When is Cryptic's contract up? Maybe things will get better when someone else is given it. Not going to happen until then, apparently.
People keep saying that... if that happens the game just shuts down. It doesn't keep going with another company running it. They won't just hand over their intellectual property to the next company.
When is Cryptic's contract up? Maybe things will get better when someone else is given it. Not going to happen until then, apparently.
As the previous poster has said:
Cryptic owns the game. If the contract ends, the game gets shut down. Now, Cryptic's management could change (with or without personnel changes) or PWE could change or PWE could sell Cryptic and the game might survive any of those things.
CBS isn't running the game. Cryptic is paying CBS to allow them to put Star Trek branding on a game Cryptic owns.
The closest thing I could foresee if CBS pulled the license (which would be several years from now) might be that Cryptic could rapidly launch a new space MMO with all of the Star Trek assets stripped out but with the same core mechanics.
And if CBS took the license back and issued it to someone else, just based on the general market direction, the resulting game would not be an MMO as we think of it. It just wouldn't.
It might have online aspects. It might have RPG mechanics.
But I think what was an MMO is branching out in two directions. On one end you have facebook games and browser games. App games. Which are really imrpoving in quality and which have business models similar to STO's. This would be stuff like Star Trek: Alien Domain, which is a 25th century-set Star Trek game with Starcraft style mechanics coupled with what appear to be ground social hubs with very STO-like graphics. It went into beta last week.
On the other side would be something like Mass Effect, Batman: Arkham, or Telltale Games' products, which would be more like interactive movies with arcade mechanics and RPG and/or puzzle game gear. These would be unlikely to devote as much energy to space as STO does. You might have some space battles in the way Arkham is adding the Batmobile. Or stuff on par with Kingdom Hearts piloting. And you might have social hubs online or areas of the games where friends' characters are visible.
And you might see yet another game with a piloting sim type setup, likely a console game.
The Star Trek brand will persist. I think anybody else who tried for a similar type of game would make ground combat fun and might have strategic space combat. The one thing I doubt you will see is space action combat with the complexity STO has that also tries to tackle ground in the same game. At the very least not at launch. You might see an EvE type thing, where ground is basically a separate game, or two interlocking games.
Funnily enough it was so obvious to me that they were trying to manipulate players to make them play the new content that I just stopped going to the Delta Quadrant completely, weeks ago.
Good job, Cryptic.
I have only been using PvEs to level. The game may be giving me a big fat middle finger for it, but I respond with a big fat FO!
Fun in essence is a "why". Data mining, aka metrics, can only tell you what and when. It cannot tell you why. You can only get whys by doing other types of modeling (which are no more then guesses really) or by asking for and receiving feedback from your customers. But you can never get feedback from all of you customers so is will refine down to statistics (which gets back to that guesses thing again).
So ultimately fun is not something that you can directly measure. You end of with guesses which you hope are more accurate than not.
Cryptic changes something. The metrics tell it either:
- No Chance
- Numbers go down
- Numbers go up.
Based on that, Cryptic can look into what they can do - and that probably takes into account feedback. But if feedback is in conflict with the numbers, they can only choose to ignore it. They add increased skill point requirements to leveling and put i ncontent that requires to achieve certain levels. People on the forums tell you they hate it. But what if the numbers have gone up? Should they really listen to these people?
If the numbers go down, yeah, they certainly should - but if the metrics tell them they are doing better than before, what can they do with negative feedback?
I have some ideas, but I know that removing the fundamental change is not gonna be the solution. Tweaks, sure. I also could (and hope) see them looking into alt-friendliness. Alts are probably not that big of a concern to them - there is no guarantee that a player has any alts, so all the leveling expectations will be based on a single player. That is why we can have stuff like sponsorship tokens.
Another challenge is that the forum feedback tends to focus on the negative. That is natural. It's the same way on most MMO forums, I think. People that are happy just have less incentive - they figure if nothing changes, they stay happy. But unhappy people want a change - so they report about their issues. That's perfectly logical and legitimiate. But if 1000 people like a change and 500 people hate it, then you cannot expect a 10:5 distribution on forum replies.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Here's a useful fact I was taught when I did my sales training some years ago. For every one person that complains there are 9 more that don't, they simply stop using your product. Your 10:5 ratio is way off mate.
If someone was annoyed so much that they wanted to say something then it's not difficult to login to this forum and speak your mind. But you see most people are more casual, they will play a few hours a week and if they feel they don't like it any more then they will simply do something else, they won't complain, they don't care that much to write a forum post, but they do make their feelings known by no longer playing.
As for Cryptics Metrics, LOL right, like I believe them, they present us no factual evidence, they present us no qualitative or quantitative results, all we get is "the numbers are up", says who? How do they know? What does that mean? etc, sorry but I don't buy it.
Remember, and this is pretty well known across all industries:
For every one person that complains there are NINE more that don't, they simply stop using your product
Well put. I've changed my sig to represent what I think of STO's mysterious metrics and how Cryptic are interpreting them....
Here's a useful fact I was taught when I did my sales training some years ago. For every one person that complains there are 9 more that don't, they simply stop using your product. Your 10:5 ratio is way off mate.
You risk comparing apples and oranges.
I am not talking about hidden numbers of people that are unhappy. I am talking about the likehood that someone that is unhappy complains vs someone that is happy praises. Do you have anything from your sales training to enlighten us there?
You basically say that every person that complains actually represents 10 unhappy customers.
I think that every person that praises actually represents much more than 10 happy customers.
When was the last time you called the support of your local store to mention to them how satisfied you are with their service?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Funnily enough it was so obvious to me that they were trying to manipulate players to make them play the new content that I just stopped going to the Delta Quadrant completely, weeks ago.
Good job, Cryptic.
Same. I've only run one toon through. Managed level 60 on six others by doffing and Mirror Incursion.
I won't bore you with tons more stuff, but ask yourself this, if Cryptic had a customer satisfaction survey on the login application, the results to be posted real time on this forum, what do YOU think it would reveal, a company doing well with a happy player base or a company that doesn't listen to it's customers and does what the hell it likes as long as it's falsified and unrealistic metrics are looking good to present to PWE?
I don't know what it would reveal. Of course, even such surveys can have a selection bias (unless they are mandatory), but I would find it very interesting. Shame that Cryptic has never done such a thing to my knowledge.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Cryptic changes something. The metrics tell it either:
- No Chance
- Numbers go down
- Numbers go up.
Based on that, Cryptic can look into what they can do - and that probably takes into account feedback. But if feedback is in conflict with the numbers, they can only choose to ignore it. They add increased skill point requirements to leveling and put i ncontent that requires to achieve certain levels. People on the forums tell you they hate it. But what if the numbers have gone up? Should they really listen to these people?
Uh... I have a half dozen accounting textbooks that say you should place qualitative consumer feedback ahead of accounting metrics.
Because accounting performance is a lagging indicator and by the time you wait for that, it can be too late to completely mitigate the damage. This is what ACCOUNTANTS recommend: that you don't wait for them.
If Cryptic is doing some variation of the balanced scorecard, a quarter of that is customer satisfaction.
This idea of making decisions on the metrics without a framework that emphasizes qualitative data for quicker responsiveness seems pretty alien if that's how they do it.
I still find it a bit strange that people continue to defend Cryptic's recent terrible decisions and poor long-term strategic planning with regards to this game.
I know someone will come back and basically say that we should trust what they're doing, there are things we as players don't know but Cryptic do and other blind-faith statements like that but consider the fact that the staunchest of Cryptic's supporters - vocally and financially - are falling away. The people being most vocal in their support are putting up straw man arguments, leading people off on side issues and basically saying "There's stuff going on we don't need to know about" even though there's no way they themselves could possibly know that.
It all sounds hollow, it all sounds strange and they risk turning themselves into nothing more than a joke.
I don't hate the game and I don't need to be told "just shut up and play" by someone who knows as much about Cryptic's motives as I do.
I don't know what it would reveal. Of course, even such surveys can have a selection bias (unless they are mandatory), but I would find it very interesting. Shame that Cryptic has never done such a thing to my knowledge.
They did run a player survey once. Even gave out ZEN* for doing it if memory serves. That was under Atari.
* - It would have been Cryptic Points or Atari Tokens at that point. Which were the same premise except prices were different and they were worth 80 to $1, which many of us complained back then was a manipulative psychological practice.
I still find it a bit strange that people continue to defend Cryptic's recent terrible decisions and poor long-term strategic planning with regards to this game.
I think peope fail to see whatt he real long-term strategic planning is here, and that it is anything but "poor", but actually makes a lot of sense for Cryptic.
The whole level cap increase with new ships and upgrades is basically to replace the fleet and reputation grind that many players have effectively "finished". once you got a good endgame set, you don't really need a new one. The new ship tier means they can sell more ships again - if you alraedy own 20 C-Store ships, do you really need a 21st one? You do if your 20 C-Store ships are obsolete. Old lockbox ships are now also no longer the top tier ships - you need the new lock box ships for that.
The level grind at end game can serve to convert "story-only" gamers into more active players. Some will abandon STO because they can't just jump in, play the new mission, and leave, but others will stick around - and if you have to earn a lot of skill points, you need to play a lot - and that means you might want special or a even a new ship. Which m eans either you get busy on the Exchange and to Queued missions for marks, dilithium and what not (becoming "content" for other players), or you buy stuff directly.
There is a lot of long-term strategic planning behind this. It basically allows another year or more of selling stuff to customers, instead of having to face an increasingly saturated market.
Uh... I have a half dozen accounting textbooks that say you should place qualitative consumer feedback ahead of accounting metrics.
Are your accounting textbooks about forum feedback?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I think peope fail to see whatt he real long-term strategic planning is here, and that it is anything but "poor", but actually makes a lot of sense for Cryptic.
The whole level cap increase with new ships and upgrades is basically to replace the fleet and reputation grind that many players have effectively "finished". once you got a good endgame set, you don't really need a new one. The new ship tier means they can sell more ships again - if you alraedy own 20 C-Store ships, do you really need a 21st one? You do if your 20 C-Store ships are obsolete. Old lockbox ships are now also no longer the top tier ships - you need the new lock box ships for that.
The level grind at end game can serve to convert "story-only" gamers into more active players. Some will abandon STO because they can't just jump in, play the new mission, and leave, but others will stick around - and if you have to earn a lot of skill points, you need to play a lot - and that means you might want special or a even a new ship. Which m eans either you get busy on the Exchange and to Queued missions for marks, dilithium and what not (becoming "content" for other players), or you buy stuff directly.
There is a lot of long-term strategic planning behind this. It basically allows another year or more of selling stuff to customers, instead of having to face an increasingly saturated market.
As I already said, you have no more knowledge about Cryptic's decisions than I do.
No, it was just his best guess based on supposition and what he thinks Cryptic is planning. There's no actual information there because only Cryptic themselves know what their long-term strategic plans are.
Oh, and long-term in business typically covers 5 years or more. A year is just short term. If the planning for this game only covers one year then that's worrying.
Despite all the complaining and itching with a b in front of it metrics are the only true objective way to assess content in the game.
What is really funny though is that by far the best place in the game to gather XP and skill points is not located in the Delta Quadrant.
Gained 1.5 spec point in roughly 45 minutes by doing that particular content.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Shared it with my fleet, but keeping it off the forum to avoid leechers.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Are you sure it's actually more than Argala? You have to add critter kill count in too.
I'm sure. Final reward for argala is 5k, npc give 900 each but are limited in number. The content i play has npc with mostly lower reward each but there's literally tons of them.
Think SB24 on steroids and without the loot limit from the foundry.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
No, it was just his best guess based on supposition and what he thinks Cryptic is planning. There's no actual information there because only Cryptic themselves know what their long-term strategic plans are.
Oh, and long-term in business typically covers 5 years or more. A year is just short term. If the planning for this game only covers one year then that's worrying.
Moveable goal posts are really useful, I know.
But anyway:
The game isn't even 5 years old yet and it has seen a big ownership change and changed from a subscription to a F2P model.
Why should the developers devise a 5 year long plan and implement it in a single expansion?
And if only Cryptic knows its long term plans, why do you say it's a poor plan?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I'm pretty sure some years from now, students at colledges will study Cryptic Studios and their games as an example of failed game design and how not to design gameplay. What they're doing has gone waaay beyond stupid now.
Good job Dynamic Duo (Geko/D'Angelo)! :rolleyes:
I think any game that can show its highest revenue day was over four years after launch is likely to be studied as an example of doing things right.
I love how STO has been failing ever since launch of you believe the forums, and yet it just keeps getting bigger every year somehow... Almost as if the vocal minority on this forum are rarely indicative of the wider population.
And if only Cryptic knows its long term plans, why do you say it's a poor plan?
This is more-or-less my thought as well. Cryptic is a company, that both wants to make profit and wants to continue to exist. But in order to do that, it needs to create a product people will use.
To that end, there's an end-goal that the business plan sees as being achieved. If it's not, they'll try to change gears. Either way, I don't know the business plan. I hope it's a sound one, because I enjoy the game and want to see it continue running for a long time. But in the absence of information, I'm just going to keep playing.
One thing I find a little odd through is that so many posters are quick to jump on players who suggest the business plan is sound, claiming that those players are wearing rose-coloured glasses and have no way of making that determination. Why then are are some players so willing to slam the business model as negative on that very same lack of information?
We have no way of knowing anything about Cryptic's internal business model (note I say internal, given that we can obviously see how the company operates externally). All we know is that the game is still there, content is still being released, and there are plenty of Cryptic employees who are visible in the forum and elsewhere across the social media channels. Positive or negative business plan aside, the company is still alive to provide the STO service at this moment.
i really cant see what all the fuss is about skill points, i always knew the leveling from 50 to 60 would be slower then leveling from 0>50, having said that i have manage to level all of my characters to 60, sure they have boosted the points in the delta quadrant its only understandable that they want us to play the new stuff but having said that i have played very little DR stuff only the first 5 missions and all my other leveling has been done playing normal alpha quadrant stuff.
it only took me about 6 weeks to reach lv60 with all of my characters and since then i have been taking it easy just doing doff missions and epohh tagging as i didnt want to do too much before the winter event yet i have still now earned another specialization point with each of my characters by filling my skill point bar, it makes me wonder how many times over i could have filled it by hard core play in the delta quadrant maybe 3 or 4 more time over, maybe more.
this may not be quick enough for players who want instant gratification from the game but its nowhere near as slow as many posters are making it out to be.
and look at it this way before DR any play we did really got us nowhere as such, i had been stuck at level 50 so long i cant even remember, but since DR almost anything we do will earn us some skill points towards specialization points to some degree or another even if its only doff missions.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
You have a car company. You produce cars. You have a clear consumer base which likes your cars, finds them attractive, finds prices affordable and good for the value and purchases your cars when needed.
Then you announce a new car model. Send e-mails, promo materials to all your consmers that ever purchased one or more of your cars, offering them to buy the new state of the art model (which is more expensive than your previous cars at their release) at some 30% discount, as loyal customers.
So people see the promo and given the pleasant history with your company and cars they have, they consider it a bargain for a brand new state of the art model at a discount. People rush in and buy. Buy a lot of this new model.
Only this time the cars are faulty. Half of them are broken. The value your new models have is nowhere near the price and nowhere near the quality of previous models. These new cars fall apart in matter of weeks. Engines stop working, they consume gas like crazy, brakes stop reacting....
So your opening sales day for the new model is a huge hit. It's your best revenue day ever!
It could also be the last time you've seen such amount of cash in your life, because next time the majority of people who feel ripped off will buy "that other car" from "that other company". And all you'll be left with is a quarter of brain-dead morons (if you're lucky) that scream "Walshicus sold me a broken car that I almost died in! Awesum, gimme MOAR!!".
What I'm saying is - we're yet to see the long term effects from the "best launch evar!". While it's release may have been the best revenue day ever, it also may have killed any potential chances of increasing or maintaining a long-term profit by pissing off a lot of customers.
And I'm also inclined to take everything Geko says with a huge grain of salt.
I love how STO has been failing ever since launch of you believe the forums, and yet it just keeps getting bigger every year somehow... Almost as if the vocal minority on this forum are rarely indicative of the wider population.
I never said STO is failing or it will fail. Too much Trek obsesed dumbasses (including myself here) whose passion and love for Star Trek fuels this mediocre product. And FYI this year the game actually got smaller as well. But you were not paying attention to the actual topic and discussion and just felt that fanboy itch to defend the company, didn't you?
What I was saying is that what Cryptic is using is a fail game design, not that the game is failing. Many Trekkies/Trekkers or general fans will eat it up, many neutrals will because of friends and also many people without disposable income because it's F2P. That doesn't change the fact that instead of doing something creative with new content, nerfing everything else besides the new content to coerce people to play it in order to fuel metrics for the corporate overlords is a fail game design.
People spend most money when they're enjoying something. People enjoy freedom the most and having the opportunity to decide what, where and when they'll do something in a game themselves. Everything Cryptic has done since D'Angelo took the helm was in the completely opposite direction - to herd players into doing what they say, when they say and how they say it.
If you like being a sheeple or a mindless drone, hey, more power to you! But don't judge people who want and expect to see better just becasue "you have a sandwich".
Comments
People keep saying that... if that happens the game just shuts down. It doesn't keep going with another company running it. They won't just hand over their intellectual property to the next company.
Do you really want the game shut down?
Free Tibet!
As the previous poster has said:
Cryptic owns the game. If the contract ends, the game gets shut down. Now, Cryptic's management could change (with or without personnel changes) or PWE could change or PWE could sell Cryptic and the game might survive any of those things.
CBS isn't running the game. Cryptic is paying CBS to allow them to put Star Trek branding on a game Cryptic owns.
The closest thing I could foresee if CBS pulled the license (which would be several years from now) might be that Cryptic could rapidly launch a new space MMO with all of the Star Trek assets stripped out but with the same core mechanics.
And if CBS took the license back and issued it to someone else, just based on the general market direction, the resulting game would not be an MMO as we think of it. It just wouldn't.
It might have online aspects. It might have RPG mechanics.
But I think what was an MMO is branching out in two directions. On one end you have facebook games and browser games. App games. Which are really imrpoving in quality and which have business models similar to STO's. This would be stuff like Star Trek: Alien Domain, which is a 25th century-set Star Trek game with Starcraft style mechanics coupled with what appear to be ground social hubs with very STO-like graphics. It went into beta last week.
On the other side would be something like Mass Effect, Batman: Arkham, or Telltale Games' products, which would be more like interactive movies with arcade mechanics and RPG and/or puzzle game gear. These would be unlikely to devote as much energy to space as STO does. You might have some space battles in the way Arkham is adding the Batmobile. Or stuff on par with Kingdom Hearts piloting. And you might have social hubs online or areas of the games where friends' characters are visible.
And you might see yet another game with a piloting sim type setup, likely a console game.
The Star Trek brand will persist. I think anybody else who tried for a similar type of game would make ground combat fun and might have strategic space combat. The one thing I doubt you will see is space action combat with the complexity STO has that also tries to tackle ground in the same game. At the very least not at launch. You might see an EvE type thing, where ground is basically a separate game, or two interlocking games.
I have only been using PvEs to level. The game may be giving me a big fat middle finger for it, but I respond with a big fat FO!
- No Chance
- Numbers go down
- Numbers go up.
Based on that, Cryptic can look into what they can do - and that probably takes into account feedback. But if feedback is in conflict with the numbers, they can only choose to ignore it. They add increased skill point requirements to leveling and put i ncontent that requires to achieve certain levels. People on the forums tell you they hate it. But what if the numbers have gone up? Should they really listen to these people?
If the numbers go down, yeah, they certainly should - but if the metrics tell them they are doing better than before, what can they do with negative feedback?
I have some ideas, but I know that removing the fundamental change is not gonna be the solution. Tweaks, sure. I also could (and hope) see them looking into alt-friendliness. Alts are probably not that big of a concern to them - there is no guarantee that a player has any alts, so all the leveling expectations will be based on a single player. That is why we can have stuff like sponsorship tokens.
Another challenge is that the forum feedback tends to focus on the negative. That is natural. It's the same way on most MMO forums, I think. People that are happy just have less incentive - they figure if nothing changes, they stay happy. But unhappy people want a change - so they report about their issues. That's perfectly logical and legitimiate. But if 1000 people like a change and 500 people hate it, then you cannot expect a 10:5 distribution on forum replies.
Well put. I've changed my sig to represent what I think of STO's mysterious metrics and how Cryptic are interpreting them....
I am not talking about hidden numbers of people that are unhappy. I am talking about the likehood that someone that is unhappy complains vs someone that is happy praises. Do you have anything from your sales training to enlighten us there?
You basically say that every person that complains actually represents 10 unhappy customers.
I think that every person that praises actually represents much more than 10 happy customers.
When was the last time you called the support of your local store to mention to them how satisfied you are with their service?
Same. I've only run one toon through. Managed level 60 on six others by doffing and Mirror Incursion.
I don't know what it would reveal. Of course, even such surveys can have a selection bias (unless they are mandatory), but I would find it very interesting. Shame that Cryptic has never done such a thing to my knowledge.
Uh... I have a half dozen accounting textbooks that say you should place qualitative consumer feedback ahead of accounting metrics.
Because accounting performance is a lagging indicator and by the time you wait for that, it can be too late to completely mitigate the damage. This is what ACCOUNTANTS recommend: that you don't wait for them.
If Cryptic is doing some variation of the balanced scorecard, a quarter of that is customer satisfaction.
This idea of making decisions on the metrics without a framework that emphasizes qualitative data for quicker responsiveness seems pretty alien if that's how they do it.
I know someone will come back and basically say that we should trust what they're doing, there are things we as players don't know but Cryptic do and other blind-faith statements like that but consider the fact that the staunchest of Cryptic's supporters - vocally and financially - are falling away. The people being most vocal in their support are putting up straw man arguments, leading people off on side issues and basically saying "There's stuff going on we don't need to know about" even though there's no way they themselves could possibly know that.
It all sounds hollow, it all sounds strange and they risk turning themselves into nothing more than a joke.
I don't hate the game and I don't need to be told "just shut up and play" by someone who knows as much about Cryptic's motives as I do.
Free Tibet!
They did run a player survey once. Even gave out ZEN* for doing it if memory serves. That was under Atari.
* - It would have been Cryptic Points or Atari Tokens at that point. Which were the same premise except prices were different and they were worth 80 to $1, which many of us complained back then was a manipulative psychological practice.
The whole level cap increase with new ships and upgrades is basically to replace the fleet and reputation grind that many players have effectively "finished". once you got a good endgame set, you don't really need a new one. The new ship tier means they can sell more ships again - if you alraedy own 20 C-Store ships, do you really need a 21st one? You do if your 20 C-Store ships are obsolete. Old lockbox ships are now also no longer the top tier ships - you need the new lock box ships for that.
The level grind at end game can serve to convert "story-only" gamers into more active players. Some will abandon STO because they can't just jump in, play the new mission, and leave, but others will stick around - and if you have to earn a lot of skill points, you need to play a lot - and that means you might want special or a even a new ship. Which m eans either you get busy on the Exchange and to Queued missions for marks, dilithium and what not (becoming "content" for other players), or you buy stuff directly.
There is a lot of long-term strategic planning behind this. It basically allows another year or more of selling stuff to customers, instead of having to face an increasingly saturated market.
Are your accounting textbooks about forum feedback?
As I already said, you have no more knowledge about Cryptic's decisions than I do.
Free Tibet!
You just got owned there.
I have had many of my own complaints about DR, T6 ships, and everything that came with it. But what he said, admittedly, makes perfect sense.
No, it was just his best guess based on supposition and what he thinks Cryptic is planning. There's no actual information there because only Cryptic themselves know what their long-term strategic plans are.
Oh, and long-term in business typically covers 5 years or more. A year is just short term. If the planning for this game only covers one year then that's worrying.
Free Tibet!
What is really funny though is that by far the best place in the game to gather XP and skill points is not located in the Delta Quadrant.
Gained 1.5 spec point in roughly 45 minutes by doing that particular content.
Keep it to yourself unless you want it to be "rebalanced"
Free Tibet!
I'm sure. Final reward for argala is 5k, npc give 900 each but are limited in number. The content i play has npc with mostly lower reward each but there's literally tons of them.
Think SB24 on steroids and without the loot limit from the foundry.
But anyway:
The game isn't even 5 years old yet and it has seen a big ownership change and changed from a subscription to a F2P model.
Why should the developers devise a 5 year long plan and implement it in a single expansion?
And if only Cryptic knows its long term plans, why do you say it's a poor plan?
I think any game that can show its highest revenue day was over four years after launch is likely to be studied as an example of doing things right.
I love how STO has been failing ever since launch of you believe the forums, and yet it just keeps getting bigger every year somehow... Almost as if the vocal minority on this forum are rarely indicative of the wider population.
This is more-or-less my thought as well. Cryptic is a company, that both wants to make profit and wants to continue to exist. But in order to do that, it needs to create a product people will use.
To that end, there's an end-goal that the business plan sees as being achieved. If it's not, they'll try to change gears. Either way, I don't know the business plan. I hope it's a sound one, because I enjoy the game and want to see it continue running for a long time. But in the absence of information, I'm just going to keep playing.
One thing I find a little odd through is that so many posters are quick to jump on players who suggest the business plan is sound, claiming that those players are wearing rose-coloured glasses and have no way of making that determination. Why then are are some players so willing to slam the business model as negative on that very same lack of information?
We have no way of knowing anything about Cryptic's internal business model (note I say internal, given that we can obviously see how the company operates externally). All we know is that the game is still there, content is still being released, and there are plenty of Cryptic employees who are visible in the forum and elsewhere across the social media channels. Positive or negative business plan aside, the company is still alive to provide the STO service at this moment.
Without good products or services, the "company" does not survive.
Without a good business plan, the "company" has no direction.
Without any of the above, why even bother!
Zeus
it only took me about 6 weeks to reach lv60 with all of my characters and since then i have been taking it easy just doing doff missions and epohh tagging as i didnt want to do too much before the winter event yet i have still now earned another specialization point with each of my characters by filling my skill point bar, it makes me wonder how many times over i could have filled it by hard core play in the delta quadrant maybe 3 or 4 more time over, maybe more.
this may not be quick enough for players who want instant gratification from the game but its nowhere near as slow as many posters are making it out to be.
and look at it this way before DR any play we did really got us nowhere as such, i had been stuck at level 50 so long i cant even remember, but since DR almost anything we do will earn us some skill points towards specialization points to some degree or another even if its only doff missions.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Riiiiiight.....
Let me use an oversimplified analogy here:
You have a car company. You produce cars. You have a clear consumer base which likes your cars, finds them attractive, finds prices affordable and good for the value and purchases your cars when needed.
Then you announce a new car model. Send e-mails, promo materials to all your consmers that ever purchased one or more of your cars, offering them to buy the new state of the art model (which is more expensive than your previous cars at their release) at some 30% discount, as loyal customers.
So people see the promo and given the pleasant history with your company and cars they have, they consider it a bargain for a brand new state of the art model at a discount. People rush in and buy. Buy a lot of this new model.
Only this time the cars are faulty. Half of them are broken. The value your new models have is nowhere near the price and nowhere near the quality of previous models. These new cars fall apart in matter of weeks. Engines stop working, they consume gas like crazy, brakes stop reacting....
So your opening sales day for the new model is a huge hit. It's your best revenue day ever!
It could also be the last time you've seen such amount of cash in your life, because next time the majority of people who feel ripped off will buy "that other car" from "that other company". And all you'll be left with is a quarter of brain-dead morons (if you're lucky) that scream "Walshicus sold me a broken car that I almost died in! Awesum, gimme MOAR!!".
What I'm saying is - we're yet to see the long term effects from the "best launch evar!". While it's release may have been the best revenue day ever, it also may have killed any potential chances of increasing or maintaining a long-term profit by pissing off a lot of customers.
And I'm also inclined to take everything Geko says with a huge grain of salt.
I never said STO is failing or it will fail. Too much Trek obsesed dumbasses (including myself here) whose passion and love for Star Trek fuels this mediocre product. And FYI this year the game actually got smaller as well. But you were not paying attention to the actual topic and discussion and just felt that fanboy itch to defend the company, didn't you?
What I was saying is that what Cryptic is using is a fail game design, not that the game is failing. Many Trekkies/Trekkers or general fans will eat it up, many neutrals will because of friends and also many people without disposable income because it's F2P. That doesn't change the fact that instead of doing something creative with new content, nerfing everything else besides the new content to coerce people to play it in order to fuel metrics for the corporate overlords is a fail game design.
People spend most money when they're enjoying something. People enjoy freedom the most and having the opportunity to decide what, where and when they'll do something in a game themselves. Everything Cryptic has done since D'Angelo took the helm was in the completely opposite direction - to herd players into doing what they say, when they say and how they say it.
If you like being a sheeple or a mindless drone, hey, more power to you! But don't judge people who want and expect to see better just becasue "you have a sandwich".