It happens, especially during a pandemic like this. This is not a Cryptic-specific issue. What matters is that they see they made a mistake, and took the game offline to fix it. If they left it online and said 'eh, we'll get to it later' that'd be a different story.
yadiyadiyaaaah, excuses. Most of us who are having a job don't have the luxury to hide behind excuses when we mess it up. No blaming the enduser for our mistakes, nor the pathetic excuse of "it's software", or this or that and never take up their own responsability. Go ahead, try for yourself in your personal job to make such mistakes on such a regular base, and see how quick the door will be shown. Yeah, I know it's software, depending on thousands of different configurations, but at the end, the software is an end product that if they want to make money of it should be a quality product without flaws.
What annoys me isn't that they screwed up. Anyone can get things wrong, particularly with the Covid situation. It's what you do about putting it right again that is important. Quite clearly they have lot of unhappy customers and the silence from management is deafening.
I also play Warframe. It's had a number of big releases over the past year or so. (I think Kuva Liches were released a bit over a year ago.) They've all had problems, some hilarious, some frustrating. However they regularly communicate with the users when they TRIBBLE up, so we know what's going on.
Let's look at the current state of affairs.
No response at all on the Phoenix box giveaways yet. Not even acknowledging that it exists.
We've got a thread on the skill point reset that starts with "Borticus says..." I don't know where Borticus said that. I don't see it on GNN, the STO news section, Reddit or Twitter. I'm sure he said it, I just have no idea how he expects the average user to find out, unless a player goes through the trouble of spreading the word. (So, thanks jkwrangler2010. Seriously.)
Borticus said that the issue was supposed to go into the patch notes, but got left out. OK. Why not fix them? How about posting something in GNN about it?
An awful lot of communications from Cryptic are incomplete, wrong, or just inadequate by any standard. I have no clue whose fault it is, and doubt that it's any one person. But at some point, shouldn't someone say, "we're doing a horrible job at this. Shouldn't we try to figure out how to do this better?"
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
Yeah, I know it's software, depending on thousands of different configurations, but at the end, the software is an end product that if they want to make money of it should be a quality product without flaws.
You do know in an MMO environment that is virturally impossible right? You could spend a whole year squishing existing bugs, get the game running smooth as can be... only for a bug to crop up the next time they add something to the game. It is unavoidable. There is ALWAYS going to be a bug somewhere in an MMO. It is a constantly evolving creature of complex code. And no matter how many bugs you squish, there will always be some bit of code that doesn't play with some other bit of code.
For an MMO, what matters is the severity of the bug, how quickly they address it, and how long it takes to ultimately solve it.
In this case, we had a rather large... ok nuclear, bug. Next day they bring the server down to work on it. While they may not have solved ALL the problems, they're getting the game back into at least a playable state while they dig into the speggetti code to fix other parts of it.
Getting it to at least a playable state means we're not sitting on our thumbs waiting for them to fix everything, or in some cases just outright raging. Once its playable, they may be able to use the live data to help narrow down what went wrong.
Serious question; I watched a whole youtube ad on it yesterday and it looked good but I know literally nothing about it.
I'm very fond of STO and a huge ST fan but it's not been a great gaming experience lately. I start to think I need to diversify.
If you think STO is either qrindy or it's playerbase toxic; compared to EVE Online STO is a quick/fast/theme park/kindergarten.
You want the EVE Online experience - go open and mouse around on an MS Excel spreadsheet.
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..."
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
Yea... there's jokes about EVE being a spreadsheet game.
Also in my limited experience... you don't fly the ship like you do in STO. In many areas its more hands off than STO in terms of controls.
An awful lot of communications from Cryptic are incomplete, wrong, or just inadequate by any standard. I have no clue whose fault it is, and doubt that it's any one person. But at some point, shouldn't someone say, "we're doing a horrible job at this. Shouldn't we try to figure out how to do this better?"
Bingo. Many of the rages can be avoided by simply communicating what's happening/going to happen.
If you blindside people again and again and again, because you simply cannot patch something without breaking something else (and it happens EVERY TIME they change something in the code), and even the things you know are gonna require player input are not communicated clearly through the appropiate channels - patch notes and the official forums plus social media, with reddit taking a very clear backseat - then you're quite literally playing yourself.
As for the use of the Tribble sure, the population is the big difference, (assuming of course that the Tribble has been updated with the game in its latest state), but there's an easy solution for that: open up the damn test server, ADVERTISE that the new content will be playable in part (no access to the episode, so as not to give spoilers away; I don't see anything wrong with letting people play the STF, in fact it would be most beneficial if they did), and STRESS TEST properly so as to get as much feedback as you can... and then act on it.
Stress testing and debugging are there for a reason: to fix what need fixing BEFORE the game/update/dlc/website/whatever-you-can-think-of goes live.
Not agreeing with someone doesn't give you the right to be an TRIBBLE.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
Bingo. Many of the rages can be avoided by simply communicating what's happening/going to happen.
Yes and no. There are 2 kinds of people(for the purposes of this statement): reasonable and unreasonable. As the name implies, you can't reason with an unreasonable person. So to the actually UNreasonable ragers, the communication won't actually help.
That said, even reasonable people can get angry and upset when they think the company is ignoring problems. So it is THAT group of people that the communication would actually help with.
Bingo. Many of the rages can be avoided by simply communicating what's happening/going to happen.
Yes and no. There are 2 kinds of people(for the purposes of this statement): reasonable and unreasonable. As the name implies, you can't reason with an unreasonable person. So to the actually UNreasonable ragers, the communication won't actually help.
That said, even reasonable people can get angry and upset when they think the company is ignoring problems. So it is THAT group of people that the communication would actually help with.
So yes, it should be happening.
Oh, for sure. Unreasonable people will never be happy no matter what you say or do: clear case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
Fortunately, they're usually not the majority of the population - just the most vocal.
And as you said, it's for the reasonable ones that communication should be handled way better than this - or, you know, just handled so that it actually happens.
Not agreeing with someone doesn't give you the right to be an TRIBBLE.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
Except it does, for example, with this respec bug. If I am "expected" to respec all of my characters.... how was I supposed to know that unless I see a post telling me that?
Exactly. What's worse, the info wasn't even posted on any official channel, but to Reddit. And it wasn't even unprompted, but as an answer to someone reporting it as a bug, which was to be expected since it was not communicated anywhere.
"We meant to put it in the patch notes"... sure Borticus, then why wasn't it? I should think something of this magnitude is important enough to remember to put it where people can actually see it and prepare for it, regardless of the fact that preparation in this case was just going to be "well damn, that's gonna take a lot of time to do... better take screenshots so I remember what goes on what character".
But I guess they didn't want people to start asking for a (working) feature that would allow us to save skills and traits - tho, looking at how borked the loadouts can be, I guess we're better off just respeccing manually everytime - so they went with the usual "better ask for forgiveness than for permission".
Not agreeing with someone doesn't give you the right to be an TRIBBLE.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
Of course they haven't. And they won't unless the problem goes on long enough that even my grandma will hear of it.
Not agreeing with someone doesn't give you the right to be an TRIBBLE.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
The CM of Warframe livestreams the game a couple of times a week. The devs, famously, don't. The latest devstream had her trying to hold her tongue as devs openly questioned player choices. ("Why would you replace that ability?" Maybe because it's terrible?)
Trendy was well liked when she was CM. She also communicated with us.
Problems or bugs are so obvious that even a toddler of 4 years can spot them. As it stands now, main bugs aren't fixed aka, Skills Unvalid, so we have to retain our skills and waste our time to rebuild our alt and hope that those rebuild alts don't get the same error the next time we use them. And that one louzy transport ship that doesn't want to follow the escape route or get and remains stuck in the starbase turning the TFO into an endless shootfest.
My advice to the devs, play the game from a PC that isn't situated on your offices by creating an alt and level it from bottom to top by running all the episodes, TFO's, patrols possible. It's the only way to spot for themselves where the issues are laying.
I hereby dub somtaawkhar as Captain of the Cryptic Defense Force. He is as good as ignoring what people are actually trying to say and twist their words as Cryptic is.
Did you get your chat channels back?
Is your fleet put back together after being without for < 24 hours?
The devs don't livestream every week but they sure do have many devstreams (or did, before the pandemic) where they do and I'm not talking about their Con, especially before each expansion where the lead designer is the one handling it until the expansion goes live. And they frequently have livestreams where you have about 4 main designers of various departments talking about some upcoming stuff.
The devs don't livestream every week but they sure do have many devstreams (or did, before the pandemic) where they do and I'm not talking about their Con, especially before each expansion where the lead designer is the one handling it until the expansion goes live. And they frequently have livestreams where you have about 4 main designers of various departments talking about some upcoming stuff.
The (Warframe) devs do livestreams. They (most of them) don't play the game.
Ok, I hear you loud and clear! I may give it a go at some point, but I am suitably forewarned!
STO is the first MMO I've played, which is perhaps surprising for a gamer of 25+ years. I found it frustrating initially as I seemed to keep tripping up over important metrics I had no idea existed, and this continued for a good few months. Without this forum or in-game chat I'm sure I would've remained lost. Who remembers those PSX CD cases from the 90s with the thick square manuals behind the cover art? I used to take those to bed and study them when I was a kid . I'm a visual learner, and I did find the curve hard here. The hardest point was approaching the level cap on my toon and I found I couldn't "blag" my way through any more, this is the crunch point where you can't really go further without investing yourself in knowledge of traits, reps, gaining endeavour perks, training and using boff abilities, etc. etc.
It's called "endgame" but even that confused me - I hadn't completed the episodic content at the level cap and actually I still haven't on my main toon (I can feel the shame!).
What kept me going was player generosity. I was in a fully provisioned fleet and another player gifted me modules to get the Galaxy dread, which has always been one of my favourites from Trek. Someone else gave me a mk XV shield and torp and that just saw me through to seeing the light and standing on my own two feet with rep gear, phoenix and upgrade weekends.
I expect I could've done things more easily, and I'm not a particularly high DPS player, but I have enjoyed myself and been happy to put a bit of money into the game subsequently because of my fellow players.
Any suggestion I would make to Cryptic then would be to value those players highly, and I think one of the core ways of doing that is an abundance of communication with the player base. If it's too time-consuming to engage in dialogue, at least be extremely thorough in communicating issues and change. I think that shows respect and gets people on side. Going back to my earlier experience, I would've found more thorough documentation on the gameplay mechanics - and just basic item information - in STO from the developer really useful. Gamepedia etc. are great, but don't always cut it. Maybe this just isn't the way things are in the MMO world, but I wonder if that comes at a cost of losing people to inaccessibility - I don't know. But I nearly gave up on it.
I will slightly take back what I said about the content lately, I have actually enjoyed some of the recent FTFOs, and the latest one I am warming to slightly with each play through. It's fun when you land on a good team, anyway. But I do maintain that the game needs more ground-based social challenge zones like the summer event - Risa is where people really come together for a long period and connections flourish - I would really like to see just a bit more of that sort of thing in the game available all the time.
Comments
yadiyadiyaaaah, excuses. Most of us who are having a job don't have the luxury to hide behind excuses when we mess it up. No blaming the enduser for our mistakes, nor the pathetic excuse of "it's software", or this or that and never take up their own responsability. Go ahead, try for yourself in your personal job to make such mistakes on such a regular base, and see how quick the door will be shown. Yeah, I know it's software, depending on thousands of different configurations, but at the end, the software is an end product that if they want to make money of it should be a quality product without flaws.
I also play Warframe. It's had a number of big releases over the past year or so. (I think Kuva Liches were released a bit over a year ago.) They've all had problems, some hilarious, some frustrating. However they regularly communicate with the users when they TRIBBLE up, so we know what's going on.
Let's look at the current state of affairs.
No response at all on the Phoenix box giveaways yet. Not even acknowledging that it exists.
We've got a thread on the skill point reset that starts with "Borticus says..." I don't know where Borticus said that. I don't see it on GNN, the STO news section, Reddit or Twitter. I'm sure he said it, I just have no idea how he expects the average user to find out, unless a player goes through the trouble of spreading the word. (So, thanks jkwrangler2010. Seriously.)
Borticus said that the issue was supposed to go into the patch notes, but got left out. OK. Why not fix them? How about posting something in GNN about it?
An awful lot of communications from Cryptic are incomplete, wrong, or just inadequate by any standard. I have no clue whose fault it is, and doubt that it's any one person. But at some point, shouldn't someone say, "we're doing a horrible job at this. Shouldn't we try to figure out how to do this better?"
You do know in an MMO environment that is virturally impossible right? You could spend a whole year squishing existing bugs, get the game running smooth as can be... only for a bug to crop up the next time they add something to the game. It is unavoidable. There is ALWAYS going to be a bug somewhere in an MMO. It is a constantly evolving creature of complex code. And no matter how many bugs you squish, there will always be some bit of code that doesn't play with some other bit of code.
For an MMO, what matters is the severity of the bug, how quickly they address it, and how long it takes to ultimately solve it.
In this case, we had a rather large... ok nuclear, bug. Next day they bring the server down to work on it. While they may not have solved ALL the problems, they're getting the game back into at least a playable state while they dig into the speggetti code to fix other parts of it.
Getting it to at least a playable state means we're not sitting on our thumbs waiting for them to fix everything, or in some cases just outright raging. Once its playable, they may be able to use the live data to help narrow down what went wrong.
It ain't pretty, but you do what you can.
If you think STO is either qrindy or it's playerbase toxic; compared to EVE Online STO is a quick/fast/theme park/kindergarten.
You want the EVE Online experience - go open and mouse around on an MS Excel spreadsheet.
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..."
Also in my limited experience... you don't fly the ship like you do in STO. In many areas its more hands off than STO in terms of controls.
Bingo. Many of the rages can be avoided by simply communicating what's happening/going to happen.
If you blindside people again and again and again, because you simply cannot patch something without breaking something else (and it happens EVERY TIME they change something in the code), and even the things you know are gonna require player input are not communicated clearly through the appropiate channels - patch notes and the official forums plus social media, with reddit taking a very clear backseat - then you're quite literally playing yourself.
As for the use of the Tribble sure, the population is the big difference, (assuming of course that the Tribble has been updated with the game in its latest state), but there's an easy solution for that: open up the damn test server, ADVERTISE that the new content will be playable in part (no access to the episode, so as not to give spoilers away; I don't see anything wrong with letting people play the STF, in fact it would be most beneficial if they did), and STRESS TEST properly so as to get as much feedback as you can... and then act on it.
Stress testing and debugging are there for a reason: to fix what need fixing BEFORE the game/update/dlc/website/whatever-you-can-think-of goes live.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
Yes and no. There are 2 kinds of people(for the purposes of this statement): reasonable and unreasonable. As the name implies, you can't reason with an unreasonable person. So to the actually UNreasonable ragers, the communication won't actually help.
That said, even reasonable people can get angry and upset when they think the company is ignoring problems. So it is THAT group of people that the communication would actually help with.
So yes, it should be happening.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Oh, for sure. Unreasonable people will never be happy no matter what you say or do: clear case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
Fortunately, they're usually not the majority of the population - just the most vocal.
And as you said, it's for the reasonable ones that communication should be handled way better than this - or, you know, just handled so that it actually happens.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
Exactly. What's worse, the info wasn't even posted on any official channel, but to Reddit. And it wasn't even unprompted, but as an answer to someone reporting it as a bug, which was to be expected since it was not communicated anywhere.
"We meant to put it in the patch notes"... sure Borticus, then why wasn't it? I should think something of this magnitude is important enough to remember to put it where people can actually see it and prepare for it, regardless of the fact that preparation in this case was just going to be "well damn, that's gonna take a lot of time to do... better take screenshots so I remember what goes on what character".
But I guess they didn't want people to start asking for a (working) feature that would allow us to save skills and traits - tho, looking at how borked the loadouts can be, I guess we're better off just respeccing manually everytime - so they went with the usual "better ask for forgiveness than for permission".
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
- quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
- quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;
Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
The CM of Warframe livestreams the game a couple of times a week. The devs, famously, don't. The latest devstream had her trying to hold her tongue as devs openly questioned player choices. ("Why would you replace that ability?" Maybe because it's terrible?)
Trendy was well liked when she was CM. She also communicated with us.
Problems or bugs are so obvious that even a toddler of 4 years can spot them. As it stands now, main bugs aren't fixed aka, Skills Unvalid, so we have to retain our skills and waste our time to rebuild our alt and hope that those rebuild alts don't get the same error the next time we use them. And that one louzy transport ship that doesn't want to follow the escape route or get and remains stuck in the starbase turning the TFO into an endless shootfest.
My advice to the devs, play the game from a PC that isn't situated on your offices by creating an alt and level it from bottom to top by running all the episodes, TFO's, patrols possible. It's the only way to spot for themselves where the issues are laying.
Did you get your chat channels back?
Is your fleet put back together after being without for < 24 hours?
The devs don't livestream every week but they sure do have many devstreams (or did, before the pandemic) where they do and I'm not talking about their Con, especially before each expansion where the lead designer is the one handling it until the expansion goes live. And they frequently have livestreams where you have about 4 main designers of various departments talking about some upcoming stuff.
The (Warframe) devs do livestreams. They (most of them) don't play the game.
Ok, I hear you loud and clear! I may give it a go at some point, but I am suitably forewarned!
STO is the first MMO I've played, which is perhaps surprising for a gamer of 25+ years. I found it frustrating initially as I seemed to keep tripping up over important metrics I had no idea existed, and this continued for a good few months. Without this forum or in-game chat I'm sure I would've remained lost. Who remembers those PSX CD cases from the 90s with the thick square manuals behind the cover art? I used to take those to bed and study them when I was a kid
It's called "endgame" but even that confused me - I hadn't completed the episodic content at the level cap and actually I still haven't on my main toon (I can feel the shame!).
What kept me going was player generosity. I was in a fully provisioned fleet and another player gifted me modules to get the Galaxy dread, which has always been one of my favourites from Trek. Someone else gave me a mk XV shield and torp and that just saw me through to seeing the light and standing on my own two feet with rep gear, phoenix and upgrade weekends.
I expect I could've done things more easily, and I'm not a particularly high DPS player, but I have enjoyed myself and been happy to put a bit of money into the game subsequently because of my fellow players.
Any suggestion I would make to Cryptic then would be to value those players highly, and I think one of the core ways of doing that is an abundance of communication with the player base. If it's too time-consuming to engage in dialogue, at least be extremely thorough in communicating issues and change. I think that shows respect and gets people on side. Going back to my earlier experience, I would've found more thorough documentation on the gameplay mechanics - and just basic item information - in STO from the developer really useful. Gamepedia etc. are great, but don't always cut it. Maybe this just isn't the way things are in the MMO world, but I wonder if that comes at a cost of losing people to inaccessibility - I don't know. But I nearly gave up on it.
I will slightly take back what I said about the content lately, I have actually enjoyed some of the recent FTFOs, and the latest one I am warming to slightly with each play through. It's fun when you land on a good team, anyway. But I do maintain that the game needs more ground-based social challenge zones like the summer event - Risa is where people really come together for a long period and connections flourish - I would really like to see just a bit more of that sort of thing in the game available all the time.