The #1 mistake amateur programmers make is not tracing program functions. A does X and Y... is often only technically true. You also need to look at everything that points at it and the variables it touches. The devs have stated in interviews that the real issue isn't getting rid of the faction flags, the problem is that the faction system is the digital equivalent of a house of cards. THOUSANDS of things in the code are based on it, or based on things that are based on it... etc...
And yes, I did study computer programming while getting a degree at DeVry.
Yes. Finding the one place where the dragon spawn will occur and removing it is simple (comparatively). Making a dragon spawn at another place in game is a bit harder but doable (if the code for dragons spawning exists). But finding all the consequences of that happening or not happening is arduous. The dragon may need a flag to properly work and the second instance just bugs out. Or it will set or remove a flag and thus prevent other stuff from happening. And these are things you can only find out if you have all of the code at hand.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
The #1 mistake amateur programmers make is not tracing program functions. A does X and Y... is often only technically true. You also need to look at everything that points at it and the variables it touches. The devs have stated in interviews that the real issue isn't getting rid of the faction flags, the problem is that the faction system is the digital equivalent of a house of cards. THOUSANDS of things in the code are based on it, or based on things that are based on it... etc...
And yes, I did study computer programming while getting a degree at DeVry.
Yes. Finding the one place where the dragon spawn will occur and removing it is simple (comparatively). Making a dragon spawn at another place in game is a bit harder but doable (if the code for dragons spawning exists). But finding all the consequences of that happening or not happening is arduous. The dragon may need a flag to properly work and the second instance just bugs out. Or it will set or remove a flag and thus prevent other stuff from happening. And these are things you can only find out if you have all of the code at hand.
For a real world example: I used to mod Diablo 2, and we found a funny bug. You can mod it to spawn duplicates of bosses. BUT... If there are several and ANY of them dies, they ALL die. And the player gets XP/loot as if they killed them all. Why? they don't share HP pools, they have separate buff/debuff stacks.... It's part of the way the game does death animations, it's actually an event script triggered by the boss reaching 0 HP. The script just wasn't written to account for multiple copies of the same boss and when triggered it causes ALL of them to die in a theatrical manner.
Return of the Foundry on steroids. You’ll be able to neatly integrate Foundry missions into the cryptic storylines. For example: A bunch of Foundry authors created content for the Iconion story arc. Their missions can be integrated into the Iconion story arc to create a seamless Super Iconion arc. Or, you create a non-human alt and can replace the initial 1-10 story arc with a group of Foundry missions created specifically for that race that blends you into the main story arc at level 10 (I'm sure Cryptic would have guidelines for these).
I doubt it. They had enough of a problem trying to keep the Foundry active every time they updated the game. That kind of integration would be virturally impossible. Not only that, the level of integration mentioned here... they'd have no time to work on ANYTHING except maintaining the super Foundry.
Other ideas, group of unhappy users. Change the face? Users will be able to turn off the light show hiding your ship during combat. You will be able to select which effects to leave on or turn off.
All of the effects are meant to act as a visible indicator of buffs/debuffs. Each one with a unique effect. In the heat of battle some may find it annoying, but others use that to instantly identify what they got hit with. Sometimes you just don't have time to mouse over the small buff bar to figure out what to use to clear a debuff.
This particular issue isn't gonna be easy to solve one way or the other.
Then maybe a full immersion setting to select what StarTrek era/show to show on a user’s system. They are already doing it in a TFO, really simple to do the next step. For example, if you selected TOS era, you would see another users/npc Odyssey displayed as a TOS era equivalent ship. On the ground, everyone would be wearing a TOS uniform. Or you could leave it off and see what everyone is flying like currently. Note, this only affects what you see, not other users. They would be using their own immersion setting.
Pretty complex, and would probably require a LOT of new ship designs across the board. Not only that... putting everyone in the same uniforms...
would this be client side or what?
Last the character selection screen revamp that would allow you to set the sort order of all your alts displayed or break them into groups/squadrons (we are Fleet Admirals btw). Maybe I want to sort by ship type, or faction, or energy weapon type or some grouping I wanted. This would also make it easy to move hero characters/squadrons into the forthcoming (if they choose to do it) STO-RTS where we can level up characters in either the MMO or RTS.
Being able to manually sort characters without logging in/out to get them in the preferred order would be nice, but down to the energy type is a stretch.
Ok, one more, for all of us altaholics. Besides a link to a 12 step program (or 96 if you chose the Tholian one). The max characters per account for LTS subscribers is tied to the max level (currently 65). Any time the max level is increased, so is the max characters. And you can purchase a Jem Hadar like start for new characters.
The current max is well beyond the current level cap. You'd be taking characters away. And why only affect Lifers?
It's a wonder CBS has any time on their hands to create TV shows with all the time they spend going over Items in STO.
Psst. CBS a large corporation. They have full divisions handling all the licensing situations on various IPs they control.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Rather than say ways my friend could be wrong in what he's said to me, you would rather call me a liar or tell me I'm fabricating things.
Westie, ol' pal, I wasn't calling you a liar; naive at worst, possibly merely unversed in the intricacies of coding, but not a liar.
I was calling your friend a liar, for pretending to greater knowledge than he had, apparently in order to impress you.
And yes, flags can make all the difference. My first programming job was at HQ SAC, Force Timing & Deconfliction - making sure that if WW3 started, all our weapons would reach their targets and not take each other out. (It's trickier than you might think - a nuke that isn't armed yet can literally be dropped from a plane and just make a loud THUMP, but once it's armed, it can be set off by damn near anything, including neutron flux from a nearby nuclear explosion. Also, we had to program paths for aircraft to follow back out of the target zone after dropping all their payloads.) There was a horror story going around when I got there, to emphasize the importance of using a dummy database for software testing. A few years before I got there, someone had run a program whose only purpose was to delay certain launches by a matter of minutes in order to ensure clear airspace. He ran it against the live database, instead of the dummy. No harm done, right? Just implementing the change immediately. Except that for some reason, while adjusting the timing it also reset the target values to zeroes - 0 degrees longitude, 0 degrees latitude. If we'd gone to war in the early '80s, we'd have bombed the bejeezus out of a spot off the coast of Africa.
Cryptic has some history with this as well - when they introduced vehicles to CO, it somehow managed to completely disable Global Chat, a completely separate system. It took almost two weeks for them to find the issue and solve it. Coding software is not as simple as some wish it were.
So what do you think it will be? Some sort of exploration system? A PVP revamp? What group of players that might be unhappy do you think they will be making happy next year?
I'd bet on PvP.
Many people don't consider a game to be complete w/o a decent PvP mode.
Think of all the PvP items they can cram into a lockbox.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Cryptic has some history with this as well - when they introduced vehicles to CO, it somehow managed to completely disable Global Chat, a completely separate system. It took almost two weeks for them to find the issue and solve it. Coding software is not as simple as some wish it were.
I have a theory. Cryptic's games create chat log entries for all sorts of things that players don't normally see, for example, parsers work by reading the chatlog entries for weapon damage. Not all of this actually leaves the local client. But, if part of it WAS to do so it might crash the chat server since it'd cause a long string of unhandled exceptions.
Having worked as a FR moderator on an gaming internet presence (not a game in itself) I can tell you that there will always be things asked for not being implemented for a multitude of reasons. And it was at least at my place well over 90% of suggestions dismissed out of hand. It's not only about what players want, but about what's doable, what brings in the money to pay people, what suits the general "brand". We however read 100% of the suggestions and had some really nice ideas we could use and implemented them. Sometimes even those we dismissed 3 years prior.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Next year Cryptic will release the very last mission. These are the Voyages ... our heroic admirals will fight against the Borg, some of our bridge officers will die as we face desperate choices. As the final big bad appears and we prepare to face our doom, Agent Daniels pipes up.
"Computer, end program." the cutscene fades away, it's just Daniels and our admiral in a holodeck.
Having worked as a FR moderator on an gaming internet presence (not a game in itself) I can tell you that there will always be things asked for not being implemented for a multitude of reasons. And it was at least at my place well over 90% of suggestions dismissed out of hand. It's not only about what players want, but about what's doable, what brings in the money to pay people, what suits the general "brand". We however read 100% of the suggestions and had some really nice ideas we could use and implemented them. Sometimes even those we dismissed 3 years prior.
Yeah, people on the forum casually toss around ideas that'd require months of work and interrupting their normal release schedule. The devs aren't gonna do stuff that takes half a year especially if it's a silly cosmetic thing less than half the game population would care about.
My philosophy is that if it is part of the game, then it needs to be treated as such. If I have a festering laceration on my hand and ignore it, it's going to get worse and could result in me losing the hand. That is what Cryptic did with exploration. It's what they did with the Foundry, and it's what they've been doing with PvP… Where does logic lead us?
In software development, sometimes we use a term from medical methods: "Triage".
You come in with a festering laceration, someone else whose heart just stopped, someone with a broken bone, someone with gunshot wound, and there is a pregnant woman that just collapsed. Who do you treat first?
Sometimes amputing a hand is better than letting someone die.
Thankfully, in software development it's never that dramatic, but it doesn't change that you can't fix and implement everything at once, and so you have to prioritize and some features will die from inadequacy.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
Dude... First of all... you should relax. You're derailing the thread to rant about your viewpoint on something unrelated now.
Second... The Devs are not just gonna drop everything to work on one area of the game. What we see is literally only the tip of the iceberg. There is A LOT going on behind the scenes. For example, they had tried for MONTHS to find a way to keep the Foundry. They failed, and reluctantly made the decision to retire it. They just didn't have the capability of maintaining it. And before someone says that they could just have left it as is... the Foundry broke after EVERY MAJOR UPDATE. So even if they did put it in maintenance mode... it would have broken on the next update, making it unusable.
They don't tell us EVERYTHING they do every second of every day. We're not interested in that. They tell us the big things.
Third... It is a fine line balancing PvE and PvP. The playerbase is majority PvE. However no one has advocated for the removal of PvP, except for fearmongers trying to say its being neglected on the sole purpose of justifying removal for nefarious reasons. It is still, at its core, and despite some people saying otherwise, fully functional. The main problem is power creep and players gaming mechanics. Everything is pretty much balanced towards fighting mobs with greater HP than a player. Stick those 100k DPS builds in a PvP setting... of course players are going to get vaped. Because a player doesn't have the same stats as high end NPCs.
It is still possible to have a fair PvP as things stand now. You just have to set up prearranged matches to ensure that you're not going in against some random with a stealth vape build like you'd see in Ker'rat.
Also... A quick PvP with a fleetmate can be used to determine strengths and weaknesses to help with improving a build, as it is in a controlled setting.
Now... can we get back to the subject at hand and stop ranting about mechanics as this is about STORY content being added?
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
It isn't forum suggestions for new additions to the game going ignored that I speak of. It is requesting, and in some cases begging for things that are already part of the game to be supported.
Except most of them are made by people who think they are workable and don't know the difference.
That is what Cryptic did with exploration.
The problem with exploration wasn't neglect, it was that they made a design decision to get rid of it. The problem was numbers. The game didn't generate exploration missions on the fly. They were all premade missions and changing them required more or less the same work as a story mission. The other issue was the amount of game data they took up. It was larger than the rest of the game put together. That last part... you can't fix that unless you drastically re-write how the game stores them. Guess what? That's not maintenance. It's rebuilding the system from scratch.
It's what they did with the Foundry,
Same deal. It had problems that required it to be re-built from scratch to fix. I used to be part of the Foundry Roundtable. I know more about how badly broken the Foundry was than almost anyone. I republished all the mission I could in the last few weeks so that people could see them, and even found a fix for a problem that had been vexing me for years. Why? because I wanted people to be able to see it one last time.
and it's what they've been doing with PvP… Where does logic lead us?
PvP has neither reason to need to be rebuilt. So logic says Cryptic will continue to ignore it.
a well balanced MMO with real exploration and thousands of high quality voiced quests with at least 100 hours of new content a year in the mean time.
Anyone know what he's talking about here?
no longer had the programmers who knew how to fix it.
You're probably talking about the cluster missions and Foundry. Actually they DID know how to fix it. The original lead programmer for STO is still on the team after all. The problem was that this meant they knew how much time it'd take to fix it.
And you think this applies to the game as a whole? Because that's what you said.
The thing with the Foundry is that the "legacy knowledge" that you speak of isn't required for maintenance, it was required for large scale improvements. Big things changed in the game, LOADS of them. To have the Foundry keep up it needed changes to be made that basically required taking the core of the Foundry apart. There was only ever one or two people who ever knew how to do that. The current staff could do it in theory, but would need to reverse engineer it, which is time consuming and not 100% reliable.
if this new arc removes the lag and the rubberbanding, even if we must fight the teletubbies, i'm agree. currently, the lag and the rubberbanding are awful.
But what so few people seem to be unable to get is that had these systems been treated as being equally important as everything else, they very likely would not only still be part of the game, but they would have also have evolved and grown with the rest of the game.
Quite possible. Especially since the rest of the game would still have grown slower due to fewer resources allocated to it.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Comments
Yes. Finding the one place where the dragon spawn will occur and removing it is simple (comparatively). Making a dragon spawn at another place in game is a bit harder but doable (if the code for dragons spawning exists). But finding all the consequences of that happening or not happening is arduous. The dragon may need a flag to properly work and the second instance just bugs out. Or it will set or remove a flag and thus prevent other stuff from happening. And these are things you can only find out if you have all of the code at hand.
My character Tsin'xing
All of the effects are meant to act as a visible indicator of buffs/debuffs. Each one with a unique effect. In the heat of battle some may find it annoying, but others use that to instantly identify what they got hit with. Sometimes you just don't have time to mouse over the small buff bar to figure out what to use to clear a debuff.
This particular issue isn't gonna be easy to solve one way or the other.
Pretty complex, and would probably require a LOT of new ship designs across the board. Not only that... putting everyone in the same uniforms...
would this be client side or what?
Being able to manually sort characters without logging in/out to get them in the preferred order would be nice, but down to the energy type is a stretch.
The current max is well beyond the current level cap. You'd be taking characters away. And why only affect Lifers?
Psst. CBS a large corporation. They have full divisions handling all the licensing situations on various IPs they control.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
I was calling your friend a liar, for pretending to greater knowledge than he had, apparently in order to impress you.
And yes, flags can make all the difference. My first programming job was at HQ SAC, Force Timing & Deconfliction - making sure that if WW3 started, all our weapons would reach their targets and not take each other out. (It's trickier than you might think - a nuke that isn't armed yet can literally be dropped from a plane and just make a loud THUMP, but once it's armed, it can be set off by damn near anything, including neutron flux from a nearby nuclear explosion. Also, we had to program paths for aircraft to follow back out of the target zone after dropping all their payloads.) There was a horror story going around when I got there, to emphasize the importance of using a dummy database for software testing. A few years before I got there, someone had run a program whose only purpose was to delay certain launches by a matter of minutes in order to ensure clear airspace. He ran it against the live database, instead of the dummy. No harm done, right? Just implementing the change immediately. Except that for some reason, while adjusting the timing it also reset the target values to zeroes - 0 degrees longitude, 0 degrees latitude. If we'd gone to war in the early '80s, we'd have bombed the bejeezus out of a spot off the coast of Africa.
Cryptic has some history with this as well - when they introduced vehicles to CO, it somehow managed to completely disable Global Chat, a completely separate system. It took almost two weeks for them to find the issue and solve it. Coding software is not as simple as some wish it were.
I'd bet on PvP.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
My character Tsin'xing
"Computer, end program." the cutscene fades away, it's just Daniels and our admiral in a holodeck.
Fin.
My character Tsin'xing
You come in with a festering laceration, someone else whose heart just stopped, someone with a broken bone, someone with gunshot wound, and there is a pregnant woman that just collapsed. Who do you treat first?
Sometimes amputing a hand is better than letting someone die.
Thankfully, in software development it's never that dramatic, but it doesn't change that you can't fix and implement everything at once, and so you have to prioritize and some features will die from inadequacy.
Second... The Devs are not just gonna drop everything to work on one area of the game. What we see is literally only the tip of the iceberg. There is A LOT going on behind the scenes. For example, they had tried for MONTHS to find a way to keep the Foundry. They failed, and reluctantly made the decision to retire it. They just didn't have the capability of maintaining it. And before someone says that they could just have left it as is... the Foundry broke after EVERY MAJOR UPDATE. So even if they did put it in maintenance mode... it would have broken on the next update, making it unusable.
They don't tell us EVERYTHING they do every second of every day. We're not interested in that. They tell us the big things.
Third... It is a fine line balancing PvE and PvP. The playerbase is majority PvE. However no one has advocated for the removal of PvP, except for fearmongers trying to say its being neglected on the sole purpose of justifying removal for nefarious reasons. It is still, at its core, and despite some people saying otherwise, fully functional. The main problem is power creep and players gaming mechanics. Everything is pretty much balanced towards fighting mobs with greater HP than a player. Stick those 100k DPS builds in a PvP setting... of course players are going to get vaped. Because a player doesn't have the same stats as high end NPCs.
It is still possible to have a fair PvP as things stand now. You just have to set up prearranged matches to ensure that you're not going in against some random with a stealth vape build like you'd see in Ker'rat.
Also... A quick PvP with a fleetmate can be used to determine strengths and weaknesses to help with improving a build, as it is in a controlled setting.
Now... can we get back to the subject at hand and stop ranting about mechanics as this is about STORY content being added?
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
The thing with the Foundry is that the "legacy knowledge" that you speak of isn't required for maintenance, it was required for large scale improvements. Big things changed in the game, LOADS of them. To have the Foundry keep up it needed changes to be made that basically required taking the core of the Foundry apart. There was only ever one or two people who ever knew how to do that. The current staff could do it in theory, but would need to reverse engineer it, which is time consuming and not 100% reliable.
My character Tsin'xing
Quite possible. Especially since the rest of the game would still have grown slower due to fewer resources allocated to it.
I guess the game which sends out real world money just for logging in and offers a monthly massage to customers.