You have yet to demonstrate that it IS a "simple variable". You CLAIM it is but have no way to offer any proof. THIS is what people are disagreeing with you about.
It might be, but we don't really know.
It would be easier to do it the reverse way. Change the mission text to address everyone as captain, the same way all official PR/Announcements/etc. already address the players (ala, "Greetings, Captains! Here's our latest infographic on fun holiday STO facts"
Then people could set their title to whatever they want (a function already in-game) ... and viola, move on from this oft-asked for thing, because the game would call you captain no matter your rank, as it kind of should and as the devs already do ... and you can be a captain, admiral, missile commander, stalwart, hero of the empire, to your heart's content.
No real need for coding, just altering mission text. And while that may be tedious and time consuming, I've seen other companies use interns for data entry to great effect in the past. I'm sure it's not a concept alien to the game development industry either, but if it is, they're out there in CA and some other tech company can guide them on how to do it up smooth. Would give some lucky intern a chance to see a gaming company up close and personal, make some valuable contacts for their budding career and pull off a QoL change that the community has wanted done forever and ever.
you left out all the items and ships and junk that are affected by what your rank is and whether you qualify for one thing or another. it's not the missions so much. It's everything else.
Well, there's also the fact that the game is apparently actually checking an arbitrary Xp number to figure out what your rank should be and this doesn't always match what it actually IS. How do I know this? a while back there was a bug where level up rewards were NOT actually gained AT the level, but half way between levels.
Yeah, that's part of why I was sitting back smugly and not spelling out to Soph why I thought he was wrong about how easy it'd be.:p This game uses an arcane system of layered data tables for a bunch of things. He keeps posting that your rank is a text string, but it's apparently a long integer. The routines that display your rank check the integer against one of several data tables(depending on your faction) and represent the number with a text string. Lieutenant, sub-commander, general... etc.... But it doesn't seem to have a separate variable that stores this.
You have yet to demonstrate that it IS a "simple variable".
Oh, right. I am not talking to people who could actually know such things, just people who claim they do.
So, $RANK, your mission is to fly the $SHIPNAME to the outskirts of the $PLANET system, download the new code from an ancient communications satellite there, read and understand it, and implement it on your system. Once you have done that, the people around will start adressing you with your chosen title of $TITLE.
If that is too difficult a task for an officer of your reputation, I suggest you send a SFA cadet to do it for you.
on the face of it this seems like a simple change if it is as you suggest it might be simply exchange and variables of $RANK within text to $TITLE job done, easypeasy.
the problem is have you bothered to count how many instances where your rank as stated within text, first the devs will need to trace each and every instance of $RANK in the game and then they have to replace every one of them with $TITLE and there must be 100's of times this occurs throughout the game, now this could well be as easy as doing a search and replace like in a text document, I don't know.
this might satisfy a lot of players as they could be called whatever title they choose from Adjutant, Advocate and Agent all the way through to Tal Shiar's Most Wanted, Wicked, and Xenophobe without actually altering your rank status at all whether it be Commander, Captain or Admiral.
but if this change is so easy it begs the question why hasn't it been implemented, maybe the answer is its not as easy as you seem to think.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
[...
So what would happen when all instances of the $RANK variable are replaced by the $TITLE variable? ...
You are being extremely silly. It doesn't make you look good.
And you are being extremely dismissive of a valid concern and insulting. If Eve could release a patch that deletes the boot.ini file on a computer rendering the computer unusable until it is fixed, then a patch that replaces every instance of $RANK with $TITLE has a possibility of happening. This would be the worst case scenario while losing out on mission rewards would be the best case scenario of something going wrong, but responsible companies always look at the worst case scenario and looking at how they can prevent it and minimize the risks if it does happen. Using Replace All instead of determining what each instance of the RANK variable does sounds like an error that can easily happen.
I don't make a claim to know how easy or difficult it would be since I don't have access to the code or even how everything is organized. There could be a separate file for each mission or even a separate file for the dialog of each mission, but that is only speculation. It could be a mess for all we know.
To do this Search and Replace that you constantly mention is easy properly, then the devs would have to determine what each instance of $RANK does before they change it to $TITLE which can be an extremely easy task if the dialog of each mission is contained in its own file, slightly annoying if each mission has its own file, or extremely tedious if the code is a chaotic mess. As I said before in my previous post that you were extremely dismissive about "dev confirmation is the only way to know if this feature is extremely easy or extremely difficult to do."
the thing is, the older the program, the more additions and alteration that program has to undergo just to keep current, the more odd things it will tend to do. He was right to refer to it as a possible chaotic mess. If you ever talk to any of the devs, you'll find that the game often does things that are completely unexpected, due to lost code fragments still running around and other things. A simple Change All command in this situation could very easily delete every account in the game, just to give an example of a possible down side. Even if they could cobble together an automated system to replace all those variables as you suggest, they would still have to go back and manually verify that what was changed what actually what was supposed to be changed. Changing just one part of code to another predetermined part of code, isn't even programming as much as just data entry. As someone stated above a bunch of interns could do it, yes. But it could take them months.
That was not my intention, so apologies if you were actually insulted. But applying those standards you apparently use for feeling insulted, I would have had every right to whine about being insulted much earlier already. And I am not talking about insulting everyone's intelligence with such ridiculous claims about it being oh so terribly hard to do.
And really, please stop making sh... stuff up just so you can be dismissive of the whole idea.
Apology accepted. I can't speak for everyone, but I always try to not make personal attacks against someone that I have a disagreement with. Calling someone extremely silly is a personal attack IMO which is where I felt insulted. I always try to be serious in my arguments and treat people in a way that I wish to be treated.
Most of us are not dismissive of the idea. I certainly know I am not. It would be nice if I can be called by Master Chef or any other title that I choose, but it is not a necessity for my enjoyment of the game. What the majority of us disagree with is how easy it is. It could be extremely easy or extremely difficult to implement, but without dev confirmation, then there is no way to know for sure. Only a dev would have the experience to know how long this would take to implement and what the potential damage will be if something goes seriously wrong with it.
on the face of it this seems like a simple change if it is as you suggest it might be simply exchange and variables of $RANK within text to $TITLE job done, easypeasy.
I already posted the real reason I think it's not that easy. But just to continue your analogy.... what if the game has another variable called $Rank_Up? If you do a quick search and replace you may or may not replace all instances of that variable with one named $Title_Up. Now what happens? Hard to say.... Worst case scenario: the server crashes every time someone gains a level....
Ever heard of this thing called Occam's Razor? You're not using it.
Dude, it doesn't matter how simple you think something SHOULD be, until we look at the code and know exactly how it works we don't know how simple it might or might not be.
Yeah the problem with Occam's Razor is that it's an uniformed opinion. I've seen it get applied so that whichever idea gets expressed in the fewest sentences is right... The idea behind it(IE whichever statement is simpler has less ways it could be wrong) sounds good, but... it's only useful when you don't have any other way to make a decision.
I'm using Ockham's razor (which, by the way, gets pretty dull in the IT realm). We already know Cryptic's engine is spaghetti-coded; we've seen this in action. (Or do you think it's mere coincidence that there are multiple game and server crashes after every major update?) We also know that, contrary to your assertions, soph, the programmers here are neither lazy nor children (both epithets you've applied to them over this issue), else we would never have gotten, for instance, LoR or the Klingon tutorial. Therefore, it is far more reasonable to suppose that the issue is more difficult than you choose to believe, than it is to suppose that it really is that simple but no one except for you is intelligent enough to think of it.
And, as I said before, if you really do believe you're just that good, Cryptic is hiring - I even gave you the link to their Careers page...
The pulled-out-of-the-behind assumption that the STO code is somehow sort-of impossible to modify with such a simple feature is not only contradictory to the regular code modifications we see with the game. It is also a completely unnecessary assumption to explain what else we observe. Hence it is best to drop it - until such time that we have an observation that can most simply be explained by this assumption.
Are you aware of any such observation?
Didn't I POST one earlier? Why yes I believe I did.... which you seem to have utterly ignored. You basically stated in your own words that you are making arbitrary guesses as to the nature of STO's coding. I'm not.
[...]
Apology accepted. I can't speak for everyone, but I always try to not make personal attacks against someone that I have a disagreement with. Calling someone extremely silly is a personal attack IMO
5. Laughable or amusing through foolishness or a foolish appearance.
FWIW, the German word I was thinking of is "albern".
you do know that referring to how a person acts, in your opinion is the same as attacking them in person? Calling a person silly because you believe something they said is foolish isn't much different than calling them the back-end of a horse to their face or some other phrase you may favor. Name-calling also avoids having a reasonable discussion or debate over any facts of an issue placed before a group.
As to you whether or not what you're saying is 'simple' could be done? Yes it could. but the time and cost in funds and labor are what you're ignoring. This is the issue everyone is having with what you're saying. The easy route of replacing everything has some possible major draw backs. Those of us you keep arguing with have only pointed out some of these issues.
Ever heard of this thing called Occam's Razor? You're not using it.
Occam's Razor is just a lame way to explain away something you don't understand and cant currently be proved or disproved with the simplest explanation possible without using a shred of evidence to back it up.
it basically says that if there are two or more possible explanations for a thing the simplest "must" be correct, as we all know this is not always the case.
it wasn't so long ago that they would have used Occam's Razor to "prove" man could not walk on the moon or even use some device to make him fly and if you had tried to explain a personal computer to them they would have used Occam's Razor to "prove" such a device could never exist.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
For the sake of the discussion... let's just say it is an easy fix so everyone can move on.
Instead, let's discuss as to why Cryptic should even bother with, what I would consider, a rather insignificant and trivial matter.
For the sake of the discussion... let's just say it is an easy fix so everyone can move on.
Instead, let's discuss as to why Cryptic should even bother with, what I would consider, a rather insignificant and trivial matter.
Why is this so important to some players?
some people are irked by trifling details even if they are inconsequential to the overall experience and just cant use their imagination to invent a scenario where these peculiarity's of the game fit in with how they think it should be.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
De gustibus non est disputandem. But there is no way people could still recognize it as a Star Trek game then.
Being President of the Federation would work as a Star Trek game, but not as a MMO and it would be pretty boring due to all the meetings and diplomacy. Being Chancellor of the Klingon Empire would be far more exciting than President of the Federation.
I wouldn't say that. Being President of the United States worked just fine in Saints Row 4, it wasn't boring at all and the gameplay was the same as other installments of the series.
It's just a title.
And considering majority of the stuff you do in this game fits snugly in the ensign-lieutenant range of the rank hierarchy, "president" isn't that much more off than "fleet admiral."
For the sake of the discussion... let's just say it is an easy fix so everyone can move on.
Instead, let's discuss as to why Cryptic should even bother with, what I would consider, a rather insignificant and trivial matter.
Why is this so important to some players?
some people are irked by trifling details even if they are inconsequential to the overall experience and just cant use their imagination to invent a scenario where these peculiarity's of the game fit in with how they think it should be.
That's unnecessarily harsh. The fact is, some people here are seriously dedicated Star Trek fans and that's why they're here, to enjoy an interactive Star Trek experience. Other people are gamers who heard about the latest MMO or whatever, and play it in rotation with any number of other games. The former are certain to care about setting and canon details, geeking out about all the little immersive things that make the game align with the IP, and the latter are far more likely to not care about such things as long as the game is fun. If you're in the latter category that's fine, more power to you if you've never even seen a Star Trek episode and just enjoy the game for what it is, but that doesn't mean the people here for the IP and care about its canon are wrong or bad.
There are solid reasons behind the claims that making the player characters Admirals is inconsistent with Star Trek established canon and internal logic. People who are here for the IP have the right to care about such things, and it's not cool for you to be dismissive of them and condescending to them. If you don't care, why are you in opposition? You're borderline trolling at this point, and that's not cool. Please stop it.
Some people are also obsessive nitpickers who'll elevate even the tiniest little potential of a complaint into epic proportions just because they can.
You can have your "right to care," but others also have a right to not care. And if you insult other players and/or the devs for not caring about the same things, you should expect opposition.
And this is me talking as someone who supports letting us choose our form of address. Because while it would be a fun little detail to customize, it is important to remember it's just a little detail.
Comments
It would be easier to do it the reverse way. Change the mission text to address everyone as captain, the same way all official PR/Announcements/etc. already address the players (ala, "Greetings, Captains! Here's our latest infographic on fun holiday STO facts"
Then people could set their title to whatever they want (a function already in-game) ... and viola, move on from this oft-asked for thing, because the game would call you captain no matter your rank, as it kind of should and as the devs already do ... and you can be a captain, admiral, missile commander, stalwart, hero of the empire, to your heart's content.
No real need for coding, just altering mission text. And while that may be tedious and time consuming, I've seen other companies use interns for data entry to great effect in the past. I'm sure it's not a concept alien to the game development industry either, but if it is, they're out there in CA and some other tech company can guide them on how to do it up smooth. Would give some lucky intern a chance to see a gaming company up close and personal, make some valuable contacts for their budding career and pull off a QoL change that the community has wanted done forever and ever.
Yeah, that's part of why I was sitting back smugly and not spelling out to Soph why I thought he was wrong about how easy it'd be.:p This game uses an arcane system of layered data tables for a bunch of things. He keeps posting that your rank is a text string, but it's apparently a long integer. The routines that display your rank check the integer against one of several data tables(depending on your faction) and represent the number with a text string. Lieutenant, sub-commander, general... etc.... But it doesn't seem to have a separate variable that stores this.
My character Tsin'xing
on the face of it this seems like a simple change if it is as you suggest it might be simply exchange and variables of $RANK within text to $TITLE job done, easypeasy.
the problem is have you bothered to count how many instances where your rank as stated within text, first the devs will need to trace each and every instance of $RANK in the game and then they have to replace every one of them with $TITLE and there must be 100's of times this occurs throughout the game, now this could well be as easy as doing a search and replace like in a text document, I don't know.
this might satisfy a lot of players as they could be called whatever title they choose from Adjutant, Advocate and Agent all the way through to Tal Shiar's Most Wanted, Wicked, and Xenophobe without actually altering your rank status at all whether it be Commander, Captain or Admiral.
but if this change is so easy it begs the question why hasn't it been implemented, maybe the answer is its not as easy as you seem to think.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
And you are being extremely dismissive of a valid concern and insulting. If Eve could release a patch that deletes the boot.ini file on a computer rendering the computer unusable until it is fixed, then a patch that replaces every instance of $RANK with $TITLE has a possibility of happening. This would be the worst case scenario while losing out on mission rewards would be the best case scenario of something going wrong, but responsible companies always look at the worst case scenario and looking at how they can prevent it and minimize the risks if it does happen. Using Replace All instead of determining what each instance of the RANK variable does sounds like an error that can easily happen.
I don't make a claim to know how easy or difficult it would be since I don't have access to the code or even how everything is organized. There could be a separate file for each mission or even a separate file for the dialog of each mission, but that is only speculation. It could be a mess for all we know.
To do this Search and Replace that you constantly mention is easy properly, then the devs would have to determine what each instance of $RANK does before they change it to $TITLE which can be an extremely easy task if the dialog of each mission is contained in its own file, slightly annoying if each mission has its own file, or extremely tedious if the code is a chaotic mess. As I said before in my previous post that you were extremely dismissive about "dev confirmation is the only way to know if this feature is extremely easy or extremely difficult to do."
Apology accepted. I can't speak for everyone, but I always try to not make personal attacks against someone that I have a disagreement with. Calling someone extremely silly is a personal attack IMO which is where I felt insulted. I always try to be serious in my arguments and treat people in a way that I wish to be treated.
Most of us are not dismissive of the idea. I certainly know I am not. It would be nice if I can be called by Master Chef or any other title that I choose, but it is not a necessity for my enjoyment of the game. What the majority of us disagree with is how easy it is. It could be extremely easy or extremely difficult to implement, but without dev confirmation, then there is no way to know for sure. Only a dev would have the experience to know how long this would take to implement and what the potential damage will be if something goes seriously wrong with it.
My character Tsin'xing
And, as I said before, if you really do believe you're just that good, Cryptic is hiring - I even gave you the link to their Careers page...
My character Tsin'xing
you do know that referring to how a person acts, in your opinion is the same as attacking them in person? Calling a person silly because you believe something they said is foolish isn't much different than calling them the back-end of a horse to their face or some other phrase you may favor. Name-calling also avoids having a reasonable discussion or debate over any facts of an issue placed before a group.
As to you whether or not what you're saying is 'simple' could be done? Yes it could. but the time and cost in funds and labor are what you're ignoring. This is the issue everyone is having with what you're saying. The easy route of replacing everything has some possible major draw backs. Those of us you keep arguing with have only pointed out some of these issues.
Occam's Razor is just a lame way to explain away something you don't understand and cant currently be proved or disproved with the simplest explanation possible without using a shred of evidence to back it up.
it basically says that if there are two or more possible explanations for a thing the simplest "must" be correct, as we all know this is not always the case.
it wasn't so long ago that they would have used Occam's Razor to "prove" man could not walk on the moon or even use some device to make him fly and if you had tried to explain a personal computer to them they would have used Occam's Razor to "prove" such a device could never exist.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Instead, let's discuss as to why Cryptic should even bother with, what I would consider, a rather insignificant and trivial matter.
Why is this so important to some players?
some people are irked by trifling details even if they are inconsequential to the overall experience and just cant use their imagination to invent a scenario where these peculiarity's of the game fit in with how they think it should be.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
It's just a title.
And considering majority of the stuff you do in this game fits snugly in the ensign-lieutenant range of the rank hierarchy, "president" isn't that much more off than "fleet admiral."
You can have your "right to care," but others also have a right to not care. And if you insult other players and/or the devs for not caring about the same things, you should expect opposition.
And this is me talking as someone who supports letting us choose our form of address. Because while it would be a fun little detail to customize, it is important to remember it's just a little detail.