Eh, I don't personally care about the Andorian ship nonsense. It's almost guaranteed to be a Federation exclusive, and you lot have already gotten quite enough of those recently.
My PvP toon is Krov, of The House of Snoo. Beware of my Hegh'ta of doom.
Meh. Too many tactical ships. You got the temporal destroyer, the 1000-day destroyer, the Steamrunner, and now the Breen thingy. Science got the temporal science ship and the wildly anticipated Vesta. Cruisers got... ??
Are you kidding? In the past year cruisers have gotten D'Kora, Galor, the Odyssey trio, and the Regent.
That isn't even counting mirror ships or fleet ships but even if you reduce same skin ships cruisers are not nearly as neglected as most people want us all to think (Tac 8, Eng 8, Sci 10). Keep in mind as well that the next lockbox ship being a Dominion based ship is probably going to be a tactical cruiser for at least one of the two ships and the Ambassador has been hinted to be the anniversary ship I don't see a lot of reason that anyone can claim imbalance in just options for ships outside of KDF players.
That isn't even counting mirror ships or fleet ships but even if you reduce same skin ships cruisers are not nearly as neglected as most people want us all to think (Tac 8, Eng 8, Sci 10). Keep in mind as well that the next lockbox ship being a Dominion based ship is probably going to be a tactical cruiser for at least one of the two ships and the Ambassador has been hinted to be the anniversary ship I don't see a lot of reason that anyone can claim imbalance in just options for ships outside of KDF players.
And that's really what it comes down to. Federation players still want more spiffy-looking goodies. . .as I could've predicted before they even put out the Wells.
It's time for the KDF to get the focus, not the leftovers/copy+paste jobs. It's time to tell the Federation enthusiasts (the people who don't even consider playing KDF, and instead demand that all KDF exclusives be given to the Federation) to sit down, shut up, and make do with what they've been getting in the last few months.
My PvP toon is Krov, of The House of Snoo. Beware of my Hegh'ta of doom.
Meh. Too many tactical ships. You got the temporal destroyer, the 1000-day destroyer, the Steamrunner, and now the Breen thingy. Science got the temporal science ship and the wildly anticipated Vesta. Cruisers got... ??
The Breen ship is a hybrid of all three ship types. It has a weapons loadout like a Cruiser, turn rate and device slots of a Science ship, with Commander Tac and Lt. Com Sci stations.
And as has been said, Escort options are still either equal to or behind Cruisers and Science ships. Just because they've been playing catch-up lately doesn't mean there are now more Escorts than anything else.
And that's really what it comes down to. Federation players still want more spiffy-looking goodies. . .as I could've predicted before they even put out the Wells.
It's time for the KDF to get the focus, not the leftovers/copy+paste jobs. It's time to tell the Federation enthusiasts (the people who don't even consider playing KDF, and instead demand that all KDF exclusives be given to the Federation) to sit down, shut up, and make do with what they've been getting in the last few months.
The KDF get no love ship wise because they don't make the money to cover the costs of making the ships. It doesn't help that they lock away the kdf for no reason. It would be extremely easy for them to just unlock the faction and have kdf start at lvl 1 again like they used to.
You're forgetting that there will be a lockbox *after* the dominion lockbox.
Given that it's getting a bridge, my money says it's going in that one. As far as I'm aware, the only non-lockbox ships to get a bridge were the TOS Connie, and the DS9 bundled Defiant (you didn't actually get a ship, you got a bridge and interior pack on the latter).
The aquarius bridge for the oddy there are bridge packs for the defiant, Prometheus, soverign, galaxy, intrepid, etc...
As a time traveller, Am I supposed to pack underwear or underwhen?
Not everything you see on the internet is true - Abraham Lincoln
The aquarius bridge for the oddy there are bridge packs for the defiant, Prometheus, soverign, galaxy, intrepid, etc...
Only one of which comes attached to a ship. The rest are individually purchased bundles that can be applied to any ship. To my knowledge zero non-linked bridges have been added post F2P.
Yes, I am aware of that quote but to me you were implying KDF C-Shop ships dont sell period that is not true, this is a case of Cryptic not really giving the KDF much beyond consoles since there are few C-Shop T5 KDF ships.
I never implied anything of the sort.
Anyway, I'd welcome more KDF ships on the C-store too. KDF could use more options. Cryptic's staff probably has a tough time getting approval for more KDF ships on the C-Store, though, since such a relatively small number of players play KDF compared to the Federation.
They make ships that are more likely to sell, and I believe the last figure quoted for the percentage of the STO playerbase that plays Klingons was something like 12% or 15%? And not all of those players are going to buy whatever KDF ships go up in the C-Store.
The interesting quote here is when Stahl said they "lost money" on the KDF ships. Let's look at what that means -- obviously there's no physical resource that goes into these things, so it's not like they're eating physical production costs and having to dump unsold merch into a landfill. So, the costs going into developing a KDF ship is time: they need to have a meeting to come up with the concept for a new ship, create a schedule for development, and assign personnel to the task. Then they need to have an artist do concept artwork for it, from which they then make the 3D model we see in-game (which includes both 3D modeling and UVW texture mapping). They have to program the ship in after that, including its weapon hardpoints, abilities, etc. Then someone has to add it to the C-Store.
I can't claim to know how much the employees at Cryptic make, but let's say it takes 5 people two months from concept to deployment to make a new ship. That's probably way wrong, but I don't have any real figures here. So, when they say they lost money, it basically means that the time employees were drawing pay working on these ships was not made back through sales.
Essentially, the KDF ship that they worked on for a couple of months was a waste of time for the company.
If you were running a business, and you saw that one thing made money and the other did not (Fed ships vs. KDF ships), what would you do? Where would you put your resources? Especially given the ridiculously unbalanced population.
That's why we don't see more KDF ships. Again, for the record, I do wish that KDF had more options... but arguing that you should get more ships doesn't mean anything if Cryptic sees it as a risky venture.
The problem with the KDF is that it's hamstringed from the beginning. You need to be level 24 on the Fed side before you can even play KDF, the tutorial missions are uninspired "run around and talk to people" garbage instead of taking command of your own ship to fight the Borg, and they're barely mentioned in any of the advertising. Therefore, the only people playing are the ones who really want to, while everyone keeps their mid-level Fed as their main and makes a KDF maybe as an alt if they feel like it. Cryptic can't say that the KDF player base sucks, which they essentially are, when they've handicapped the faction from the start. Flesh it out, make everything on equal standing and give them an actual chance.
On the topic of the Andorian ship, it's pretty much one of the few species-specific ships that absolutely has to be tactical-based to fit the lore of the species. With that in mind, the Vulcan science ship should be beefed up a bit, or at least given an upgraded fleet version, and they should finish the triangle by making a Tellarite engineering ship.
They make ships that are more likely to sell, and I believe the last figure quoted for the percentage of the STO playerbase that plays Klingons was something like 12% or 15%? And not all of those players are going to buy whatever KDF ships go up in the C-Store.
Last numbers that were seen were ~20%. Thats a 5th of the customer base. But fine, no more ships for the KDF becuase they're not important.
Then apply the same argument and:
I guess that carriers are the least flown ships. So Cryptic don't need to make any ships for them as they're not important, and its not worth cryptics time, as they can make more money for the same resources by making a Escort or Crusier.
If you were a business, wouldn't you want to make the most profit from rescources expended?
Then apply the same argument and:
I guess that science ships are the least flown ships. So Cryptic don't need to make any ships for them as they're not important, and its not worth cryptics time, as they can make more money for the same resources by making a Escort or Crusier.
If you were a business, wouldn't you want to make the most profit from rescources expended?
Etc etc.
Now I get the point your trying to make, I'm just taking it to its logical conclussion. But the odd ship would be nice ya know. Just a little mention.
Its the level of neglect when it takes 6 months to get a fleet science vessel in game. Equally People won't spend cash when they think the company dosen't care. And I don't know many businesses who would activley neglect around a 5th of their customer base.
But anyway back to the Andorians. Cryptic said it looks Like one of those Andorian ships linked ot earlier.
Any idea what he means? I only ask as the Vulcan target ship looked (to my eye) very much like the one from the series.
I don't think it's a matter of IMPORTANT. It's a matter of profitable.
I think Stahl and others see the KDF as important. But being important doesn't justify spending thousands of dollars in hopes of making thousands of dollars in sales. Things don't wind up in the C-Store because they're fair. They're there because they're supposed to generate money in excess of production cost and, really, it's a loss if they generate less money than another ship (say, Fed or lockbox) that could have been generated in the same time.
Now, personally, I think Cryptic ought to bundle specific KDF ships and Fed ships together, so that people who buy one get both.
Or at least that consoles owned one side should transfer to the other.
A big problem IMHO is that Cryptic has gated its sales. This is a big part of why I think having enemy factions is a dumb idea. (Allied factions? That could be a different story.) It's a dumb idea in WoW and it was a dumb idea in City of Heroes. It's a silly artifact of faith that opposing factions is more compelling. There are one or two perks to the idea and a dozen negatives.
It hurt the Feds and the KDF. A lot of the game's content should have been faction agnostic but the factional opposition choked that out. I'm not saying the KDF should have gotten ported Fed missions, per se, although it's nice to see they did that. It's that the philosophy of the mission design should have made faction less baked into the story.
The mission givers, the situations, etc. should unfold out of what happens on the planet. You should be undertaking missions for the natives, not for command in your military organization. More mysteries, less orders.
Without making PvP a major part of the game, the faction idea never really solves as many problems as it creates... and it chokes off players from content while choking the developer off from maximized revenue for every product they create.
To add, I think it shows that they think the KDF is IMPORTANT because they make sure to release a KDF ship with every "free" ship release and make ships cross-faction when they can. If KDF were not important, they wouldn't get ships developed for events or starbases or fleet tier ships AT ALL.
It's when the ships are for sale, designed to raise money, that the KDF get neglected. Because if the purpose behind making a given ship is solely to make money, you'd always be better off releasing it as cross-faction or to the faction that is bigger.
Now I get the point your trying to make, I'm just taking it to its logical conclussion.
Actually, what you did is called hyperbole. If "least flown ship" is still profitable, they'll try to sell them. Science ships sell, as demonstrated by the Vesta being everywhere in-game. Carriers sell, too, as demonstrated by the Atrox and Heavy Escort carriers also being everywhere in-game.
The reason those ships are everywhere in game is because 4/5's of the population have access to them, while 1/5 does not. Therefore, a greater number of players buy them. The same can't be said for KDF ships, because a KDF science ship is appealing to a much smaller percentage of players than a Federation science ship.
Let's assume that all things are fair (they're not, of course), and KDF is split into even thirds with Science, Engineering, and Tactical captains, and that the same percentages fly the respective ships. If you release a Science-oriented KDF ship, then that ship is only appealing to 1/3 of 1/5 of your player population.
Conversely, a Science ship released Federation-side is appealing to 1/3 of 4/5 of your population.
But the odd ship would be nice ya know. Just a little mention.
Its the level of neglect when it takes 6 months to get a fleet science vessel in game. Equally People won't spend cash when they think the company dosen't care. And I don't know many businesses who would activley neglect around a 5th of their customer base.
Businesses can't satisfy all of their customers all of the time, and when their numbers show that a specific 1/5 of their customer base isn't buying what they're trying to sell, they aren't going to try to sell them anything anymore.
That is why they seem to be focused more on Federation-exclusive content, and cross-faction lockbox content. Selling to KDF-only is just not where the money is.
I'm not saying it's not Cryptic's fault, because if they had launched with a full KDF faction (and they said they would, as anyone who was around before the game officially went into beta can tell you, despite Cryptic devs trying to pretend otherwise), then the population would likely be much more evenly split, and it would be more worth Cryptic's time to develop KDF ships for the C-store.
Comments
Are you kidding? In the past year cruisers have gotten D'Kora, Galor, the Odyssey trio, and the Regent.
Cruiser list is (11):
D'Kora
Galor
Odyssey Operations
Odyssey Science
Odyssey Tactical
Regent
Galaxy
Galaxy Dreadnaught
Sovreign
Emmisary
Excelsior
Science list is (12):
Atrox Carrier
Wells
D'Kyr
Intrepid
Nebula
Vesta Operations
Vesta Science
Vesta Tactical
Luna
Destiny
Recluse
Orb Weaver
Escort list is (9):
Defiant
Armitage
Chimera
Mobius
Prometheus (Standard)
Prometheus (MVAM)
Dervish
Jem'Hadar Attack
Chell Grett
That isn't even counting mirror ships or fleet ships but even if you reduce same skin ships cruisers are not nearly as neglected as most people want us all to think (Tac 8, Eng 8, Sci 10). Keep in mind as well that the next lockbox ship being a Dominion based ship is probably going to be a tactical cruiser for at least one of the two ships and the Ambassador has been hinted to be the anniversary ship I don't see a lot of reason that anyone can claim imbalance in just options for ships outside of KDF players.
And that's really what it comes down to. Federation players still want more spiffy-looking goodies. . .as I could've predicted before they even put out the Wells.
It's time for the KDF to get the focus, not the leftovers/copy+paste jobs. It's time to tell the Federation enthusiasts (the people who don't even consider playing KDF, and instead demand that all KDF exclusives be given to the Federation) to sit down, shut up, and make do with what they've been getting in the last few months.
The Breen ship is a hybrid of all three ship types. It has a weapons loadout like a Cruiser, turn rate and device slots of a Science ship, with Commander Tac and Lt. Com Sci stations.
And as has been said, Escort options are still either equal to or behind Cruisers and Science ships. Just because they've been playing catch-up lately doesn't mean there are now more Escorts than anything else.
The KDF get no love ship wise because they don't make the money to cover the costs of making the ships. It doesn't help that they lock away the kdf for no reason. It would be extremely easy for them to just unlock the faction and have kdf start at lvl 1 again like they used to.
The aquarius bridge for the oddy there are bridge packs for the defiant, Prometheus, soverign, galaxy, intrepid, etc...
Not everything you see on the internet is true - Abraham Lincoln
Occidere populo et effercio confractus
http://sto.perfectworld.com/news/?p=769201
"It may also help us determine which KDF ships to make, because there have been several KDF ships that we actually lost money on unfortunately"
Only one of which comes attached to a ship. The rest are individually purchased bundles that can be applied to any ship. To my knowledge zero non-linked bridges have been added post F2P.
Looks like Cryptic is selling stronger Federation starships with every month now. First the Odyssey, then the Vesta and now the Kumari Type.
The KDF got the Bortas'qu with the FED's Odyssey
Raptr profile
I never implied anything of the sort.
Anyway, I'd welcome more KDF ships on the C-store too. KDF could use more options. Cryptic's staff probably has a tough time getting approval for more KDF ships on the C-Store, though, since such a relatively small number of players play KDF compared to the Federation.
They make ships that are more likely to sell, and I believe the last figure quoted for the percentage of the STO playerbase that plays Klingons was something like 12% or 15%? And not all of those players are going to buy whatever KDF ships go up in the C-Store.
The interesting quote here is when Stahl said they "lost money" on the KDF ships. Let's look at what that means -- obviously there's no physical resource that goes into these things, so it's not like they're eating physical production costs and having to dump unsold merch into a landfill. So, the costs going into developing a KDF ship is time: they need to have a meeting to come up with the concept for a new ship, create a schedule for development, and assign personnel to the task. Then they need to have an artist do concept artwork for it, from which they then make the 3D model we see in-game (which includes both 3D modeling and UVW texture mapping). They have to program the ship in after that, including its weapon hardpoints, abilities, etc. Then someone has to add it to the C-Store.
I can't claim to know how much the employees at Cryptic make, but let's say it takes 5 people two months from concept to deployment to make a new ship. That's probably way wrong, but I don't have any real figures here. So, when they say they lost money, it basically means that the time employees were drawing pay working on these ships was not made back through sales.
Essentially, the KDF ship that they worked on for a couple of months was a waste of time for the company.
If you were running a business, and you saw that one thing made money and the other did not (Fed ships vs. KDF ships), what would you do? Where would you put your resources? Especially given the ridiculously unbalanced population.
That's why we don't see more KDF ships. Again, for the record, I do wish that KDF had more options... but arguing that you should get more ships doesn't mean anything if Cryptic sees it as a risky venture.
On the topic of the Andorian ship, it's pretty much one of the few species-specific ships that absolutely has to be tactical-based to fit the lore of the species. With that in mind, the Vulcan science ship should be beefed up a bit, or at least given an upgraded fleet version, and they should finish the triangle by making a Tellarite engineering ship.
Last numbers that were seen were ~20%. Thats a 5th of the customer base. But fine, no more ships for the KDF becuase they're not important.
Then apply the same argument and:
I guess that carriers are the least flown ships. So Cryptic don't need to make any ships for them as they're not important, and its not worth cryptics time, as they can make more money for the same resources by making a Escort or Crusier.
If you were a business, wouldn't you want to make the most profit from rescources expended?
Then apply the same argument and:
I guess that science ships are the least flown ships. So Cryptic don't need to make any ships for them as they're not important, and its not worth cryptics time, as they can make more money for the same resources by making a Escort or Crusier.
If you were a business, wouldn't you want to make the most profit from rescources expended?
Etc etc.
Now I get the point your trying to make, I'm just taking it to its logical conclussion. But the odd ship would be nice ya know. Just a little mention.
Its the level of neglect when it takes 6 months to get a fleet science vessel in game. Equally People won't spend cash when they think the company dosen't care. And I don't know many businesses who would activley neglect around a 5th of their customer base.
But anyway back to the Andorians. Cryptic said it looks Like one of those Andorian ships linked ot earlier.
Any idea what he means? I only ask as the Vulcan target ship looked (to my eye) very much like the one from the series.
I don't think it's a matter of IMPORTANT. It's a matter of profitable.
I think Stahl and others see the KDF as important. But being important doesn't justify spending thousands of dollars in hopes of making thousands of dollars in sales. Things don't wind up in the C-Store because they're fair. They're there because they're supposed to generate money in excess of production cost and, really, it's a loss if they generate less money than another ship (say, Fed or lockbox) that could have been generated in the same time.
Now, personally, I think Cryptic ought to bundle specific KDF ships and Fed ships together, so that people who buy one get both.
Or at least that consoles owned one side should transfer to the other.
A big problem IMHO is that Cryptic has gated its sales. This is a big part of why I think having enemy factions is a dumb idea. (Allied factions? That could be a different story.) It's a dumb idea in WoW and it was a dumb idea in City of Heroes. It's a silly artifact of faith that opposing factions is more compelling. There are one or two perks to the idea and a dozen negatives.
It hurt the Feds and the KDF. A lot of the game's content should have been faction agnostic but the factional opposition choked that out. I'm not saying the KDF should have gotten ported Fed missions, per se, although it's nice to see they did that. It's that the philosophy of the mission design should have made faction less baked into the story.
The mission givers, the situations, etc. should unfold out of what happens on the planet. You should be undertaking missions for the natives, not for command in your military organization. More mysteries, less orders.
Without making PvP a major part of the game, the faction idea never really solves as many problems as it creates... and it chokes off players from content while choking the developer off from maximized revenue for every product they create.
It's when the ships are for sale, designed to raise money, that the KDF get neglected. Because if the purpose behind making a given ship is solely to make money, you'd always be better off releasing it as cross-faction or to the faction that is bigger.
Actually, what you did is called hyperbole. If "least flown ship" is still profitable, they'll try to sell them. Science ships sell, as demonstrated by the Vesta being everywhere in-game. Carriers sell, too, as demonstrated by the Atrox and Heavy Escort carriers also being everywhere in-game.
The reason those ships are everywhere in game is because 4/5's of the population have access to them, while 1/5 does not. Therefore, a greater number of players buy them. The same can't be said for KDF ships, because a KDF science ship is appealing to a much smaller percentage of players than a Federation science ship.
Let's assume that all things are fair (they're not, of course), and KDF is split into even thirds with Science, Engineering, and Tactical captains, and that the same percentages fly the respective ships. If you release a Science-oriented KDF ship, then that ship is only appealing to 1/3 of 1/5 of your player population.
Conversely, a Science ship released Federation-side is appealing to 1/3 of 4/5 of your population.
Businesses can't satisfy all of their customers all of the time, and when their numbers show that a specific 1/5 of their customer base isn't buying what they're trying to sell, they aren't going to try to sell them anything anymore.
That is why they seem to be focused more on Federation-exclusive content, and cross-faction lockbox content. Selling to KDF-only is just not where the money is.
I'm not saying it's not Cryptic's fault, because if they had launched with a full KDF faction (and they said they would, as anyone who was around before the game officially went into beta can tell you, despite Cryptic devs trying to pretend otherwise), then the population would likely be much more evenly split, and it would be more worth Cryptic's time to develop KDF ships for the C-store.