Exploration would have always been removed because the entire foundation for the Genesis system was fundamentally flawed and broken, and it never could have provided deep or meaningful exploration as it was.
Genesis was a stop-gap measure thrown in at the last minute before launch to provide content for the game which was sorely lacking when it launched. It was never meant to be developed beyond what it was.
Now if the powers that be had tied the Foundry into an true exploration system - we really would have gotten nearly limitless and DETAILED worlds/missions to experience. There were roughly 100,000 missions in the Foundry when it shut down. Granted many of those may have been terrible, but even at a 1% rate of having great missions that means we would have had 1000 absolutely top rate missions to explore.
But as Sirsitsalot so eloquently put it, they dropped the ball big time by letting it rot and not giving it any attention as the game moved on.
Why are we still talking about this? Wait until after STLV when something more than a golly-gee-willikers 'wink wink nudge nudge say no more say no more' Tweet from Geko might be forthcoming.
'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.'
Why are we still talking about this? Wait until after STLV when something more than a golly-gee-willikers 'wink wink nudge nudge say no more say no more' Tweet from Geko might be forthcoming.
Considering he already took back the whole "change the face of the game" -quote and admitted it's just some backstory, I wonder the same. It was just an exaggeration, nothing's gonna come out of it.
By the time something gets released, I expect only people who even remember the whole line will be the posters of the obligatory "I'm disappointed" -threads, who will complain nothing changed.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
And I'll have an obligatory facedesk at those threads.
Why are we still talking about this? Wait until after STLV when something more than a golly-gee-willikers 'wink wink nudge nudge say no more say no more' Tweet from Geko might be forthcoming.
Considering he already took back the whole "change the face of the game" -quote and admitted it's just some backstory, I wonder the same. It was just an exaggeration, nothing's gonna come out of it.
By the time something gets released, I expect only people who even remember the whole line will be the posters of the obligatory "I'm disappointed" -threads, who will complain nothing changed.
Don't think that story changes cannot "change the face of the game" on their own, because they can (unfortunately the trend seems to be change for the worse in a lot of games, but that is beside the point). In this case I hope it is just hype because the alternative probably involves considerable story retcons to align the game closer with CBS and Discovery which has a lot of potential pitfalls.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
Don't think that story changes cannot "change the face of the game" on their own, because they can (unfortunately the trend seems to be change for the worse in a lot of games, but that is beside the point). In this case I hope it is just hype because the alternative probably involves considerable story retcons to align the game closer with CBS and Discovery which has a lot of potential pitfalls.
Cryptic has already stated that if things from Picard deviate TOO much, STO will just branch off rather than gut everything to conform. As for Discovery... STO really has nothing to worry about due to taking place in the 25th Century. Anything from the Fed-Klingon War has already been handled. Hell... Yard 39 is the reason we got 25th Century versions of Discovery era ships. Its the Picard series that we're going in blind, at least from the player base.
I think a lot of this will depend on what you call "the face of the game". As multiple threads have shown, there are players here for mechanics as well as the meta game as well as the story told. Did ending the Iconian thread (T'ket excepted) change "the face of the game" for you? (That's "general you") Of course something can be more unexpected (that the Iconian arc needed to happen was obvious), get more to the core of the background. But I think the general gist is: is something like that, a new puppetmaster enemy, unexpected, changing the face of the game? Mechanics players and meta players may not think so, story players may do. Neither would be wrong.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
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.
You do realize that chances are more than highly likely this is not anything about Cryptic, right?
maybe, but even if they realise the best stuff of the millenia, if they don't make the effort to do something for the lag and the rubberbanding, their efforts would be wasted.
btw, i know that they don't manage the servers, but cryptic is a client of a company, and the service produced by this company, is not satisfying.
I think a lot of this will depend on what you call "the face of the game". As multiple threads have shown, there are players here for mechanics as well as the meta game as well as the story told. Did ending the Iconian thread (T'ket excepted) change "the face of the game" for you? (That's "general you") Of course something can be more unexpected (that the Iconian arc needed to happen was obvious), get more to the core of the background. But I think the general gist is: is something like that, a new puppetmaster enemy, unexpected, changing the face of the game? Mechanics players and meta players may not think so, story players may do. Neither would be wrong.
They're not going to change the existing story all that dramatically, because it would be too expensive to redo all the voiceovers.
And merely continuing the story, new enemies or not, is just business as usual. Not actually changing anything.
This is probably not that game-face-changing thing, but one thing I'd like and is purely story-wise:
Adjusting the timeline. Every major story arc should basically cover roughly one year. It's not just about our quick rise from zero to hero, but also about the sheer density of conflicts with the current timeline.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
This is probably not that game-face-changing thing, but one thing I'd like and is purely story-wise:
Adjusting the timeline. Every major story arc should basically cover roughly one year. It's not just about our quick rise from zero to hero, but also about the sheer density of conflicts with the current timeline.
There's a timeline?
I mean, an official one, not one made up by players based on one or three vague references kinda-sorta-maybe mentioned somewhere at some point and a metric ton of guessing.
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.
You do realize that chances are more than highly likely this is not anything about Cryptic, right?
maybe, but even if they realise the best stuff of the millenia, if they don't make the effort to do something for the lag and the rubberbanding, their efforts would be wasted.
btw, i know that they don't manage the servers, but cryptic is a client of a company, and the service produced by this company, is not satisfying.
Here you go:
A-B-C-D-E
A is you. You've got the best connectivity hardware you can get
B is your ISP and its data pipeline. They offer ultra-high speed data flow.
C is some fly by night third party ISP'sdata pipeline with mediocre at best data flow.
D is cryptic's ISP which also offers ultra high speed data flow,
E is Cryptic.
Neither your ISP nor Cryptic's ISPs can do anything about the fly by night ISP's infrastructure any more than You or Cryptic can. That's just how the internet works.
Frequently the connection goes A-B-C-C-B-C-C-B-<argument over whether this B should pay extra for large volumes of high-speed data>-D-E. Sometimes there are more letters in the middle. And not every data packet follows the same route - imagine your commute to work, except that your car is divided into foot-long segments, each segment can take a different road, and you can't get out of the car until all the segments arrive at work. Is it your employer's fault when segments 7 and 12 are caught in traffic and arrive after the others?
Yes, there's a timeline. Yes, there's an official timeline. There are many date references throughout the game. Some of the official blogs, which flesh out the story, also give stardates (it doesn't matter whether you personally count them or not). For those events/missions without a clearly stated date associated with them, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Mission A happens after Mission B, and that both occur before Story Arc X.
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Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
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.
Np legacy knowledge WOULD be required for maintenance as when they added new stuff to the game in a big branch update, the Foundry ALWAYS broke, and in a way it didn't break before so it needed Programmer time to figure out what broke, and how to fix it - and without the legacy code knowledge, that becomes a lot harder for a programmer (and at some point, they just may not be able to figure out how to fix it - and I'm sure that played into the final decision to retire it.)
If it 'broke' the same way every time, or just required some database link remapping/restoration, they probably would have kept the Foundry. The last time the Foundry broke it was down for MONTHS before they managed to bring it back online; and then announced their decision to sunset it.
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..."
This is probably not that game-face-changing thing, but one thing I'd like and is purely story-wise:
Adjusting the timeline. Every major story arc should basically cover roughly one year. It's not just about our quick rise from zero to hero, but also about the sheer density of conflicts with the current timeline.
Why would most major story arcs need a year?
Things like the Breen, Reman, Devidian, 2800, Wasteland, New Romulus, and even the Tzenkethi arc, are things that could happen anywhere in just a day or two(Wasteland) to things that could easily happen within a week or two. And, on the flip side, with the Iconians sheer technological and numerical superiority, there is no way we could have lasted a year in a war with them.
Well, it doesn't have to be that the entire arc is always exactly a year or perfectly evenly distributed across it, take it more as an average per story arc.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
Is there any subject that doesn't devolve into inane rants about the foundry?
Nope.
And people are STILL hung up on mechanics rather than Story. And I have to agree that we should all just wait for STLV rather than spiral down mechanics and rants.
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.
Tacofangs once explained why they couldn't "fix" the exploration clusters. Simply put, they had a design flaw that made them too time consuming to work on. This being that there was thousands of them. Genesis wasn't part of the game, and cluster missions weren't generated on the fly. They were all premade maps and missions. Fixing them would require editing them individually. 6 minutes per mission doesn't sound like a lot, until you math it. 6*1000 = 6000 minutes or 100 hours of work. Realistically that's at least half a month of work... for random junk missions.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
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.
Np legacy knowledge WOULD be required for maintenance as when they added new stuff to the game in a big branch update, the Foundry ALWAYS broke, and in a way it didn't break before so it needed Programmer time to figure out what broke, and how to fix it - and without the legacy code knowledge, that becomes a lot harder for a programmer (and at some point, they just may not be able to figure out how to fix it - and I'm sure that played into the final decision to retire it.)
If it 'broke' the same way every time, or just required some database link remapping/restoration, they probably would have kept the Foundry. The last time the Foundry broke it was down for MONTHS before they managed to bring it back online; and then announced their decision to sunset it.
And each time it was different. Lighting 2.0? It lead to what was dubbed the "crazy quilt bug". IE some of the maps had bizarre color patterns spread all over the geometry that resembled abstract art.
Another example was this:
Way back in 2013, several Foundry maps had large chunks of their geometry rearranged. The best information I have is that they used shared assets and the shared assets got changed. Why did it happen? No one really knows. The best guess anyone can come up with is that a story map was getting revamped and this was collateral damage.
The Foundry was seemingly coded in a very idiosyncratic way, probably because whoever coded it focused on "making it work". This is not to say it was undocumented spaghetti code. If it was it would have tanked sooner than it did.
Don't think that story changes cannot "change the face of the game" on their own, because they can (unfortunately the trend seems to be change for the worse in a lot of games, but that is beside the point). In this case I hope it is just hype because the alternative probably involves considerable story retcons to align the game closer with CBS and Discovery which has a lot of potential pitfalls.
Cryptic has already stated that if things from Picard deviate TOO much, STO will just branch off rather than gut everything to conform. As for Discovery... STO really has nothing to worry about due to taking place in the 25th Century. Anything from the Fed-Klingon War has already been handled. Hell... Yard 39 is the reason we got 25th Century versions of Discovery era ships. Its the Picard series that we're going in blind, at least from the player base.
True, but the devs did say that A: the Picard Show writers know at least the basics of the STO story line, and B: minor retcons to make it fit are a possibility.
they didn't need to fix 1000 missions, though - they needed to fix the ones that were BROKEN only, which was a significantly smaller number
Oh they did for a while actually do that. Then they switched gears and simply deleted any cluster missions that were broken.
But that's not really what I was talking about. I was talking about IMPROVING them. Given what happened with the Foundry with Lighting 2.0, I don't think the clusters would have ever been updated for Lighting 2.0. Like I said, too much work.
Only two years in-game??!! That can't be, I've helped kill the Crystalline Entity hundreds of times, helped save Starbase 234 hundreds of times, killed thousands of Borg on Defera, cleared Kobali Prime of Vaadwaur hundreds of times.....
Got promoted from Cadet to Fleet Admiral, earned the undying respect from twelve different Reputation groups, became a Master Crafter in ten different Schools, became a Diplomat.....
Nah, it has to be more than two years!!
'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.'
Only two years in-game??!! That can't be, I've helped kill the Crystalline Entity hundreds of times, helped save Starbase 234 hundreds of times, killed thousands of Borg on Defera, cleared Kobali Prime of Vaadwaur hundreds of times.....
Replays don't count.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
How many times have we heard Tuvok mention our meteoric rise through the ranks, "Kurland Here", K'Valk sing, resisted the urge to punch a Ferengi wanting to buy Jenolan, Admiral Leeta hamming it up...
Comments
Genesis was a stop-gap measure thrown in at the last minute before launch to provide content for the game which was sorely lacking when it launched. It was never meant to be developed beyond what it was.
Now if the powers that be had tied the Foundry into an true exploration system - we really would have gotten nearly limitless and DETAILED worlds/missions to experience. There were roughly 100,000 missions in the Foundry when it shut down. Granted many of those may have been terrible, but even at a 1% rate of having great missions that means we would have had 1000 absolutely top rate missions to explore.
But as Sirsitsalot so eloquently put it, they dropped the ball big time by letting it rot and not giving it any attention as the game moved on.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
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.'
By the time something gets released, I expect only people who even remember the whole line will be the posters of the obligatory "I'm disappointed" -threads, who will complain nothing changed.
Don't think that story changes cannot "change the face of the game" on their own, because they can (unfortunately the trend seems to be change for the worse in a lot of games, but that is beside the point). In this case I hope it is just hype because the alternative probably involves considerable story retcons to align the game closer with CBS and Discovery which has a lot of potential pitfalls.
Cryptic has already stated that if things from Picard deviate TOO much, STO will just branch off rather than gut everything to conform. As for Discovery... STO really has nothing to worry about due to taking place in the 25th Century. Anything from the Fed-Klingon War has already been handled. Hell... Yard 39 is the reason we got 25th Century versions of Discovery era ships. Its the Picard series that we're going in blind, at least from the player base.
Please yes?!
maybe, but even if they realise the best stuff of the millenia, if they don't make the effort to do something for the lag and the rubberbanding, their efforts would be wasted.
btw, i know that they don't manage the servers, but cryptic is a client of a company, and the service produced by this company, is not satisfying.
And merely continuing the story, new enemies or not, is just business as usual. Not actually changing anything.
Adjusting the timeline. Every major story arc should basically cover roughly one year. It's not just about our quick rise from zero to hero, but also about the sheer density of conflicts with the current timeline.
I mean, an official one, not one made up by players based on one or three vague references kinda-sorta-maybe mentioned somewhere at some point and a metric ton of guessing.
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Np legacy knowledge WOULD be required for maintenance as when they added new stuff to the game in a big branch update, the Foundry ALWAYS broke, and in a way it didn't break before so it needed Programmer time to figure out what broke, and how to fix it - and without the legacy code knowledge, that becomes a lot harder for a programmer (and at some point, they just may not be able to figure out how to fix it - and I'm sure that played into the final decision to retire it.)
If it 'broke' the same way every time, or just required some database link remapping/restoration, they probably would have kept the Foundry. The last time the Foundry broke it was down for MONTHS before they managed to bring it back online; and then announced their decision to sunset it.
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..."
I am curious about this backstory change and what impact that will have in the currently exisiting missions.
Well, it doesn't have to be that the entire arc is always exactly a year or perfectly evenly distributed across it, take it more as an average per story arc.
Nope.
And people are STILL hung up on mechanics rather than Story. And I have to agree that we should all just wait for STLV rather than spiral down mechanics and rants.
My character Tsin'xing
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Another example was this:
Way back in 2013, several Foundry maps had large chunks of their geometry rearranged. The best information I have is that they used shared assets and the shared assets got changed. Why did it happen? No one really knows. The best guess anyone can come up with is that a story map was getting revamped and this was collateral damage.
The Foundry was seemingly coded in a very idiosyncratic way, probably because whoever coded it focused on "making it work". This is not to say it was undocumented spaghetti code. If it was it would have tanked sooner than it did.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
But that's not really what I was talking about. I was talking about IMPROVING them. Given what happened with the Foundry with Lighting 2.0, I don't think the clusters would have ever been updated for Lighting 2.0. Like I said, too much work.
My character Tsin'xing
Got promoted from Cadet to Fleet Admiral, earned the undying respect from twelve different Reputation groups, became a Master Crafter in ten different Schools, became a Diplomat.....
Nah, it has to be more than two years!!
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.'