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New Klingon exploration missions a sloppy mess
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Please Craptic, don't even bother adding new things if they are going to be hastily thrown together nuggets of TRIBBLE. Hours spent looking for mission objectives does not equal content.
Ground missions:
Space missions:
I really hope you get your act together soon.
Ground missions:
- Many buildings don't sit properly on the ground.
- Many times enemies don't spawn.
- Objectives don't "shimmer" like the fed's do.
- Objects you are supposed to destroy can't be tracked with the tri-corder like in the fed missions and don't get targeted unless you are standing on them. Do you really think players want to waste a half hour running around on a planets surface looking for a tiny borg device that blends in with the terrain ? To make it even harder many maps has a cheesy greenish swap gas special effect that hides the greenish glow that the devices give off.
I can only assume that you have some sort of mission editor to create these hideous missions... is it that hard to program it to automatically make Objectives glow and be trackable by a tri-corder? These missions are just plain sloppy and unprofessional. You should be embarrassed.
Space missions:
- BORING same thing time after time... just change the race of the ships.
- Destroy derelict ships, Really? Where the f*** are they? After fighting the ships protecting them you sometimes cant find them again. They can't be tracked with the scanner like the fed side. You also can't target them unless your are on top of them. God help u if you forget to kill the derelict ship before moving on to the next, because you will never find it again in the mass of bland ugly asteroids that usually populate the mission area.
I really hope you get your act together soon.
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After trying that TRIBBLE im back to pvp lvling..Cryptic keep failing...oh well.
All these issues were reported on Tribble before release of the Exploration content.
Try living in the real world, it's not perfect but its bearable at times.
and yet here we are dealing with it.
On the bright side: Since the issues were reported early i'm sure there on the fix list.
In Dublin's (and oddly enough the developers') defense this is not the fault of the people working on this stuff or the testers testing it.
This problem is directly related to the one huge criticism I've had for Cryptic's test server protocols since I was playing Champions Online regularly last year and consistently pointing this out to anyone who would listen.
The simplest way of explaining the problem is this ...
In OTHER MMO's ... pick one, it doesn't matter, let's say Everquest ... the dev team would move content over to the test server. And the testers would test it. Report bugs. Bugs would then get identified. And fixed. And the test server would be updated. And those fixes would eventually make it live.
This does not quite happen with Cryptic's system of doing things. Their protocol is different. There is an obstacle in the way. I'm not exactly sure where it is, but basically what it does is what you're seeing here. Bugs that are reported and acknowledged by the dev team still make it live. Through no fault other than ... their system is set up to prevent fast fixes from making it in before the deadline to move a patch live.
It's something with their hardware. And how they use it. And it's something that the people who do these jobs are aware of. But I'm not sure what their options are to address it.
I've read posts from the Champs devs that explained their process a bit. And posts from the STO devs that sort of confirm that process. They know this limitation exists.
One really classic example of it in Champions was when a power (Mindful Reinforcement) that got "fixed" ended up going live in it's broke form again ... MONTHS LATER AFTER IT WAS FIXED. Undocumented, completely un-needed change to a power. How did an old bug make it live again? Their system. Something is wrong in their system.
And you see it at work here in STO with problems like the Klingon PVE mission issues.
I felt the need to elaborate a bit because ...
- It justifies all of the frustration I used to feel in Champions as a tester, when it seemed like nothing got fixed. And all the bugs just went live anyways.
- It's useful to have more information on the issue.
- I see a lot of the posts from the devs working with the tribble server and they tend to read like the people are concerned about getting the bugs fixed. So I don't want to blame them for something that I see is a larger problem with Cryptic itself as this definitely mirrors the issues Champions has.
- One of Roper's "state of the game" addresses at Champions basically blamed the testers for problems like this. And that was both insulting and unfair to the people who did all that testing. It is further evidence of what I now beleive is a problem with Cryptic way beyond the development level. If Roper's going to throw the testers under the bus, and the players want to throw the devs under the bus ... the problem itself never gets fixed. Oh and Roper's comments got overlooked big time because in the same post he mentioned Vibora Bay would be free. So only people who read the whole thing and understood what Roper was saying was an insult really noticed it. Those being ... the testers he was insulting.
So yeah ... my biggest beef with Cryptic right now is ... their system doesn't work in terms of running a normal test server.
And as long as folks like Roper don't seem to grasp the mechanics of that ... the fix is not forthcoming.
Bug reports are made by the players. The devs read them.
But the FIXES don't get live. The fault lies not with the reports. They're there. Or the development staff. They're there trying to fix it.
The fault lies with the system. It should allow these fixes to make it live. Like any other MMO has setup.
Ummm I live in the real world. I am the foreman for 40 electricians wiring a 10 story office building. When something is not done right, things tend to burn down or explode and kill people. Now granted I don't get to sit on my TRIBBLE all day and surf the web while coding buggy TRIBBLE, but work is work. If people don't do their jobs properly they should be fired. What makes the gaming industry any different? The lead developers obviously knew about these bugs and decided to release TRIBBLE instead of a quality product.
What if everyone in the world did such a half-assed job? Programming is not rocket science... Programmers don't deserve free passes in life. If Crypitc is happy with the quality of the Season one release, this game is doomed to fail.
Its clear there isn't a large enough team working on STO .
Change will be slow unfortunately.
I worry many won't have the patience.
Both of these issues cost a lot of time and money. What is even more troublesome are all the hidden costs when you aren't validating check-ins, and streamlining your QA. You can easily wind up with endless QA cycles (i.e. sweeps), with no real game progress for the end user. Issues are constantly at risk of being verified open, then closed, and then later re-opened (eventually overwhelming even the best of QA teams with regression sweeps). Anomalies reported by customers (i.e. end-users who are in essence paying your salary) are delayed in being reported to QA. This delay unnecessarily increases turn-around time, adds needless process(es), wastes resources, and damages your product (and most likely employee morale).
The most notable thing so far..............
No bugs to report after 18 missions.
Don't worry, the next sector will take care of that! Reported several in Eidon (or whatever it is called). Including hit-boxes for destructible objectives being underground, a whole lot more of empty Enemy Confrontation (space) and Defeat Invaders (ground) missions. I hit one chain of 4 bugged missions in a row.
i share your worries. But i also find myself thinking that cryptic just doesnt care anymore. We'll see
And Im afraid im one of "them". I'm really thinking of canceling my membership to STO. I do feel kinda let down by Cryptic. I tried out Champions and liked it at first but it got really boring really fast. That is the same problem here. I might come back at some later time and play one of the two, if their are some major improvments. But their is no point paying for something for six months and not play it....In fact with that said I might not try out MMOS at all anymore because they have been having a bad record.
So with that said I'm going to spend my free time playing Empires Total War. No bugs, no fee and always changeing and challanging you.
A few bugs in some insta-missions. If it's too weird I just beam out, drop mission, try again. I would rather get some actual mission arcs with Federation-like rewards. In the meantime make the PvP rewards better since that's all we have to do as Klingons. At least in the lower levels till you get a decent tier ship. K'tinga.
I think for most of us, it goes quite deeper. This content is what passes for acceptable quality for public consumption by a paying customer at risk of damage to the IP and companies involved (and all the tangled legal that could follow). What does that mean for the future? I understand the initial decision to make KDF PvP only at first. Short on time and resources - that decision alone probably cut almost half of the development time. Was it short-sighted? Yes, very much so, and will continue to haunt them.
As a result, Federation content is more robust which more and more people will gravitate to. This of course means more subscribers are on that side of the fence. Money obviously drives decision making, so more content for the Federation (which also means they win the balance war de facto). Thereby the cycle continues and the gap between the "haves" and "have nots" only widens. Kudos for attempting to bridge that gap in some small part for Season 1, but the quality of the delivery significantly sours the effort. (Yes, it really does feel like cut & paste code performed by an intern.) If I allowed content like that to ship on such a prestigious IP, I would expect to be terminated.
I concur with SuperChum's analysis. Cryptic's policies are exceptionally obtuse when it comes to testing. The change control they have (or don't have) is frightening. Going live with the number of known issues defies explanation other than, that's the way things get done there.
Seeing the same issues in STO as in CO both comforting and distressing. At least with CO they finally realized that mega-patches two months in the making were bad ideas. Let's see how long it takes the STO team to learn.
Or they could just give us the PvP rewards without having to actually do the all to easy PvP.
Saves them the effort of writing all that code.
Nailed it!
A good place to start might be here: http://boards.startrek.com/community/messages.html?act=SF;f=15
They won't fix it if they don't know what's broke!
There are two things I want to mention about the star cluster missions.
1) Our writers went through and re-wrote every single star cluster mission variation for the klingons. There is no cut and paste. Yes the missions are generated from templates but the templates are all brand new for the klingons. Obviously the templates are similar to the federation, but they were all changed in some way.
2) This has probably been mentioned before, but there are hundreds of variations of star clusters. While the missions themselves do tend to blend together (as randomly generated missions from a template tend to do) the maps they are built on (which is where the bugs you are experiencing are) are made from so many minute variations that it is near impossible for QA to test them all.
Now I'm not saying that QA doesn't try, but darn it there are a lot of them.
When you find a bug in the star cluster make sure you submit a bug ticket while still on the map and not after. The reason that is important is because your ticket will capture the exact variable set that you are on. We can then forward that to QA who verifies it, and then they forward it on to the devs who can load up that variable set, fix the bug, and send it on its way.
The devs have fixed a lot of bugs, but there is always going to be that chance that you land on a map that still has some. The best thing to do is bug it and move on. Chances are you will never see that particular map ever again, even after we fix it.
They have stated before this is not a bug. Since the objectives in Klingon missions are destructible the scanners do not pick them up. Imho they should b/c they are solid objects that exist within our space/time. Maybe the explanation is that the Tribbles are so ****ed about their homeworld that they hired the Smurfs to run tiny cloaking devices around stuff Klingons would want to destroy........:eek:
Since they are destructable items like NPC's then they should show up on the map when you bring it up, just like a NPC. Either that, or there should be a beacon(like in space, even if it is just something invisible), or crate next to were the destroyable object is. Personally I think they should had made an icon for all those items on the map when you pull it up anyway.
Come on it's the future, I can pull up a GPS map on my cell phone that gives more detailed info then the area maps we get, and we are suppose to have the ultimate satellite over head, our ship. Maybe some of those people on our ship should do some work while we are on the ground blowing stuff up.
Slackers