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http://trekmovie.com/2010/07/26/exclusive-interview-star-trek-online-exec-producer-daniel-stahl-on-season-2-the-future-of-sto/
Excerpt:
"I really feel bad about this whole C-Store thing. There hasnt been a lot of communication about it and it is something I am trying to clear up. We are tying to work together to come up with a better solution. We are fixing the thing about the costume slots, making them account-wide instead of per character, and we going to refund people. That whole mess up has made us reevaluate getting to the right pricing."
"We cannot rest on our laurels and just say the "the game is done." I dont think the game is done at all. I think the game needs a lot of work, fixing bugs, making features work better. Like exploration needs some love. And Memory Alpha and the data research/crafting component of the game is incomplete and needs more items and needs more things to do. So as we move forward, there is no end in sight on my list of things to do. We have a lot of things on the schedule."
Comments
DON'T CLICK IT GAVE ME A VIRUS.
(TrekMovie: So what is the story behind the title for Season 2 "Ancient Enemies"?
Daniel Stahl: That is another part of Season 2. The "Ancient Enemies" really refers to ancient enemies on two fronts. There is the ancient enemies of the Klingons we are bringing back an enemy called the Fekihri. There is a storyline about Kahless and how he vanquished them and these ancient enemies are going to reappear and cause some grief for the Klingon players adding more content for the Klingon faction. In addition it also refers to the conflict between the Borg and the Undine, which is our admiral level content and we are continuing some storylines we saw on Voyager where you are going into Fluidic Space and you are going to find out a little bit more about who these guys, and what are they really up to. )
( oh I'm kidding, sorry kirkfat )
Jerk, lol.
.:cool:
Your welcome. LOL
well this pops out to me.
TrekMovie: It is about six months to get to Season 2, is that the pattern we can expect for Season 3, 4, 5 etc.?
Daniel Stahl: Yes. We are really trying to stick with the level production we have had. We have put out a lot of updates, but I think we need to do a lot more. We cannot rest on our laurels and just say the "the game is done." I dont think the game is done at all. I think the game needs a lot of work, fixing bugs, making features work better. Like exploration needs some love. And Memory Alpha and the data research/crafting component of the game is incomplete and needs more items and needs more things to do. So as we move forward, there is no end in sight on my list of things to do. We have a lot of things on the schedule.
And here you were saying William was the one on the sugar high
If you can pull off everything you discussed.....
..... you will be praised as a deity by a lot of happy Trekkies.
.
lol that is true. * looks at the bottle of pepsi that is nearly empty. * truth is I have nothing to do right now. I'm at work, no one is here, and I'm reading up on klingons. ( thinking about doing a video documentary about leveling a klingon. I'm going under cover to see how hard they have it
"And now reporting from deep within the Klingon experience is our own Zodi-emish. Zodi, what's the situation down there?"
* loud noises out side *
Well LotD it is quite horrible. the klingons were not lying when they say they have no content. I tried the exploration missions, and three of my bridge officers committed suicide. Right now I'm hiding because the Klingons have found out that I'm really with the federation. They are chanting something. the translator reads out as. "blood blood, death to those who mistreated us. " they seem blame the federation, and some company named cryptic for being mistreated. from what I can tell they are stocking up on weapons, and they seem to be researching a way to travel time. before I was cut from the empire when they found out I was with the federation I was able to get a copy of their battle plans. they plan to go to a place called Los Gatos, in the old state of California on earth, and they are demanding blood.
*loud explosion *
I believe they found me. I must keep moving. tell my wife and kids I love them. This is zodi emish reporting behind enemy lines.
* another explosion followed by phaser, and disruptor fire. *
Thank you for that report Zodi. Next up, will we see snow on Tuesday? But first, a word from our sponsors.
Hmm, if its priced on a storage thing. Then a single character slot of course costs as much as 4 ship upgrades, and what, 5 bo upgrades. So 45 dollars each right? An extra character slot is 50 dollars since that price the pricing on those per character slots is storage based.
That's what you just said, I'm just helping with your math.
What, what? TWO character slots is $6.25?
Oh, well, two character slots hold 16 ships, and lets call it 20 officers between them (adjusted for rank). So that should cost, lessee, 90 dollars. Hmm... My math must be off since 90 /= 6.25.
Lets try it backwards then, if two character slots are $6.25 and contain the equivalent of 18 per character upgrades at $5.00 each, those BO and ship slot upgrades should cost.... and I'll round up because I'm generous. .57 cents.
So since the cost on these things is based on storage. Either character slots should be 45 dollars each, or ship and BO slot upgrades should be around .57 cents. Using your numbers.
Could I get a clarification on this from accounting?
lol, mostly because if I were them I would rest on my laurels at this point. After getting out season 2 and stuff I'd definitly want a big long break.
Terabyte Drives are on the decline in price. The overall cost of storage is the cheapest it has ever been. So you saying it costs money is like a Telecom firm saying a text message has an expense associated with it. Yeah sure it does, but what really is $.0000000000001? Sure in the hell not worth the 20 cents a text message costs the consumer.
Gonan call you out on this Dan... come clean. Storage costs are practically irrelevant and this is a pure profit C-Store item.
Of course unless you need some funky special hard drive that is like a solid state drive or something... then ok... you're right it can get costly.
Blakinik
You're right... I probably should have been clearer about what I was referring to and not have said storage because that's not exactly the issue. (but those live interviews are always tricky and you feel like you have to say stuff quick!)
Here's the deal... and I hope this makes more sense (even though it isn't going to completely answer the why does it cost X when this other thing costs Y... more on that later)
There are some parts of the game that are more or less expensive from a "game" perspective. That cost could be a db transaction cost, it could be a client performance cost, it could even be a cost in terms of manpower needed to create the item or service.
When the team that sets the C-Store prices looks at what to price a new item at we discuss relative costs.
When it comes to things such as "slots" (costumes, ship, bridge officer, ...etc) we talk about the fact that some of our most "expensive" transactions in the game have to do with converting your character back and forth between being a ship in space and an away team on the ground. The more slots your character has stored - the more expensive the transaction gets. This impacts things such as performance, data storage, as well as bandwidth traffic.
So when I said "storage" ... that was my lame attempt to come up with a short word to describe all of the above.
Now... why does it cost x and not y.
There isn't a clear and specific answer that will make you happy. There is a lot of debate about pricing and since Star Trek is new to this business, a lot of trial and error.
What seems clear and simple is that items in the C-Store need to be priced appropriately so that they will sell and cover the cost of making said item. There is certainly room for improvement as we've found that the cost to make some items (both from an overhead standpoint and transaction cost) hasn't come close to what we spent to make it, while other things simply don't sell as well as we'd like because they might be priced too high.
The teams are committed to making improvements in how items are priced. We are learning and will adjust over time as the data comes in on cost vs. income. We want prices to be reflective of what you are getting and still cover expenses (monetary and transactionally)
Hopefully that clears up some of what I said. It definitely sounded like I was saying "we need to buy more hard-drives" and that's not really it at all. I'll try to clean up my interview rambling too... i come across all over the place when I'm transcripted and it bugs me. I'll work on it.
Liked the interview and I like where STO is headed. Thanks for everything.
I will put forth that there's still more of a market for selling slots 'per account' rather than 'per character', from the standpoint of people who'll want to delete and reroll characters, but feel that doing so means they'll have utterly thrown away any money that's tied to that single character. This will discourage folks from having multiple characters, which leads to them not having as much to do, and more likely to just walk away from the game.
And they say you guys don't listen or answer. :cool:
So... $5 covers it for the life of my lifetime account? All of the switching back and forth, all of the transactions every time I transfer maps for months and months and months and months?
If that's true then the price is so infinitesimal compared to the cost, that you may as well not charge anything at all, or make it account wide, or make it $0.50 per toon.
Like I said... pricing on items isn't taking into account all relative costs. For all we know $5 won't even come close to covering the cost of the feature in the long run.
This is why we will continue to improve our pricing and establish better pricing in the C-Store... because right now it is all over the place and not taking many things into account.
This is a better excuse than the "lack of storage one". It still does not stand up to scrutiny though.
Back when memory was a limited thing, there's an old adage in computer science. You can make it faster and use more memory, or slower and use less memory. Nowadays we generally have enough memory that we can use however much we need.
Now, explain to me if I have any of the technical details wrong, but it seems to me that there are basically two ways to go about the switch from space to ground or vice-versa.
1. your character, all of the BOs, and all of your ships are stored in a database. When loading a space map the database searches for the ship and/or bridge officers that are being used out of all of your ships and bridge officers and then loads it/them onto the instance. This would be saving memory at expense of speed, and even then it smells fishy that this would take a significant amount of time.
2. Same as above, except there is a special section of the database that has the data for your default ship, the BOs that are part of the away team, and the BOs assigned to ship stations. Now instead of searching all of your ships and BOs the database can take the information directly from those default positions. You give up a bit of storage space though. This is the speed over memory solution.
Now, I'm aware that parts of the BOs, even those that are not specifically being used, still need to be loaded because you can manipulate their paper dolls. However, in regards to ship slots you can only manipulate one ship paper doll at a time unless you are actually swapping ships at ESD. Therefore, there is really no excuse to saying how these are going to put a greater drain on your database, especially given the second approach that I outlined.
And if I've gotten any details wrong, or if I've oversimplified things please correct me *in detail*.
Which is exactly my point. If the price doesn't even cover the cost, then all you're going to do is make people upset. The feelings will be, "Well if giving it to us free is not cost effective, and charging us $5 per character isn't really much better, then why charge per character at all?"
=edit=
If I may ask another question, though. Was the $5 per toon priced to keep scads of people from purchasing an unknown element until more information could be found or just randomly assigned?
=/edit=
However, I shall relent. Now that I understand the reasoning a bit better, I am more sympathetic to why it is happening; so I'll ease up on you guys in this regard. However, I feel I would like to encourage Cryptic to consider the human psychological element when making certain announcements and replies (or the lack thereof).
While I have your attention (I hope), I would like to re-assert my suggestion for a crew uniform tab in the player status window much like the fleet uniform tab in the fleet window. Perhaps this would be less expensive alternative, resource wise, than people wanting extra selectable BOs; it would also have the practical upshot of not making me feel like a stranger on my own ship.
This is all assuming that we have perfect coding practices and don't introduce lousy transactions into the game... but as you've figure out there are some things we don't do very well at all and need to redesign.
Take for example weapon swapping. We have spent so much time and effort getting that to work that the code for performing the swap is probably way bigger than it needs to be and so you end up with crazy latency trying to swap the weapon.
This is just one example where in order to make our game overhead cheaper from tansaction standpoints, we need to go back and re-engineer some things in Season 3.
Some other great examples of this are loading into Sol System and the crazy weird rubberbanding in the warp out animation/cutscene.
Also - don't mistake me for a dev who knows what the heck I'm talking about. Executive Producers are only trained in understanding software lingo... but I really am not an expert when it comes to coding in any way shape or form... there are others on the team that specialize in that
Still doesn't explain everything about c-store pricing - but it shows that we have a lot of learning to do when it comes to making sure the items we sell are profitable and that players think the price is valid.
I hear you loud and clear ... this is another one of those "we need to make this whole feature better" things we want to address moving into Season 3. Everyone should have the ability to set a "shipwide default costume" and choose whether that is applied to their Boffs (like the fleet uniform as you said)
Ooooh! I had always assumed the latency was to keep me from exploiting the ability to set up an expose attack with one weapon and then instantly switching to use an exploit weapon. Since actually putting one weapon away and pulling another wouldn't be instantaneous, even with a transporter.
Nice.
Well, it still doesn't explain the ship slot thing, which is never swapped. Would like to hear one of the more technical members of your team explain that. However, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that there is some kind of "wonky thing" happening in the background that shouldn't be. If that really is the case, I'm sure we can both agree that those should have been fixed before introducing the C-store items so they could have been introduced as account-wide, and a TRIBBLE ton of drama and bad PR could have been avoided.
Now, none of what you've said explains why the two additional character slot pricing is so out of whack with this per character stuff. If you really are being honest when you say that you aren't so great with the technical stuff, I'd figure that one out asap with the people on your team that are. In the meantime, assuming that making those items per account is going to actually lose you money (which I am still very much unconvinced of), the best way to go forward may be to make them par account since the cat is already out of the bag, eat the costs to begin with, and work on fixing the tech so that those items become less expensive on your end.
I'd also like to apologize for calling you out the way I did. Especially in the thread that was addressed to you. You do generally say the right things, but you've also stuck your foot in your mouth a few times now, and this time what seemed like a genuine lie was probably more of a miscommunication. Again, I apologize and I'll try not to be so quick to judge next time, hope you'll accept, because I realize that was totally uncool of me to do.
I got tired of the discrepancy and decided to give all my bridge officers the default crewman uniform (so many wear it, so it's probably Starfleet's present standard uniform - not to mention it's a bit similar to the TOS uniforms seen in the Star Trek 2009 movie). My captain went from having a Variant 5 uniform back to having the more 'default' variant uniform 1.
You're right about sticking the foot in mouth which is easy to do in live interviews. No harm done and in all reality - my goal is to keep communication open and make things clearer on all accounts.
This game relies on that... and one of the best things we can do for the game is earn respect for our decisions and be clear about our intentions.
As I stated in the interview - I do feel bad for all the confusion over the C-Store stuff and it is something I hope to see get clearer over time so that it can become a valuable part of the game instead of this nebulous evil feature. It really does help us get more done and a great way to get fan requested items in the game.
To me thats a win - we just have to iron out the details...
Now that you mention this - there was talk of doing that... allowing a "copy the captain" feature where Boffs would attempt to mimic the selections of the captain. There are some validation steps to making it work (not all costume parts are valid for each species) but I'll make sure we consider this when we get closer to a solution for shipwide costume.
Come on STO maybe new but it s not the first MMO for Cryptic... you don t have to reinvent the wheel here... There s no one in the building able to share their previous experience and knowledge about Micro-transactions??? i think you guys are just testing the market... to maximize profit...
We ve already discovered that there no such a thing as a separate C store team... there s only one team working on both in game content and C store items...so when Mr Capnlogan built the Nebula, he was obviously not working on monthly fee game content and i do believe he s part of the Dev team paid by our subscription? Now if you can prove me he did it at home...then...it s a different story... i ll be more than happy to send him directly some money (minus a cryptic c store fee)
Mr Stahl, you are the Exclusive producer of this project... you have ultimately the last word...so if your pseudo C store team said let s make ship/Bo slots per character so we are going to make more money than per account...you have the right to say...i hear you guys but i rather not looking too greedy now as we are still running an unfinished game...and i think that s the main issue for all the C store complainers...
Now on a positive note, i m looking forward season 2... a lot of improvement obviously. I ve purposely not played too much and I have been very quiet until very recently...so i don t get too angry at the current product. But when i see your C store policy and reading some lousy explanations about it...it made me questioned a lot of your practices and goals... and yes i know you are not just here to entertain us...
Keep up the good work for season 3 etc...this game has great potentials so just try to take it easy on the C store stuff for a while...
Well, there's another one of those C-store confusions you can clear up right here and now. Exactly *how* does the C-store help get you more done? Exactly *how* does it get those fan requested items in the game faster?
I mean, I've heard that you're bringing on a new person, but in general the STO team has shrunk a little bit since launch, correct? Exactly what positions are being funded by C-store revenue that otherwise would not be viable to keep? And as far as getting fan requested items in the game, shouldn't you be doing that anyway? Isn't that kind of your thing? The "guy who listens to the community"? The way you say it makes it sound like we need to bribe Cryptic in order to get stuff we want into the game.
This would be a huge time-saver on the player end. Not to mention a more accurate uniform for all crew. I do not know if others have this issue or if I am just a little senile, but I sometimes forget exactly which element was changed and how for each BOff.
In other words, as I gain new BOffs, I find that I am not always sure exactly what my crew uniform is made up of. I could take notes, and do the research by looking at my older BOffs--I have done both actually--but a simple "Set Crew Uniform" option would be a whole lot simpler and much faster.
This will be particularly useful on the Klingon side once all of the basic costume options are available to all crew--regardless of species.
Good to hear this is in the works!
On the flipside, we will likely need to break this into two (a "Male" and a "Female") uniform tabs. Particularly since some of the specialized uniforms are gender specific (e.g. Mirror and TOS).
For what it's worth (probably not a whole lot, lol), I'm one of the people who has started to view the C-Store as an evil feature. However, your willingness to communicate with us about it is starting to make me hate it less. I still don't totally like it, but I'm starting to come to terms with it, at least.
I am intrigued, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.