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An Open Letter and Plea to the STO Team
kovabomb
Member Posts: 52 Arc User
Written to the people behind Star Trek Online.
First and foremost, I wish to say that I like STO. I’ve been playing the game for some time now and I’ve found the stories, concepts and mechanics presented therein to be most intriguing. There is a satisfaction to being the commander of your own ship and fleet, even if it is fictional. I also appreciate the new content that the team has striven to put together, keeping the game alive.
That being said, while the game is “alive,” I don’t think that it is “alive and well.” Underneath the hood are a myriad of glitches, bugs and instabilities that have persisted throughout the game’s growth. The team has done a good job at fixing the “game breaker” issues, but the smaller bugs tend to fall by the wayside. For some it’s not a problem; they just soldier on and don’t let it bother them. For others it’s almost unbearable. What’s more, the manner in which these small issues have been handled (or seemingly ignored) has reflected badly on the team’s skill and care for the game and the community that plays it.
It is for this reason that I issue a suggestion and a plea to the STO team to fix the smaller issues that have plagued the game and work to make the build more stable. I may not be a professional programmer or a businessman, but I know enough of both to know that if a product is perceived as shoddy then people will stop using it, despite any new features that are made for it. True, new content tends to net the most revenue for the game, but that content will be rendered meaningless if people can’t or won’t play it.
To that end, perhaps a compromise can be made between creating more game content and fixing the existing bugs. And the thing is that the structure for it is largely already in place. Why not set aside a scheduled week or weekend event and dedicate it to “Hunting the Bugs?” During this event, perhaps a special activity or mission could be set up in which the players help locate the smaller issues of the game that require fixing. The activity could be something designed explicitly to test the game’s stability and limits. And while the event is running, the STO team could be working to improve the build while not losing too much time in creating new content. The fixing of the game effectively becomes part of the game’s content.
I hope that these suggestions and items of feedback prove useful. Let me reiterate: I like Star Trek Online and look forward to its continued life. Let’s make it the best it can be.
First and foremost, I wish to say that I like STO. I’ve been playing the game for some time now and I’ve found the stories, concepts and mechanics presented therein to be most intriguing. There is a satisfaction to being the commander of your own ship and fleet, even if it is fictional. I also appreciate the new content that the team has striven to put together, keeping the game alive.
That being said, while the game is “alive,” I don’t think that it is “alive and well.” Underneath the hood are a myriad of glitches, bugs and instabilities that have persisted throughout the game’s growth. The team has done a good job at fixing the “game breaker” issues, but the smaller bugs tend to fall by the wayside. For some it’s not a problem; they just soldier on and don’t let it bother them. For others it’s almost unbearable. What’s more, the manner in which these small issues have been handled (or seemingly ignored) has reflected badly on the team’s skill and care for the game and the community that plays it.
It is for this reason that I issue a suggestion and a plea to the STO team to fix the smaller issues that have plagued the game and work to make the build more stable. I may not be a professional programmer or a businessman, but I know enough of both to know that if a product is perceived as shoddy then people will stop using it, despite any new features that are made for it. True, new content tends to net the most revenue for the game, but that content will be rendered meaningless if people can’t or won’t play it.
To that end, perhaps a compromise can be made between creating more game content and fixing the existing bugs. And the thing is that the structure for it is largely already in place. Why not set aside a scheduled week or weekend event and dedicate it to “Hunting the Bugs?” During this event, perhaps a special activity or mission could be set up in which the players help locate the smaller issues of the game that require fixing. The activity could be something designed explicitly to test the game’s stability and limits. And while the event is running, the STO team could be working to improve the build while not losing too much time in creating new content. The fixing of the game effectively becomes part of the game’s content.
I hope that these suggestions and items of feedback prove useful. Let me reiterate: I like Star Trek Online and look forward to its continued life. Let’s make it the best it can be.
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Comments
Every real-world application has bugs, usually dozens or hundreds of them. Most non-trivial open source projects have a bug tracker database to manage the scores of bugs. Bugs get fixed, new bugs get found, some old bugs persist for years.
For commercial software, bugs are assigned priorities and fixed in that order as time permits. Time never permits fixing them all.
I'm aware that I'm not the first to voice this concern and I'm sure I won't be the last. However, I'm not just complaning, as many are wont to do. I'm also putting out ideas to help solve the issue. And in the off-chance that my suggestions can help in any way, then it is worth saying.
I've never read any Cryptic Dev or Mod actually post here that They don't care or aren't trying.
PATIENCE is a virtue, and it doesn't hurt to assume the best occasionally instead of the worst.
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
I didn't say that they aren't trying. In fact, I know that they are. What I did say is that some people have perceived the persistence of many of the small bugs as though the team didn't care or that they don’t know what they’re doing... When in fact the team does care, is competent, and puts up with lots of schlock. It’s the small blemishes that often are the cannon fodder for the trolls and complainers.
"Because if it can't be perfect, why should we try to be better?" Probably in the top five failures of human reasoning. Right there next to "Other people do things badly, which validates us doing it badly." Elegant how you managed to get them both into one post.
Sure, the two functions aren't done by the same folks, but hiring is done out of one pool of money, and I have to agree getting another bug smasher on the pay roll would not go amiss.
I did neither. I just pointed out "perfect is the enemy of the good" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
No real-world application is bug free. In commercial development bugs are never fixed in the order of discovery, they are fixed in some combination of severity and effort required.
That isn't an excuse to not fix as much as you can, it just means that we customers have to accept that a) there will always be some bugs and b) some old bugs will persist forever.
Software is always broken, programming is never truly complete. What many companies fail to do is regular maintenance to their software and services, which isn't an area where Cryptic has a problem.
I do in fact read the patch notes. I'm also well aware that programming for a game like this is never really done. It's impressive what the team has been able to do thus far and I'm not trying to drag them down. I did not intend for my original post to feel demeaning in any way. The fact is that unless people speak up in a constructive way, it's that less likely that something will be done.
Oh jeez... These kind of threads come up far too often. The above is the simplest explanation to the issue raised.
My opinions on this have been stated in a previous thread just like this, and again in one before that, so I don't have to say anything.
... except: Can someone please put this kind of thread in the FCT category so it doesn't get asked every month or so?
The two problems with your position, though, are that 1) as pointed out already, your solutions simply aren't that realistic, nor are they really novel. First, there's already a team of players who are supposed to be out there helping track down bugs, and while as a whole the STO playerbase is terrifyingly inadequate in many important ways, one thing that the huddled masses are good at is "bringing attention" to bugs, usually in the form of overblown posts about how staggeringly incompetent the game devs are, because there is STILL a stretched texture on a particular console in a mission, or whatever other nit-pick they've got stuck in their craw. Not only that, but you fall into the fallacy that many of the so-called minor bugs could be realistically solved during a "weekend event", and there's nothing in the world to suggest that is true. At best, your proposal would be a way for Cryptic to noisily "do something" about bugs, without actually accomplishing much. More realistically, it would simply cause players to develop hysterically excessive expectations about bugs being fixed, and then the Monday after the even the forums would be aflame with people demanding to know why Cryptic didn't fix all the bugs after having one whole weekend to do it.
That's problem 1.
Problem 2 is your underlying assumption that Cryptic needs to be responsible for adapting to the mistaken perceptions of the significant portion of the player base that seems to think that because they once "got" a programming language joke on xkcd, that they are therefore coding experts, or whatever. You even acknowledged up thread that this isn't really about Cryptic not fixing bugs, it's about the erroneous perception that bug fixing isn't happening. I'm really not sure why it is up to Cryptic to adapt to the unreasonable expectations and perceptions of those people. It seems to me that in any reasonable version of the world, we would call upon those who were mistaken in their perceptions to, you know, educate themselves so they can stop being mistaken?
Yes but... as long as STO is making money as-is, nothing is going to change. There are bugs as old as this game still unfixed.
This is one of the best explainations, the devs have came out and admitted that adding any new code to the game has a potential the break it, they do their best to prevent it from happening. however when it does they work hard looking for the problem. though i think Microsoft windows was pictured in the dicionary first
As someone who's made somewhat complicated excel sheets, I guarantee you that adding code to literally anything has the potential to break it.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
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Original STO beta tester.
That's exactly what you're trying to do. You're flat out saying they're not doing a good enough job, and claiming that STO will bleed players if it's not fixed.