This was brought up in armada chat recently, and I do agree, but imagine the game manual for STO:
"One easy download! Complete in 94,000 pages!".
Seriously. What's with that? "It would be a lot to read" seems to be a totally valid argument not to do something? Again, such a document would not be required to play. Some people treat it as mandatory but that's not the point.
This was brought up in armada chat recently, and I do agree, but imagine the game manual for STO:
"One easy download! Complete in 94,000 pages!".
Seriously. What's with that? "It would be a lot to read" seems to be a totally valid argument not to do something? Again, such a document would not be required to play. Some people treat it as mandatory but that's not the point.
Also it would change every patch....
Exactly my point
So, they should not do anything that requires continous maintenance, because it's effort?
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
This was brought up in armada chat recently, and I do agree, but imagine the game manual for STO:
"One easy download! Complete in 94,000 pages!".
Seriously. What's with that? "It would be a lot to read" seems to be a totally valid argument not to do something? Again, such a document would not be required to play. Some people treat it as mandatory but that's not the point.
Also it would change every patch....
Ditto!
The major problem of this game is DPS. People are obsessed by it. Whilst some think it's fun obliterating the enemy in one shot, I don't. Take the example of the SFC series (Unmodded). There were individual subsystems you could target, not 'general' ones like this and they took longer to repair. For example, taking out the Impulse Engine so the enemy couldn't move, knocking out the opponents Tractor Beam so it couldn't repel yours, taking out individual weapon arrays or knocking out the Warp Core so they had no shields or weapons to rely on whilst you transported Marines on to take the ship. It's this mechanic that STO is missing, on top of the longer time for repairing the hulls and shields (having to hide from aload of enemy to repair really added to the feel of the game. Also, need I mention the almost 'infinite' power supplies!
And then there is 'canon'. Most of the time, Starfleet aims to disable a ship, rather than destroy it, the exception obviously being whilst in war. There is always an attempt to resolve the conflict before it begins. There is a really lack of strategy compared to how we've seen Captains on-screen operate in ship to ship combat, as I said DPS!
"You don't want to patrol!? You don't want to escort!? You don't want to defend the Federation's Starbases!? Then why are you flying my Starships!? If you were a Klingon you'd be killed on the spot, but lucky for you.....you WERE in Starfleet. Let's see how New Zealand Penal Colony suits you." Adm A. Necheyev.
This is perfectly normal for a Video game. 90% of video games only ever really give you the most basic explanation.
Pokemon, for example, never bothers explaining IVs, EV,s and nature beyond VERY basic description of what they do (and even then, not names, EVs are only mentioned as "pokemon trained by a trainer are stronger then one in the wild" for example).
Most Fighting games rarely if ever explain a lot of the technical stuff you would need to know, super smash Bros Melee never even mentions wave dash and similar things anywhere.
This was brought up in armada chat recently, and I do agree, but imagine the game manual for STO:
"One easy download! Complete in 94,000 pages!".
Seriously. What's with that? "It would be a lot to read" seems to be a totally valid argument not to do something? Again, such a document would not be required to play. Some people treat it as mandatory but that's not the point.
Also it would change every patch....
Ditto!
The major problem of this game is DPS. People are obsessed by it. Whilst some think it's fun obliterating the enemy in one shot, I don't. Take the example of the SFC series (Unmodded). There were individual subsystems you could target, not 'general' ones like this and they took longer to repair. For example, taking out the Impulse Engine so the enemy couldn't move, knocking out the opponents Tractor Beam so it couldn't repel yours, taking out individual weapon arrays or knocking out the Warp Core so they had no shields or weapons to rely on whilst you transported Marines on to take the ship. It's this mechanic that STO is missing, on top of the longer time for repairing the hulls and shields (having to hide from aload of enemy to repair really added to the feel of the game. Also, need I mention the almost 'infinite' power supplies!
And then there is 'canon'. Most of the time, Starfleet aims to disable a ship, rather than destroy it, the exception obviously being whilst in war. There is always an attempt to resolve the conflict before it begins. There is a really lack of strategy compared to how we've seen Captains on-screen operate in ship to ship combat, as I said DPS!
Start Fleet Command! Loved it! That kind of game mechanic I'd really like to see in STO. I just cannot agree with the current system; e.g. a ship can be reduced to 0% shileds and 1% hull but still have all subsystems running at max, dealing max damage and still have all captain and BOff abilities available. Does anybody get unconscious, wounded when the ship is almost reduced to space rubble?
Several comments here refered to (all) other games where they also do not have sufficient or any documentation. Is that what all gamers should agree with, silently accept? No, we are entitled to ask for improvements and keep on insisting.
This was brought up in armada chat recently, and I do agree, but imagine the game manual for STO:
"One easy download! Complete in 94,000 pages!".
Seriously. What's with that? "It would be a lot to read" seems to be a totally valid argument not to do something? Again, such a document would not be required to play. Some people treat it as mandatory but that's not the point.
Also it would change every patch....
Ditto!
The major problem of this game is DPS. People are obsessed by it. Whilst some think it's fun obliterating the enemy in one shot, I don't. Take the example of the SFC series (Unmodded). There were individual subsystems you could target, not 'general' ones like this and they took longer to repair. For example, taking out the Impulse Engine so the enemy couldn't move, knocking out the opponents Tractor Beam so it couldn't repel yours, taking out individual weapon arrays or knocking out the Warp Core so they had no shields or weapons to rely on whilst you transported Marines on to take the ship. It's this mechanic that STO is missing, on top of the longer time for repairing the hulls and shields (having to hide from aload of enemy to repair really added to the feel of the game. Also, need I mention the almost 'infinite' power supplies!
And then there is 'canon'. Most of the time, Starfleet aims to disable a ship, rather than destroy it, the exception obviously being whilst in war. There is always an attempt to resolve the conflict before it begins. There is a really lack of strategy compared to how we've seen Captains on-screen operate in ship to ship combat, as I said DPS!
Start Fleet Command! Loved it!
Not to go off too off topic here but I just recently bought SFC from GOG.com on sale and how I missed out on playing this game I have no idea. Loads of fun! It's too bad this style was never expanded more, especially where you take command of multiple ships and the AI takes over the ships you don't control. Very cool. Oh well, maybe someday.
The documentation and the tutorials for that game isn't half bad, but even then, it wasn't the greatest I found. I had to Google a few areas of the game as I didn't quiet fully understand certain areas. (I had to get it through my thick skull that DPS is not even close to being everything with SFC!).
With that said, the documentation that's available is night and day in comparison. Things have downgraded in terms of available documents(in most games) and appear it's up to the community to have such information.
Retired. I'm now in search for that perfect space anomaly.
So, they should not do anything that requires continous maintenance, because it's effort?
They actually do lots of stuff requiring continuous maintenance. They just forget to mantain it after a couple patches! See exploration clusters, they made a dozen available, then they added a grand total of one during the first seasons (borg space), and after that they forgot they ever existed.
They actually do lots of stuff requiring continuous maintenance. They just forget to mantain it after a couple patches! See exploration clusters, they made a dozen available, then they added a grand total of one during the first seasons (borg space), and after that they forgot they ever existed.
Yeah, only years later a dev actually came forth, stating they always disliked them and stopped working on them the moment they went live As if we couldn't tell
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
They actually do lots of stuff requiring continuous maintenance. They just forget to mantain it after a couple patches! See exploration clusters, they made a dozen available, then they added a grand total of one during the first seasons (borg space), and after that they forgot they ever existed.
Yeah, only years later a dev actually came forth, stating they always disliked them and stopped working on them the moment they went live As if we couldn't tell
I think the phrase used was "a lot of work for very little content".
They actually do lots of stuff requiring continuous maintenance. They just forget to mantain it after a couple patches! See exploration clusters, they made a dozen available, then they added a grand total of one during the first seasons (borg space), and after that they forgot they ever existed.
Yeah, only years later a dev actually came forth, stating they always disliked them and stopped working on them the moment they went live As if we couldn't tell
I think the phrase used was "a lot of work for very little content".
I think more than anything else some sort of streamlining of the UI and tooltips would be the easiest task for the devs to complete. I mean we've got tooltips that are wildly incorrect or in some cases have never been updated. Plus you've also got confusing descriptions when you consider some text refers to % increases and others talk about skill point increases. It's or clear exactly what you're getting. Tooltips should really display the actual change you would see on screen not the increase before the calculation. It's overly complex to say something gives a 30% increase when it really only gives 15% for example.
That alone would help people understand what the hell is going on with their builds.
But the problem is that there's no 'basic formula'. There are ridiculously complicated formulas, that are constantly in flux.
That's actually a point in favour of documentation, not against it.
Not really if the documentation will often be out of date or just plain confusing to anyone without a PHD in mathematics
Actually, you just need a working knowledge of Algebra, there is no Calculus, Differential Equations, or math higher than Algebra involved. The real thing you need is patience to work out the calculations, especially with anything to do with damage resistance.
This was brought up in armada chat recently, and I do agree, but imagine the game manual for STO:
"One easy download! Complete in 94,000 pages!".
Seriously. What's with that? "It would be a lot to read" seems to be a totally valid argument not to do something? Again, such a document would not be required to play. Some people treat it as mandatory but that's not the point.
Also it would change every patch....
Ditto!
The major problem of this game is DPS. People are obsessed by it. Whilst some think it's fun obliterating the enemy in one shot, I don't. Take the example of the SFC series (Unmodded). There were individual subsystems you could target, not 'general' ones like this and they took longer to repair. For example, taking out the Impulse Engine so the enemy couldn't move, knocking out the opponents Tractor Beam so it couldn't repel yours, taking out individual weapon arrays or knocking out the Warp Core so they had no shields or weapons to rely on whilst you transported Marines on to take the ship. It's this mechanic that STO is missing, on top of the longer time for repairing the hulls and shields (having to hide from aload of enemy to repair really added to the feel of the game. Also, need I mention the almost 'infinite' power supplies!
And then there is 'canon'. Most of the time, Starfleet aims to disable a ship, rather than destroy it, the exception obviously being whilst in war. There is always an attempt to resolve the conflict before it begins. There is a really lack of strategy compared to how we've seen Captains on-screen operate in ship to ship combat, as I said DPS!
What does this "DPS" you hate so much have to do with STO's TRIBBLE-poor documentation of its own systems and the Starfleet Command game?
You say DPS is a problem, but your entire post has nothing to do with it. SFC had a deeper combat system, but make no mistake: The end goal of SFC was to destroy the other ship by any means as necessary as quickly as you can. This was true of the MANY combat portions of every SFC game. This was COMPLETELY true of SFC's multiplayer. There were certain parts where you had to disable a ship, but that was only for story required purposes.
All that?
Just like in STO. Combat oriented. The point is to wreck ships unless the single player story specifically dictated / made you do otherwise.
Anyways, proper documentation of how combat works needs to be made available. Not everyone will be interested in it. But there are those that strive to do better will dig deeper into the gameplay to wring performance out of their ships and playstyle. PVP, PVE, doesn't matter.
And so what if the game changes? Then make it reflect in the documentation! They put patch notes out, don't they??? Surely if they know WHAT they did in the game and WHY they did it, it can reflect in the documentation for those that want to go deeper into it.
I seem to remember that several years ago (2011-2012?) there used to be a "Message of The Day" pop-up box that would appear when you would log in to a character, and this would have important announcements, patch notes, etc.
This would have been especially helpful for dealing with situations like when the ability to delete exchange mails was removed for a week. Unless you were constantly following the STO social media channels, there was no way you could find out why exchange mails couldn't be deleted. Many people don't even read the Release Notes and then ask why various things are different from "yesterday".
I think that if the in-game MOTD pop-up could be re-enabled, this would be very helpful for delivering important announcements.
On another note, the Library Computer system (accessible via the ? icon by the minimap) is filled with either exceptionally basic or even outdated information, saying things like Auxiliary power boosts turn rate.
And the beauty of a wiki is that anyone can edit them or add content.
Noticed a lot of games do this. They tell you little and figure some number cruncher out there will do the job for them. I find it a bit lazy. But for Cryptic the answer is obvious... they are called Cryptic afterall.
(...)
Anyways, proper documentation of how combat works needs to be made available. Not everyone will be interested in it. But there are those that strive to do better will dig deeper into the gameplay to wring performance out of their ships and playstyle. PVP, PVE, doesn't matter.
And so what if the game changes? Then make it reflect in the documentation! They put patch notes out, don't they??? Surely if they know WHAT they did in the game and WHY they did it, it can reflect in the documentation for those that want to go deeper into it.
That's my whole point. Documentation doesn't even need to have the numbers but solely reveal the basic principles of how the things work and as another poster said, you don't need a degree to calculate that. It's just basic math but you need to know what is calculated to understand how it works and why some things have relative and some things have absolute vlaues and neither of those is actually added to the current one.
But it's astounding how many people seem to principally reject any thought of documentation because either:
a) They can't read without their eyes bleed or something
b) Some third party already figured it out (which, I guess, completely takes Cryptic out of the equation to deliver)
c) It would cause work for the developing company and appearantly the fear that this would cause insta-shutdown of the game outweighs any wish to comprehend the game they are playing.
It's baffling.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
I can agree that certain parts need to be better documented, such as buff categories, THAT confuses people a LOT. But this would simply be less incomplete than what we have.
Writing good documentation and keeping it up to date is a monomentous task for any project of this size.
It could certainly be done, but the time spent there needs also to pay off - and I don't think it would.
Documentation is not exactly the kind of killer feature that gets you countless of new subscribers or Zen sales.
The Combat Log and the tooltips have helped the community to figure out a lot in how the game works - and I strongly suspect that this is actually something that some players find interesting and gets them to identify with the game. Gaining and Posessing system mastery can actually be a satisfying achievement for certain player types.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
maintenance would be simplified if they could make the tooltips automatically update for the most part.
like the way npcs address player names with the <<name>> thing. that way only when they change a function would they need to do text edits.
but avoiding things like this need to be addressed. and thins is for a relativly new ability. not for FAW or some other primordial sto power.
The Combat Log and the tooltips have helped the community to figure out a lot in how the game works - and I strongly suspect that this is actually something that some players find interesting and gets them to identify with the game. Gaining and Posessing system mastery can actually be a satisfying achievement for certain player types.
if only it was a built in feature that clearly communicated its information to the player to let them know how well they where doing...
tooltips do update though? Hover over a weapon in sol space and activate some abilities.
heh in NW currently there's a Wiki edit contest with possible pack prize. Srsly if they ever put airship combat in NW then I'm gone from STO. I will just name my airship Enterprise and call it a day lol...
There's actually an interact in the tutorial that explains firing arcs (although it confuses beam banks with arrays). I bet only a small handful of people know it exists.
You're a Gold Member of the DPS league? You are sooo awesome omg a hero even!!!!11!!!
I think the thing I find amusing is the idea (a little retro here), that one might buy an sto disk, in a little box like the games of old. And where you would usually have a little book detailing the various aapects of the game and how to excel, here you would instead hear an ominous beeping noise as a forklift approaches carrying your game manual. Ridiculous I know but it was the first thought that came inti my head when someone said "sto manual".
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
I think the thing I find amusing is the idea (a little retro here), that one might buy an sto disk, in a little box like the games of old. And where you would usually have a little book detailing the various aapects of the game and how to excel, here you would instead hear an ominous beeping noise as a forklift approaches carrying your game manual.
Ridiculous I know but it was the first thought that came inti my head when someone said "sto manual".
Which is kind of sad, really. I did buy STO boxed with a disk. It didn't came with a manual as they stopped doing that in the early '00 already but already nobody remembers any more or thinks it's reasonable games are documented at all and instead we rely on third parties to figure the game out for us and put it on the internet.
Then again, I had a minor depression episode (not really ) thinking about people these days, even those that are adult now don't know things like an Atari 5200 or NES any more. Those are only tales, they don't know that. They don't know games with documentations and only time-gated, paywalled WIP games bound on online accounts and they think it is truly the best thing the industry came up with, ever.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
I think more than anything else some sort of streamlining of the UI and tooltips would be the easiest task for the devs to complete.
I mean we've got tooltips that are wildly incorrect or in some cases have never been updated.
Plus you've also got confusing descriptions when you consider some text refers to % increases and others talk about skill point increases. It's or clear exactly what you're getting.
Tooltips should really display the actual change you would see on screen not the increase before the calculation. It's overly complex to say something gives a 30% increase when it really only gives 15% for example.
That alone would help people understand what the hell is going on with their builds.
The problem with Cryptic games (Neverwinter has the same problem) is that tooltips don't draw on actual database parameters/formulas, but they are mostly handwritten. So often some dev modifies the ingame item and forgets to update the tooltip, and we have a shield absorbing 10% damage but the tooltip says 20% (Iconian Rep shield IIRC) and it only gets fixed when some player does some detailed testing and reports it.
Or tooltips are plain wrong because no one knows anymore (or doesn't care to check) how that item exactly works.
Or you don't really know how does a skill quantity translate ingame (i.e. +15 Flux Capacitor skill, how much does that actually affect a draining effect? 1,5%? 15%? 150%? What does +500 stealth do? Is it a lot? How does it affect my interaction with an enemy entity?), so even a technically correct tooltip is still unusable.
tooltips do update though? Hover over a weapon in sol space and activate some abilities.
not quite what i meant, but thats on my poor communication.
even with what you say being true, these details arent always accurate, something that i used to read the dps and pvp peoples discussions on.
and even if they where accurate, they dont say what range at which they do X damage (i just presume point-blank to 2km).
yes you can hover over the weapon tooltip for the full list, but even this information lacks practical application to people who havnt already read the maths for how, if and when each ability interacts to reach the final number, wont show stacks and in many cases will only be there for more than 10 seconds.
even then there is no way to get numbers for effective damage after resists are accounted for without using 3rd party apps like the clr and doing lots of rather clinical testing.
this being another thing that can result in players missing the forest for the trees as i referenced earlier.
Ok, so say you had this documentation... you have 1 weapon, so you'd need to show a chart of how much damage that does at 1 each distance, plus at all the different power level variations, then with each possible buff, plus combinations of buffs, and then add onto that the resistances of the target, plus all the various debuffs that both you and your team are doing, plus pets, cross referenced with each other.
Then repeat for every possible weapon, combination of weapons, situations, abilities, buffs, etc etc etc
I'm not trying to deliberately be a TRIBBLE, but what you want is just ridiculously impractical to not only implement, but also to maintain. Especially when there would be absolutely no financial return on Cryptic's colossal investment of time into it.
Comments
Exactly my point
So, they should not do anything that requires continous maintenance, because it's effort?
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Ditto!
The major problem of this game is DPS. People are obsessed by it. Whilst some think it's fun obliterating the enemy in one shot, I don't. Take the example of the SFC series (Unmodded). There were individual subsystems you could target, not 'general' ones like this and they took longer to repair. For example, taking out the Impulse Engine so the enemy couldn't move, knocking out the opponents Tractor Beam so it couldn't repel yours, taking out individual weapon arrays or knocking out the Warp Core so they had no shields or weapons to rely on whilst you transported Marines on to take the ship. It's this mechanic that STO is missing, on top of the longer time for repairing the hulls and shields (having to hide from aload of enemy to repair really added to the feel of the game. Also, need I mention the almost 'infinite' power supplies!
And then there is 'canon'. Most of the time, Starfleet aims to disable a ship, rather than destroy it, the exception obviously being whilst in war. There is always an attempt to resolve the conflict before it begins. There is a really lack of strategy compared to how we've seen Captains on-screen operate in ship to ship combat, as I said DPS!
Pokemon, for example, never bothers explaining IVs, EV,s and nature beyond VERY basic description of what they do (and even then, not names, EVs are only mentioned as "pokemon trained by a trainer are stronger then one in the wild" for example).
Most Fighting games rarely if ever explain a lot of the technical stuff you would need to know, super smash Bros Melee never even mentions wave dash and similar things anywhere.
Start Fleet Command! Loved it! That kind of game mechanic I'd really like to see in STO. I just cannot agree with the current system; e.g. a ship can be reduced to 0% shileds and 1% hull but still have all subsystems running at max, dealing max damage and still have all captain and BOff abilities available. Does anybody get unconscious, wounded when the ship is almost reduced to space rubble?
Several comments here refered to (all) other games where they also do not have sufficient or any documentation. Is that what all gamers should agree with, silently accept? No, we are entitled to ask for improvements and keep on insisting.
Not to go off too off topic here but I just recently bought SFC from GOG.com on sale and how I missed out on playing this game I have no idea. Loads of fun! It's too bad this style was never expanded more, especially where you take command of multiple ships and the AI takes over the ships you don't control. Very cool. Oh well, maybe someday.
The documentation and the tutorials for that game isn't half bad, but even then, it wasn't the greatest I found. I had to Google a few areas of the game as I didn't quiet fully understand certain areas. (I had to get it through my thick skull that DPS is not even close to being everything with SFC!).
With that said, the documentation that's available is night and day in comparison. Things have downgraded in terms of available documents(in most games) and appear it's up to the community to have such information.
They actually do lots of stuff requiring continuous maintenance. They just forget to mantain it after a couple patches! See exploration clusters, they made a dozen available, then they added a grand total of one during the first seasons (borg space), and after that they forgot they ever existed.
Yeah, only years later a dev actually came forth, stating they always disliked them and stopped working on them the moment they went live
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
I mean we've got tooltips that are wildly incorrect or in some cases have never been updated.
Plus you've also got confusing descriptions when you consider some text refers to % increases and others talk about skill point increases. It's or clear exactly what you're getting.
Tooltips should really display the actual change you would see on screen not the increase before the calculation. It's overly complex to say something gives a 30% increase when it really only gives 15% for example.
That alone would help people understand what the hell is going on with their builds.
Actually, you just need a working knowledge of Algebra, there is no Calculus, Differential Equations, or math higher than Algebra involved. The real thing you need is patience to work out the calculations, especially with anything to do with damage resistance.
What does this "DPS" you hate so much have to do with STO's TRIBBLE-poor documentation of its own systems and the Starfleet Command game?
You say DPS is a problem, but your entire post has nothing to do with it. SFC had a deeper combat system, but make no mistake: The end goal of SFC was to destroy the other ship by any means as necessary as quickly as you can. This was true of the MANY combat portions of every SFC game. This was COMPLETELY true of SFC's multiplayer. There were certain parts where you had to disable a ship, but that was only for story required purposes.
All that?
Just like in STO. Combat oriented. The point is to wreck ships unless the single player story specifically dictated / made you do otherwise.
Anyways, proper documentation of how combat works needs to be made available. Not everyone will be interested in it. But there are those that strive to do better will dig deeper into the gameplay to wring performance out of their ships and playstyle. PVP, PVE, doesn't matter.
And so what if the game changes? Then make it reflect in the documentation! They put patch notes out, don't they??? Surely if they know WHAT they did in the game and WHY they did it, it can reflect in the documentation for those that want to go deeper into it.
This would have been especially helpful for dealing with situations like when the ability to delete exchange mails was removed for a week. Unless you were constantly following the STO social media channels, there was no way you could find out why exchange mails couldn't be deleted. Many people don't even read the Release Notes and then ask why various things are different from "yesterday".
I think that if the in-game MOTD pop-up could be re-enabled, this would be very helpful for delivering important announcements.
On another note, the Library Computer system (accessible via the ? icon by the minimap) is filled with either exceptionally basic or even outdated information, saying things like Auxiliary power boosts turn rate.
Noticed a lot of games do this. They tell you little and figure some number cruncher out there will do the job for them. I find it a bit lazy. But for Cryptic the answer is obvious... they are called Cryptic afterall.
That's my whole point. Documentation doesn't even need to have the numbers but solely reveal the basic principles of how the things work and as another poster said, you don't need a degree to calculate that. It's just basic math but you need to know what is calculated to understand how it works and why some things have relative and some things have absolute vlaues and neither of those is actually added to the current one.
But it's astounding how many people seem to principally reject any thought of documentation because either:
a) They can't read without their eyes bleed or something
b) Some third party already figured it out (which, I guess, completely takes Cryptic out of the equation to deliver)
c) It would cause work for the developing company and appearantly the fear that this would cause insta-shutdown of the game outweighs any wish to comprehend the game they are playing.
It's baffling.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
My character Tsin'xing
It could certainly be done, but the time spent there needs also to pay off - and I don't think it would.
Documentation is not exactly the kind of killer feature that gets you countless of new subscribers or Zen sales.
The Combat Log and the tooltips have helped the community to figure out a lot in how the game works - and I strongly suspect that this is actually something that some players find interesting and gets them to identify with the game. Gaining and Posessing system mastery can actually be a satisfying achievement for certain player types.
tooltips do update though? Hover over a weapon in sol space and activate some abilities.
You're a Gold Member of the DPS league? You are sooo awesome omg a hero even!!!!11!!!
Ridiculous I know but it was the first thought that came inti my head when someone said "sto manual".
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
Which is kind of sad, really. I did buy STO boxed with a disk. It didn't came with a manual as they stopped doing that in the early '00 already but already nobody remembers any more or thinks it's reasonable games are documented at all and instead we rely on third parties to figure the game out for us and put it on the internet.
Then again, I had a minor depression episode (not really
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The problem with Cryptic games (Neverwinter has the same problem) is that tooltips don't draw on actual database parameters/formulas, but they are mostly handwritten. So often some dev modifies the ingame item and forgets to update the tooltip, and we have a shield absorbing 10% damage but the tooltip says 20% (Iconian Rep shield IIRC) and it only gets fixed when some player does some detailed testing and reports it.
Or tooltips are plain wrong because no one knows anymore (or doesn't care to check) how that item exactly works.
Or you don't really know how does a skill quantity translate ingame (i.e. +15 Flux Capacitor skill, how much does that actually affect a draining effect? 1,5%? 15%? 150%? What does +500 stealth do? Is it a lot? How does it affect my interaction with an enemy entity?), so even a technically correct tooltip is still unusable.
Ok, so say you had this documentation... you have 1 weapon, so you'd need to show a chart of how much damage that does at 1 each distance, plus at all the different power level variations, then with each possible buff, plus combinations of buffs, and then add onto that the resistances of the target, plus all the various debuffs that both you and your team are doing, plus pets, cross referenced with each other.
Then repeat for every possible weapon, combination of weapons, situations, abilities, buffs, etc etc etc
I'm not trying to deliberately be a TRIBBLE, but what you want is just ridiculously impractical to not only implement, but also to maintain. Especially when there would be absolutely no financial return on Cryptic's colossal investment of time into it.