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MODS!!!! Not moderators, MODS!!!
wrahth
Member Posts: 6 Arc User
I took the time to post in a thread that was titled for this, but it was abruptly (not abruptly overall, but relative to my post) shut down and locked.... Not getting mad at this fact, because I see WHY it was, just sucks I caught the !#% end of a thread that was titled this but ended up being..... ya you get the picture. All I can say and will say "here" to Lingg, is if even 10% of that "joke/resume" is true, get into the API, write a "genius" mod.... testing will be tough but not impossible... and simply send it to them. Would LOVE to debate some things about spacetime with you (and yes you say space time, i say spacetime) sometime. But PLEASE do not go on and on about a "job" in a thread here about making MODS for a game, I want real responses to this.
IF YOU ARE NOT LINGG PLEASE IGNORE ALL ABOVE THIS LINE!!!!
Anyway, I have searched about this, and still see not much if anything about this.
I have played STO for a while, but never "played" it. I have watched it from almost the start. It just wasn't enough to pull me away from WoW.
Now that they have nerfed WoW so much a 2 yr old can play it, it is no longer fun. Back when it was a "game" it was fun and well..... blizzard is just the KING of RPG starting with diablo. They just have it and know how to do it... untill...... they slowly nerfed and nerfed it to where you get 1 skill choice every 10 levels or so and choose between 3 skills.
STO has "expanded" the experience, not contracted it like blizzard did. I gave Blizzard my $15/month since the "vanilla days" all the way to the last expansion.
WIth that said, I have decided to bow out of wow and concentrate on STO.
When I first started WoW, I thought the whole "Mods" thing would totally ruin the game. Through the years, I found that the whole "Addon Community" did the exact opposite. Blizzard set fourth strict guidelines that HAD to met.... beyond that, if you did not cross those lines they drew, your mod had free reign of the API.
STO's UI system totally SUCKS!. It is workable but..... Blizzard did recruit people to join their "team" as well, but by opening up the API to mods, they recruited the whole gaming community to improve their game, and...... those people were paying THEM to work for them because they had to pay their $15/month just like everyone else.
And just like STO, Blizzard's UI just SUCKED!!!!!! through the years, blizzard noticed some the top mods, and absorbed them into the default UI.
I used Bartender for years for my action bar system untill a guy wrote a little bar addon that blew it away. Bartender had option screen after option screen just to set the thing up and was super complicated. This guy wrote a mod that had 1 OPTION, "click to show". a box pops up with basically "create, delete". Once it creates the bar, there was 10 or so little buttons on the bar in "edit" mode. you could create as many bars as you want with as many buttons as you want with the size drag and all that. You set hotkeys, visibility condition macros, EVERYTHING from 10 or so buttons on the actual bars. He advertised this as a "companion" to the default bar system to put a couple bars where you want. I pushed this mod as far as I could push it to see what it could do..... With this "baby toy" mod, I created an action bar system with 50 or so bars on my druid, stacked them all up into the space of "1 bar" and all 50 bars' buttons were hot keyed to "1-9", "Shift + 1-9", "Ctrl + 1-9" and "alt + 1-9".... 50 bars, each with those hotkeys and they didn't conflict with each other. Using the Visibility conditions, only 1 bar would be visible on the screen at any given time. If its not visible, the keybind is not active allowing the "other bars" to use them. 50+ action bars running off the main "action" hotkeys and it only has 1 option in the game options menu. O ya, and the memory usage was less than most mods. I wrote a step by step with screen shots on how to do all of this to show what this little mod could do. http://www.rage-web.com/buttonforge. PURE GENIUS.
I do not know what the fear is of opening up the API... Yes... you have a TON of mods that are worthless, do nothing, and just take up space on the screen and eat up valuable memory but the ones that revolutionize the game become popular and well known, and the others are just there taking up space.
Blizzard had all this and let you create super complex macros that could check for multiple conditions to fire off different stuff depending on conditions. If focus exists and its enemy fire this, if focus exists and its friendly fire this, if no exist and my target is enemy fire this, if friendly fire this. so with 1 "smart button" that checks several conditions fires what needs to be fired.
But... you could not have a macro that had every skill you own and cycle through them nonstop. It would cycle through them and once it hit a skill that was on cooldown, the macro would stop. "Cant spam 1 button nonstop to kill something" They had their lines you could not cross.
In STO you can macro 1 button to "fire all weaps + syncronize shields + cycle every skill on a hotbar nonstop" 1 button spam that does everything......
Take that away and allow us to make a better bar sysem, auction window thats more useful.....
Certain parts of the API are "secure" that you cannot access. In wow you can create a window that displays who your teammate is target without target your teammate to see his target, or display enemy and say how many of you are target him.... but.... you cannot access the function in reverse to show how many of THEM are target any of your team.
You can open up your API and STILL restrict what you can access and what functions are "secure" that only the game can access. You don't just open up everything in the game for a "free for all" feeding frenzy.
In WoW I found "OpenRDX" that was a UI framework. It was not a UI but a wire frame you could build on. With this, I totally deleted all of WoW's default UI and built a UI from the ground up using a mod that acted like "front page" or "dreamweaver" program to build a web page.
I think you guys should SERIOUSLY consider allowing mods..... It would take a huge strain off your programmers that would need to come up with those genius "buttonforge" ideas then go through the process of revamping the bar system piled on top of the already tedious tasks you have to do to keep the game going and expanding with new content and such.
Your "arrange UI" function where you can move/hide the UI pieces" is almost there.... let some gifted people help you out and do some stuff that would NEVER get done by a few that have a plate full already keeping the game going/expanding.
Instead of making a Auction window that is not a pain to use (REALLY REALLY needed) you make a function that moves stuff on a ship to a new "readied stars ship".
I think the "Foundry" is a step in the right direction, and should let THAT expand and grow. Not only does it remove some strain, but gives you a awesome platform to hand pick people for your "team" As was mentioned before, you do this already, but there are much more out there that would gladly do their "magic" and pay you $15/month in the process, and give you a much better idea of the skill your community has. Not only those that can make a "map" and put a story line or mission to it" but people that can blow your mind with a super tiny mod that uses practically nothing to create a miracle auction window that does a 100x more than what you have and eat less system resources to do it.
The game is and always will be "yours" and you draw those lines that you don't want crossed to keep the game within your "vision" but let us create a bar system or auction window, or....
As I said, I truly thought the whole "mod" thing would ruin WoW, but it ultimately amplified the game greatly while keeping it within blizzard's "vision" and "values" of what they wanted the game to be. It was Blizzard that "broke" their own game, not the people that wrote the addons.
Let your community surprise and amaze you
I played the Age of Empires series for years. In AoE2 I made a super simple map, nothing big or flashy. All I did was make a map with no water, had 1 type of tree on it, 1 type of terrain, put the gold/stone resourses, deleted the Town Center you start with, increased the range your villagers start at, and LAND NOMAD was born. No flashy "eye candy" on the map, 1 terrain type, 1 tree type and u pick where you start your Town Center, one of the most simple concepts you could possibly make and if you go to the game rooms for AoE2 TODAY you will still see LN played. EVERYONE and their mother copied it, and messed around with the resource amounts/placements, and some even copied my original exactly and renamed it, but through the years, my little simple map is still played, and was one of the most popular maps for the game. Just shows you, something simple and small can revolutionize a game. I got on the Alpha test team for their next game "Age of Mythology" because of that map.
Back on the Commodore64, my dad wrote a program that "ran the joystick". The one being used was like 2+ pages of code to run the joystick and he got it down do like 1/2 page of code. He submitted it to the magazine for entry. If they publish your program in their magazine u got like $100. They didn't publish it, but they used it on every disk that came with every magazine that had a few games and stuff on it every month. He didn't get the $100 cuz it was not published, but came out with every magazine ever since on that disk. He was a Heating/Air installer untill he retired.
Your community is not just full of people who guy a game and play in thier spare time, there are TONS of people who do amazing things that have nothing to do with the actual "game production" industry. Its not about people doing something better than you, or "showing you up" because you have an awesome concept here. I have... well.... cant say "played" since the start, but have kept an eye on STO from time to time. It is expanding very nicely.
Blizzard i believe is STILL #1 for MMORPG after how many years? When I say they are king, its not just my opinion, its the opinion of the millions of people who feed them their $15 a month so for so many years. STO i DO believe is in the same "bracket" of awesomeness as that bad word "WOW!". My explanation I tell people for STO is "STO = WOW in space." This IS the very first game I have ever seen that I would even consider putting in that position.
Opening up for MODS is not saying YOU SUCK!, it is saying, let some people bang out a few mods that are "regulated" and help out with the UI. One thing blizzard did GOOD at was create a game and game world that was unbeatable for years and years, even before WOW came. One thing that did not expand with the game, was their damn UI that did suck. Mods were made, and people that payed THEM $15/month created very awesome mods that did the trick. Buttonforge was probably the most genius mod I have used..... yes even more so than the TradeSkillMaster, Bartender GIANTS.
WoW's UI got a huge overhaul and guess what, the people that did it payed BLIZZARD $15/month to do the WORK that they probably couldn't do. Well.... they could, but they just had more.... more important things on their plate to deal with than to overhaul an action bar or make a new auction window.
You already allow "macro building" by the community, (can't stand the "syntax" needed) but very nice.
You should take a long look at WoW, if you haven't already for one simple reason.... They are #1 and have been for more than 10 years in the very field you are in. They STILL do not allow "free play" and require all players to pay them $15/month AND get the benefit of very gifted and skilled people who do a TON of work to the UI for them while they focus on the "game" itself. Like I said all those gifted and talented people pay $15/month to Blizzard AND do part of the work for them.
If you are 100% dead set against opening up the the API for UI mods, then..... one more time, thousands of ppl pay blizzard $15/month and do the TRIBBLE THEY don't want do like revamp a bar because they have a "game" to keep expanding and building on.
I completely understand you guys have a lot to do, and little stuff like redo a bar system, would be on the bottom of the list if on the list at all for the "to do's" But I would not be here, spending my TIME here if your game "sucked".
Blizzard's head just got too big, and it got to the point where i don't think they actually care about the game anymore, they keep shrinking the game more than expand it. Ya, the maps keep adding, features keep getting added, and so on, but the "game" itself is getting smaller and smaller with every nerf they do. STO has been the opposite, it has expanded and kept going like the Big Bang. You don't take away what makes your game good you keep adding more. I get abundant skills to mess with and tweak.... what.... now more of em to mess with.... OMG another set of skills/tree to tinker with..... u get the picture... This added with an awesome world that keeps growing.... like I said Blizz no longer gets my $15/month. (long time players.. I don't want to hear your "rants" about a farming nerf STO did to ruin your "honey hole" as I have not "played" but merely "watched" the game grow and yes, it has gotten better and better so !#^$ off with your I had life easy, now I gotta find a new spot to grind in.....)
Open it up and let your community do some of the bull#%TRIBBLE work that you don't have the time for.... and if you say your auction house window is the awesome most perfect window ever created...... sorry, it is a pain like a dagger in my a#$ to use. So much so, that I find myself destroying a vast majority of items so i don't have to stick that dagger even further in by using that window. But why fix something that is not "broke" because it DOES work... just not the way it should when you have tons of stuff on your "to do" list already. I am not saying get off your $@! and make a new one..... let someone pay you $15/month and make one for you.
The model is there, examine it and study it because the system I thought would destroy the game made it a LOT better thanks to the people that pay blizzard $15/month to do part of their "job". I'm not saying do not hire bright brilliant people to come work for you.... I'm saying there are TONS of bright brilliant people that just want to fix a "part" that is not so great in a great game and play the game. They have their life and job and don't want to uproot their life to come work for a game development company.
Then there are those that will devote even more time to create a whole new community devoted to this new avenue and create even more free advertising and hype for STO. It is not just about letting someone mess with your "baby", it is and has been proven to be a big $$$ maker for the parent company that makes the game because they drive more traffic your way and give your community a new place to dive into to create a better experience for them, and all it cost you was the time to tweak some code to secure the parts you DON'T want messed with so the game still remains in your "vision".
Once again check out http://www.rage-web.com/buttonforge and tell me a guy that just plays your game cannot give you a super awesome SMALL action bar system that is amazing is just a guy that means nothing and you have no use for. He don't want to devote his life to you, he just wants a good, solid action bar system and made one. He wants to pay you $15/month to play your game and give the players a bar system that rocks, not change the game you created. You get a free bar system you did not have take the time to make and embed into your code because he did it for you AND payed you.
Opening up API to mods, is a win/win/win for you guys, it is financially sound and will grow your profits. GUARANTEED, not maybe, it is GUARANTEED. Win/Win/Win because you get a new action bar, or window or .... you get payed by the guy that did it ..... and he is creating more intrest in your game, not only for current community, but any new people that join, and may even drive more to come because they see the new "STOinterface.com" community springing up that WILL spring up.
There is EVERY reason to open up for mods, and absolutely NO reason to ignore this..... well.... besides the "We don't want anyone messing with ANY part of our code even though they would be paying us $15/month to make a piece of UI for us"
Well, thats my 2 cents worth about the whole idea and I hope to see a STOinterface.com community rise up in the near future.
IF YOU ARE NOT LINGG PLEASE IGNORE ALL ABOVE THIS LINE!!!!
Anyway, I have searched about this, and still see not much if anything about this.
I have played STO for a while, but never "played" it. I have watched it from almost the start. It just wasn't enough to pull me away from WoW.
Now that they have nerfed WoW so much a 2 yr old can play it, it is no longer fun. Back when it was a "game" it was fun and well..... blizzard is just the KING of RPG starting with diablo. They just have it and know how to do it... untill...... they slowly nerfed and nerfed it to where you get 1 skill choice every 10 levels or so and choose between 3 skills.
STO has "expanded" the experience, not contracted it like blizzard did. I gave Blizzard my $15/month since the "vanilla days" all the way to the last expansion.
WIth that said, I have decided to bow out of wow and concentrate on STO.
When I first started WoW, I thought the whole "Mods" thing would totally ruin the game. Through the years, I found that the whole "Addon Community" did the exact opposite. Blizzard set fourth strict guidelines that HAD to met.... beyond that, if you did not cross those lines they drew, your mod had free reign of the API.
STO's UI system totally SUCKS!. It is workable but..... Blizzard did recruit people to join their "team" as well, but by opening up the API to mods, they recruited the whole gaming community to improve their game, and...... those people were paying THEM to work for them because they had to pay their $15/month just like everyone else.
And just like STO, Blizzard's UI just SUCKED!!!!!! through the years, blizzard noticed some the top mods, and absorbed them into the default UI.
I used Bartender for years for my action bar system untill a guy wrote a little bar addon that blew it away. Bartender had option screen after option screen just to set the thing up and was super complicated. This guy wrote a mod that had 1 OPTION, "click to show". a box pops up with basically "create, delete". Once it creates the bar, there was 10 or so little buttons on the bar in "edit" mode. you could create as many bars as you want with as many buttons as you want with the size drag and all that. You set hotkeys, visibility condition macros, EVERYTHING from 10 or so buttons on the actual bars. He advertised this as a "companion" to the default bar system to put a couple bars where you want. I pushed this mod as far as I could push it to see what it could do..... With this "baby toy" mod, I created an action bar system with 50 or so bars on my druid, stacked them all up into the space of "1 bar" and all 50 bars' buttons were hot keyed to "1-9", "Shift + 1-9", "Ctrl + 1-9" and "alt + 1-9".... 50 bars, each with those hotkeys and they didn't conflict with each other. Using the Visibility conditions, only 1 bar would be visible on the screen at any given time. If its not visible, the keybind is not active allowing the "other bars" to use them. 50+ action bars running off the main "action" hotkeys and it only has 1 option in the game options menu. O ya, and the memory usage was less than most mods. I wrote a step by step with screen shots on how to do all of this to show what this little mod could do. http://www.rage-web.com/buttonforge. PURE GENIUS.
I do not know what the fear is of opening up the API... Yes... you have a TON of mods that are worthless, do nothing, and just take up space on the screen and eat up valuable memory but the ones that revolutionize the game become popular and well known, and the others are just there taking up space.
Blizzard had all this and let you create super complex macros that could check for multiple conditions to fire off different stuff depending on conditions. If focus exists and its enemy fire this, if focus exists and its friendly fire this, if no exist and my target is enemy fire this, if friendly fire this. so with 1 "smart button" that checks several conditions fires what needs to be fired.
But... you could not have a macro that had every skill you own and cycle through them nonstop. It would cycle through them and once it hit a skill that was on cooldown, the macro would stop. "Cant spam 1 button nonstop to kill something" They had their lines you could not cross.
In STO you can macro 1 button to "fire all weaps + syncronize shields + cycle every skill on a hotbar nonstop" 1 button spam that does everything......
Take that away and allow us to make a better bar sysem, auction window thats more useful.....
Certain parts of the API are "secure" that you cannot access. In wow you can create a window that displays who your teammate is target without target your teammate to see his target, or display enemy and say how many of you are target him.... but.... you cannot access the function in reverse to show how many of THEM are target any of your team.
You can open up your API and STILL restrict what you can access and what functions are "secure" that only the game can access. You don't just open up everything in the game for a "free for all" feeding frenzy.
In WoW I found "OpenRDX" that was a UI framework. It was not a UI but a wire frame you could build on. With this, I totally deleted all of WoW's default UI and built a UI from the ground up using a mod that acted like "front page" or "dreamweaver" program to build a web page.
I think you guys should SERIOUSLY consider allowing mods..... It would take a huge strain off your programmers that would need to come up with those genius "buttonforge" ideas then go through the process of revamping the bar system piled on top of the already tedious tasks you have to do to keep the game going and expanding with new content and such.
Your "arrange UI" function where you can move/hide the UI pieces" is almost there.... let some gifted people help you out and do some stuff that would NEVER get done by a few that have a plate full already keeping the game going/expanding.
Instead of making a Auction window that is not a pain to use (REALLY REALLY needed) you make a function that moves stuff on a ship to a new "readied stars ship".
I think the "Foundry" is a step in the right direction, and should let THAT expand and grow. Not only does it remove some strain, but gives you a awesome platform to hand pick people for your "team" As was mentioned before, you do this already, but there are much more out there that would gladly do their "magic" and pay you $15/month in the process, and give you a much better idea of the skill your community has. Not only those that can make a "map" and put a story line or mission to it" but people that can blow your mind with a super tiny mod that uses practically nothing to create a miracle auction window that does a 100x more than what you have and eat less system resources to do it.
The game is and always will be "yours" and you draw those lines that you don't want crossed to keep the game within your "vision" but let us create a bar system or auction window, or....
As I said, I truly thought the whole "mod" thing would ruin WoW, but it ultimately amplified the game greatly while keeping it within blizzard's "vision" and "values" of what they wanted the game to be. It was Blizzard that "broke" their own game, not the people that wrote the addons.
Let your community surprise and amaze you
I played the Age of Empires series for years. In AoE2 I made a super simple map, nothing big or flashy. All I did was make a map with no water, had 1 type of tree on it, 1 type of terrain, put the gold/stone resourses, deleted the Town Center you start with, increased the range your villagers start at, and LAND NOMAD was born. No flashy "eye candy" on the map, 1 terrain type, 1 tree type and u pick where you start your Town Center, one of the most simple concepts you could possibly make and if you go to the game rooms for AoE2 TODAY you will still see LN played. EVERYONE and their mother copied it, and messed around with the resource amounts/placements, and some even copied my original exactly and renamed it, but through the years, my little simple map is still played, and was one of the most popular maps for the game. Just shows you, something simple and small can revolutionize a game. I got on the Alpha test team for their next game "Age of Mythology" because of that map.
Back on the Commodore64, my dad wrote a program that "ran the joystick". The one being used was like 2+ pages of code to run the joystick and he got it down do like 1/2 page of code. He submitted it to the magazine for entry. If they publish your program in their magazine u got like $100. They didn't publish it, but they used it on every disk that came with every magazine that had a few games and stuff on it every month. He didn't get the $100 cuz it was not published, but came out with every magazine ever since on that disk. He was a Heating/Air installer untill he retired.
Your community is not just full of people who guy a game and play in thier spare time, there are TONS of people who do amazing things that have nothing to do with the actual "game production" industry. Its not about people doing something better than you, or "showing you up" because you have an awesome concept here. I have... well.... cant say "played" since the start, but have kept an eye on STO from time to time. It is expanding very nicely.
Blizzard i believe is STILL #1 for MMORPG after how many years? When I say they are king, its not just my opinion, its the opinion of the millions of people who feed them their $15 a month so for so many years. STO i DO believe is in the same "bracket" of awesomeness as that bad word "WOW!". My explanation I tell people for STO is "STO = WOW in space." This IS the very first game I have ever seen that I would even consider putting in that position.
Opening up for MODS is not saying YOU SUCK!, it is saying, let some people bang out a few mods that are "regulated" and help out with the UI. One thing blizzard did GOOD at was create a game and game world that was unbeatable for years and years, even before WOW came. One thing that did not expand with the game, was their damn UI that did suck. Mods were made, and people that payed THEM $15/month created very awesome mods that did the trick. Buttonforge was probably the most genius mod I have used..... yes even more so than the TradeSkillMaster, Bartender GIANTS.
WoW's UI got a huge overhaul and guess what, the people that did it payed BLIZZARD $15/month to do the WORK that they probably couldn't do. Well.... they could, but they just had more.... more important things on their plate to deal with than to overhaul an action bar or make a new auction window.
You already allow "macro building" by the community, (can't stand the "syntax" needed) but very nice.
You should take a long look at WoW, if you haven't already for one simple reason.... They are #1 and have been for more than 10 years in the very field you are in. They STILL do not allow "free play" and require all players to pay them $15/month AND get the benefit of very gifted and skilled people who do a TON of work to the UI for them while they focus on the "game" itself. Like I said all those gifted and talented people pay $15/month to Blizzard AND do part of the work for them.
If you are 100% dead set against opening up the the API for UI mods, then..... one more time, thousands of ppl pay blizzard $15/month and do the TRIBBLE THEY don't want do like revamp a bar because they have a "game" to keep expanding and building on.
I completely understand you guys have a lot to do, and little stuff like redo a bar system, would be on the bottom of the list if on the list at all for the "to do's" But I would not be here, spending my TIME here if your game "sucked".
Blizzard's head just got too big, and it got to the point where i don't think they actually care about the game anymore, they keep shrinking the game more than expand it. Ya, the maps keep adding, features keep getting added, and so on, but the "game" itself is getting smaller and smaller with every nerf they do. STO has been the opposite, it has expanded and kept going like the Big Bang. You don't take away what makes your game good you keep adding more. I get abundant skills to mess with and tweak.... what.... now more of em to mess with.... OMG another set of skills/tree to tinker with..... u get the picture... This added with an awesome world that keeps growing.... like I said Blizz no longer gets my $15/month. (long time players.. I don't want to hear your "rants" about a farming nerf STO did to ruin your "honey hole" as I have not "played" but merely "watched" the game grow and yes, it has gotten better and better so !#^$ off with your I had life easy, now I gotta find a new spot to grind in.....)
Open it up and let your community do some of the bull#%TRIBBLE work that you don't have the time for.... and if you say your auction house window is the awesome most perfect window ever created...... sorry, it is a pain like a dagger in my a#$ to use. So much so, that I find myself destroying a vast majority of items so i don't have to stick that dagger even further in by using that window. But why fix something that is not "broke" because it DOES work... just not the way it should when you have tons of stuff on your "to do" list already. I am not saying get off your $@! and make a new one..... let someone pay you $15/month and make one for you.
The model is there, examine it and study it because the system I thought would destroy the game made it a LOT better thanks to the people that pay blizzard $15/month to do part of their "job". I'm not saying do not hire bright brilliant people to come work for you.... I'm saying there are TONS of bright brilliant people that just want to fix a "part" that is not so great in a great game and play the game. They have their life and job and don't want to uproot their life to come work for a game development company.
Then there are those that will devote even more time to create a whole new community devoted to this new avenue and create even more free advertising and hype for STO. It is not just about letting someone mess with your "baby", it is and has been proven to be a big $$$ maker for the parent company that makes the game because they drive more traffic your way and give your community a new place to dive into to create a better experience for them, and all it cost you was the time to tweak some code to secure the parts you DON'T want messed with so the game still remains in your "vision".
Once again check out http://www.rage-web.com/buttonforge and tell me a guy that just plays your game cannot give you a super awesome SMALL action bar system that is amazing is just a guy that means nothing and you have no use for. He don't want to devote his life to you, he just wants a good, solid action bar system and made one. He wants to pay you $15/month to play your game and give the players a bar system that rocks, not change the game you created. You get a free bar system you did not have take the time to make and embed into your code because he did it for you AND payed you.
Opening up API to mods, is a win/win/win for you guys, it is financially sound and will grow your profits. GUARANTEED, not maybe, it is GUARANTEED. Win/Win/Win because you get a new action bar, or window or .... you get payed by the guy that did it ..... and he is creating more intrest in your game, not only for current community, but any new people that join, and may even drive more to come because they see the new "STOinterface.com" community springing up that WILL spring up.
There is EVERY reason to open up for mods, and absolutely NO reason to ignore this..... well.... besides the "We don't want anyone messing with ANY part of our code even though they would be paying us $15/month to make a piece of UI for us"
Well, thats my 2 cents worth about the whole idea and I hope to see a STOinterface.com community rise up in the near future.
Post edited by wrahth on
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This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Because that thread was locked due to the OP necroing the thread. Creating a new thread about mods is fine.
As far as STO being moddable, even if the devs decided that they want to make STO moddable by players, it would likely take an immense amount of effort to make it available. Games that allow mods usually are designed for mod support. The only mods that I know of that are currently available for STO are passive mods that seem to just read the combat log to determine DPS.
Problem is, Cryptic has seriously work for every dollar they earn with STO (and NW and CO too). They just lost 18 peeps from their roster. And their primary source of income is selling power. I know at some time Blizzard had 3 UI programmers. That's enviable.
But to play STO you have to pay nothing. While if you want to play Blizzard's game you have to buy the box, the expansion and pay subscription fee per month.
With that said I would very much like Cryptic allow us to mod STO's interface or at least bring up STO's UI up to par with NW's.
Let the stupid suffer
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They make a wondrous mess of things. Brave amateurs, they do their part.
This is why I very much put emphasis on the extra flow of income that would be guaranteed to head their way. Its Free, Free to play, and $15/month is optional. The Mods would greatly help many of the UI features that they don't want to spend time on to better them. "Why fix it if it's not "Broke"". The community that WOULD spring up around the mod feature would most certainly drive traffic and funnel more traffic straight to STO. Without the "addons" thing, WoW would just SUCK..... Blizzard could not make a UI to save their life, but the game and world was amazing. Where would blizzard be today WITHOUT that feature? Probably trying to scrape a profit from a free to play game they are trying to get people to pay for because they do not have enough time to do all the great things some of the more thought out and great mods that made WoW what it was. Bartender, one of the Auction mods a couple good ones take your pick, Recount, and Atlas Loot..... I could live with or without the rest, but in my opinion, those were the I cant live without mods in WoW that I used. All made by people they did not "hire" but by people that payed them their $15/month just like everyone else and made my game a LOT better but really did not change what WoW was.
It CAN stop there. It can stop wherever they want it to stop. They can lock out EVERYTHING except for the API giving access to only lets say the action bar code and nothing else. Or anything they would be willing to let out.
I disagree with the DPS thing..... Even though I have been watching STO for a long time, I was playing WoW. But would log in STO and play around a little to see some of the stuff they were doing, but had no clue about how endgame fight mechanics work or anything like that, but it gave me an idea of the overall general idea of the STO game. The DPS thing is a great addition, and myself would love to see a small dps meter somewhere, not even as robust as the ones on wow, but just a number on the screen like a FPS # that tells you your DPS. I do like to know how my character "setup" is performing other than "ok, I kill that one that fast, and now try something else and hmmm, how fast was that??" Just a small # giving my DPS lets me guage how a new setup is doing compared to my old one. And yes, its about doing DAMAGE lol. You shoot stuff and kill stuff, so yes, i want to be good at what the game IS
Stuff like "gearscore" YES!!!! 100% agree. What, your not 1,000,000 gearscore? NO you can't join the group.... you suck.... lol.
Stuff like DBM.... I loved the concept of something like that, but with a bunch of modders, its about functions, options and bloat bloat bloat.... but that is the modders fault. I tried it for a while, but was not worth the resources it took to run it. Give Me a audio or visual of a skill the boss is casting or whatever that isnt . that big but stop there would = best DBM mod.
I did a LOT to address this. A huge portion of my "Wall of text" was to address exactly this. If they are not interested in driving revenue and boosting their profit level of a game they offer for free, that I would seriously put them almost at the level wow is.... not the fan base or how many people play it and how much they make.... but more about overall game content and how fun it is compared to WoW...... I tell people STO is WoW in space. I have tried a bunch of other RPG (yes I know its MMORPG but it boils down to they are all still RPG games) and lets just say, i "tried" them and uninstalled ALL of them after a couple hours and most within 15 minutes of downloading them. When I say blizzard is king, they are the KING of RPG since Diablo 1. They are and should be the model for ANY other rpg that wants to break into the scene. If you say I'm wrong then tell that to the millions of people that have played their games nonstop since the creation of Diablo 1, and have given them their $15/month for 10 years or so sicne WoW hit the scene. Sorry, but you cannot argue against that, and that alone makes them the KING of RPG.
I am putting STO right up there with them seeing where they have taken this game and keep taking it. That is saying a LOT, a WHOLE LOT. If they are simply too egotistical to accept help, then that is their choice to let a game that could and I think WOULD rival WoW go the way of the dodo bird just like every other RPG, I mean who talks about Everquest anymore?? Blizzard knows how to do it and have known how to do it since the early days in Diablo 1. They are just NOW, well..... they started this a while back with the nerf after nerf they slowly added to it. They have so many people now, they dont care if they loose a thousand here or there because of a stupid BS move that nobody wants., but they still know their stuff, they just don't care anymore (my opinion). If STO truly don't care about profit or the bottom line, then so be it.... the game will never reach the level it could truly be because the "in house" programmers only have so many "hours" they can humanly possibly put into creating stuff for STO. I think they have done an outstanding job thus far with a free game and still managed to bring enough profit to keep them going but I believe opening up even 1-2 areas of the UI for mods would start a chain reaction that would truly take them to the stars. If they only have the way of thinking "Its ours, only ours, and will NEVER give ANYTHING like this a chance" then they are missing the other side of the coin..... more coins.
Yes, there are countless pages of stupid mods that do really nothing or the same thing that each other one does, but ya, that will happen and thats the weeds you have to wade through or better yet, mow over to get see the truly great mods that are genius creations. But guess what? Even those stupid mods nobody cares about serve a purpose too.... not for us the gamers, but for company that create the game, because that is still bodies that sit and focus on THEIR game instead of someone else's game and more bodies that focus on their game = more revenue comming their way. Lots of people want something like this, but nobody has shown or even attempted to show any possible way this could benefit the ones that actually MAKE the game. I searched for posts about mods and only found a couple in the first 30 clicks of forum search results. All I have seen is a handful of posts of people saying this would be great but not once has anyone attempted to say, or show this would totally benefit the actual people who are trying to make a living by making this game possible..... I truly believe it would open doors they never dreamed existed because I have seen what it did in WoW. I cringed at the thought of letting the gamers create ANYTHING for the game because all I could think about is how anything created for past games by the gamers = cheat cheat hack, you suck because I hack. Well, I was wrong because I would have quit WoW years ago if it was not for the brilliant people that created brilliant mods that made my experience with a awesome game better. If it did that for me, I guess it did that for countless other like me and kept me and those giving our $15/month for years and years. Its all about the bottom line. If anyone says different, they are ramming you, because it is..... Take away 100% of the income STO makes or even take away ONLY what the actual people make as their salary and leave only the $$ needed to keep the actual physical equipment going and STO = dodo bird tomorrow.... Get enough new players they could even do what Blizzard does and (dont shoot me too fast) charge EVERYONE $15/month and only offer a 30 day free trial to new accounts. I am a guy who lives paycheck to paycheck.... but.... I can scrape together $15 in a month (most of the time) to play a awesome game that isnt fire and forget (a game you buy off the shelf that gets updated once or twice and becomes extinct). Even if I couldnt renew time, it wasnt long before i COULD and get back in. $15 isn't much for something that provides that level of "entertainment" and keeps updating and growing and... well... kept up with. Blizzard no longer gets mine after.... well, i started right before the 1st expansion BC, so you do the math.... This game is already almost that level of quality, but things in it are so "cave man".
The time and effort to ready the thing for something like this is, well ya big task for sure. But the potential, and I would say guaranteed income growth that would head their way would be more than worth the effort.... just look at the "model" for RPG games. They took on Everquest and said see ya. Mods alone will not make a game great and never will.... but the mods can take a great game and make it immortal.... they already have (back to the model).
Look at wal-mart..... an old hillbilly from bentonville arkansas started a little rinky dink store and now that company can do whatever it wants, and it will take an act of GOD to make them go bust and "go away". That is Blizzard now in RPG. They will have enough players for a LONG LONG LONG time to keep the developers pockets full and going no matter what they do, as long as they dont pull the plug.... STO can put themselves in that position, not by getting help to create a game, but by getting help to do things they don't have the time to do, like fix stupid stuff that is not broke, but needs to be enhanced. Why spend the time to overhaul a action bar that works now, when they can invest that time to expanding what makes them a great game? That bar does not make them a great game, the GAME makes them a great game, the modders are the ones that create that awesome new bar system that you cant live without, not the ones dedicated to expanding the game.... but that awesome bar/auction/dps meter and so fourth creates hype and creates a whole NEW community dedicated to advertising their game that bring in new bodies that bring them more income.
"Its our game, you cant touch it, just give us $, we dont care about what this would bring us in the near future" Then it is 100% THEIR loss, well mostly all their loss, because the gamers still have to deal with those windows/bars and such that they dont have the time to enhance. You catch flies with honey, not vinegar......
Otherwise without that, no clickie, everyone one go BOOOM!
There are mods??? All I know of is a log parser that sits on your desktop? A mod IS a UI addon. So in essence, mods LET you do custom UI things. And yes, it would be a big project for the developers to take on for sure.
This is the only MMO I have or ever will play. I am "Old School" a table top D&D player since 1976. The only reason I played this game was I was a Trekkie who's D&D game decided to take a break after 13 continous years of meeting every weekend.
Since Cryptic refuses to fix this game we started back up the old group and went back to dice rolling over lag and disconnects.
First, the latency issue is well documented as an issue between Verizon and Cogentco, basically Verizon is throttling Cogentdo because they won't agree to pay Verizon for the extra bandwidth used by Netflix traffic. The problem is not with Cryptic, their servers, or anything else they have control over. And before you say "why don't they leave Cogentco," its not that easy. When it comes to residential services, you sign your agreement and maybe pay a penalty if you want to switch providers. On the business side, a binding contract is made when a service provider is selected, and it is legally very difficult to break said contract. It also does NOT affect everyone, like so many people seem to believe. I don't know if a player's ISP determines the impact of the Verizon/Cogentco problem, but I have Comcast, and I have no lag issues of any kind.
Second, I fail to see how your post relates to this thread. This thread is for discussing hypothetical uses of modification support that we will almost certainly never get, NOT ranting about well documented connection issues with no easy solution.
A reply from cryptic would be awesome. If the game itself cannot be set up to accept mods, it would be nice if Cryptic would just say so.
I do know a huge majority of the STO community would LOVE the ability for mods. It would nice to get a reply about this subject, either way (yes, no, maybe, HELL no).
A great idea would be to just open up 1 thing or section of the UI for modding, lets say the action bars or the Boff trays for example. This way Cryptic could see how well, or how bad the injection of add-ons would be. This way if the whole add-on idea is a bust, they would not have the entire UI to revert back to "closed API (no mods)". On the other hand, if it turns out to be a great success, they can work on opening up a few more areas. This would actually be a GREAT idea, as they can deal with a small section at a time so they are not bombarded with TONS of stuff at once. This way, it would turn a HUGE project into a not so huge project.
A reply from Cryptic about this subject would be greatly appreciated either way. If it is totally 100% out of the question, it would allow us to just
if they allowed people to modify the game code and it is substantially better then anything cryptic could ever manage, it not only throw into doubt how bad cryptic devs are with something like that when players can do a far better job, without pay and a contract, but it shows how bad the organisation is behind the curtains to not be able to get some quality upgrades to their own game. but the very idea that cryptic would allow players to modify the game would only magnify the weakness that cryptic can no longer handle their own affairs any more.
it would be a very bad idea for cryptic to allow it. the UI stays, adapt around it.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
It would not show how "bad" the devs are..... The devs are only so many, with so many "man hours" they can put into the game. Just because someone creates a better bar system does not mean the devs "suck" by no means. Add-ons do not make a great game.... the GAME makes a great game. Creating content and expanding the game puts a bunch of stuff on their "plate". STO has a bar system that works, so why go in and revamp a bar system (or any other window) that works instead of expanding the content/game? Revamping a window or element in the UI would most definitely be at the bottom of the "to-do list" or not even be ON the list. (I am not saying the bar system sucks, just an example).
Cryptic has done an outstanding job on the game and letting the community create UI mods does not even come close to saying cryptic can no longer handle their own affairs..... Making a UI Add-on is nowhere near modifying the "game code". Technically yes, you can say this because the UI is indeed part of the game code but making a new Exchange window is not modifying the game, just a user interface element.
In the game menu, you can go into the UI editing mode that allows you to hide/show, resize and move the UI elements. Does this show that cryptic cannot handle their own affairs, or create doubt that makes you think the players are better than cryptic??? YA, Cryptic SUCKS because they put the officer window here, instead of there!!!! Of course NOT!! Creating UI mods is like using the UI editor thing in the game menu, just a little more advanced version of this.
I am not talking about letting players rewrite the game or changing the game at all, just to allow them to create a new Auction Window or action bar. You make it sound as if making a new action bar is tearing the game apart and rewriting how the game works!
Let me answer that for you: it does to some extent. My routing is BHN->RR->Cogentco. I can't get around it. Beyond the initial connect from my firewall to my ISP, I can't control where the packets go. Some of us get Verizon, some of us don't.
Last night's DC timed out at PatchServer2 inside the Cryptic network. Cogentco definitely had issues with their BOS01 node in the past, but the majority of timeouts are coming from beyond that--inside the Cryptic network in Boston. (There could be multiple issues here--there's no Verizon between me and Cogentco [at least not that I can see during a trace], and there might be some shaky switches in the Cryptic rack room in BOS. None of this is ever simple. [I work in a Fortune 400 tech company and I get to see far too much of this kind of thing].)
Cryptic has acknowledged the bug and the TOS violation but as far as we know they haven't taken action against the group that caused the issue.
As for "mods" lol ummm just no, PWE/Crapstick will NEVER let it happen. In 5 years of begging and pleading it's never happened, hell, we testers report bugs all the time and they are ignored. The MODS topic is ignored and will be for the life of STO
That's far from the only sources of the lag. It existed before that unfortunate event, and is still persisting quite well. That was the source of Lag in Tribble ISA instances for a few days only.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!
Cryptics engine is an "In House" "proprietary" engine.. Its not unreal, or Cry, or any of the rest.
I'm very very sure that the ability of players to mod the player side client is pretty limited at best.
My impression is that they just don't want players modding the client in any which way what so ever. Honestly, just fine with that. The only "Mods" out there aren't really mods at all..They might have a screen overlay element that overlays the game display, but they are entirely separate applications. At least 2 possibly 3 DPS parsers that just parse the combat results are all I currently know of. I don't run one.. I already have lag issues in game with out causing myself issues by trying to parse combat logs on the same machine I'm playing on.
To be able to enable modding of the game client Cryptic would have to release proprietary information. In case it hasn't been noticed, this is not something cryptic likes to do, even when they should.
Honestly, Give it up. Your wasting your time. It's yours to waste, but your definitely wasting it.
That's so far off base it's not even wrong. Ego has nothing to do with it.
I don't suppose you've ever noticed that DC Comics and Marvel don't accept unsolicited submissions? That's not ego--that's business.
Introduction of 3rd-party code would involve management of copyright and intellectual property issues. That means lawyers, and lawyers means $$$. For lots of reasons--both legal and business-it just wouldn't be money well-spent.
Look at it this way: if your neighbor Fred drives home a new Ferrari one day, you might decide it would look better with green rally stripes and offer to paint them on the car for free. Fred will likely say no. That's not ego--that's ownership. Would you then walk around the neighborhood telling everyone that Fred is just too egotistical to let you paint rally stripes on his Ferrari?
(If you would, then you're the one with the ego problem, not Fred.)
I work for a Fortune 400 and somewhere along the way, I wrote a complete emulation of our hardware platform so that we can build and test apps on top of it without having to run directly on the hardware. (It's easier to debug on our laptops than it is to go into the lab, load onto the hardware, and debug by reading logs.) I happen to think our hardware customers would benefit from access to the emulation suite.
I can't just give it away, though. Although I work for the business, I am not the business. Because I wrote the emulation platform under its employ, the business owns it and decides what gets done with it outside my team. Due to my longevity with the business and my seniority in my particular line of business, I'm allowed (sometimes) to advise--but I don't decide.
For all you know the coders inside Cryptic have been writing internal change requests to upgrade the UI and improve the way certain processes work in order to remove lag--and the business defers those changes in order to schedule functionality improvements that the business--in its wisdom, or lack thereof--finds more appropriate and valuable.
I don't know Cryptic's business plan, and I certainly am not here to pass judgment on management's priorities. We all have opinions about what would be best for the game. With 34 years of professional software development experience under my belt, I understand that not everything the customers think is correct will be done--or, for that matter, is even correct. Not everything the coders think is correct will be done. The only way to affect management is to become management. I'm not going to become management at Cryptic, nor within the business that currently employs me. The former is reality, the latter is choice.
I agree that it's entirely possible for a person to be completely ego-driven, and for that to have detrimental effects on a business. Businesses are designed to mitigate that possibility--or at least that long term possibility.
I also agree that it's possible for management and ownership to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes mistakes get made by committee. At the same time, declaring something to be a mistake is often a matter of opinion. A lot of the time those opinions aren't what one would call "informed," and uninformed opinions tend to come from individuals outside the business.
I cringe every time I see the game lose track of my ship loadout and officer assignments. I have enough experience with programming--and yes, even game programming--to believe that it's a relatively easy task not to break that functionality with each release. My belief doesn't make it fact, though. I haven't seen the code. The model I have in my mind might be over-simplified compared to how the engine actually manages and retrieves that data. That engine, as software goes, is pretty old now. I manage and work around a legacy codebase myself, so I understand that sometimes it's just too costly to rewrite the legacy components in order to make incremental improvements. (Go too deep, and the regression testing costs rise exponentially.)
So I accept that there are just some things that are going to happen whether we like them or not. I know the coders don't want them to happen, and I'm pretty sure the designers don't want them to happen. I couldn't speak for the ownership of PWE, so I won't even speculate.
And neither should you.
It would make this old Okie happy if they just added back in the ability to change weapon colors like they tried in the Beta. Yeah, I know the arguments against it, esp. for the PvP players. but at this point, besides procs, it really doesn't matter since most energy weapon damage is equal.
still something like heal bot, but for ship or ground would be incredible here.
A wild long post appears. It uses many words. It's super effective!!!
Sorry, had to do it. :P
It's a unique set of player-facing tools that are all black-boxes, we can't see inside and learn Cryptic's secrets from it. We can stack those black boxes to do things, but if there's no box for the thing we want and no combination of boxes to approximate the thing we want then we'd need to ask Cryptic to make a new box (which may or may not happen). We don't have "access to the code".
I know, right?
I'm a little suprised this thread didn't get closed back before it was resurrected. I don't give it long now.
/10char