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Priority one interview with geko
chalpen
Member Posts: 2,207 Arc User
It wasn't posted to the forums but I would like to post my opinion of the interview.
3 more episodes "in the can" for the iconian arc, I am not sure if that means they have only 3 more episodes because
1) they said s10 will end the iconian arc and
2) s10 will have as much episodes as delta rising
My thing: I get what you are saying but it seems that their are more things to do while fighting the tholians than their are the herald. The tholians are the worst rep fight in the game and you have a battle zone, more queues, and a lot of solo content. Iconians are missing a battle zone in my opinion.
Fleet revamp.
Awesome.
Duty officer revamp. Awesome (except the deck change idea).
Ship traits crossing factions? Saw that coming.
Breen arc redux: unless the last part is some ensign backing up he library to a thumb drive don't bother.
Felkiri arc? Yes please update.
Give Cookie her asexual born in a bikini.
3 more episodes "in the can" for the iconian arc, I am not sure if that means they have only 3 more episodes because
1) they said s10 will end the iconian arc and
2) s10 will have as much episodes as delta rising
My thing: I get what you are saying but it seems that their are more things to do while fighting the tholians than their are the herald. The tholians are the worst rep fight in the game and you have a battle zone, more queues, and a lot of solo content. Iconians are missing a battle zone in my opinion.
Fleet revamp.
Awesome.
Duty officer revamp. Awesome (except the deck change idea).
Ship traits crossing factions? Saw that coming.
Breen arc redux: unless the last part is some ensign backing up he library to a thumb drive don't bother.
Felkiri arc? Yes please update.
Give Cookie her asexual born in a bikini.
Should I start posting again after all this time?
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i am about to listen and find out.
http://priorityonepodcast.com/po219/
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He didn't go into much, but said it's coming very soon... my guess: Season 10.5 (summer).
Reciprocity for my Negh'tev? All my yes.
They are going to make it better
Like Terradome
He wants to 'retire' some existing PvE queues so other queues will see more play.
Seriously? If someone's not playing a PvE Queue either:
1) They don't find the content fun to play (Retiring other queues won't help here, unless the unplayed queues are the only ones remaining, OR the ONLY way to get a needed Mark, etc.)
2) Players don't feel the reward is worth the time spent to acquire it.
At least he is considering the other method of IMPROVING rewards or reworking the mechanics of underplayed queues; but sorry, his (seemingly always first) idea of REMOVING CONTENT FROM STO shows why he needs a break from his STO Lead development position. (IMO)
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
And I wish they would do that to the Borg red alerts as well.
--Geko designed the Herald enemies.
--Potential changes to queues, bonus rewards or cycling groups of them to increase participation.
Maybe remove really old ones (gorn minefield, big dig, breaking the planet)
--Many new ships coming over next year. Potential for cross-faction starship t---raits via lockboxes.
--Skill tree overhaul still planned ("probably in the next year") Maybe merge with the spec trees.
--Personal traits will be separated space from ground. "Biggest problem is that most species do not have 9 space and 9 ground traits." Will probably make new traits.
--Hilarious gorn gender discussion around 47-48 minutes.
--More crafting additions are scheduled (potentially cost tuning, selectable mods, or new items, depends on time) Still deciding.
--Fleet additions scheduled. "Things people have been asking for for a long time" Tied into story. A lot of things that fleets need aside from a new holding.
--Improve doff UI. Normalize doff rewards. (Purple assignments should award more than green) Should be a point to do all kinds of assignments, science, engineering, etc. Improved assignment chains. Still deciding. Other stuff, around the 1 hour mark. Scheduled after crafting/fleets.
--Geko knows nothing about the lag (he systems, not hardware). Problem is well known and people are trying to resolve. Geko has experienced lag.
--Plans for new GPL items. Potentially move unpopular c-store items into GPL store. Lobi store more favored for adding new items.
--No immediate plan for borg playable ship. Technology exists to create/fly it though. Will not happen in lock box, saving for faction.
--Probably playable Dominion/Liberated borg someday.
--Extremely low demand for KDF science ships. Most likely just a reskin with existing consoles/trait, if at all.
--Cardassian story arc next on schedule to be redone. Afterwards is either fekihri or breen. (Geko prefers fekihri but it depends)
--Trying to get featured episode replay for items, not the lobi, in delta recruitment event. If not then definately in next few months.
--Delta recruit event far more successful than anticipated. Potentially similar events in future now that technology is in place.
--Reducing dil price of transwarp coils from dil store.
--Taco did basically all the visuals for new sector space.
--New episode about every month until Iconian story finished.
...or
3) They're playing a different PvE queue.
And the more Cryptic adds to STO the more #3 becomes a factor. There's a definite limit on how many sinks a given population can support (ecology 101) and while that may require cuts to enable growth the fact that the bulk of the PVE system is woefully underutilized means that the practical effect of any small cut here is going to be so marginal that it shouldn't be worth discussion (see. how the previous loss of the Gekli feeding grounds didn't shake STO to its very core.)
Yes, its a shame to see things go. But hording isn't a viable practice in conservation biology.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Agian, it's a fact they ARE playing a different queue. That said, I'd say they need to look at finding out WHY certain queues aren't being played and it usually comes down to mechanics (IE 'not fun'); or not rewarding enough vs time spent to complete.
Again, if it's at the point they feel there are too many queues, perhaps they need to look at expanding the rewards (IE maybe make it so you can choose ANY mark, etc) - but again, no matter what they do, these that want/need a certain type of reward will ALWAYS just choose the easiest/fastest queue regardless of the story/mechanics, etc <-- and there's no way to curb that without really normalizing queues across the board.
But again, if they feel it time to remove a certain type of content, maybe they instead need to think about a new type of content, etc. Again, STO is honestly not what I would call an MMO 'overflowing' with content.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
The Fek'lhri arc works well (IMO) in part because its to the point. I'm sure there's sub-plots and McGuffins cryptic could add mid-series to fluff the content out but personally if there's a dirth of dev time I'd rather see that translated into more stand-alone missions (like the KDF hirogen exclusive) where being fluff isn't such a bad thing.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
You have a point, but there is no real reason behind the enduring popularity of ISA. The reward is meh, the length is meh, the fun factor? Meh! Yet, it's still the go-to queue. DPS junkies like it because there's little lag time between mission phases, but that's it.
Again that how you see the content. Others may see it differently. For example there was someone who wished they'd remove/change the way Red Alerts work - but for me, they're one of the things I really enjoy doing when that pop.
^^^
And that's (MO) what makes an MMO fun/successful - enough content across the board that appeals to a wide variety of players; and gives players with various playstyles something they enjoy doing. When you make something that appeals to virtually no one; or is surplanted by something 'newer'; IMO it's better to rework the old content then to just dump it outright. The Devs in charge of STO (IMO too often) seem to just want to completely dump existing content outright.
You don't really see that paradigm with either Champions or NeverWinter; but we've seen it A LOT with STO (IMO).
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when he got to the part about why certain folks are hitting up certain queues...in relation to trying to drive folks to other queues. The whole rotation thing, carrot on a stick thing...but I kind of focused on the rotation thing.
Folks are playing X cause they're having fun. They're not play Y cause they're not having fun. Let's rotate it...so...there's no X, then they'll play Y!
And I'm just really glad I wasn't drinking anything when I burst out laughing...
Which just results in bias. Bias then only translates to dead queues depending on 1. the degree (which may represent a problem with mechanics, however there are other reasons for why one thing may be played more than another thing besides bad game design) and 2. what the bias is acting on, IE. the population. Its unreasonable to expect without corresponding increases in the PvE population that addititions will be viable ad-infinitum. Sure, the system may continue to function but with more and more queues one would expect that only the ones with positive bias (ie. some factor aggregating the too few players playing among too many queues) would be reliably playable. Simultaneously, one should expect a bias because another word for that is popularity (which is intrinsic to all human-driven social systems).
Cryptic should be easily able to assess the relative importance between 1 and 2 by simply averaging the PVE population across the total number of queues. If the result is consistently less than the minimum team size (MTS) there is a huge problem with the number of queues, and ideally for a healthy matchmaking system the number of people playing should be significantly greater than the MTS. I definitely wouldn't go so far as saying that we have a huge problem, but there is a problem when a good bulk of a multiplayer system is inaccessible due to population distribution problems which are only partially attributable to time-output imbalances (which incidentally is a much, much harder problem to rectify because it requires that all queues be designed to not yield strong favorites. In other words so that nothing becomes popular [which is practically impossible particularly with any new release or PvE event, which also is when the distribution problems are greatest. With these two points in mind the effort is almost certainly doomed to fail. Ergo, cuts. Those may certainly take place along with other types of rebalances, but rebalances alone cannot solve cryptics problem.])
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
I have always wondered why they don't have some sort of "bounty" on underplayed queues or a "random queue" with bonus rewards for not being able to pick.
I thought the latter worked out well in WoW.
No premade groups. No choice in which queue you get. Big rewards for doing a random queue the first 25 times or so a week, less rewards after that. Includes unique cosmetic rewards both for playing your first 50 randoms (it was a pet there) and random rewards attached to each instanced dungeon that drop from the random bonus reward crate at the end.
So, for example, running 50 randoms might get you a cool pet or costume piece and then every instance would get something like a 1% drop costume piece that only awards from playing it randomly. Or maybe make it a ship that's crafted and requires 25 unique BoP components that have a 20% chance of dropping from any random bonus crate. Congrats! You just created a 30+ hour timesink for random queues. Maybe have the random queues be a bit less predictable as well and clean up the ground STFs to attract more PuGs.
Yep, and that's my issue with that type of Dev thinking: it's an attempt to "Remove and Force" (which IMO isn't a good solution and I don't think has worked for STO to date) rather 'Entice or Rework".
And honestly, "Entice and Rework" did seem to work in the form of the "Delta Recruit" event (to the point that we had Login Queues for the first time since LoR's launch. So it amazes me that after seeing that the first idea espoused is the old "Remove and Force".
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Yes. Everybody on this side of the wall knows queues are dead because (a) reduced rewards (b) increased failure rate, so anybody with a rational brain figures out do something else that is more productive.
Beatings have failed to boost morale, so beatings will be increased
I'm curious as to where he's getting his information on this. Next to a T6 Bird of Prey its is the most requested ship for KDF and also very highly requested for romulans as well.
It worked for the Halo franchise.
Way back in the day we had a thing called rocket race. New "queue", a little bit off form everyone's preferred gametype. It had a few weeks of life and then died (because there wasn't a large enough dedicated niche to justify keeping the queue in the system). But the fact that it was inviable as a permanent queue didn't mean that it didn't have some place in the game. So the devs brought it in under a temporary rotation. Its still part of the franchise today (in the background but not every piece of content needs to headline) and so are several other queues which wouldn't be if they weren't brought in on a novelty-preserving rotation.
Not every queue is intrinsically worth the same level of interest. Equalize the reward/time and risk/return, and some because of their gameplay, structure, and setting will be more likable than other PVE's. With an incredibly large population that isn't a problem (small niches are sufficient to support their own interests) but for STO (which would be fair to label a "niche" interest in its own right) there does have to be some consideration made to conservation.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
the sales don't seem to bear that out...I guess its one of those things....the buyer says "this is something I really want" and then no one really buys it
Step two, increase AI hit points to ridiculous levels.
Step three, Nerf rewards to cheapskate levels.
Step four, announce to community that nobody plays content, so it's only logical to remove it.
Deadfaced golf clap.
First of all, what I'd like to see is the elimination of failure/critical failure and convert DOff assignments into something with multiple positive outcomes that are different in flavor.
Second, I have always said that the system isn't as visual as what it could be. My suggestion is to introduce a new type of DOff: Team Leads. These leads could influence types of assignment available and have set personalities/voice that respond to key assignments. Obviously you'll never have a thousand DOffs with cutscenes and voiceover or a presence aboard your ship but Team Leads (a step below Department Heads and above DOffs) could feature BOff style customization, voiceover, appear on your ship interior, turn up in missions and cutscenes, etc. while acting as a kind of guide to DOffing.
Basically, introduce one of each gender for each species. Maybe we can set their department and traits. Have them respond to and lead DOff assignments with existing DOffs serving under them.
Existing DOffs would be like Interrupts/Events/Land/Resource cards whereas Team Leads would become our Creatures/Personnel cards.