You are just one person stating his opinion. I for one still love the foundry, even if the fleet marks are removed. Dilithium is in abundance now for most people and while the season 6 fleet actions for Fleet Marks might be boring, some of them do have a good amount of reward for playing them.
I don't like the long, drawn out foundry mission either so that makes two of us if you want to start counting...and getting 14 fleet marks for spending 20 painful minutes in colony invasion while two people AFK is hardly good.
No, I am not who you think I am. I am someone different. I am instead a banana.
Thank you for the reply. But the problem is that they keep pushing this Foundry TRIBBLE and now force you to play boring missions to get dilithium which you could get in a few seconds before by doing the fast dailies. It should be optional. You should be allowed to finish IOC which they removed in 2 seconds and 2 hours.
Great job Cryptic..
I dig what you're saying. The only advice I can offer you is to remember that the Foundry isn't required content. Just like lockboxes, tribble breeding, Epoh tagging, whatever, one of the great things about this game is that there is almost no "mandatory content" - on the Fed side you can even skip the tutorial.
I do feel your pain about the dailies - it was a lot easier to raise fleet marks (which are the bottleneck for my fleet) when we could get them doing Foundry content - but at the same time I understand what the devs are saying about the Foundry having too much reward synergy.
If you are looking for more interesting and challenging content to liven up the dil grind especially, check out the Elite STFs. While there are only eight to choose from, they have a pretty good level of challenge. Likewise, PVP can be downright brutal, and the OrganizedPVP chat channel is a good way to sidestep the long queues.
You are just one person stating his opinion. I for one still love the foundry, even if the fleet marks are removed. Dilithium is in abundance now for most people and while the season 6 fleet actions for Fleet Marks might be boring, some of them do have a good amount of reward for playing them.
Dilithium acquisition is not the issue, anyone with an hour or two is already swimming in enough raw ore to build an armada, it's the now extremely limited routes of fleet mark acquisition. That's what this entire display of collective anger at Cryptic is about (that and the giant "**** you small fleets" message at the beginning of this thread).
dahal you say fleet marks are not needed more then dilium is needed because of your metric system but that's because we had a foundry mission to get them but now that you took it out your metric system numbers are completely useless.
And as for dil for small fleets give us more missions to get ore is point less ore is so easy to get its the daily cap that is slowing the small fleets down so giving us ore is point less since we can only do 8000 a day so if you have 15 or less people in fleet going to take for ever to get 80k dil and also get stuff from the rep system that's the problem with dil not ore REFINED ORE is the problem
Got to love when ppl rants and threats about stop playing STO or spending money on it. The truth is that may work in other games, not here. The STO players base, big trek fans, will play it, and keep playing it, no matter what. If devs ever hear is due to their "good will" not because someone will stop spending his $200 on this game.
2) There are three "high-return" routes to acquire fleet marks:
Tier IV commendation missions available in the Op Center of your Starbase (75+ each)
Fleet Action of the Day wrapper mission (50)
Season 6 PVE missions (Fleet Alert, Starbase Defense, Colony Defense, etc.) plus the Nukara Prime adventure zone
"Temporal Ambassador" may still be awarding Fleet Marks on replay. Whether or not this is still true and how many marks it awards I do not know, but if it's 50 then that mission is also a high-return option.
Anything higher than 5-man is pointless to try on KDF side. Breaking the Planet, The Big Dig and Starbase Fleet Defense never pop.
I do not know how positive I can be about the recent changes you made with Star Trek Online.
Maybe I just do not get it. What good is the foundry if it can not be utilized for effective grinding purposes.
What ever you have in mind for STO . I believe in time you are going to lose the players from the game and it is going to decline.
I am sorry that my missions were efficient and effective to gave players a way to each EC's, Marks, and Expertise. [20+ Level 50's are hard to maintain], I only have 6 myself.
Why is it so terrible that people did the IOR's and got 50 fleet marks. How is this bad. The star bases are moving very slow as it is. "You admit it yourself" The abilite to acquire the resources are stifled greatly as it is, and now more so.
You even mentioned in a past blog update that you felt not enough people were refining dilithium. Well at that time you took away the ability to get dilithium. And the uproar was tremendous if I recall.
I am sorry to say you are going to lose players with the direction you are going. the decline has already been happening and it is going to decline further. Do you really want this.
So the following points that I am going to make will probably not even be considered but let me say them anyways.
* Please reinstate the Investigate Officer Reports. Why not let this continue it is not hurting the game and giving players a chance to help their fleets.
* Reinstate the Timid Creature. I have not see a decline in gear drops even with the timid creature feature off. Unless you have limited the drop cap
* Increase the Loot Cap Drops. help us out here.
* Allow the foundry authors to acquire the rewards "of dilithium" like any one else. Why restrict the author from getting the dilithium. I would like to use the missions I have published.
* Please give the STO community a chance to enjoy the foundry.
* I realize your in the business to make money. Of course you are, but if you look at my records of purchasing Zen I think you will find I have stopped buying them. For several months. It is because you are removing the ability to have fun. You want people to play foundry missions give a reason to.
* Increase the monthly Zen for subscriptions to 2000 a month because that would entice the F2P players to perhaps get gold memberships or lifetime.
* Give the ability for keys to be a stack of 50 charges .. Instead of 1 being so expensive.
* Lock boxes - Increase the rare drops a bit. If someone is going to spend so much money to acquire keys. Give us a better drop rate chance. So we can get a return on our dollar. A lottery to get a cool ship is really not the way to go. [one person open 5 boxes and get 2 ships but yt one who spends 200 dollars get nothing] Seems a bit unfair.
* If a person wins a ship for example make it account wide like a cstore ship. Give the community a reason to buy them.
* Give us back the ability to farm for data samples in the nebulas again. How does this hurt the market.
* Drop the price of the Unreplicatable materials to 100 Dilithium instead of 1000.
* I am sure you are well aware crafting is at a dead stand still. How about relaxing those crafting requirement so people can craft again. it is not going to hurt the game at all. Even as the R&D still has great gear that can be utilized.
* I know all these request may fall on deaf ears, because it helps the STO player out, not Cryptic making and raking money from the public.
I believe if you were to do implement these suggestions and return to the game these request. The game is going to florish again. PLEASE I ask reinstate the past nerfs that you have instituted.
I know I am being kind of brash, I do not intend to be but I know no other way to express it.
Thank you for STO I do love the game but you are making it hard to enjoy it.
Perhaps a good compromise would be to make the officer of the watch the new "wrapper".
Something like play 2-3 fleet mark missions / events and get 50 fleet marks. That way cryptic gets us playing the missions intended for earning fleet marks and we get a decent level of fleet mark generation back.
I could get behind this. The current 5 FMs these missions give out is pointless, and those of us without the time to spend hours grinding the boring FM missions need an urgent replacement for IOR.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
This character is why I don't play my Romulan any more. Tovan Khev is NOT my BFF! Get him off my bridge!
I've been away for a few days, I don't play as often anymore after you ruined the game in Season 7.
I see however that yet again you've managed to earn the ire of a great many players through your frankly amateur communication policy that seems to assume that when one ****s their pants it's best to wait before telling the rest of the room you've done so. At least give others the courtesy to leave the room or hold their noses by pre-warning them, I mean it's basic etiquette.
Before you reel off more useless numbers, I'd just like to say I don't believe a word you say about "how great" the game is doing. Maybe if you published your figures and the sources from which they were calculated I might be willing accept them. You see statistics should never be trusted if their is no accompanying source, this is something elementary to anyone who has the capability of critical thought.
I do find it funny though how you wheel out the same statements every time you mess up like this. This is why I find it so hard to believe your statements. You see I only started playing in August of last year and since then I've lost count of how many things you've meddled in, however I've noticed a clear decline in my enjoyment of the game.
I've not been here as long as some so I won't make any phony statement about how if only you produced more content I'd be happy and that I'm a long suffering player (I feel for you guys that are, it must be soul-wrenching). The truth is your content sucks, your systems suck and at the moment the lack of creativity is making this game go stale real quick.
You see your own statements really are all I need to confirm to me just how poorly run this game is. Firstly your explanation of why you chose the design options you did for the Fleet system smacks of a group of developers who are either to lazy or too uncreative to look beyond two poor choices for fleet development and try a more out of the box approach.
Then there is all this talk about players getting more dilithium than ever before. This is another statement I don't believe at all especially when you go on to say that the average max player isn't hitting their refining cap. The reality was most of us "max" players were hitting the refining cap consistently in Season 6, now very few of us are.
Season 7 was already the end for small fleets this was just the final nail. You see Dan, you may or may not be aware of this but most of your playerbase are time-limited. We have limitations as to how much time we can play. So when you meddle with the game and introduce new ever more boring time wasting grind content and make it more difficult to amass currency we have to shift our playing habits within the time-limitations we have. Let me spell this out for you personal reputation systems and the sinks involved meant many people either left the game (as did 6 of my 8 fleet members) or made a choice to focus on one irritating grind course to take either fleet or personal rep.
If the idea was to get me to play more, it failed. You want to know why it failed? in a nutshell it's boring. In detail, your fleet missions suck and give out bugger all in rewards, not only that but the 20 man Starbase Defence is a lag-happy mess. The reason why people look for exploits is becuase the grind sucks, they want to do fun things like play with friends on cool new episode missions, oh but wait that's never going to happen, or play PVP, oh wait it's terrible in this game... maybe we could play group mission on foundry content, oh wait it's bugged to hell.
You see Dan I could sit here and write a whole book on how badly handled this game and it's playerbase is... if there is any loyalty from us players it's to the franchise not the game or Cryptic. If a proper Star Trek MMO came out tomorrow with real team based story adventure, fully realized PVP and Factions... you would be closing up shop it is as simple as that. As it stands it's the only place to get my Star Trek fix though I log in less and less as many of my old friends are gone.
However I'm not going to write too much more.
I will break it down for you though in a kind of executive summary.
Increasing the demand for currencies by in-game inputs and stagnating the supply or reducing the supply of said currencies has ruined the game
People do not want to grind your poorly designed fleet missions over and over for a pitiful amount of currency
The entire game feels like a fun fair filled with the broken dreams of players and the half finished half arsed pet projects of the developers
Legacy bugs, there are so many it's not even funny
You have no in-house QA and treat a weekend test on tribble as a benchmark for "fit to release", also totally ignoring the feedback and concerns of said tribble testers who get paid nothing to QA your game
The story content you have is about as deep as pool of urine in my pants when I forget to wear my incontinence nappy.
Apparently it's been 3 years since you failed to keep your promise on the KDF
In line with your policy on pet projects you will no doubt leave the KDF in a half finished state and move onto a Romulan mini-faction
The point of games is that they are fun Dan... fun, not an exercise that feels like work but where I actually pay to do it.
In closing I was hooked in August and I'm pretty much want-a-way by February, I'm an average player, not hardcore just average I have a life, a job, family, friends... other hobbies and wheres STO was winning out against my other hobbies in August, it is now way down on the pecking order.
Carry on TRIBBLE your players and meddling in things endlessly whilst throwing a few ships about and come May the Romulan mini-faction and "Search for Sela" episodes will be too little too late for most of us.
Regards,
Signed
Mr. STO made damn sure I'm never moving from DDO to Neverwinter.:cool:
During my first year on "Star Trek: Online", I spent around $200+ on the purchase of zen. I was investing into the system, for I believed Cryptic would solve these issues. "Star Trek: Online's" featured episodes are exciting and fun. If the reputation system existed, without the fleet bases and embassies, I think Cryptic would have had a lot of raving fans.
After reading through this article, I am now under the belief that Cryptic is not concerned. If Cryptic is able to reduce the grinding, while also bringing in new featured episodes, I will once again invest into the game. On the flip-side, if Cryptic continues to push fans around, I will just take my time on returning to the game.
When it comes to "Star Trek: Online's" failures, the player base has nothing to lose. Players can always shop around for another game. Free to play MMOs are becoming a dime a dozen, and "Star Trek: Online" will not be the last "Star Trek" game.
Cryptic should consider the phrase, "Do not bite the hand that feeds you", for it will be too late when the first marks are made.
Well said.
I originally left startrek online when we had the huge hiatus of no content some time ago, and was around when said mmo came out. Gave me the oppertunity to "stretch my legs" in something else. I truely deeply love this game, I just hate the things they constantly do to the folks who actually play their game and support with every fibre in them. Ive spent an upwards of 1000 on this game, and if they showed me one..inkling they would improve the game further.. I wouldnt hesitate in funding them accordingly.
But there has to come a time when you look at how they deal with their fan base, the little lies that gets passed by even said infront of the whole crowd.. and go really.. is it really worth putting up with...
Im not going to answer that as of yet, but there has to be a time when we the fan base have to put our foot down and say enouph is enouph. Again I love this game, but I wont stand idly by, and to force us into certain sections of the game, that really I have no interest in doing repetitive fleet actions, as others have certain areas they dont want to partake in.
I had thought this game was to please many forms of game play, I remember the discussions about open pvp and how many people didnt want to see it happen, because they didnt want to be FORCED into a situation they didnt want to be in.. this situation is the same. It may be small in standards but never the less, it was one of the things myself and my fleet enjoyed doing. I have no desire to be forced into fleet actions. Make content that makes sense that goes with fleet activity "which to me is grouped activity" and reward us accordling in something we enjoy doing.
I understand the foundry was being used incorrectly, but thats not everyones fault, fix the situation then penalizing others. They can do better, they have the tools.
Anyways before I make a speach, I hope dan and the dev team take a good look at whats been said here, and hopefully a fix will be made.. if not they just might of hit the cliff and gone way to over it.... time will tell I guess.
No idea which business your talking about. Airlines are rated as having some of the poorest customer service and rude flight attendants. Facebook and Google basically don't even have customer service. Most businesses have moved towards cheap products and little to no customer support. The same applies to most manufacturers of computer components: ASUS, Sapphire, MSI, and ASROCK-all have greatly reduced customer support within the last 5-7 years.
You talk a big game with the words you use leviathon but honestly, paradigms and drafting implement strategy and roll out are buzzwords that basically mean nothing unless businesses can back up that nonsense with real growth and a pleased and loyal customer base. Most of that buzzword speak is nonsense that was invented by a group of clever executives to confuse low to mid level workers so that they could never understand the decisions that were made by the top level guys.
"streamlining customer experience" You've got to be joking? What does that actually mean?
It means you have somebody or a team of somebodies who does feng shui on the customer experience by being solely dedicated to it. You're describing service providers with an inflexible level of demand, relatively little competition, and high barriers for entry when you talk banks and airlines... although that hasn't stopped many of them from looking at least somewhat beyond the production (ie. "if we build a product or service, they will come") mentality.
Here's a nice summary of the eras, though it uses different terms than I'm used to:
The Production Era: Beginning with the colonization of America and continuing until the early 1900's, this era was focused on reducing the cost of production as there was a seemingly unbound demand for product. The biggest marketing focus was on increasing production while lowering costs of storage and distribution.
The Selling Era: Began in the 1920's and focused on shifting focus from mass production to selling. Selling and advertising took hold in an effort to persuade consumers to purchase existing products.
The Marketing Concept Era: Existed from the end of World War Two until the late 1900's. This era is commonly termed the baby boom as soldiers returned home to start families. This rise in families created a very sudden increase in consumer spending and thus demand for products and services. Out of this boom came the Marketing Concept which was composed of an orientation on customers, service, and profit. In this business were focused on determining what consumers wanted, their overall level of satisfaction, and producing the goods and services that would produce the largest profit.
The Customer Relationship Era: From the late 1900's and early 200's and continuing today, companies have sought to extend it's marketing concepts into the practice of customer relationship management. Customer relationship management is focused on the continuous learning and information gathering about customers and in doing so being able to not only meet a consumers expectations or needs but to go above and beyond in producing ongoing consumer satisfaction. Through the use of CRM software and more recently the use of social media, companies are continuing to find innovative ways in which they can not only reach customers buy interact and learn about them.
By and large, Cryptic's approach skews towards emphasizing production and tacking on advertising after the fact. They DO use datamining but they use it to coral people back towards expectation rather than in an anticipatory, relationship-building way.
Think for a second about something like Amazon or even airlines. They tailor offers and pricing to the user and generally try to shift the offer to the user. They pursue a sale they think is likely when they put any effort into it. Disney is, overall, a good example of a marketing company. For people who live leisurely lives, Disney targets them frequently while with people on fixed incomes, they may try to get with a more affordable vacation package.
They aren't trying to get the consumer to buy the product their way. They find aspects of the product that appeal to a target market and try to align the consumer with the right offer.
Things like the customer script at Starbucks or those "company values" manuals at service chains are also great. People like it when you ask their name, when you write their name. A good customer experience is like a spell. Subtle. Customers shouldn't necessarily consciously realize they're being influenced by it and may deny being influenced by it. I think it's easy to dismiss this stuff as a cynical Gen X/Millennial but I think it's a profound artform that works and doesn't really require customers believing that it works. There is a wealth of behavioral experiment literature on what works.
And I'll give you an example, a very small one, where Cryptic got one little aspect of this right. The fleet contribution sound effect. There were podcasters and players raving about this, some describing their reaction to those rapid pupil dilation cuts from "Requiem for a Dream." I have a feeling it was almost an afterthought from Cryptic but it greased the gears for a gameplay activity tremendously. That's a really micro example and fairly mechanical but you do it longterm and strategically.
PvP, The Foundry, Klingon play, DOffs, Fleet Actions, STFs... These are all in effect offers or value propositions which, once bought into, are used as a center for soft sells on the C-Store.
How much do you think Cryptic does this when designing game systems?
For example, take the Foundry or PvP:
Qualitative marketing research, such as focus groups and various types of interviews
Quantitative marketing research, such as statistical surveys
Experimental techniques such as test markets
Observational techniques such as ethnographic (on-site) observation
My feeling is that they probably only employed datamining in any kind of systematic way. Anything else boiled down to polling friends and fleetmates.
To achieve the desired objectives, marketers typically identify one or more target customer segments which they intend to pursue. Customer segments are often selected as targets because they score highly on two dimensions: 1) The segment is attractive to serve because it is large, growing, makes frequent purchases, is not price sensitive (i.e. is willing to pay high prices), or other factors; and 2) The company has the resources and capabilities to compete for the segment's business, can meet their needs better than the competition, and can do so profitably.[3] In fact, a commonly cited definition of marketing is simply "meeting needs profitably." [5]
How much do you see Cryptic doing this? I think Cryptic's iterative approach winds up being a lot more employee driven and hobby-like, to a point where they neither meet needs nor do they do so profitably. (In fact, I think the profit generated is often markedly divorced from the needs being met. To a point where their approach might often be effectively using profit -- whether measured as money or activity -- to underwrite unprofitable game design elements -- whether measured in popularity or revenue generated.)
In general, how much do they manage their brand and the brands they license? How often does anyone say, "What does this do to customer satisfaction?" I'd bet the IDEA comes up but that they don't have anyone primarily concerned with that... and because they don't, it's what gets compromised when the chiefs meet and Al is pushing systems and Jesse/Kestrel are pushing story and the art leads are looking at their workloads. It's a missing voice in the room in terms of having a dedicated voice and because it's a missing voice, it gets compromised.
You need people educated in customer satisfaction strategies to make that a co-equal focus with systems, art, content, etc. If nothing else, to wear a different hat and say, "How will this impact the player?" But ideally armed with behavioral psychology, pertinent questions, and studies and analysis based on more than just staring at numbers looking for patterns.
Above all, asking, "How do we make the game that people want to play?" and not, "How do we make people play the game the way we want them to?"
The minute you start deciding how you want players to play the game, you've lost.
Does that mean letting them exploit clickies? Heck, no. But a clickie exploiter has a desire. You find the desire and exploit it with a strategy. Maybe they like repetitive action. Maybe the activities they enjoy playing are not linked to or consistent with the rewards they want.
Somebody playing a clickie wants something. Dilithium. A weapon. A ship. A costume. And they want to use that in the game somewhere. Maybe they want to spend more time PvPing or more time posing in their new costume on the fleet starbase. Maybe they want to play a big Foundry mission but want to get the reward they think the mission deserves first so they can play that mission with the new guns they want. Maybe they only want to play at length once a month. And the clickie lets them do what they want to do when they get around to playing and lets them avoid doing what they don't want to do.
Every exploiter wants something. You find out what it is they want and offer it attractively in a legitimate way. Shutting them down is just herding them like cattle towards things they don't want to do. You miss out on figuring out what they DO want to do when you just close an exploit.
Designers should not be determining how people play but should be figuring out how to serve the ways people DO want to play.
"Option A was that fleet size would determine the maximum tier for Fleet Holdings. The larger the Fleet, the higher the Fleet Holding Tiers could achieve. This is how other MMOs have developed Guilds, but we felt that it is artificially limiting to active small fleets. Option B was to allow Fleets of any size to achieve all tiers of Fleet Holdings. The drawback is that because fleet size range so much, we had to find a balance so that large fleets had some challenge"
The above was copied from the Ask Cryptic published today......
"Option A was that Fleet size would determine the maximum tier for Fleet Holdings. The larger the Fleet, the higher the Fleet Holding Tiers could achieve. This is how many other MMOs gate Guild progression, but we felt that it is artificially limiting to the many active small Fleets in STO.
Option B was to allow Fleets of any size to achieve all tiers of Fleet Holdings. The drawback is that because Fleet sizes range so much, we had to find a balance so that Large Fleets had some challenge, while still allowing small Fleets to achieve all tiers, albeit at a much slower pace."
This one was copied from the post D'Stahl started this very thread with.
My question is, which one is a copy of the other?
Or are both copied from a PR document called 'Damage Control And How Not To Do It'?
It means you have somebody or a team of somebodies who does feng shui on the customer experience by being solely dedicated to it. You're describing service providers with an inflexible level of demand, relatively little competition, and high barriers for entry when you talk banks and airlines... although that hasn't stopped many of them from looking at least somewhat beyond the production (ie. "if we build a product or service, they will come") mentality.
Here's a nice summary of the eras, though it uses different terms than I'm used to:
By and large, Cryptic's approach skews towards emphasizing production and tacking on advertising after the fact. They DO use datamining but they use it to coral people back towards expectation rather than in an anticipatory, relationship-building way.
Think for a second about something like Amazon or even airlines. They tailor offers and pricing to the user and generally try to shift the offer to the user. They pursue a sale they think is likely when they put any effort into it. Disney is, overall, a good example of a marketing company. For people who live leisurely lives, Disney targets them frequently while with people on fixed incomes, they may try to get with a more affordable vacation package.
They aren't trying to get the consumer to buy the product their way. They find aspects of the product that appeal to a target market and try to align the consumer with the right offer.
Things like the customer script at Starbucks or those "company values" manuals at service chains are also great. People like it when you ask their name, when you write their name. A good customer experience is like a spell. Subtle. Customers shouldn't necessarily consciously realize they're being influenced by it and may deny being influenced by it. I think it's easy to dismiss this stuff as a cynical Gen X/Millennial but I think it's a profound artform that works and doesn't really require customers believing that it works. There is a wealth of behavioral experiment literature on what works.
And I'll give you an example, a very small one, where Cryptic got one little aspect of this right. The fleet contribution sound effect. There were podcasters and players raving about this, some describing their reaction to those rapid pupil dilation cuts from "Requiem for a Dream." I have a feeling it was almost an afterthought from Cryptic but it greased the gears for a gameplay activity tremendously. That's a really micro example and fairly mechanical but you do it longterm and strategically.
PvP, The Foundry, Klingon play, DOffs, Fleet Actions, STFs... These are all in effect offers or value propositions which, once bought into, are used as a center for soft sells on the C-Store.
How much do you think Cryptic does this when designing game systems?
For example, take the Foundry or PvP:
My feeling is that they probably only employed datamining in any kind of systematic way. Anything else boiled down to polling friends and fleetmates.
How much do you see Cryptic doing this? I think Cryptic's iterative approach winds up being a lot more employee driven and hobby-like, to a point where they neither meet needs nor do they do so profitably. (In fact, I think the profit generated is often markedly divorced from the needs being met. To a point where their approach might often be effectively using profit -- whether measured as money or activity -- to underwrite unprofitable game design elements -- whether measured in popularity or revenue generated.)
In general, how much do they manage their brand and the brands they license? How often does anyone say, "What does this do to customer satisfaction?" I'd bet the IDEA comes up but that they don't have anyone primarily concerned with that... and because they don't, it's what gets compromised when the chiefs meet and Al is pushing systems and Jesse/Kestrel are pushing story and the art leads are looking at their workloads. It's a missing voice in the room in terms of having a dedicated voice and because it's a missing voice, it gets compromised.
You need people educated in customer satisfaction strategies to make that a co-equal focus with systems, art, content, etc. If nothing else, to wear a different hat and say, "How will this impact the player?" But ideally armed with behavioral psychology, pertinent questions, and studies and analysis based on more than just staring at numbers looking for patterns.
Above all, asking, "How do we make the game that people want to play?" and not, "How do we make people play the game the way we want them to?"
The minute you start deciding how you want players to play the game, you've lost.
Does that mean letting them exploit clickies? Heck, no. But a clickie exploiter has a desire. You find the desire and exploit it with a strategy. Maybe they like repetitive action. Maybe the activities they enjoy playing are not linked to or consistent with the rewards they want.
Somebody playing a clickie wants something. Dilithium. A weapon. A ship. A costume. And they want to use that in the game somewhere. Maybe they want to spend more time PvPing or more time posing in their new costume on the fleet starbase. Maybe they want to play a big Foundry mission but want to get the reward they think the mission deserves first so they can play that mission with the new guns they want. Maybe they only want to play at length once a month. And the clickie lets them do what they want to do when they get around to playing and lets them avoid doing what they don't want to do.
Every exploiter wants something. You find out what it is they want and offer it attractively in a legitimate way. Shutting them down is just herding them like cattle towards things they don't want to do. You miss out on figuring out what they DO want to do when you just close an exploit.
Designers should not be determining how people play but should be figuring out how to serve the ways people DO want to play.
I actually winced when I saw the huge wall of type, but you summed it up nicely, eloquently and easy for us mouth breathers to understand.
I see the complete larger picture and agree with many of you. I'll skip the revisionist history, but suffice it to say, even though Cryptic wasn't much better under the Atari banner, had a western company purchased them instead of PWE, I do believe we see a different type of game from at least the free to play standpoint.
Many of us who were players from beta or early launch 2010, had an uneasy feeling when PWE took over based on the endless money grind nature of their other games. Many posters on the old forum then forecasted correctly that the game would likely turn into a deliberate intensive grind, funneled toward spending large amounts of money by the player as the only way to alleviate it.
Now we stand with things in their current state, half a KDF still, bugs present from 3 years ago, and new ones every patch. Gated content, and resource restrictive content. Seasons labeled as "new content" only to contain grind content instead of core content.
I need not go on, but you understand. We as a playerbase are guilty in a way for allowing it with every dollar we spend. Make no mistake, blame lies on PWE and then Cryptic, but falls on the player too.
Sadly, this cycle of strife won't end until the release of the next cash jewel PWE has their eye on: Neverwinter.
Even then, this all won't end fully until the servers finally go offline for STO.
Lifetime subber and former STO player from when it didn't suck.
I've never ever read so much bull about options and whatnot when the actual decisions are crystal clear: Turn STO into a grindfest even more.
You know what? Others did that before. Most of them killed their games themselves while doing so, especially casual games.
Or is it too far fetched to compare STO to SWG? You know you got the bonus of a nice little franchise. But that's all you got.
On the other hand, you got lots of problems (spelled bugs for example) and you're doing nothing about them.
The solution to the big vs. small fleet progression for example? Pretty simple. Option C.
Replace all needed commodities for fleet projects except fleet marks and maybe dili.
Reward fleet marks on a procentual basis for doing fleet missions based on the size of the fleet.
So when i fly such a mission, i get 1000 fleet marks multiplied by my dedication.
That's one out of 10 fleet members in such a small fleet: 1000*.1=100.
Or one out of 500 fleet members in a large fleet: 1000*.005=2.
But your number 1 solution is GREED. Nothing else.
I wish you a lot of supporters for that strategy.
Cryptic please don't listen to all these complainers. Of course all the people that are against it are going to be complaining the loudest and most on forums, but fact is most players aren't complaining here and don't really have a problem with these changes.
Both my Fed and KDF fleets are close to 500 members and most are not active on the forums, and from what I have seen of other Fleets this size it is similar with them.
From what I hear from everyone on Fleet chat and teamspeak none of them are complaining or care I assume this is similar with many other fleets. The mostly silient majority does not mind these changes and are ok with it, don't let the loud angry minority bully you into giving them their exploits back. These changes were the right thing to do for the foundry and for the Fleet Event system (maybe we will actually get the queues active again outside of events)
In answer, Black Ops Armada is 5 fleets of 500 players. 2500 in total. we use a full fleet chat channel and vent servers. Guess what, so far not a single player that I have heard supports this change.
Well, I know I feel guilty for handing my money over freely and allowing myself to be held on by promises of a true Star Trek game that was about the fans first and foremost, and not about the money.
At least I can think back to the first few months of the game when it really felt that way for a little while.
Lifetime subber and former STO player from when it didn't suck.
It means you have somebody or a team of somebodies who does feng shui on the customer experience by being solely dedicated to it. You're describing service providers with an inflexible level of demand, relatively little competition, and high barriers for entry when you talk banks and airlines... although that hasn't stopped many of them from looking at least somewhat beyond the production (ie. "if we build a product or service, they will come") mentality.
Here's a nice summary of the eras, though it uses different terms than I'm used to:
By and large, Cryptic's approach skews towards emphasizing production and tacking on advertising after the fact. They DO use datamining but they use it to coral people back towards expectation rather than in an anticipatory, relationship-building way.
Think for a second about something like Amazon or even airlines. They tailor offers and pricing to the user and generally try to shift the offer to the user. They pursue a sale they think is likely when they put any effort into it. Disney is, overall, a good example of a marketing company. For people who live leisurely lives, Disney targets them frequently while with people on fixed incomes, they may try to get with a more affordable vacation package.
They aren't trying to get the consumer to buy the product their way. They find aspects of the product that appeal to a target market and try to align the consumer with the right offer.
Things like the customer script at Starbucks or those "company values" manuals at service chains are also great. People like it when you ask their name, when you write their name. A good customer experience is like a spell. Subtle. Customers shouldn't necessarily consciously realize they're being influenced by it and may deny being influenced by it. I think it's easy to dismiss this stuff as a cynical Gen X/Millennial but I think it's a profound artform that works and doesn't really require customers believing that it works. There is a wealth of behavioral experiment literature on what works.
And I'll give you an example, a very small one, where Cryptic got one little aspect of this right. The fleet contribution sound effect. There were podcasters and players raving about this, some describing their reaction to those rapid pupil dilation cuts from "Requiem for a Dream." I have a feeling it was almost an afterthought from Cryptic but it greased the gears for a gameplay activity tremendously. That's a really micro example and fairly mechanical but you do it longterm and strategically.
PvP, The Foundry, Klingon play, DOffs, Fleet Actions, STFs... These are all in effect offers or value propositions which, once bought into, are used as a center for soft sells on the C-Store.
How much do you think Cryptic does this when designing game systems?
For example, take the Foundry or PvP:
My feeling is that they probably only employed datamining in any kind of systematic way. Anything else boiled down to polling friends and fleetmates.
How much do you see Cryptic doing this? I think Cryptic's iterative approach winds up being a lot more employee driven and hobby-like, to a point where they neither meet needs nor do they do so profitably. (In fact, I think the profit generated is often markedly divorced from the needs being met. To a point where their approach might often be effectively using profit -- whether measured as money or activity -- to underwrite unprofitable game design elements -- whether measured in popularity or revenue generated.)
In general, how much do they manage their brand and the brands they license? How often does anyone say, "What does this do to customer satisfaction?" I'd bet the IDEA comes up but that they don't have anyone primarily concerned with that... and because they don't, it's what gets compromised when the chiefs meet and Al is pushing systems and Jesse/Kestrel are pushing story and the art leads are looking at their workloads. It's a missing voice in the room in terms of having a dedicated voice and because it's a missing voice, it gets compromised.
You need people educated in customer satisfaction strategies to make that a co-equal focus with systems, art, content, etc. If nothing else, to wear a different hat and say, "How will this impact the player?" But ideally armed with behavioral psychology, pertinent questions, and studies and analysis based on more than just staring at numbers looking for patterns.
Above all, asking, "How do we make the game that people want to play?" and not, "How do we make people play the game the way we want them to?"
The minute you start deciding how you want players to play the game, you've lost.
Does that mean letting them exploit clickies? Heck, no. But a clickie exploiter has a desire. You find the desire and exploit it with a strategy. Maybe they like repetitive action. Maybe the activities they enjoy playing are not linked to or consistent with the rewards they want.
Somebody playing a clickie wants something. Dilithium. A weapon. A ship. A costume. And they want to use that in the game somewhere. Maybe they want to spend more time PvPing or more time posing in their new costume on the fleet starbase. Maybe they want to play a big Foundry mission but want to get the reward they think the mission deserves first so they can play that mission with the new guns they want. Maybe they only want to play at length once a month. And the clickie lets them do what they want to do when they get around to playing and lets them avoid doing what they don't want to do.
Every exploiter wants something. You find out what it is they want and offer it attractively in a legitimate way. Shutting them down is just herding them like cattle towards things they don't want to do. You miss out on figuring out what they DO want to do when you just close an exploit.
Designers should not be determining how people play but should be figuring out how to serve the ways people DO want to play.
Well written, but will anyone at Cryptic pay attention to any of it?
In answer, Black Ops Armada is 5 fleets of 500 players. 2500 in total. we use a full fleet chat channel and vent servers. Guess what, so far not a single player that I have heard supports this change.
I wouldn't even bother replying to someone whose analytical abilities are so slight they can seriously posit the idea that a small fleets drain server capacity through creating extra starbase instances when in reality a fleet of 5 will probably only create an instance once ever week or so if that, I had a fleet of 8 before Season 7 and I think I was the only one who even visited the base more than once in the entirety of season 6 mainly because T1-T3 offers nothing worth turning up for on a regular basis.
He's either a troll or someone with low critical thought capacity
Well, I know I feel guilty for handing my money over freely and allowing myself to be held on by promises of a true Star Trek game that was about the fans first and foremost, and not about the money.
At least I can think back to the first few months of the game when it really felt that way for a little while.
Tell me about it, same here... the unprofessional and frankly amateurish way everything has been handled since I started playing this game really is quite astonishing... I only started playing in August... I wasn't even around for the Year of Hell (2011).
It means you have somebody or a team of somebodies who does feng shui on the customer experience by being solely dedicated to it. You're describing service providers with an inflexible level of demand, relatively little competition, and high barriers for entry when you talk banks and airlines... although that hasn't stopped many of them from looking at least somewhat beyond the production (ie. "if we build a product or service, they will come") mentality.
Here's a nice summary of the eras, though it uses different terms than I'm used to:
By and large, Cryptic's approach skews towards emphasizing production and tacking on advertising after the fact. They DO use datamining but they use it to coral people back towards expectation rather than in an anticipatory, relationship-building way.
Think for a second about something like Amazon or even airlines. They tailor offers and pricing to the user and generally try to shift the offer to the user. They pursue a sale they think is likely when they put any effort into it. Disney is, overall, a good example of a marketing company. For people who live leisurely lives, Disney targets them frequently while with people on fixed incomes, they may try to get with a more affordable vacation package.
They aren't trying to get the consumer to buy the product their way. They find aspects of the product that appeal to a target market and try to align the consumer with the right offer.
Things like the customer script at Starbucks or those "company values" manuals at service chains are also great. People like it when you ask their name, when you write their name. A good customer experience is like a spell. Subtle. Customers shouldn't necessarily consciously realize they're being influenced by it and may deny being influenced by it. I think it's easy to dismiss this stuff as a cynical Gen X/Millennial but I think it's a profound artform that works and doesn't really require customers believing that it works. There is a wealth of behavioral experiment literature on what works.
And I'll give you an example, a very small one, where Cryptic got one little aspect of this right. The fleet contribution sound effect. There were podcasters and players raving about this, some describing their reaction to those rapid pupil dilation cuts from "Requiem for a Dream." I have a feeling it was almost an afterthought from Cryptic but it greased the gears for a gameplay activity tremendously. That's a really micro example and fairly mechanical but you do it longterm and strategically.
PvP, The Foundry, Klingon play, DOffs, Fleet Actions, STFs... These are all in effect offers or value propositions which, once bought into, are used as a center for soft sells on the C-Store.
How much do you think Cryptic does this when designing game systems?
For example, take the Foundry or PvP:
My feeling is that they probably only employed datamining in any kind of systematic way. Anything else boiled down to polling friends and fleetmates.
How much do you see Cryptic doing this? I think Cryptic's iterative approach winds up being a lot more employee driven and hobby-like, to a point where they neither meet needs nor do they do so profitably. (In fact, I think the profit generated is often markedly divorced from the needs being met. To a point where their approach might often be effectively using profit -- whether measured as money or activity -- to underwrite unprofitable game design elements -- whether measured in popularity or revenue generated.)
In general, how much do they manage their brand and the brands they license? How often does anyone say, "What does this do to customer satisfaction?" I'd bet the IDEA comes up but that they don't have anyone primarily concerned with that... and because they don't, it's what gets compromised when the chiefs meet and Al is pushing systems and Jesse/Kestrel are pushing story and the art leads are looking at their workloads. It's a missing voice in the room in terms of having a dedicated voice and because it's a missing voice, it gets compromised.
You need people educated in customer satisfaction strategies to make that a co-equal focus with systems, art, content, etc. If nothing else, to wear a different hat and say, "How will this impact the player?" But ideally armed with behavioral psychology, pertinent questions, and studies and analysis based on more than just staring at numbers looking for patterns.
Above all, asking, "How do we make the game that people want to play?" and not, "How do we make people play the game the way we want them to?"
The minute you start deciding how you want players to play the game, you've lost.
Does that mean letting them exploit clickies? Heck, no. But a clickie exploiter has a desire. You find the desire and exploit it with a strategy. Maybe they like repetitive action. Maybe the activities they enjoy playing are not linked to or consistent with the rewards they want.
Somebody playing a clickie wants something. Dilithium. A weapon. A ship. A costume. And they want to use that in the game somewhere. Maybe they want to spend more time PvPing or more time posing in their new costume on the fleet starbase. Maybe they want to play a big Foundry mission but want to get the reward they think the mission deserves first so they can play that mission with the new guns they want. Maybe they only want to play at length once a month. And the clickie lets them do what they want to do when they get around to playing and lets them avoid doing what they don't want to do.
Every exploiter wants something. You find out what it is they want and offer it attractively in a legitimate way. Shutting them down is just herding them like cattle towards things they don't want to do. You miss out on figuring out what they DO want to do when you just close an exploit.
Designers should not be determining how people play but should be figuring out how to serve the ways people DO want to play.
My god Jim! He's a freaking genius, not a doctor!!!!!!
You're forgetting 735 comments in the thread that got closed
You're absolutely right.
There can't be many subjects that have attracted this many comments in such a short time.
If we look at the front page of the Federation News Network, this thread alone has outstripped every other one, in far less time.
While a few have supported the changes as is, the vast majority have opposed them vehementally.
There have been numerous, thoughtful suggestions for a fix, it is clear to me that the vast majority of those who oppose this decsion are trying to be thoughtful and constructive.
However, the only 'official' responses were very early on....page 2 IIRC.
Branflakes has not posted even once.
A community moderator did post once, but his statement was fact checked into oblivion is minutes.
Even the standard 'we have/are/will read everything' post has not been issued on this thread.
My god Jim! He's a freaking genius, not a doctor!!!!!!
A genius wouldn't need so many words, it's simple.
Find out what people find fun, create something that is fun, make money.
Don't act like and TRIBBLE and try to force people to enjoy something because you want to make it a certain way and to hell with what paying customers want.
Why don't these Update posts containing from-the-heart/wallet explanations of changes (we're doing it - deal with it) ever make it to the front page of the site, for the non-forum reading folk? :rolleyes:
Comments
I don't like the long, drawn out foundry mission either so that makes two of us if you want to start counting...and getting 14 fleet marks for spending 20 painful minutes in colony invasion while two people AFK is hardly good.
I dig what you're saying. The only advice I can offer you is to remember that the Foundry isn't required content. Just like lockboxes, tribble breeding, Epoh tagging, whatever, one of the great things about this game is that there is almost no "mandatory content" - on the Fed side you can even skip the tutorial.
I do feel your pain about the dailies - it was a lot easier to raise fleet marks (which are the bottleneck for my fleet) when we could get them doing Foundry content - but at the same time I understand what the devs are saying about the Foundry having too much reward synergy.
If you are looking for more interesting and challenging content to liven up the dil grind especially, check out the Elite STFs. While there are only eight to choose from, they have a pretty good level of challenge. Likewise, PVP can be downright brutal, and the OrganizedPVP chat channel is a good way to sidestep the long queues.
Best of luck!
I just pulled up a quote on their parent company, I wonder, would they, be the ones held responsible for the sub company if there was, wrong doing?
Dilithium acquisition is not the issue, anyone with an hour or two is already swimming in enough raw ore to build an armada, it's the now extremely limited routes of fleet mark acquisition. That's what this entire display of collective anger at Cryptic is about (that and the giant "**** you small fleets" message at the beginning of this thread).
And as for dil for small fleets give us more missions to get ore is point less ore is so easy to get its the daily cap that is slowing the small fleets down so giving us ore is point less since we can only do 8000 a day so if you have 15 or less people in fleet going to take for ever to get 80k dil and also get stuff from the rep system that's the problem with dil not ore REFINED ORE is the problem
Arguments, ppl, arguments not ludicrous threats.
Anything higher than 5-man is pointless to try on KDF side. Breaking the Planet, The Big Dig and Starbase Fleet Defense never pop.
Maybe I just do not get it. What good is the foundry if it can not be utilized for effective grinding purposes.
What ever you have in mind for STO . I believe in time you are going to lose the players from the game and it is going to decline.
I am sorry that my missions were efficient and effective to gave players a way to each EC's, Marks, and Expertise. [20+ Level 50's are hard to maintain], I only have 6 myself.
Why is it so terrible that people did the IOR's and got 50 fleet marks. How is this bad. The star bases are moving very slow as it is. "You admit it yourself" The abilite to acquire the resources are stifled greatly as it is, and now more so.
You even mentioned in a past blog update that you felt not enough people were refining dilithium. Well at that time you took away the ability to get dilithium. And the uproar was tremendous if I recall.
I am sorry to say you are going to lose players with the direction you are going. the decline has already been happening and it is going to decline further. Do you really want this.
So the following points that I am going to make will probably not even be considered but let me say them anyways.
* Please reinstate the Investigate Officer Reports. Why not let this continue it is not hurting the game and giving players a chance to help their fleets.
* Reinstate the Timid Creature. I have not see a decline in gear drops even with the timid creature feature off. Unless you have limited the drop cap
* Increase the Loot Cap Drops. help us out here.
* Allow the foundry authors to acquire the rewards "of dilithium" like any one else. Why restrict the author from getting the dilithium. I would like to use the missions I have published.
* Please give the STO community a chance to enjoy the foundry.
* I realize your in the business to make money. Of course you are, but if you look at my records of purchasing Zen I think you will find I have stopped buying them. For several months. It is because you are removing the ability to have fun. You want people to play foundry missions give a reason to.
* Increase the monthly Zen for subscriptions to 2000 a month because that would entice the F2P players to perhaps get gold memberships or lifetime.
* Give the ability for keys to be a stack of 50 charges .. Instead of 1 being so expensive.
* Lock boxes - Increase the rare drops a bit. If someone is going to spend so much money to acquire keys. Give us a better drop rate chance. So we can get a return on our dollar. A lottery to get a cool ship is really not the way to go. [one person open 5 boxes and get 2 ships but yt one who spends 200 dollars get nothing] Seems a bit unfair.
* If a person wins a ship for example make it account wide like a cstore ship. Give the community a reason to buy them.
* Give us back the ability to farm for data samples in the nebulas again. How does this hurt the market.
* Drop the price of the Unreplicatable materials to 100 Dilithium instead of 1000.
* I am sure you are well aware crafting is at a dead stand still. How about relaxing those crafting requirement so people can craft again. it is not going to hurt the game at all. Even as the R&D still has great gear that can be utilized.
* I know all these request may fall on deaf ears, because it helps the STO player out, not Cryptic making and raking money from the public.
I believe if you were to do implement these suggestions and return to the game these request. The game is going to florish again. PLEASE I ask reinstate the past nerfs that you have instituted.
I know I am being kind of brash, I do not intend to be but I know no other way to express it.
Thank you for STO I do love the game but you are making it hard to enjoy it.
Qwark@Jasper22
I could get behind this. The current 5 FMs these missions give out is pointless, and those of us without the time to spend hours grinding the boring FM missions need an urgent replacement for IOR.
This character is why I don't play my Romulan any more. Tovan Khev is NOT my BFF! Get him off my bridge!
I've been away for a few days, I don't play as often anymore after you ruined the game in Season 7.
I see however that yet again you've managed to earn the ire of a great many players through your frankly amateur communication policy that seems to assume that when one ****s their pants it's best to wait before telling the rest of the room you've done so. At least give others the courtesy to leave the room or hold their noses by pre-warning them, I mean it's basic etiquette.
Before you reel off more useless numbers, I'd just like to say I don't believe a word you say about "how great" the game is doing. Maybe if you published your figures and the sources from which they were calculated I might be willing accept them. You see statistics should never be trusted if their is no accompanying source, this is something elementary to anyone who has the capability of critical thought.
I do find it funny though how you wheel out the same statements every time you mess up like this. This is why I find it so hard to believe your statements. You see I only started playing in August of last year and since then I've lost count of how many things you've meddled in, however I've noticed a clear decline in my enjoyment of the game.
I've not been here as long as some so I won't make any phony statement about how if only you produced more content I'd be happy and that I'm a long suffering player (I feel for you guys that are, it must be soul-wrenching). The truth is your content sucks, your systems suck and at the moment the lack of creativity is making this game go stale real quick.
You see your own statements really are all I need to confirm to me just how poorly run this game is. Firstly your explanation of why you chose the design options you did for the Fleet system smacks of a group of developers who are either to lazy or too uncreative to look beyond two poor choices for fleet development and try a more out of the box approach.
Then there is all this talk about players getting more dilithium than ever before. This is another statement I don't believe at all especially when you go on to say that the average max player isn't hitting their refining cap. The reality was most of us "max" players were hitting the refining cap consistently in Season 6, now very few of us are.
Season 7 was already the end for small fleets this was just the final nail. You see Dan, you may or may not be aware of this but most of your playerbase are time-limited. We have limitations as to how much time we can play. So when you meddle with the game and introduce new ever more boring time wasting grind content and make it more difficult to amass currency we have to shift our playing habits within the time-limitations we have. Let me spell this out for you personal reputation systems and the sinks involved meant many people either left the game (as did 6 of my 8 fleet members) or made a choice to focus on one irritating grind course to take either fleet or personal rep.
If the idea was to get me to play more, it failed. You want to know why it failed? in a nutshell it's boring. In detail, your fleet missions suck and give out bugger all in rewards, not only that but the 20 man Starbase Defence is a lag-happy mess. The reason why people look for exploits is becuase the grind sucks, they want to do fun things like play with friends on cool new episode missions, oh but wait that's never going to happen, or play PVP, oh wait it's terrible in this game... maybe we could play group mission on foundry content, oh wait it's bugged to hell.
You see Dan I could sit here and write a whole book on how badly handled this game and it's playerbase is... if there is any loyalty from us players it's to the franchise not the game or Cryptic. If a proper Star Trek MMO came out tomorrow with real team based story adventure, fully realized PVP and Factions... you would be closing up shop it is as simple as that. As it stands it's the only place to get my Star Trek fix though I log in less and less as many of my old friends are gone.
However I'm not going to write too much more.
I will break it down for you though in a kind of executive summary.
In closing I was hooked in August and I'm pretty much want-a-way by February, I'm an average player, not hardcore just average I have a life, a job, family, friends... other hobbies and wheres STO was winning out against my other hobbies in August, it is now way down on the pecking order.
Carry on TRIBBLE your players and meddling in things endlessly whilst throwing a few ships about and come May the Romulan mini-faction and "Search for Sela" episodes will be too little too late for most of us.
Regards,
Signed
Mr. STO made damn sure I'm never moving from DDO to Neverwinter.:cool:
#2311#2700#2316#2500
Well said.
I originally left startrek online when we had the huge hiatus of no content some time ago, and was around when said mmo came out. Gave me the oppertunity to "stretch my legs" in something else. I truely deeply love this game, I just hate the things they constantly do to the folks who actually play their game and support with every fibre in them. Ive spent an upwards of 1000 on this game, and if they showed me one..inkling they would improve the game further.. I wouldnt hesitate in funding them accordingly.
But there has to come a time when you look at how they deal with their fan base, the little lies that gets passed by even said infront of the whole crowd.. and go really.. is it really worth putting up with...
Im not going to answer that as of yet, but there has to be a time when we the fan base have to put our foot down and say enouph is enouph. Again I love this game, but I wont stand idly by, and to force us into certain sections of the game, that really I have no interest in doing repetitive fleet actions, as others have certain areas they dont want to partake in.
I had thought this game was to please many forms of game play, I remember the discussions about open pvp and how many people didnt want to see it happen, because they didnt want to be FORCED into a situation they didnt want to be in.. this situation is the same. It may be small in standards but never the less, it was one of the things myself and my fleet enjoyed doing. I have no desire to be forced into fleet actions. Make content that makes sense that goes with fleet activity "which to me is grouped activity" and reward us accordling in something we enjoy doing.
I understand the foundry was being used incorrectly, but thats not everyones fault, fix the situation then penalizing others. They can do better, they have the tools.
Anyways before I make a speach, I hope dan and the dev team take a good look at whats been said here, and hopefully a fix will be made.. if not they just might of hit the cliff and gone way to over it.... time will tell I guess.
It means you have somebody or a team of somebodies who does feng shui on the customer experience by being solely dedicated to it. You're describing service providers with an inflexible level of demand, relatively little competition, and high barriers for entry when you talk banks and airlines... although that hasn't stopped many of them from looking at least somewhat beyond the production (ie. "if we build a product or service, they will come") mentality.
Here's a nice summary of the eras, though it uses different terms than I'm used to:
By and large, Cryptic's approach skews towards emphasizing production and tacking on advertising after the fact. They DO use datamining but they use it to coral people back towards expectation rather than in an anticipatory, relationship-building way.
Think for a second about something like Amazon or even airlines. They tailor offers and pricing to the user and generally try to shift the offer to the user. They pursue a sale they think is likely when they put any effort into it. Disney is, overall, a good example of a marketing company. For people who live leisurely lives, Disney targets them frequently while with people on fixed incomes, they may try to get with a more affordable vacation package.
They aren't trying to get the consumer to buy the product their way. They find aspects of the product that appeal to a target market and try to align the consumer with the right offer.
Things like the customer script at Starbucks or those "company values" manuals at service chains are also great. People like it when you ask their name, when you write their name. A good customer experience is like a spell. Subtle. Customers shouldn't necessarily consciously realize they're being influenced by it and may deny being influenced by it. I think it's easy to dismiss this stuff as a cynical Gen X/Millennial but I think it's a profound artform that works and doesn't really require customers believing that it works. There is a wealth of behavioral experiment literature on what works.
And I'll give you an example, a very small one, where Cryptic got one little aspect of this right. The fleet contribution sound effect. There were podcasters and players raving about this, some describing their reaction to those rapid pupil dilation cuts from "Requiem for a Dream." I have a feeling it was almost an afterthought from Cryptic but it greased the gears for a gameplay activity tremendously. That's a really micro example and fairly mechanical but you do it longterm and strategically.
PvP, The Foundry, Klingon play, DOffs, Fleet Actions, STFs... These are all in effect offers or value propositions which, once bought into, are used as a center for soft sells on the C-Store.
Let me toss an article out there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_management
How much do you think Cryptic does this when designing game systems?
For example, take the Foundry or PvP:
My feeling is that they probably only employed datamining in any kind of systematic way. Anything else boiled down to polling friends and fleetmates.
How much do you see Cryptic doing this? I think Cryptic's iterative approach winds up being a lot more employee driven and hobby-like, to a point where they neither meet needs nor do they do so profitably. (In fact, I think the profit generated is often markedly divorced from the needs being met. To a point where their approach might often be effectively using profit -- whether measured as money or activity -- to underwrite unprofitable game design elements -- whether measured in popularity or revenue generated.)
In general, how much do they manage their brand and the brands they license? How often does anyone say, "What does this do to customer satisfaction?" I'd bet the IDEA comes up but that they don't have anyone primarily concerned with that... and because they don't, it's what gets compromised when the chiefs meet and Al is pushing systems and Jesse/Kestrel are pushing story and the art leads are looking at their workloads. It's a missing voice in the room in terms of having a dedicated voice and because it's a missing voice, it gets compromised.
You need people educated in customer satisfaction strategies to make that a co-equal focus with systems, art, content, etc. If nothing else, to wear a different hat and say, "How will this impact the player?" But ideally armed with behavioral psychology, pertinent questions, and studies and analysis based on more than just staring at numbers looking for patterns.
Above all, asking, "How do we make the game that people want to play?" and not, "How do we make people play the game the way we want them to?"
The minute you start deciding how you want players to play the game, you've lost.
Does that mean letting them exploit clickies? Heck, no. But a clickie exploiter has a desire. You find the desire and exploit it with a strategy. Maybe they like repetitive action. Maybe the activities they enjoy playing are not linked to or consistent with the rewards they want.
Somebody playing a clickie wants something. Dilithium. A weapon. A ship. A costume. And they want to use that in the game somewhere. Maybe they want to spend more time PvPing or more time posing in their new costume on the fleet starbase. Maybe they want to play a big Foundry mission but want to get the reward they think the mission deserves first so they can play that mission with the new guns they want. Maybe they only want to play at length once a month. And the clickie lets them do what they want to do when they get around to playing and lets them avoid doing what they don't want to do.
Every exploiter wants something. You find out what it is they want and offer it attractively in a legitimate way. Shutting them down is just herding them like cattle towards things they don't want to do. You miss out on figuring out what they DO want to do when you just close an exploit.
Designers should not be determining how people play but should be figuring out how to serve the ways people DO want to play.
The above was copied from the Ask Cryptic published today......
"Option A was that Fleet size would determine the maximum tier for Fleet Holdings. The larger the Fleet, the higher the Fleet Holding Tiers could achieve. This is how many other MMOs gate Guild progression, but we felt that it is artificially limiting to the many active small Fleets in STO.
Option B was to allow Fleets of any size to achieve all tiers of Fleet Holdings. The drawback is that because Fleet sizes range so much, we had to find a balance so that Large Fleets had some challenge, while still allowing small Fleets to achieve all tiers, albeit at a much slower pace."
This one was copied from the post D'Stahl started this very thread with.
My question is, which one is a copy of the other?
Or are both copied from a PR document called 'Damage Control And How Not To Do It'?
I actually winced when I saw the huge wall of type, but you summed it up nicely, eloquently and easy for us mouth breathers to understand.
Now if only Craptic would read it...
Although maybe they wouldn't understand it...
Hmmm...
Many of us who were players from beta or early launch 2010, had an uneasy feeling when PWE took over based on the endless money grind nature of their other games. Many posters on the old forum then forecasted correctly that the game would likely turn into a deliberate intensive grind, funneled toward spending large amounts of money by the player as the only way to alleviate it.
Now we stand with things in their current state, half a KDF still, bugs present from 3 years ago, and new ones every patch. Gated content, and resource restrictive content. Seasons labeled as "new content" only to contain grind content instead of core content.
I need not go on, but you understand. We as a playerbase are guilty in a way for allowing it with every dollar we spend. Make no mistake, blame lies on PWE and then Cryptic, but falls on the player too.
Sadly, this cycle of strife won't end until the release of the next cash jewel PWE has their eye on: Neverwinter.
Even then, this all won't end fully until the servers finally go offline for STO.
Fed: Astarsha, level 60 tactical officer
KDF: K'tana level 54 tactical officer
The above sums up the real problem at PWE/Cryptic....
They think they know how we want to play, but the truth is something very different indeed!
Maybe they should change who they have "test" their ideas on.... uhmmm!
PWE/Cryptic Stop the "farm", bring back the fun!
Zeus
I've never ever read so much bull about options and whatnot when the actual decisions are crystal clear: Turn STO into a grindfest even more.
You know what? Others did that before. Most of them killed their games themselves while doing so, especially casual games.
Or is it too far fetched to compare STO to SWG? You know you got the bonus of a nice little franchise. But that's all you got.
On the other hand, you got lots of problems (spelled bugs for example) and you're doing nothing about them.
The solution to the big vs. small fleet progression for example? Pretty simple. Option C.
Replace all needed commodities for fleet projects except fleet marks and maybe dili.
Reward fleet marks on a procentual basis for doing fleet missions based on the size of the fleet.
So when i fly such a mission, i get 1000 fleet marks multiplied by my dedication.
That's one out of 10 fleet members in such a small fleet: 1000*.1=100.
Or one out of 500 fleet members in a large fleet: 1000*.005=2.
But your number 1 solution is GREED. Nothing else.
I wish you a lot of supporters for that strategy.
Because i will not.
In answer, Black Ops Armada is 5 fleets of 500 players. 2500 in total. we use a full fleet chat channel and vent servers. Guess what, so far not a single player that I have heard supports this change.
857 posts
36190 views
In less than 24 hours
And, apparently, still no answer from Cryptic.
You've had a full working day, how are we supposed to not view this as contempt for the player base?
At least I can think back to the first few months of the game when it really felt that way for a little while.
Fed: Astarsha, level 60 tactical officer
KDF: K'tana level 54 tactical officer
Well written, but will anyone at Cryptic pay attention to any of it?
You're forgetting 735 comments and 28623 views in the thread that got closed
Apparently some forum posters have diplomatic immunity nowadays, where can I get mine? [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I wouldn't even bother replying to someone whose analytical abilities are so slight they can seriously posit the idea that a small fleets drain server capacity through creating extra starbase instances when in reality a fleet of 5 will probably only create an instance once ever week or so if that, I had a fleet of 8 before Season 7 and I think I was the only one who even visited the base more than once in the entirety of season 6 mainly because T1-T3 offers nothing worth turning up for on a regular basis.
He's either a troll or someone with low critical thought capacity
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Plus the ones that were merged with both threads.
Tell me about it, same here... the unprofessional and frankly amateurish way everything has been handled since I started playing this game really is quite astonishing... I only started playing in August... I wasn't even around for the Year of Hell (2011).
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My god Jim! He's a freaking genius, not a doctor!!!!!!
Add that to the 100,000's of views for issues with Season 7's introduction and all the other things Cryptic have messed up (Doff grinder etc).
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You're absolutely right.
There can't be many subjects that have attracted this many comments in such a short time.
If we look at the front page of the Federation News Network, this thread alone has outstripped every other one, in far less time.
While a few have supported the changes as is, the vast majority have opposed them vehementally.
There have been numerous, thoughtful suggestions for a fix, it is clear to me that the vast majority of those who oppose this decsion are trying to be thoughtful and constructive.
However, the only 'official' responses were very early on....page 2 IIRC.
Branflakes has not posted even once.
A community moderator did post once, but his statement was fact checked into oblivion is minutes.
Even the standard 'we have/are/will read everything' post has not been issued on this thread.
This is not how to do damage control.
A genius wouldn't need so many words, it's simple.
Find out what people find fun, create something that is fun, make money.
Don't act like and TRIBBLE and try to force people to enjoy something because you want to make it a certain way and to hell with what paying customers want.
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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]