions a little - make everyone happy to spend money again. I've seen you do it before, I believe you can do it again.
I know you're trying to do better, Cryptic (or at least I hope you are), but I fear what you've done so far in reparation of the several recent debacles might not be enough. I hope it is, though, because I have had fun in this game before - I believe you can help me, and others like me,to be able to do so again.
Suggestions:
-Ease crafting grind in some way - really anything in that vein would probably be welcomed by players.
-Ease XP leveling post-60 - leveling in this game has not historically been stressful; some relief from the typical grind here I think would go a long way towards bringing people back.
-Make the game more alt-friendly - you already did this with the Reputation System updates, and doing the above two things would go a long way towards fixing this as well.
Morale doesn't improve from continued beatings; loosen up our restrictions a little - make everyone happy to spend money again. I've seen you do it before, I believe you can do it again.
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Personally I believe thing will never get better until they beam GEKO into space.
D,
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Please keep the QQ to a minimum.
>>>PUNISH THE FEDs<<<
>>>Positive Feedback from a PvE HERO<<<
GG Cryptic.
dnirg eht nioj
Examples:
1) The ridiculous 1 year grind on each school of the R&D system.
2) While I get the "pay dil to speed up" thing on the R&D system since time=XP there, there is absolutely no reason except creating a dil sink to put a timer on upgrading gear.
3) The long grind to level 60, and then repeating that 59->60 grind 45 more times to fill specialization trees pretty much killed alts except for farming.
4) The advanced/elite queues are pretty much dead thanks to their approach to making NPCs harder by just purely pushing their hulls/shields higher.
They pushed casual players out and they're going to have to somehow bring them back in.
Though the way testing was on tribble a lot of this shouldn't have happened in the first place.
It took 2 - 3 months after LoR to get back to pre-LoR levels.
So? That's a given.
But these are the only numbers we have, and I have no reason to think that Steam STO players are behaving any differently then ARC users or "launcher users".
Give it a rest already because the grumpy old man routine you're putting up is growing boring.
Trust me, even if life hack technology existed some people still wouldn't understand how sample based statistics worked, I have tried explaining it to people before but it is just a waste of time.
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
I said pre-DR levels, which were about 2.5 k on weekdays, not the pre-DR average. There is a reason I linked to the 3 month chart: it's the longest day-by-day reading available (meaning the weekend bump is clearly visible), and therefore the data I used to determine trends.
Huge uptick on the last day of the mirror event (gee, I wonder why), but weekend levels still appear consistent with, if not lower than, pre-DR levels.
In other words, one player on for a continuous 24 hours would add 1 to the top linechart, and 24 to the bottom linechart. 20 players on for an hour each would add 20 to the top chart, and a total of 20 (20 players X 1 hour each) to the bottom.
If this is a correct conclusion of how those work, then the charts demonstrate that DR had a pip of activity, and that total accumulated playerbase hours is now a result of "quick get in, set up doff missions, log off". It would also imply that the game hasn't had so few players on at any one time in its F2P/Steam history.
And that's what happens when you treat your customer base as the enemy.
(creepy seeing the nov20th 15:00 to nov21 11:00 lol)
The average player for DR seems to be equivalent to LoR. But to be fair, while it varies, it's close to what we have when we have a season for example (slightly less than for february for example, season 8.5). Probably because the majority of those players are simply regular players that always play the game for expansions and seasons alike.
However, the peak player is very low. Considering the game was hyped pretty much the same way than LoR, it failed to attract people. Especially when you consider LoR had a lot of server trouble and emergency downtime and all.
Finally, it's worth noting Cryptic did several event to try to keep the game from bleeding (started when the graphic stop crashing in the beginning of DR). Free lobi giveaway, another free giveaway for Europe players, double marks, double dil event.... This kind of events makes the numbers higher than they would have been. Also, LoR didn't had all those extra events, so the numbers you see for LoR can only be attributed for the extension itself.
It is my opinion the expansion was not successful at all. At least as it was planned. Backlash aside, they made so many event to try to keep the player, even without the charts, we would already know that. But the chart shows the hype was not enough, and player retention was extremely low. Or maybe it was high, but veterans players left in mass, which is pretty much the same in the end.
I assumed that too, but if you look at the graphic as it is now, the bottom linechart (solid) has current lines since the DR "pip" underneath the rest of the line excepting maybe October 2012. Because of that, it simply doesn't seem to fit the "average players" numbers. I imported the data into Excel and that solid linechart doesn't seem to represent either peak, nor average as displayed below.
I agree with the rest of your assessment, it's just the nature of the solid chart I think we may have been misinterpreting.
I only have one friend left that plays this game still, and that's all he does now. Of course I could be dead wrong about this but the queues could be a possible indicator.
There have been a lot of recent complaints about slow or even completely dead queues. I believe your assessment of actual activity is correct.
Crafting is supposed to be an intensive and complicated system to produce goods to be sold on the market, that's not really possible right now, it takes too many resources, including dilithium to actually be able to produce and upgrade an item to make it worthwhile to sell or to buy.
As far as the levelling grind, that should be faster to sixty with a grind for all the specialization points needed to max a toon, it gives something to work towards as a goal and it gives a nice boost when you actually earn a point just playing normally.
min-maxing in a game is fine but it does tend to have deleterious affects on the majority of the community in favor of the minority of min-maxers.
They want this because some people have many chars and get tons of dilithium and that is not in cryptics interest.
What they do now is of course wrong.
To play multiple chars adds to the game alot.
Yet not everyone wants to play several chars a day or only 2 or 3.. maybe even only one.
What would be good is a change to the daily dilithium refining cap.
Cryptic should make it account wide.
So each day you can refine X amount of dilithium on your account.
It doesnt matter if you do it with one char or with 10 chars.
Of course if you do it with more chars it is a little easier cause you can pick only a few fast and easy dilithium sources to farm.
There are alot of players who only play one char and even if they play alot.. they have a dilithium problem, while cryptic is throwing more and more dilithium costs at us to counter those multi char farmers.
So Cryptic/Customers should find a number that is fair for players and cryptic.
Which means that players with one or few chars will gain from this while those 5+ chars farmers will lose.
So what would be fair.. 24k dilithium cap per account/day?
When they do this the dilithium resource should also be shared between all you chars like zen is so we dont need to go the way using the dili exchange to move our dilithium between our chars.
The Steam numbers are not an accurate representation. We've been over this too many times to argue.
But I look at our fleet, and the players from my friends list that have left for other games. The simple answer is that the game's fun was sucked out the Delta Rising airlock.
Voice your opinion. Use Twitter. Use Facebook. Post anywhere a review is made. Make your feelings known. Vote with your wallet. The dev's do listen, but the executives won't act till it impacts their bottom line.
I can't agree with that, not because you're wrong, but because the dilithium based economy is a huge pain in the butt. It's also horribly overused, everything utilizes dilithium from upgrading weapons to upgrading doffs, it's rediculous and seems more designed to obfuscate the actual intent of gating the TRIBBLE out of the game than to add anything to it. If dilithium was a marketable commodity like the crafting resources, that would be a different matter, it isn't. There are only two ways to get dilithium, buy it outright with cash converted to zen converted to dilithium or spend most of your time farming it.
Full disclosure, I am one of those guys with a crapload of toons, I do play most of them for variety but I have some that only do doff missions just to get the dilithium, I currently get 500 to 1000 dilithium per day from each of them, and would still fit in your 27k per diem plan, but since the whole dilithium system is silly, I have to disagree with you for that reason only.
Careful posting with facebook, I can't post on STO's facebook page anymore 'cause someone got a bit peeved when I publically questioned their business ethics and recommended that everyone with an old business ethics textbook to spare send it to Cryptic's corporate headquarters.
For some reason, they took offense to that so be aware that they will stop you from posting if you cross some invisible and wavering line that they seem to love to move about.
I agree to an extent with what you've said; my position could probably be summed as a series of key points.. I want the game's machanics to be:
Consistent: if it takes R&D skill to level up rewards like those from Reputation, then this should have been the case all the way through. This also means that it could have been introduced along the lines of Omega being able to be "upgraded" via rep projects rather than "Oh you've got Mk XI? Well if you want Mk XII you have to regrind the whole thing!"
Predictable: If it takes "one mission plus one patrol" to achieve a level, then that should be the case all the way through. If it takes "one mission" moving up to "five missions", then it should be a steady incline. "One mission" at Level 1-50, then abruptly being "10 missions" 51-60, and then "75 missions (or whatever it is)" at 61+ (specs are levels let's face it) is just asking for trouble. Which is what they've got.
Stable: Devs should have took a position and stuck to it. We were told that Elite would be a new level and Normal/Advanced would stay the same. Okay great, stick to it. Don't go changing stuff every five minutes like a spoiled brat with ADD and too many toys on Christmas morning who didn't get exactly what they expected.
Focused: Is it meant to be an adventure-based MMO? Fine, give us adventure with intriguing engaging tales. Is it meant to be a battle-strategy MMO? Fine, up the battle capabilities to more than point-and-click. Don't do this "It's adventure so here's a new story... but it's really battles so here's lots of five groups of five patrols to grind your way through"
Flexible: Stop trying to force us into some sort of funnel. If the devs would personally like to play MMOs in a particular way, that's totally irrelevant to the business they're employed by. It's clear that STO has a broad range of players, and they're doing nobody any favors by constantly stuffing things around as they try to force everyone into their own tiny little opinions about how people "should" play, as though we're all rats in a maze.
Player-Oriented: how do players feel they've "achieved" something? In my case, I felt as though I achieved in a myriad of ways, none of which includes the current "slow down to a crawl" grindfest. I don't need Cryptic employees to tell me the One Way To Achieve... I'm a grownup and can decide for myself, thank you very much. Now get out of my way and let me achieve in my own way.
Enjoyable: Unlike for the employees, for the customers, this isn't a job, it's entertainment. It's not a system where we must do X to be justified in using it. Currently STO isn't entertaining, because the enjoyment factor has been replaced by the "Hard Brain-Numbing Grind Equals Achievement" thought bubble that has somehow infested the gaming industry. And on the flipside: for employees, this isn't entertainment, this is a job. Are we customers not behaving in-game the way you expected or wanted us to? Well so sad, too bad. We're not here to provide you with anything but money. If on the whole, we want something other than what you've provided, that's your failure, not ours.
Business: It's a business. We're customers, Cryptic is a profit enterprise, hiring employees to make something that will translate into profit. It also means that customer need should be first and foremost. If an employee can't cope, or has no interst in developing what the playerbase wants, they need to be shown the door, for their own benefit, the benefit of customers, and of shareholders. Customers aren't going to pay an entertainment enterprise for something that lacks entertainment value. Fact of life.
And finally there should have been some effort to 'grandfather' established players. Want to change the leveling system? Fine, but then it should have included a legacy "Translate unspent boff XP points into points for use in Spec system" or whatever. This is precisely what happened with R&D Materials. Want to change it from a western adventure MMO into an Asian grinder? Fine, work out a way to grandfather current playerbase.
This stuff isn't rocket science. The only thing I can think of is that employee egos are getting in the way of business decisions. And unless it changes, nobody's going to be the winner of this.
I used to play quite regularly up until DR hit.
Spent a week grinding my face off to hit 60.
Saw the "fun" I had doing that.
Decided to vote with my wallet and time and stop playing. I haven't logged in since that first week of DR. I'm still looking for a "Whoops we screwed up, we're doing x,y,z to fix things." I doubt I'll be seeing that given the responses from cryptic I've see.
They've admitted they don't bother reading the forums, they seem to ban people who make them look too bad on Facebook... We simply don't have another choice but to stop playing and hope they get the message as they simply don't want to hear anything.
Not that this has been all that bad... I've been able to clear out a good portion of my steam backlog.
You would still be able to do what you do now.. just that once the account cap (whatever it will be) is reached it ends.
Or you say "TRIBBLE those one or few char players, i want to get ****tons of dilithium and dont give a TRIBBLE if the game isnt enjoyable for them"?