The old "return on investment" excuse is a joke. If you invest in a property, you keep your customers interested. You can't say "the game is too old" or "we can't improve such and such."
Not when WoW is still sitting in the top MMO spot after 15 years. They have continued to innovate their game so much that they are putting out a classic edition without expansions because the game has evolved so much that enough old school players want to play it as it was. The problem is that Cryptic as a company does not care about the franchise, much like CBS/Paramount doesn't care what kind of facile tripe they are churning out in movies and TV series. The Dev team may care, they may be hardcore fans, but the suits in Beijing don't care about anything but Western dollars.
Answer me this, PWE. How many of your games have premiered and failed in the time STO and Neverwinter have been live?
Maybe if you would stop churning out half-cracked games that don't have a chance and used those resources on the games that do, the hardworking folks that make STO and Neverwinter would have all the resources they need to keep stupid limitations like this from affecting their projects.
"Oh, the guys that wrote that code are gone and we can't work on OUR OWN GAME". I call bullcrap on that. You don't have a mentoring system lie every other software designer does? Imagine if Microsoft had neglected to keep up with training their new talent. They would be bankupt, having never made it to Windows 95. It's a poor excuse that shows how shoddily the company is being run.
You could make a new, more integrated version of the foundry. Heck, you could crack the core code down to basics and rewrite key systems. Blizzard has been doing it for 15 years. But you won't. Not "can't" but WON'T. Because real reinvestment in your properties isn't as much of a quick buck as churning out one money-grabbing lockbox after another.
After years on this game and a lifetime as a Trek fan, you won't get another dime from me until I see signs that you are taking your business seriously.
I hope this is not in violation of community standards, but I am seeing so many softball excuses being thrown out lately, because the majority of people don't know how a software company works. I do, I work at one.
Nothing breaks the tension better than a tankard of warnog - except maybe a good brawl...
Say I have $10 that I can spend on make you happy and you'll as result give me $2 in profit. But if I invest that $10 in something else, I get $5 in profit.
Sorry, but keeping you as a custom would mean I lose $3. I don't need you as a customer.
Not when WoW is still sitting in the top MMO spot after 15 years.
Here you're correct. Cryptic is clearly not at the top spot and there are reasons for that. Lots of reasons, so many in fact its hard to tell which were the most important.
EverQuest is still going as well. Do either of them remove parts of their games because the code is old? (honest question here, I don't know myself)?
No it's not. This is why retail is in the tank right now. Instead of investing themselves in online shopping, the future of the business, they doggedly kept building more and more big box stores that now sit half-empty or are closed.
"You have to spend money to make money" is one of the greatest truisms of any retail enterprise. Why, out of all the little general stores in smalltown America in the 50's, did Walmart become one of the largest, most profitable businesses in the world while 99.999999% of the others are long since gone? Because they offered what their customers needed and continued to reinvest in growing their business and building an ironclad infrastructure. I've seen so many small businesses whine about how the "big box stores" are driving their business away. But those big chains started with one person starting one location, managing it well, and not being afraid to expand.
It's the same reason the movie industry has taken such hits. They are so focused on churning out something to match what someone else did rather than creating. And most movies are bland, homogenized, predictable messes as a result. Because they rarely risk greenlighting an innovative concept. The bean-counters would rather get modest returns on old reliable tired-and-true concepts.
Think about it. If it were not for a few risk takers in the film and TV business, there would be no Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Avengers. In the 60's a sci-fi show was the odd man out amongst all the westerns and detective shows. In the 70's, comedies and dramas were beating out sci-fi by orders of magnitiude. In the late 90's comic book movies were considered pure poison.
But someone stepped out and went ahead with those projects, and were wildly successful. That is return on investment. But first you have to MAKE the investment.
Nothing breaks the tension better than a tankard of warnog - except maybe a good brawl...
No it's not. This is why retail is in the tank right now. Instead of investing themselves in online shopping, the future of the business, they doggedly kept building more and more big box stores that now sit half-empty or are closed.
Hmm, I don't think you understand your own example.
Box Retail has a lower return on investment compare to things like Amazon, hence the growth of Amazon. You've successful provide an argument against yourself.
Success equals High Return on Investment, period. The trick is to recognize where the best returns are and to move agilely to them.
Firstly, I'd like to thank all the players who took time to create content in the Foundry. There are some truly fantastic missions in there, which will sadly be lost because of this - IMO - poorly thought out decision.
We've seen in this thread the impact it will have on the user base - a lot of players no longer interested in playing, people who have made it clear that it will influence whether they spend money on the game or not. While Cryptic claim to have no intention to sunset the game, realistically the backlash and resulting exodus as a result of this decision could in all likelihood result in shortening the games lifespan.
My personal feeling is that what they should do here is split the developers into two teams. Team one would be smaller and take some of the higher rated, higher traffic'd foundry missions, speak to their creators for their permission and then refine them for general release as main game missions. With the harder parts already created by users (storyline, maps, dialogue etc) this should be low investment on the part of Cryptic, with the team focusing on changing 'unique' characters for the main game characters (such as Adm. Quinn), refining transitions and adding V/O for general mission release, rather than developing the new content themselves. The time saved and extra resource available for Team 2 could then be put into developing a Foundry 2.0 which is fully understood and easy to enhance with future game updates.
Given the way the player base has reacted to the news of the Foundry's demise, going down this route would get a massively positive reaction from fans getting fed up with way new content is currently being delivered.
Don't get me wrong - My opinion is that Cryptic are clearly putting a lot of effort into the new content compared to some older missions. However, this has resulted in shorter missions, smaller season sizes with a significant drop in terms of mission numbers and story arcs etc and a multitude of lock-boxes and zen content.
I'd rather they scrubbed any new content and spend the time on developing a new foundry, than close the foundry and continue to churn out content at the current rate. I expect that most of the player base also feels this way. And done right, the launch of the new foundry, coinciding with a new 'Foundry bundle' of ships/outfits to fit the new system could be quite profitable to them and would be far more palatable to the player base than the current semi-exploitative approach.
I urge Cryptic to listen to the fans here and consider an approach to saving the Foundry - even if its not the approach suggested above!
In the long run, it will be more beneficial and profitable than closing the Foundry, which from reaction will likely see a mass drop-off in player-base.
Oh my god, Cryptic, you really TRIBBLE up this time.
I cannot say I ever payed much interest to the people creating and enjoying foundry missions, but those people were the most passionate fans, players, quite possibly paying customers. By killing the foundry you're killing the part of STO that could fix many of the issues the game itself has by not catering to the needs of any particular gamer.
This is so sad and I am sorry for you.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
TOIVA, Toi Vaxx, Toia Vix, Toveg, T'vritha, To Vrax: Bring in the Allegiance class. Toi'Va, Ti'vath, Toivia, Ty'Vris, Tia Vex, Toi'Virth: Add Tier 6 KDF Carrier and Raider. Tae'Va, T'Vaya, To'Var, Tevra, T'Vira, To'Vrak: Give us Asylums for Romulans.
@kalknight that's a brilliant idea! Heck, it would probably mean we got new story missions more often overall, given the painfully small trickle of them Cryptic can usually manage. And even if we're underestimating how hard it would be to make a new Foundry, your plan would still mean more story missions and we'd save some of the best-loved of the old Foundry missions, some of which are better loved by more players than many of the official missions, I suspect.
Edit: Tell you what, they could make them paid-for content (very small price per mission, like 50 Zen apiece or something, since I don't expect people will want to pay out a lot for each individual mission that they'll probably only play once or twice - I wouldn't). Then it'll be able to earn a bit of money for itself and everyone wins. You could give the original author a cut. Funny if the Foundry should become a paying concern in death when it never was in life, but so what? Some people say that the Foundry already makes money indirectly because it keeps people playing and buying other stuff, but even if you don't believe in that, this definitely would!
@kalknight that's a brilliant idea! Heck, it would probably mean we got new story missions more often overall, given the painfully small trickle of them Cryptic can usually manage. And even if we're underestimating how hard it would be to make a new Foundry, your plan would still mean more story missions and we'd save some of the best-loved of the old Foundry missions, some of which are better loved by more players than many of the official missions, I suspect.
I didn't play that many Foundry missions until recently, didn't have enough play time.
But those I did were better than Cryptic has put out lately. Better search functions would have helped, someone mention that people have done TOS missions there- I need to see if I can find them before they go away.
I've been watching the responses, and the make-up of the people responding here and on other social channels has surprised me a little bit. Several "influential" STO players (core fleet/armada members, discussion leaders, and the obvious foundry authors) seem to be reacting most negatively to this, including people who have no significant history of criticism towards Cryptic/PWE. Where possible, I've tried to corroborate fleet names, screen names, mission names, etc. via search in-game and general online with different fleet websites, with a fair amount of success.
What I'm wondering is if the Foundry is really a "core" feature for the most hardcore of the game's players/customers, allowing them to exceed game limitations to better meet their wants/needs. Entire mission arcs for a fleet (and I've seen some for Armadas, even bigger reach) is a pretty massive commitment of time. Creating farming/accolade/endeavor/whatever tools is another big push, and obviously designed to be a resource for an entire group. I've seen some Foundry missions clearly intended to push the limits of game difficulty, which I doubt anyone but a heavily invested player is looking for/able to survive in.
If these are the heaviest spenders, even recruiters trying to build up strong fleets/armadas, and they make good on promises of closing wallets, this one change could have a major financial impact on the game. In this case, it's not the quantity of customers who are negatively impacted, but the quality of those customers. And that doesn't even touch the chilling effect on the general userbase of Cryptic outright saying they can no longer afford/don't know how to support a portion of their own product - something they have said increasingly over the past several years about multiple in-game functions. No matter how you slice it, that is not a confidence builder.
This is not a "doom" post, or any direct condemnation of anything, but just a reminder that sometimes WHO uses something is more important to know than how many.
The old "return on investment" excuse is a joke. If you invest in a property, you keep your customers interested. You can't say "the game is too old" or "we can't improve such and such."
Not when WoW is still sitting in the top MMO spot after 15 years. They have continued to innovate their game so much that they are putting out a classic edition without expansions because the game has evolved so much that enough old school players want to play it as it was. The problem is that Cryptic as a company does not care about the franchise, much like CBS/Paramount doesn't care what kind of facile tripe they are churning out in movies and TV series. The Dev team may care, they may be hardcore fans, but the suits in Beijing don't care about anything but Western dollars.
I am calling you out on this section. I'm going to take this section in 2 paragraphs.
First off, you say the ROI excuse is a joke. Let me be frank here. Cryptic was likely not making any money when it came to the foundry itself. The only money that was spent on it was from indirect purchases like character slots or new ships. The devs put more money into upholding the Foundry through bug fixes via the Programmers.
Now, to address this so called "not caring about the franchise." The devs care a great deal about the franchise, so much that they were excited when CBS gave them the opportunity to work on Discovery content. A lot of the revamps with ship skins usually happen on the devs spare time, knowing that players will like the more canon accurate skins.
"Oh, the guys that wrote that code are gone and we can't work on OUR OWN GAME". I call bullcrap on that. You don't have a mentoring system lie every other software designer does? Imagine if Microsoft had neglected to keep up with training their new talent. They would be bankupt, having never made it to Windows 95. It's a poor excuse that shows how shoddily the company is being run.
You could make a new, more integrated version of the foundry. Heck, you could crack the core code down to basics and rewrite key systems. Blizzard has been doing it for 15 years. But you won't. Not "can't" but WON'T. Because real reinvestment in your properties isn't as much of a quick buck as churning out one money-grabbing lockbox after another.
After years on this game and a lifetime as a Trek fan, you won't get another dime from me until I see signs that you are taking your business seriously.
I hope this is not in violation of community standards, but I am seeing so many softball excuses being thrown out lately, because the majority of people don't know how a software company works. I do, I work at one.
They do likely have a mentoring system when it comes to the root systems of the games. The Foundry seems to me like it was designed as a separate system from the game. The biggest problem with the Foundry though is that there are only so many programmers at cryptic. These programmers are working hard at three currently running games and a fourth game in production. Neverwinter is currently having a new update to many game mechanics so the programmers have been hard at work on that game.
Remember that the devs all do not work on Lock boxes. Systems designers, ship designers, character artists and ship artists usually work on those.
Work on the foundry would entail mainly system designers and programmers for the framework of the system. Rebuilding the Foundry would essentially take them away from other system improvements they could do for the game.
Firstly, I'd like to thank all the players who took time to create content in the Foundry. There are some truly fantastic missions in there, which will sadly be lost because of this - IMO - poorly thought out decision.
We've seen in this thread the impact it will have on the user base - a lot of players no longer interested in playing, people who have made it clear that it will influence whether they spend money on the game or not. While Cryptic claim to have no intention to sunset the game, realistically the backlash and resulting exodus as a result of this decision could in all likelihood result in shortening the games lifespan.
We'll see what this will mean for the game's lifespan. In my opinion, no longer having to worry about the Foundry means that they can direct their attention to polishing up other areas of the game.
My personal feeling is that what they should do here is split the developers into two teams. Team one would be smaller and take some of the higher rated, higher traffic'd foundry missions, speak to their creators for their permission and then refine them for general release as main game missions. With the harder parts already created by users (storyline, maps, dialogue etc) this should be low investment on the part of Cryptic, with the team focusing on changing 'unique' characters for the main game characters (such as Adm. Quinn), refining transitions and adding V/O for general mission release, rather than developing the new content themselves. The time saved and extra resource available for Team 2 could then be put into developing a Foundry 2.0 which is fully understood and easy to enhance with future game updates.
Given the way the player base has reacted to the news of the Foundry's demise, going down this route would get a massively positive reaction from fans getting fed up with way new content is currently being delivered.
Don't get me wrong - My opinion is that Cryptic are clearly putting a lot of effort into the new content compared to some older missions. However, this has resulted in shorter missions, smaller season sizes with a significant drop in terms of mission numbers and story arcs etc and a multitude of lock-boxes and zen content.
I'd rather they scrubbed any new content and spend the time on developing a new foundry, than close the foundry and continue to churn out content at the current rate. I expect that most of the player base also feels this way. And done right, the launch of the new foundry, coinciding with a new 'Foundry bundle' of ships/outfits to fit the new system could be quite profitable to them and would be far more palatable to the player base than the current semi-exploitative approach.
I urge Cryptic to listen to the fans here and consider an approach to saving the Foundry - even if its not the approach suggested above!
In the long run, it will be more beneficial and profitable than closing the Foundry, which from reaction will likely see a mass drop-off in player-base.
May history remember the Foundry.
While what you suggest may seem to be a good idea to you, there is a reality you have to realize: The Cryptic game tools and the Foundry tools are completely different systems. They already talked about trying to convert the foundry missions into main missions. They discovered that it was not feasible to convert them and to rebuild them from scratch would take almost as much work as they do on their regular missions. This would take time away from them working on stuff they want to work on.
The other part of this is you wanting to see them develop a Foundry 2.0 in order to appease the people. Keep in mind that the first Foundry took a year to develop. I don't know how long it would take to develop a second Foundry, but assuming it would take this long, that would mean that they would likely not do anything else as far as systems work during this time, since their focus would be devoted to the Foundry. Note that they don't even have plans on working on a new foundry at this time. They've been up front about that.
In my opinion, I'm fine if they choose to focus in on the core of the game. The Foundry is good and all, but not if it constantly has to be fixed every time they do new code branches.
I've been watching the responses, and the make-up of the people responding here and on other social channels has surprised me a little bit. Several "influential" STO players (core fleet/armada members, discussion leaders, and the obvious foundry authors) seem to be reacting most negatively to this, including people who have no significant history of criticism towards Cryptic/PWE. Where possible, I've tried to corroborate fleet names, screen names, mission names, etc. via search in-game and general online with different fleet websites, with a fair amount of success.
What I'm wondering is if the Foundry is really a "core" feature for the most hardcore of the game's players/customers, allowing them to exceed game limitations to better meet their wants/needs. Entire mission arcs for a fleet (and I've seen some for Armadas, even bigger reach) is a pretty massive commitment of time. Creating farming/accolade/endeavor/whatever tools is another big push, and obviously designed to be a resource for an entire group. I've seen some Foundry missions clearly intended to push the limits of game difficulty, which I doubt anyone but a heavily invested player is looking for/able to survive in.
If these are the heaviest spenders, even recruiters trying to build up strong fleets/armadas, and they make good on promises of closing wallets, this one change could have a major financial impact on the game. In this case, it's not the quantity of customers who are negatively impacted, but the quality of those customers. And that doesn't even touch the chilling effect on the general userbase of Cryptic outright saying they can no longer afford/don't know how to support a portion of their own product - something they have said increasingly over the past several years about multiple in-game functions. No matter how you slice it, that is not a confidence builder.
This is not a "doom" post, or any direct condemnation of anything, but just a reminder that sometimes WHO uses something is more important to know than how many.
It sounds to me like the Foundry was a core feature for players.
When I came into the game, the Foundry was a means of providing expansive content in order to fill in a need for something to play when the devs could not deliver enough story content. However, there were also those that were using the Foundry for exploitative measures, such as creating quick things for farming loot and gear or console click missions in order to satisfy a daily wrapper for playing foundry missions. This led to them making changes in order to circumvent these exploits.
When Exploration clusters were removed from the game, the devs pushed for players to build their own exploration of the game by utilizing the clusters as Foundry doors. This is where stuff like the Alliance Exploration Initiative missions came about. The idea was that the Foundry existed in order to give players a means to do what they wanted with tools that were available to them.
Now most recently, I've heard talk of the Foundry being used for an easier means of completing the Personal Endeavor missions, rather than have to go and play content that may take a chunk of time out of their day. The point of the Endeavors system was that it was supposed to be a means of guiding you to play content that ideally a player would have played anyway. The removal of the Foundry hurts those players that don't wanna spend time waiting for certain queues to pop up just so they can fulfill the Endeavors.
In the end, the Foundry is one of the last old pieces of the game that has been around, and is going the way of the Genesis Exploration system, shut down and unlikely to come back. WIthout the Foundry, players will either turn back to regular content and play that over and over, or they will just find another game to play when they get bored. There's really not much that can be done now.
My personal feeling is that what they should do here is split the developers into two teams. Team one would be smaller and take some of the higher rated, higher traffic'd foundry missions, speak to their creators for their permission and then refine them for general release as main game missions. With the harder parts already created by users (storyline, maps, dialogue etc) this should be low investment on the part of Cryptic, with the team focusing on changing 'unique' characters for the main game characters (such as Adm. Quinn), refining transitions and adding V/O for general mission release, rather than developing the new content themselves. The time saved and extra resource available for Team 2 could then be put into developing a Foundry 2.0 which is fully understood and easy to enhance with future game updates.
@kalknight that's a brilliant idea! Heck, it would probably mean we got new story missions more often overall, given the painfully small trickle of them Cryptic can usually manage. And even if we're underestimating how hard it would be to make a new Foundry, your plan would still mean more story missions and we'd save some of the best-loved of the old Foundry missions, some of which are better loved by more players than many of the official missions, I suspect.
Edit: Tell you what, they could make them paid-for content (very small price per mission, like 50 Zen apiece or something, since I don't expect people will want to pay out a lot for each individual mission that they'll probably only play once or twice - I wouldn't). Then it'll be able to earn a bit of money for itself and everyone wins. You could give the original author a cut. Funny if the Foundry should become a paying concern in death when it never was in life, but so what? Some people say that the Foundry already makes money indirectly because it keeps people playing and buying other stuff, but even if you don't believe in that, this definitely would!
Oh, yeah. This is brilliant. If you want to definitely kill the game. Go back watch the livestream again. Kael said it would take months to convert a single mission over from the Foundry into the game system (they run on different systems). That's just ONE mission. Even if you limited it to just the spotlight missions, you're talking years to convert those missions. YEARS of no new content or development on anything else. The original Foundry took a team of developers a year to build, so Foundry 2.0 would take at least that long as well. The idea to put EVERY developer on these two things, MIGHT reduce this timeframe some, but not much, and again NOTHING new would be happening with the game. You think the pre-LOR content drought was something? Implement something like this, and there will be no playerbase left for Foundry 2.0 to return to, because there will have been nothing new in years to do, play, or buy to keep the game afloat and running. I hate to dump on your idea like that, but let's be realistic.
Look, I know there are many of you who want to come up with some brilliant idea to #savethefoundry. They've literally thought of almost every idea I've seen mentioned here (except that last one, yeesh) to try and save the Foundry and/or the missions. Nothing was viable. Again, they wrestled with ways to save it for a year before coming to this decision. I know it sucks. It does suck. But there's no write in campaign, petition, protest, or #hashtag that's going to change this. The Foundry will return only if/when the development schedule would allow it. Until then, if then, there is still a GREAT game here to be played, being worked on by a great bunch of developers that just want to provide the best Star Trek experience possible for you all. If you can still see your way to support them in that endeavor, it would be greatly appreciated.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
I've been reading these messages, and decided it was time to stick my oar in (at the risk of having this entire post deleted by a moderator):
Sounds like killing off the Foundry is like NBC killing off ST:TOS in 1968, only to find that there were fans passionate enough to fight for another season (which they got, and then NBC killed it off anyway). Were it not for that 3rd season, ST:TOS wouldn't have gone into syndication and re-runs. I grew up in the 1970s, watching those re-runs when I was a kid. I truly believe that were it not for ST:TOS in re-runs and the growing fanbase, ST:TMP would never have happened. For 26 years (from ST:TMP to ST:E) we've had lots of Star Trek ... thanks to someone finally believing in the original product and willing to take another chance on it. Would the first movie make money, just because "Star Wars" did? Thankfully it did. And thankfully other movies (and series) followed. Had ST:TMP flopped at the box office, I don't even want to know what the '80s, '90s, and '00s would've been like without new ST movies and series. But ST:TMP succeeded, no doubt with plenty of naysayers at the time saying, "This'll go nowhere. A movie based on a ten-year-old TV series that only lasted 3 seasons? Who cares?" Someone cared. Lots of people did.
I wonder how long it'll take (probably not long at all - hopefully not a decade) before the powers-that-be and bean-counters realize, "Hey, wait a minute! We've got customers, customers willing to pour money into it!") before the Foundry comes back, firing on all cylinders. I hope I live long enough to see that day (I'm 51 now; 52 in July). It would be a shame to see a "milch cow" like Star Trek being bled dry without giving a damn about its core creativity, hard work, long nights, and the ever-present risk of cancellation. Remember this, PWE: The creators of Foundry missions didn't have to create even ONE mission. But they did. I don't care how many poor missions there are in the Foundry. It was a place, like a kitchen, like a workshop, that gave people a chance to try out things, to build, to fail, to succeed, "to boldly go" where the corporate vision apparently wouldn't go. And that's despite having to use a set of tools that didn't improve, that had problems. They *want* to create Foundry missions. They *want* to share them with the STO community. Doesn't that impress *anyone* at the corporate level? Enough to at least leave the Foundry in place, as is? Fine, it won't get fixed. But warts and all, people were still using it, still creating with it.
Someone once said, "Tell a lie often enough and people begin to believe it's the truth." I refuse to believe that the Foundry was so broken it couldn't be saved, not even a little bit of it. *Someone* (STO's version of Roddenberry) thought it should exist in the first place. Surely there is *someone* at Cryptic today who won't let it die. Who will try to find some way to keep it alive. Even if it means thankless work, long nights, frustrating code to dig through, fix, and change, and using up free time that they could've used on something else. After all, that's how the Klingon missions were built, and I would never have created a KDF character (or several of them) without them. So ... after the Foundry, are the Klingon missions going to be killed off next, followed by the Romulan missions? And what do you have after that? A flat, two-dimensional game. A game that had such potential. And was allowed to die off, bit by bit.
Maybe we'll get lucky and STO will go into syndication and re-runs for ten years. Nostalgia, until someone picks it up again, dusts it off, and says, "You know, it really wasn't that bad. We have more means now than they did then. We can make this what they couldn't, and weren't allowed to. We can make this so damn now that good people will be playing it for at least 26 years." One can hope.
R.I.P. Foundry. To quote Hamlet, holding up a skull in one hand and looking at it: "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew thee well."
On April 11, we are sad to announce that we will be sunsetting the Foundry system for Neverwinter and Star Trek Online. Join us for a livestream at 3pm PT today for more details.
@mattjohnsonva Well, he did caveat that statement for them to be done to their current standard. Also, apparently, the tools are quite different between the two systems. I'm not doubting that you can do what you say you can do in the Foundry. But I'm also not doubting Kael when he says that the conversion would take much longer.
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Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
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I've got a solution for this...why not just port The Foundry to the Red Shirt server?
Oh, sweet baby RNGesus... I just... I can't even with you folks... Please, people. Just go back and watch the livestream again. Please.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
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@baddmoonrizin
May i suggest placing a FAQ on the first page as many people are asking the same things such as "can we have it on a different server" or "can we make some missions into real ones" ect.
"It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
Go back watch the livestream again. Kael said it would take months to convert a single mission over from the Foundry into the game system (they run on different systems). That's just ONE mission. Even if you limited it to just the spotlight missions, you're talking years to convert those missions.
I watched that live with you BMR and when Kael said that I was immediately taken aback. Months, to convert one foundry mission? Seriously? The way he said it was like it just came off the top of his head, and perhaps he's been told that to stop him pushing the issue but I don't buy it at all.
It takes months, it seems, for them to create the missions they do give us, but they include animations, cut scenes, music, voice overs etc. I can create a detailed story driven foundry mission with special effects, dialogue driven triggers, custom maps and more in a day, I have done and will willingly prove it if needed. If their system, without all the above VOs, Cut scenes etc takes so long to create anything then perhaps they should scrap their current system and use the foundry for the main game.
No, sorry, I smell something and it ain't the truth, it maybe the truth as Kael has been told but to me that's the words of a programmer trying to brow beat a believer.
I think the issue you're forgetting here is that when it comes to their tools vs. the foundry tools, foundry missions are an entirely different portion of the server. When you load up a foundry mission compared to a non-foundry mission, the load times are apparent.
When you are building a Foundry mission, Most of the assets that you want to use are already there, apart from your characters that you need to create, or ships that you may want to include. Yes, you still need to build the maps and script things out, but this is way less time than what Cryptic needs.
Cryptic, if you've noticed from their missions, usually builds stuff from SCRATCH. This includes space and ground maps, which usually look much more polished than any foundry mission map which is usually utilizing stuff that is available. Other stuff, like characters and such may be built ahead of time so they don't spend as much time, especially if its a reused character like a trek actor. Any new characters though have to be crafted for the mission.
How much time do you spend on the dialog of the missions? Cryptic's content designers do have to script things out ahead of time and make changes as they need to. I'm sure the dialog we see is never the final product right from the get go.
Remember that the Foundry was meant to be a simplified process of how they make missions and it would not be a simple conversion process from the Foundry to their mission tools.
@nickcastleton Excellent! Now that's a brilliant idea that I can get behind! On my way...
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Given everything that's been said and having some time to marinate more on it from my knee-jerk reaction, a few things have struck me.
Firstly, when Cryptic claim "We don't have the resources for man hours on this" does seem a bit...disingenuous when I've seen the lock-box ticker roll over "Someone hat a T6 Ship!" so often I've had to turn off system notification in the UI because it got that distracting in general play. Given the drop rate for those T6 Ships compared to the chaff boxes usually churn out I can only presume that clearly someone is making money hand over fist and if its not Cryptic, who is?. and where is that money being spent if Cryptic don't have the money or expertise to throw at this or hire additional bodies specifically to maintain the foundry while the core team continues on the main game.
Secondly, How bad is the legacy code, if no one currently at Cryptic can understand what the hell is going on?. I get Programmers leave, it happens. for a whole bunch of reasons but did he or she not use notation in their work? was there no documentation?
Thirdly, since people have mentioned that the Cryptic SDK and the Foundry are two separate development systems why not release a stripped down version of the Cryptic SDK as a separate IDE that can hook into a revamp of the existing foundry infrastructure, kind of like Bethesda's Creation Kit or the XCOM 2 SDK. It may be stiffer learning curve for the foundry creator and would have to rebuild all of there content, but Cryptic wouldn't have to start a new "Foundry 2.0" from scratch since you'd be using a variant of the existing dev tools already in place, bring on a small team specifically keep the SDK up to date and all the core team would have to care about is making sure the IDE can port to the main game and since again its a variant of the dev tools you know that backwards compatibility won't break anything without having to open up any code or legal liability or split the core team.
When you are building a Foundry mission, Most of the assets that you want to use are already there, apart from your characters that you need to create, or ships that you may want to include. Yes, you still need to build the maps and script things out, but this is way less time than what Cryptic needs.
Are you trying to suggest that Cryptic doesn't have access to pre-built assets or never re-uses content when able?
The subject's been covered by the devs before (specifically: zero) and I'll go through it again to save people the argument, the way the Foundry works on the back end is different from how official missions work on the back end. Cryptic could build missions in roughly the same way a Foundry mission is constructed but to rebuild a Foundry mission they would need to do so manually since the two systems aren't directly translatable (as yet.)
That is technically possible and they have considered doing it (back then, to bring select Foundry content over to consoles) but it would take about as much work as a brand new mission, however they go about doing it. Considering the unmatched quality of some of what's out there, I don't think that's a big ask as an eventual project Cryptic could tackle. Ie. pull from lost Foundry missions to improve future content, if only for thematic beats and story concepts. Alimac30 and Greendragoon for example have given Cryptic great starting points.
They don't have to build the exact same things we have, but few other MMO developers have been in a position where they can draw upon years of iteration on their own gameplay format and mission concepts (also: gameplay, Foundry authors have pushed further than Cryptic has with encounter design in missions.) Add to that a well of characters and locations that players are emotionally attached to and can pull from for minor arcs, plot points, and simple recognition. The Foundry is an incredible resource and doesn't stop being that after it's been turned off (Cryptic's saving the data, we've been and are still recording liveplays, character assets are being retranslated to boffs and characters, we're compling dialog, and the experiences remain.)
This is not a "doom" post, or any direct condemnation of anything, but just a reminder that sometimes WHO uses something is more important to know than how many.
To appreciate the importance of the Foundry in STO you'd likely have to do a networking analysis of social behavior (something I might have done for a PhD in a different context.) It's not just how much time player spend with Foundry content but how it shapes their appreciation of the game and its user base which influences the interactions they have with other users and other users with those users and so on.
Reductive business calculations don't have access to that, so the Foundry wasn't supported by the studio as much as it should have been.
Post edited by duncanidaho11 on
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
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 dont know if my fellow players are going to get this. I watched the stream about the foundry going bye bye. It basically comes down to this. You can't take parts from a 2019 Ford Mustang and put them on 1965 Ford Mustang. It's that simple. If you can't get that then god help you
Fleet Admiral of the U.S.S. ATTILA KHAN-CDA (NX-921911).
Not happy with this decision te remove foundry from start trek. And that is very mildly said, because I am angry about it.
Why? Because the foundry was an integral and important part of star trek. It represented the holodeck as in the stratrek series, where people could make their own stories to play.
So a bad bad bad move from Cryptic and also very weak argumentation saying that they do not have the knwoledge in house to maintain their own software.
A best practise is to add value to your software and product, not remove it.
Perhaps what they could do is build a program that can do the conversion process for them. We don't need scratch built assets all we need are the assets already in the foundry and most of them are identical to what is already in the main game, every asset you see in the foundry you can find already somewhere in the main game.
If the software to make Foundry missions vs. standard missions is fundamentally different, I'm guessing any program designed to convert them would take months, if not years to build (probably years).
The key words in Kael's statement are "to their standards", but nobody is asking for VOs and cut scenes for converted foundry missions, in fact I would like my missions to remain as they are, I just want people to be able to continue to enjoy the thousands of hours I have put into this game and the millions of hours everyone else has put into this game. To just discard it like this is a real kick in the face to all the long time supporters of Cryptic and their bug ridden game.
It's not just VO and cutscenes, it's language packs for the global STO audience, accessibility features for players who need them, more rigorous QA testing, and probably a bunch of other back-end things we never know they do. Even if they could do all that, those thousands upon thousands of missions then have to be maintained through any major systems updates that are yet to come.
...I also don't buy that they've been trying to think something up for a year, if that were the case why didn't they just end it at the last 10 week downtime last year, tell us they tried but couldn't fix it. There is some truth in the reasons they give but it's not the whole truth for sure, and others here have already hit the nail on the head when they spoke of endeavours.
They maintained the Foundry as best they could until every possible option was explored, then made a final decision. That's my take, at least.
Sorry about the loss of all your missions, but the Foundry's clearly been on its last legs for a long time. This is a band-aid that had to be ripped off sooner or later.
They maintained the Foundry as best they could until every possible option was explored, then made a final decision. That's my take, at least.
No they didn't. Let's at least be honest.
Instead of actually maintaining the Foundry as they should (i.e. with its own team dedicated to the task and keeping the code up to date) they decided the investment wasn't worth it and kicked the can down the road for years by doing stop-gap patches (far less than a best effort) until they decided to end even that.
It's not enough to look only at the decision before us today, we should consider the decisions made over the last few years that resulted in the current state. This stuff doesn't just happen over night, it took years for Cryptic to make this mistake.
Comments
Not when WoW is still sitting in the top MMO spot after 15 years. They have continued to innovate their game so much that they are putting out a classic edition without expansions because the game has evolved so much that enough old school players want to play it as it was. The problem is that Cryptic as a company does not care about the franchise, much like CBS/Paramount doesn't care what kind of facile tripe they are churning out in movies and TV series. The Dev team may care, they may be hardcore fans, but the suits in Beijing don't care about anything but Western dollars.
Answer me this, PWE. How many of your games have premiered and failed in the time STO and Neverwinter have been live?
Maybe if you would stop churning out half-cracked games that don't have a chance and used those resources on the games that do, the hardworking folks that make STO and Neverwinter would have all the resources they need to keep stupid limitations like this from affecting their projects.
"Oh, the guys that wrote that code are gone and we can't work on OUR OWN GAME". I call bullcrap on that. You don't have a mentoring system lie every other software designer does? Imagine if Microsoft had neglected to keep up with training their new talent. They would be bankupt, having never made it to Windows 95. It's a poor excuse that shows how shoddily the company is being run.
You could make a new, more integrated version of the foundry. Heck, you could crack the core code down to basics and rewrite key systems. Blizzard has been doing it for 15 years. But you won't. Not "can't" but WON'T. Because real reinvestment in your properties isn't as much of a quick buck as churning out one money-grabbing lockbox after another.
After years on this game and a lifetime as a Trek fan, you won't get another dime from me until I see signs that you are taking your business seriously.
I hope this is not in violation of community standards, but I am seeing so many softball excuses being thrown out lately, because the majority of people don't know how a software company works. I do, I work at one.
It's not a joke, it a iron clad fact of life.
Say I have $10 that I can spend on make you happy and you'll as result give me $2 in profit. But if I invest that $10 in something else, I get $5 in profit.
Sorry, but keeping you as a custom would mean I lose $3. I don't need you as a customer.
Numbers are harsh.
Here you're correct. Cryptic is clearly not at the top spot and there are reasons for that. Lots of reasons, so many in fact its hard to tell which were the most important.
EverQuest is still going as well. Do either of them remove parts of their games because the code is old? (honest question here, I don't know myself)?
No it's not. This is why retail is in the tank right now. Instead of investing themselves in online shopping, the future of the business, they doggedly kept building more and more big box stores that now sit half-empty or are closed.
"You have to spend money to make money" is one of the greatest truisms of any retail enterprise. Why, out of all the little general stores in smalltown America in the 50's, did Walmart become one of the largest, most profitable businesses in the world while 99.999999% of the others are long since gone? Because they offered what their customers needed and continued to reinvest in growing their business and building an ironclad infrastructure. I've seen so many small businesses whine about how the "big box stores" are driving their business away. But those big chains started with one person starting one location, managing it well, and not being afraid to expand.
It's the same reason the movie industry has taken such hits. They are so focused on churning out something to match what someone else did rather than creating. And most movies are bland, homogenized, predictable messes as a result. Because they rarely risk greenlighting an innovative concept. The bean-counters would rather get modest returns on old reliable tired-and-true concepts.
Think about it. If it were not for a few risk takers in the film and TV business, there would be no Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Avengers. In the 60's a sci-fi show was the odd man out amongst all the westerns and detective shows. In the 70's, comedies and dramas were beating out sci-fi by orders of magnitiude. In the late 90's comic book movies were considered pure poison.
But someone stepped out and went ahead with those projects, and were wildly successful. That is return on investment. But first you have to MAKE the investment.
Hmm, I don't think you understand your own example.
Box Retail has a lower return on investment compare to things like Amazon, hence the growth of Amazon. You've successful provide an argument against yourself.
Success equals High Return on Investment, period. The trick is to recognize where the best returns are and to move agilely to them.
We've seen in this thread the impact it will have on the user base - a lot of players no longer interested in playing, people who have made it clear that it will influence whether they spend money on the game or not. While Cryptic claim to have no intention to sunset the game, realistically the backlash and resulting exodus as a result of this decision could in all likelihood result in shortening the games lifespan.
My personal feeling is that what they should do here is split the developers into two teams. Team one would be smaller and take some of the higher rated, higher traffic'd foundry missions, speak to their creators for their permission and then refine them for general release as main game missions. With the harder parts already created by users (storyline, maps, dialogue etc) this should be low investment on the part of Cryptic, with the team focusing on changing 'unique' characters for the main game characters (such as Adm. Quinn), refining transitions and adding V/O for general mission release, rather than developing the new content themselves. The time saved and extra resource available for Team 2 could then be put into developing a Foundry 2.0 which is fully understood and easy to enhance with future game updates.
Given the way the player base has reacted to the news of the Foundry's demise, going down this route would get a massively positive reaction from fans getting fed up with way new content is currently being delivered.
Don't get me wrong - My opinion is that Cryptic are clearly putting a lot of effort into the new content compared to some older missions. However, this has resulted in shorter missions, smaller season sizes with a significant drop in terms of mission numbers and story arcs etc and a multitude of lock-boxes and zen content.
I'd rather they scrubbed any new content and spend the time on developing a new foundry, than close the foundry and continue to churn out content at the current rate. I expect that most of the player base also feels this way. And done right, the launch of the new foundry, coinciding with a new 'Foundry bundle' of ships/outfits to fit the new system could be quite profitable to them and would be far more palatable to the player base than the current semi-exploitative approach.
I urge Cryptic to listen to the fans here and consider an approach to saving the Foundry - even if its not the approach suggested above!
In the long run, it will be more beneficial and profitable than closing the Foundry, which from reaction will likely see a mass drop-off in player-base.
May history remember the Foundry.
I cannot say I ever payed much interest to the people creating and enjoying foundry missions, but those people were the most passionate fans, players, quite possibly paying customers. By killing the foundry you're killing the part of STO that could fix many of the issues the game itself has by not catering to the needs of any particular gamer.
This is so sad and I am sorry for you.
Toi'Va, Ti'vath, Toivia, Ty'Vris, Tia Vex, Toi'Virth: Add Tier 6 KDF Carrier and Raider.
Tae'Va, T'Vaya, To'Var, Tevra, T'Vira, To'Vrak: Give us Asylums for Romulans.
Don't make ARC mandatory! Keep it optional only!
Edit: Tell you what, they could make them paid-for content (very small price per mission, like 50 Zen apiece or something, since I don't expect people will want to pay out a lot for each individual mission that they'll probably only play once or twice - I wouldn't). Then it'll be able to earn a bit of money for itself and everyone wins. You could give the original author a cut. Funny if the Foundry should become a paying concern in death when it never was in life, but so what? Some people say that the Foundry already makes money indirectly because it keeps people playing and buying other stuff, but even if you don't believe in that, this definitely would!
I didn't play that many Foundry missions until recently, didn't have enough play time.
But those I did were better than Cryptic has put out lately. Better search functions would have helped, someone mention that people have done TOS missions there- I need to see if I can find them before they go away.
What I'm wondering is if the Foundry is really a "core" feature for the most hardcore of the game's players/customers, allowing them to exceed game limitations to better meet their wants/needs. Entire mission arcs for a fleet (and I've seen some for Armadas, even bigger reach) is a pretty massive commitment of time. Creating farming/accolade/endeavor/whatever tools is another big push, and obviously designed to be a resource for an entire group. I've seen some Foundry missions clearly intended to push the limits of game difficulty, which I doubt anyone but a heavily invested player is looking for/able to survive in.
If these are the heaviest spenders, even recruiters trying to build up strong fleets/armadas, and they make good on promises of closing wallets, this one change could have a major financial impact on the game. In this case, it's not the quantity of customers who are negatively impacted, but the quality of those customers. And that doesn't even touch the chilling effect on the general userbase of Cryptic outright saying they can no longer afford/don't know how to support a portion of their own product - something they have said increasingly over the past several years about multiple in-game functions. No matter how you slice it, that is not a confidence builder.
This is not a "doom" post, or any direct condemnation of anything, but just a reminder that sometimes WHO uses something is more important to know than how many.
I am calling you out on this section. I'm going to take this section in 2 paragraphs.
First off, you say the ROI excuse is a joke. Let me be frank here. Cryptic was likely not making any money when it came to the foundry itself. The only money that was spent on it was from indirect purchases like character slots or new ships. The devs put more money into upholding the Foundry through bug fixes via the Programmers.
Now, to address this so called "not caring about the franchise." The devs care a great deal about the franchise, so much that they were excited when CBS gave them the opportunity to work on Discovery content. A lot of the revamps with ship skins usually happen on the devs spare time, knowing that players will like the more canon accurate skins.
They do likely have a mentoring system when it comes to the root systems of the games. The Foundry seems to me like it was designed as a separate system from the game. The biggest problem with the Foundry though is that there are only so many programmers at cryptic. These programmers are working hard at three currently running games and a fourth game in production. Neverwinter is currently having a new update to many game mechanics so the programmers have been hard at work on that game.
Remember that the devs all do not work on Lock boxes. Systems designers, ship designers, character artists and ship artists usually work on those.
Work on the foundry would entail mainly system designers and programmers for the framework of the system. Rebuilding the Foundry would essentially take them away from other system improvements they could do for the game.
We'll see what this will mean for the game's lifespan. In my opinion, no longer having to worry about the Foundry means that they can direct their attention to polishing up other areas of the game.
While what you suggest may seem to be a good idea to you, there is a reality you have to realize: The Cryptic game tools and the Foundry tools are completely different systems. They already talked about trying to convert the foundry missions into main missions. They discovered that it was not feasible to convert them and to rebuild them from scratch would take almost as much work as they do on their regular missions. This would take time away from them working on stuff they want to work on.
The other part of this is you wanting to see them develop a Foundry 2.0 in order to appease the people. Keep in mind that the first Foundry took a year to develop. I don't know how long it would take to develop a second Foundry, but assuming it would take this long, that would mean that they would likely not do anything else as far as systems work during this time, since their focus would be devoted to the Foundry. Note that they don't even have plans on working on a new foundry at this time. They've been up front about that.
In my opinion, I'm fine if they choose to focus in on the core of the game. The Foundry is good and all, but not if it constantly has to be fixed every time they do new code branches.
Not if you ask THEIR forum-based doomsayers. They've been saying "the game is dying, it won't last" for more than a decade.
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It sounds to me like the Foundry was a core feature for players.
When I came into the game, the Foundry was a means of providing expansive content in order to fill in a need for something to play when the devs could not deliver enough story content. However, there were also those that were using the Foundry for exploitative measures, such as creating quick things for farming loot and gear or console click missions in order to satisfy a daily wrapper for playing foundry missions. This led to them making changes in order to circumvent these exploits.
When Exploration clusters were removed from the game, the devs pushed for players to build their own exploration of the game by utilizing the clusters as Foundry doors. This is where stuff like the Alliance Exploration Initiative missions came about. The idea was that the Foundry existed in order to give players a means to do what they wanted with tools that were available to them.
Now most recently, I've heard talk of the Foundry being used for an easier means of completing the Personal Endeavor missions, rather than have to go and play content that may take a chunk of time out of their day. The point of the Endeavors system was that it was supposed to be a means of guiding you to play content that ideally a player would have played anyway. The removal of the Foundry hurts those players that don't wanna spend time waiting for certain queues to pop up just so they can fulfill the Endeavors.
In the end, the Foundry is one of the last old pieces of the game that has been around, and is going the way of the Genesis Exploration system, shut down and unlikely to come back. WIthout the Foundry, players will either turn back to regular content and play that over and over, or they will just find another game to play when they get bored. There's really not much that can be done now.
Oh, yeah. This is brilliant. If you want to definitely kill the game. Go back watch the livestream again. Kael said it would take months to convert a single mission over from the Foundry into the game system (they run on different systems). That's just ONE mission. Even if you limited it to just the spotlight missions, you're talking years to convert those missions. YEARS of no new content or development on anything else. The original Foundry took a team of developers a year to build, so Foundry 2.0 would take at least that long as well. The idea to put EVERY developer on these two things, MIGHT reduce this timeframe some, but not much, and again NOTHING new would be happening with the game. You think the pre-LOR content drought was something? Implement something like this, and there will be no playerbase left for Foundry 2.0 to return to, because there will have been nothing new in years to do, play, or buy to keep the game afloat and running. I hate to dump on your idea like that, but let's be realistic.
Look, I know there are many of you who want to come up with some brilliant idea to #savethefoundry. They've literally thought of almost every idea I've seen mentioned here (except that last one, yeesh) to try and save the Foundry and/or the missions. Nothing was viable. Again, they wrestled with ways to save it for a year before coming to this decision. I know it sucks. It does suck. But there's no write in campaign, petition, protest, or #hashtag that's going to change this. The Foundry will return only if/when the development schedule would allow it. Until then, if then, there is still a GREAT game here to be played, being worked on by a great bunch of developers that just want to provide the best Star Trek experience possible for you all. If you can still see your way to support them in that endeavor, it would be greatly appreciated.
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Sounds like killing off the Foundry is like NBC killing off ST:TOS in 1968, only to find that there were fans passionate enough to fight for another season (which they got, and then NBC killed it off anyway). Were it not for that 3rd season, ST:TOS wouldn't have gone into syndication and re-runs. I grew up in the 1970s, watching those re-runs when I was a kid. I truly believe that were it not for ST:TOS in re-runs and the growing fanbase, ST:TMP would never have happened. For 26 years (from ST:TMP to ST:E) we've had lots of Star Trek ... thanks to someone finally believing in the original product and willing to take another chance on it. Would the first movie make money, just because "Star Wars" did? Thankfully it did. And thankfully other movies (and series) followed. Had ST:TMP flopped at the box office, I don't even want to know what the '80s, '90s, and '00s would've been like without new ST movies and series. But ST:TMP succeeded, no doubt with plenty of naysayers at the time saying, "This'll go nowhere. A movie based on a ten-year-old TV series that only lasted 3 seasons? Who cares?" Someone cared. Lots of people did.
I wonder how long it'll take (probably not long at all - hopefully not a decade) before the powers-that-be and bean-counters realize, "Hey, wait a minute! We've got customers, customers willing to pour money into it!") before the Foundry comes back, firing on all cylinders. I hope I live long enough to see that day (I'm 51 now; 52 in July). It would be a shame to see a "milch cow" like Star Trek being bled dry without giving a damn about its core creativity, hard work, long nights, and the ever-present risk of cancellation. Remember this, PWE: The creators of Foundry missions didn't have to create even ONE mission. But they did. I don't care how many poor missions there are in the Foundry. It was a place, like a kitchen, like a workshop, that gave people a chance to try out things, to build, to fail, to succeed, "to boldly go" where the corporate vision apparently wouldn't go. And that's despite having to use a set of tools that didn't improve, that had problems. They *want* to create Foundry missions. They *want* to share them with the STO community. Doesn't that impress *anyone* at the corporate level? Enough to at least leave the Foundry in place, as is? Fine, it won't get fixed. But warts and all, people were still using it, still creating with it.
Someone once said, "Tell a lie often enough and people begin to believe it's the truth." I refuse to believe that the Foundry was so broken it couldn't be saved, not even a little bit of it. *Someone* (STO's version of Roddenberry) thought it should exist in the first place. Surely there is *someone* at Cryptic today who won't let it die. Who will try to find some way to keep it alive. Even if it means thankless work, long nights, frustrating code to dig through, fix, and change, and using up free time that they could've used on something else. After all, that's how the Klingon missions were built, and I would never have created a KDF character (or several of them) without them. So ... after the Foundry, are the Klingon missions going to be killed off next, followed by the Romulan missions? And what do you have after that? A flat, two-dimensional game. A game that had such potential. And was allowed to die off, bit by bit.
Maybe we'll get lucky and STO will go into syndication and re-runs for ten years. Nostalgia, until someone picks it up again, dusts it off, and says, "You know, it really wasn't that bad. We have more means now than they did then. We can make this what they couldn't, and weren't allowed to. We can make this so damn now that good people will be playing it for at least 26 years." One can hope.
R.I.P. Foundry. To quote Hamlet, holding up a skull in one hand and looking at it: "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew thee well."
Endeavors just got a whole lot tougher to complete in a timely fashion.
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Oh, sweet baby RNGesus... I just... I can't even with you folks... Please, people. Just go back and watch the livestream again. Please.
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May i suggest placing a FAQ on the first page as many people are asking the same things such as "can we have it on a different server" or "can we make some missions into real ones" ect.
"It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
I think the issue you're forgetting here is that when it comes to their tools vs. the foundry tools, foundry missions are an entirely different portion of the server. When you load up a foundry mission compared to a non-foundry mission, the load times are apparent.
When you are building a Foundry mission, Most of the assets that you want to use are already there, apart from your characters that you need to create, or ships that you may want to include. Yes, you still need to build the maps and script things out, but this is way less time than what Cryptic needs.
Cryptic, if you've noticed from their missions, usually builds stuff from SCRATCH. This includes space and ground maps, which usually look much more polished than any foundry mission map which is usually utilizing stuff that is available. Other stuff, like characters and such may be built ahead of time so they don't spend as much time, especially if its a reused character like a trek actor. Any new characters though have to be crafted for the mission.
How much time do you spend on the dialog of the missions? Cryptic's content designers do have to script things out ahead of time and make changes as they need to. I'm sure the dialog we see is never the final product right from the get go.
Remember that the Foundry was meant to be a simplified process of how they make missions and it would not be a simple conversion process from the Foundry to their mission tools.
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Firstly, when Cryptic claim "We don't have the resources for man hours on this" does seem a bit...disingenuous when I've seen the lock-box ticker roll over "Someone hat a T6 Ship!" so often I've had to turn off system notification in the UI because it got that distracting in general play. Given the drop rate for those T6 Ships compared to the chaff boxes usually churn out I can only presume that clearly someone is making money hand over fist and if its not Cryptic, who is?. and where is that money being spent if Cryptic don't have the money or expertise to throw at this or hire additional bodies specifically to maintain the foundry while the core team continues on the main game.
Secondly, How bad is the legacy code, if no one currently at Cryptic can understand what the hell is going on?. I get Programmers leave, it happens. for a whole bunch of reasons but did he or she not use notation in their work? was there no documentation?
Thirdly, since people have mentioned that the Cryptic SDK and the Foundry are two separate development systems why not release a stripped down version of the Cryptic SDK as a separate IDE that can hook into a revamp of the existing foundry infrastructure, kind of like Bethesda's Creation Kit or the XCOM 2 SDK. It may be stiffer learning curve for the foundry creator and would have to rebuild all of there content, but Cryptic wouldn't have to start a new "Foundry 2.0" from scratch since you'd be using a variant of the existing dev tools already in place, bring on a small team specifically keep the SDK up to date and all the core team would have to care about is making sure the IDE can port to the main game and since again its a variant of the dev tools you know that backwards compatibility won't break anything without having to open up any code or legal liability or split the core team.
Are you trying to suggest that Cryptic doesn't have access to pre-built assets or never re-uses content when able?
The subject's been covered by the devs before (specifically: zero) and I'll go through it again to save people the argument, the way the Foundry works on the back end is different from how official missions work on the back end. Cryptic could build missions in roughly the same way a Foundry mission is constructed but to rebuild a Foundry mission they would need to do so manually since the two systems aren't directly translatable (as yet.)
That is technically possible and they have considered doing it (back then, to bring select Foundry content over to consoles) but it would take about as much work as a brand new mission, however they go about doing it. Considering the unmatched quality of some of what's out there, I don't think that's a big ask as an eventual project Cryptic could tackle. Ie. pull from lost Foundry missions to improve future content, if only for thematic beats and story concepts. Alimac30 and Greendragoon for example have given Cryptic great starting points.
They don't have to build the exact same things we have, but few other MMO developers have been in a position where they can draw upon years of iteration on their own gameplay format and mission concepts (also: gameplay, Foundry authors have pushed further than Cryptic has with encounter design in missions.) Add to that a well of characters and locations that players are emotionally attached to and can pull from for minor arcs, plot points, and simple recognition. The Foundry is an incredible resource and doesn't stop being that after it's been turned off (Cryptic's saving the data, we've been and are still recording liveplays, character assets are being retranslated to boffs and characters, we're compling dialog, and the experiences remain.)
*rollseyes*
To appreciate the importance of the Foundry in STO you'd likely have to do a networking analysis of social behavior (something I might have done for a PhD in a different context.) It's not just how much time player spend with Foundry content but how it shapes their appreciation of the game and its user base which influences the interactions they have with other users and other users with those users and so on.
Reductive business calculations don't have access to that, so the Foundry wasn't supported by the studio as much as it should have been.
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!
Why? Because the foundry was an integral and important part of star trek. It represented the holodeck as in the stratrek series, where people could make their own stories to play.
So a bad bad bad move from Cryptic and also very weak argumentation saying that they do not have the knwoledge in house to maintain their own software.
A best practise is to add value to your software and product, not remove it.
If the software to make Foundry missions vs. standard missions is fundamentally different, I'm guessing any program designed to convert them would take months, if not years to build (probably years).
It's not just VO and cutscenes, it's language packs for the global STO audience, accessibility features for players who need them, more rigorous QA testing, and probably a bunch of other back-end things we never know they do. Even if they could do all that, those thousands upon thousands of missions then have to be maintained through any major systems updates that are yet to come.
They maintained the Foundry as best they could until every possible option was explored, then made a final decision. That's my take, at least.
Sorry about the loss of all your missions, but the Foundry's clearly been on its last legs for a long time. This is a band-aid that had to be ripped off sooner or later.
No they didn't. Let's at least be honest.
Instead of actually maintaining the Foundry as they should (i.e. with its own team dedicated to the task and keeping the code up to date) they decided the investment wasn't worth it and kicked the can down the road for years by doing stop-gap patches (far less than a best effort) until they decided to end even that.
It's not enough to look only at the decision before us today, we should consider the decisions made over the last few years that resulted in the current state. This stuff doesn't just happen over night, it took years for Cryptic to make this mistake.