LOL, have you seen pictures of some of their desks? With whole fleets of ST ship models? Or pictures of DStahl or Geko in uniforms? They're probably bigger fans than you or I. Assuming they aren't because you don't approve of their job is silly. Even uber Trekkies have to pay bills, and game design has to balance art (the idealistic game experience) and reality (something that keeps the lights on at cryptic and the little baby trekkies fed).
I agree, they're working on a Star Trek GAME, that takes some love for the series. I mean seriously. The Devs are going about their daily lives saying "I make Star Trek". Honestly, say that out loud;
I agree, they're working on a Star Trek GAME, that takes some love for the series. I mean seriously. The Devs are going about their daily lives saying "I make Star Trek". Honestly, say that out loud;
"I make Star Trek".
How nerdy is that? :P
This isn't Star Trek.... Please mind my language but this is and has always been a bastardization.
Its not complicated at all, the system works pretty much the game as Starfleet Command III practically. It is pretty easy to tweak beams and nerf cannons, look at making Engineering and Science powers useful again and tweak them, introduce new powers ect...
Science powers are the most difficult to properly balance. Science damage can't exceed Tactical damage, that's what Tactical is for. Crowd Control and Disables can't be too strong, since that ruins playing against anything with those abilities, PvP or PvE.
Fire At Will was nerfed because it was an attempted fix to a problem (FAW had unwarranted 100% fixed accuracy), and now Borticus is trying to implement a fix to the problem uncovered by the fix (that accuracy wasn't working properly) based off of Neverwinter code (which had found the solution to the issue with Fire At Will when trying to fix their own problems with similar abilities). We haven't seen anything of that because they're trying to get it right before porting it over to Holodeck.
Takes your ship into a roll, providing 50% All Energy and Kinetic Damage Resistance for 30 seconds, boosts target-able science power exotic particle damage by 25%. Increases healing by 25% (Just a quick thought, a defensive version of Attack Pattern Alpha and Omega)
Flight patterns are definitely not Science abilities, though, and major damage resistance is mostly Engineering's schtick.
Any bonus to Science damage will mostly come as a buff to Tactical characters in Science vessels, since a multiplicative effect will be further multiplied by Attack Pattern Alpha and similar abilities.
Oh and ALL Escorts should have base hulls reduced by 50%.
Because Escorts would not have bulkheads reinforced for combat beyond that of a scientific vessel? Not all of the Escorts are tiny little Defiants, you know. The Armitage is quite large, for example.
Defense would be unlinked from "speed" and every individual ship would have their own defensive stat.
This isn't needed. Speed for defense makes sense, as not being where you were a moment ago makes you harder to hit. The defensive ability in cruisers is not in not being hit, but in making the hits matter less, via higher level Engineering powers. Science vessels are primarily support ships, but can use both speed and resistance buffs for when it needs to bolster its own defenses.
LOL, have you seen pictures of some of their desks? With whole fleets of ST ship models? Or pictures of DStahl or Geko in uniforms? They're probably bigger fans than you or I. Assuming they aren't because you don't approve of their job is silly. Even uber Trekkies have to pay bills, and game design has to balance art (the idealistic game experience) and reality (something that keeps the lights on at cryptic and the little baby trekkies fed).
I think what some people don't get is this:
When you make a game/movie/etc., you may have to do things that contradict what you'd want as a fan. Not just different priorities.
Someone can be a hardcore Star Trek fan and then when they're making a movie or a game, the objective on the table may be that they are supposed to alter, modify, omit, emphasize, or delete parts of what Star Trek means. And as a fan, they may disagree with that job. But as a professional, they do it.
That's part of what being a media professional is: the willingness to do what you as a fan would see as wrong.
When you make a game/movie/etc., you may have to do things that contradict what you'd want as a fan. Not just different priorities.
Someone can be a hardcore Star Trek fan and then when they're making a movie or a game, the objective on the table may be that they are supposed to alter, modify, omit, emphasize, or delete parts of what Star Trek means. And as a fan, they may disagree with that job. But as a professional, they do it.
That's part of what being a media professional is: the willingness to do what you as a fan would see as wrong.
There is also another phrase for that... "selling out"
When you make a game/movie/etc., you may have to do things that contradict what you'd want as a fan. Not just different priorities.
Someone can be a hardcore Star Trek fan and then when they're making a movie or a game, the objective on the table may be that they are supposed to alter, modify, omit, emphasize, or delete parts of what Star Trek means. And as a fan, they may disagree with that job. But as a professional, they do it.
That's part of what being a media professional is: the willingness to do what you as a fan would see as wrong.
Honestly? That's not a bad thing. Fandom can pollute your worldview, and you can poison the very thing you love with too much of "your" interpretation. This is why so much fanfiction is utter TRIBBLE.
No true Trekkie would make a game this bad? Of course not, they'd make one worse, where they're an all powerful experiment that discovered love and turned against their scientific masters, and now they galavant throughout the galaxy with an entourage of balloon breasted women or oiled muscle bound hunks. Oh wait, they already do.
Honestly? That's not a bad thing. Fandom can pollute your worldview, and you can poison the very thing you love with too much of "your" interpretation. This is why so much fanfiction is utter TRIBBLE.
No true Trekkie would make a game this bad? Of course not, they'd make one worse, where they're an all powerful experiment that discovered love and turned against their scientific masters, and now they galavant throughout the galaxy with an entourage of balloon breasted women or oiled muscle bound hunks. Oh wait, they already do.
Well, I don't think being a professional means tossing it all. But you do toss what you have to toss for the project in front of you. Ideally, no more and no less.
The thing is, your audience doesn't get to dictate what the project should be, in general. The project dictates who the audience is. And if the publisher/studio isn't happy with that, they make adjustments to widen the audience.
But one of the big pitfalls I think we all run into as fans is the assumption that every Star Trek game or Batman comic or whathaveyou is aimed at us and doing something wrong if we feel repelled by it. It may just be something that isn't aimed at you.
You see it time and again: bug on Tribble... "we'll fix that before it goes live"... same bug on Holodeck.
Tray powers moving around, going away, or popping up when you don't want them for YEARS even though you 'lock' the tray. Never gets fixed.
the Exchange... issues to long to bother typing.
STO has alot of potential to be great. Cryptic just seems fine with 'good enough that people don't leave en masse'.
Personally, I'm going to spend the majority of my free time back in WoW now. Just not feeling the love in STO atm. You can only do the same STFs so many thousands of times before it gets monotonous, ya know? I'll let my measly 500 Zen stipend accrue till Season 8 or whatever the new Romulan thing that's coming. My hopes are not high for STO if Cryptic's general lack of follow thru continues. Bugs and errors and years old issues are just piling up w/o resolve. The main thing they seem to care about doing is cranking out the next lock-box. Season 8 needs to be "Season 8: Where s**t gets fixed!"
Where is your morality Cryptic? Your sense of moral obligation to the players of this mess!? Its like watching your brother, who could be a doctor, throw it away and become a drug addict!
I would like to voice my agreement now;
By not tailoring the game to me, you are as immoral as ten Hitlers. Please change all of your plans to make the game based on my desires. Because, you know, ten Hitlers.
No "Trekkie" would allow this game to get this bad. Full stop.
I guess it's a good thing I'm of the "Trekker" crowd then.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I think one of the major problems Cryptic has is that they tend to bring out their personal Death Star to fix problems. Like the IOR one. They point their Death Star at the problem and blow it into kingdom come and damned be the consequences.
Granted they fixed the IOR thingy by bringing in FM to other areas in the game, but my point stands.
If they could communicate with the player base before doing said heavy handed changes, we would not have the major uprisings in the forums, and might just get a say in things, and maybe, just maybe, prevent certain changes with civil discussions...
Does anyone else feel that there are two factions in Star Trek: Online wanting control over the game. I'm not talking about Klingon or Federation... I am talking about;
Cryptic and their lovers;
- Major Fleets
- Major PvPers
- Developers
- Moderators
vs
- Casual Players
- Star Trek "Fans" (People who were fans before this game was released)
- Newbs
- Intelligent People
- Small Fleets
I like how the OP grouped the two sets of people into essentially his own personal opinion rather than any actual facts.
those that agree with him are intelligent, casual and true fans of star trek and those that dont agree with him are not intelligent, are not true fans, in huge fleets, pvpers, devs and actually like the game.
seems like a totally fair and unbiased list there.
Your argument. It doesn't work. Things like Reputation are wholeheartedly geared toward casual players and playstyle. So I don't see these "strange bedfellows" you describe.
Totally wrong.
It's geared against casual players.
Time gates that require daily log on are fundamentally problematic to those who can't log every day.
The idea that it's pro casual is a joke, it's pro regimented. The old system was pro casual I could log on for a few hours on the weekend and get a shot at end loot.
Think before you post. As the OP should've, that list of "opposition" players is a joke, very few people ever support Cryptic totally and most think the game is a mess of half finished ideas and bugs, the only difference is people who are content with the situation and the roadmap cryptic have laid out and those that are not.
All of the grind requirements can be done within a couple of hours. This is very much in the casual players favor.
You don't have to do them daily unless you're impatient, geedy, or obsesseive. They dont vanish if you don't do them every 24 hours. Acting like it will is something to be discussed with a therapist.
There is some "wrong" going on, but it ain't centersolace.
All of the grind requirements can be done within a couple of hours. This is very much in the casual players favor.
You don't have to do them daily unless you're impatient, geedy, or obsesseive. They dont vanish if you don't do them every 24 hours. Acting like it will is something to be discussed with a therapist.
There is some "wrong" going on, but it ain't centersolace.
Sorry what would you call a daily time gate? would you call it chaotic or random? no it's a regimented system.
Some of us travel for work, spend nights in hotels, some of us can't log on everyday to do a 2 hour grind. Sometimes I can't log on for 3 or 4 days, depending on work. I tell you what though you can keep calling people who work their guts out everyday greedy and obsessive about rewards in this game but it won't make it any more true, in fact those kind of slurs are actually comical.
With the old system I could log on the weekend in my actual spare time and within two hours I could have an end-game item, granted that wasn't always very likely but the point here is I could log on when I WANTED.
That is the essence of casual gaming, regimented time gates are the opposite of casual even if it only takes 5 minutes to grind the required content, because as a casual gamer I may not be able to log in daily.
With the old system I could log on the weekend in my actual spare time and within two hours I could have an end-game item..,
See, when the foundation of your premise is faulty, the rest of the argument is nonsense.
"Casual" does not mean "Get Omega Gear for logging in" like you assume. It means, "Play casually". All of the grind requirements, should you decide to do them for some reason, can be done within a short amount of playing time. The frequency of logging in is not important. Doing the grind in the first place is not important. They can still be done when you do have the time and your progress will not vanish when you don't. That is a system for casual players.
Admitting you have an injured sense of entitlement over the S7 changes is probably going to hurt. I get that. But you can do it. It takes time... Like getting a T5 starbase does... But you can do it.
Which is undeniably better than having to sit through an hour or so of ground STF, which in the end you may fail and or not even get the loot you wanted to.
This system is guaranteed to get you the gear, it might take you time. But it's guaranteed, which is more friendly to a casual player who doesn't have time to run hundreds of the same STF to get the best gear. Instead they can collect it piecemeal from the little bits they can play for.
The project timers of 20 hours are good, it means you can set them running at night and they will be finished when you get back from work the next day. But you don't have to log in everyday to get it done, it's more efficient, but not required. It also means that you can't effectively just get it all in one go and puts people on a level playing field.
LoL devs and pvpers on the same boat ? well that's a new one. Didn't Geko call the pvp community a bunch of 14 years old min-maxers in his last interview ? He despises the pvp community...
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
Time gates that require daily log on are fundamentally problematic to those who can't log every day.
The idea that it's pro casual is a joke, it's pro regimented. The old system was pro casual I could log on for a few hours on the weekend and get a shot at end loot.
Think before you post. As the OP should've, that list of "opposition" players is a joke, very few people ever support Cryptic totally and most think the game is a mess of half finished ideas and bugs, the only difference is people who are content with the situation and the roadmap cryptic have laid out and those that are not.
No sir, I believe you're pretty much wrong about this. The rep. system and the way the gear is distributed now is one of the best features that S7 brought.
This way a casual player that logs once in a while, can have the feeling of progression and that regardless wheather he/she has only half an hour to play today he/she made a step further in obtaining the desired gear, rep. marks and such.
The previous system was based purely on luck and no game should be based on luck.
The devs. mentioned this and I'd like to see, too - bringing the previous loot system that would drop some special items that are very very rare and only a number of select lucky or overally dedicated players would obtain, just for more flavour in the game, but not be game-breaking or must have.
On the other hand, obtaining end-game gear should not be based on my luck, the daily horoscope or wheather I walked in the room with the right or left foot first. :P
All of the grind requirements can be done within a couple of hours. This is very much in the casual players favor.
You don't have to do them daily unless you're impatient, geedy, or obsesseive. They dont vanish if you don't do them every 24 hours. Acting like it will is something to be discussed with a therapist.
There is some "wrong" going on, but it ain't centersolace.
I always failed and still fail to see how the time gates bring problems in the game or as you mentioned require logging on daily basis, other that the players forcing themselves into this driven by the must have it all now, or being the first to have it. IMHO this is wrong, any game should be primarily about having fun and being as good as you can at it and not something that you'll pressure yourself into doing just to show others that you're first/best etc.
This is just my opinion on this, though.
LoL devs and pvpers on the same boat ? well that's a new one. Didn't Geko call the pvp community a bunch of 14 years old min-maxers in his last interview ? He despises the pvp community...
You make the "14 year old" thing sound like an insult. He also didn't call the whole community that. He said there are bound to be 14 year olds better than the average player. It's the PvPers who assumed he was calling them 14 year olds. I think his point was more that 14 year olds are, on the whole, going to have an edge against older players if a system allows skill to dominate too much. He's not accusing PvPers of being 14. He's accusing 14 year olds of being the most innately skilled on the whole and saying skill needs to be handicapped to get more people PvPing.
Comments
Ah, the ol' No True Scotsman gambit.
most people dont see the game as "Bad"
I agree, they're working on a Star Trek GAME, that takes some love for the series. I mean seriously. The Devs are going about their daily lives saying "I make Star Trek". Honestly, say that out loud;
"I make Star Trek".
How nerdy is that? :P
This isn't Star Trek.... Please mind my language but this is and has always been a bastardization.
Fire At Will was nerfed because it was an attempted fix to a problem (FAW had unwarranted 100% fixed accuracy), and now Borticus is trying to implement a fix to the problem uncovered by the fix (that accuracy wasn't working properly) based off of Neverwinter code (which had found the solution to the issue with Fire At Will when trying to fix their own problems with similar abilities). We haven't seen anything of that because they're trying to get it right before porting it over to Holodeck. Flight patterns are definitely not Science abilities, though, and major damage resistance is mostly Engineering's schtick.
Any bonus to Science damage will mostly come as a buff to Tactical characters in Science vessels, since a multiplicative effect will be further multiplied by Attack Pattern Alpha and similar abilities. The drain mechanic needs to be fixed. Not the drain magnitudes. Fix the mechanic, and the damage will fall into place. Because Escorts would not have bulkheads reinforced for combat beyond that of a scientific vessel? Not all of the Escorts are tiny little Defiants, you know. The Armitage is quite large, for example. This isn't needed. Speed for defense makes sense, as not being where you were a moment ago makes you harder to hit. The defensive ability in cruisers is not in not being hit, but in making the hits matter less, via higher level Engineering powers. Science vessels are primarily support ships, but can use both speed and resistance buffs for when it needs to bolster its own defenses. Trust me, that would fix nothing. It would be less than a full point of turn rate for all Fed cruisers.
Can ye make a bett'a one laddie?
I think what some people don't get is this:
When you make a game/movie/etc., you may have to do things that contradict what you'd want as a fan. Not just different priorities.
Someone can be a hardcore Star Trek fan and then when they're making a movie or a game, the objective on the table may be that they are supposed to alter, modify, omit, emphasize, or delete parts of what Star Trek means. And as a fan, they may disagree with that job. But as a professional, they do it.
That's part of what being a media professional is: the willingness to do what you as a fan would see as wrong.
There is also another phrase for that... "selling out"
Trek has been pretty commercial. I think that ship sailed with lunch boxes, toys, etc.
Honestly? That's not a bad thing. Fandom can pollute your worldview, and you can poison the very thing you love with too much of "your" interpretation. This is why so much fanfiction is utter TRIBBLE.
No true Trekkie would make a game this bad? Of course not, they'd make one worse, where they're an all powerful experiment that discovered love and turned against their scientific masters, and now they galavant throughout the galaxy with an entourage of balloon breasted women or oiled muscle bound hunks. Oh wait, they already do.
The beautiful titillated women in my signature..... :rolleyes:
(seriously, this is an old trek hat)
I appreciate it every time you post.
Oh, that.
Don't they get money from us anyways?
Well, I don't think being a professional means tossing it all. But you do toss what you have to toss for the project in front of you. Ideally, no more and no less.
The thing is, your audience doesn't get to dictate what the project should be, in general. The project dictates who the audience is. And if the publisher/studio isn't happy with that, they make adjustments to widen the audience.
But one of the big pitfalls I think we all run into as fans is the assumption that every Star Trek game or Batman comic or whathaveyou is aimed at us and doing something wrong if we feel repelled by it. It may just be something that isn't aimed at you.
You see it time and again: bug on Tribble... "we'll fix that before it goes live"... same bug on Holodeck.
Tray powers moving around, going away, or popping up when you don't want them for YEARS even though you 'lock' the tray. Never gets fixed.
the Exchange... issues to long to bother typing.
STO has alot of potential to be great. Cryptic just seems fine with 'good enough that people don't leave en masse'.
Personally, I'm going to spend the majority of my free time back in WoW now. Just not feeling the love in STO atm. You can only do the same STFs so many thousands of times before it gets monotonous, ya know? I'll let my measly 500 Zen stipend accrue till Season 8 or whatever the new Romulan thing that's coming. My hopes are not high for STO if Cryptic's general lack of follow thru continues. Bugs and errors and years old issues are just piling up w/o resolve. The main thing they seem to care about doing is cranking out the next lock-box. Season 8 needs to be "Season 8: Where s**t gets fixed!"
I would like to voice my agreement now;
By not tailoring the game to me, you are as immoral as ten Hitlers. Please change all of your plans to make the game based on my desires. Because, you know, ten Hitlers.
Thank you.
I guess it's a good thing I'm of the "Trekker" crowd then.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Granted they fixed the IOR thingy by bringing in FM to other areas in the game, but my point stands.
If they could communicate with the player base before doing said heavy handed changes, we would not have the major uprisings in the forums, and might just get a say in things, and maybe, just maybe, prevent certain changes with civil discussions...
I like how the OP grouped the two sets of people into essentially his own personal opinion rather than any actual facts.
those that agree with him are intelligent, casual and true fans of star trek and those that dont agree with him are not intelligent, are not true fans, in huge fleets, pvpers, devs and actually like the game.
seems like a totally fair and unbiased list there.
That's at least fifteen Hitlers right there.
Totally wrong.
It's geared against casual players.
Time gates that require daily log on are fundamentally problematic to those who can't log every day.
The idea that it's pro casual is a joke, it's pro regimented. The old system was pro casual I could log on for a few hours on the weekend and get a shot at end loot.
Think before you post. As the OP should've, that list of "opposition" players is a joke, very few people ever support Cryptic totally and most think the game is a mess of half finished ideas and bugs, the only difference is people who are content with the situation and the roadmap cryptic have laid out and those that are not.
#2311#2700#2316#2500
Hold it right there, hoss!
All of the grind requirements can be done within a couple of hours. This is very much in the casual players favor.
You don't have to do them daily unless you're impatient, geedy, or obsesseive. They dont vanish if you don't do them every 24 hours. Acting like it will is something to be discussed with a therapist.
There is some "wrong" going on, but it ain't centersolace.
Sorry what would you call a daily time gate? would you call it chaotic or random? no it's a regimented system.
Some of us travel for work, spend nights in hotels, some of us can't log on everyday to do a 2 hour grind. Sometimes I can't log on for 3 or 4 days, depending on work. I tell you what though you can keep calling people who work their guts out everyday greedy and obsessive about rewards in this game but it won't make it any more true, in fact those kind of slurs are actually comical.
With the old system I could log on the weekend in my actual spare time and within two hours I could have an end-game item, granted that wasn't always very likely but the point here is I could log on when I WANTED.
That is the essence of casual gaming, regimented time gates are the opposite of casual even if it only takes 5 minutes to grind the required content, because as a casual gamer I may not be able to log in daily.
Regimentation is the opposite of casual.
Order the opposite of Chaos.
Think on this.
#2311#2700#2316#2500
I was thinking more like seventeen but there may have been some inflation.
See, when the foundation of your premise is faulty, the rest of the argument is nonsense.
"Casual" does not mean "Get Omega Gear for logging in" like you assume. It means, "Play casually". All of the grind requirements, should you decide to do them for some reason, can be done within a short amount of playing time. The frequency of logging in is not important. Doing the grind in the first place is not important. They can still be done when you do have the time and your progress will not vanish when you don't. That is a system for casual players.
Admitting you have an injured sense of entitlement over the S7 changes is probably going to hurt. I get that. But you can do it. It takes time... Like getting a T5 starbase does... But you can do it.
A bit
At a time.
This system is guaranteed to get you the gear, it might take you time. But it's guaranteed, which is more friendly to a casual player who doesn't have time to run hundreds of the same STF to get the best gear. Instead they can collect it piecemeal from the little bits they can play for.
The project timers of 20 hours are good, it means you can set them running at night and they will be finished when you get back from work the next day. But you don't have to log in everyday to get it done, it's more efficient, but not required. It also means that you can't effectively just get it all in one go and puts people on a level playing field.
No sir, I believe you're pretty much wrong about this. The rep. system and the way the gear is distributed now is one of the best features that S7 brought.
This way a casual player that logs once in a while, can have the feeling of progression and that regardless wheather he/she has only half an hour to play today he/she made a step further in obtaining the desired gear, rep. marks and such.
The previous system was based purely on luck and no game should be based on luck.
The devs. mentioned this and I'd like to see, too - bringing the previous loot system that would drop some special items that are very very rare and only a number of select lucky or overally dedicated players would obtain, just for more flavour in the game, but not be game-breaking or must have.
On the other hand, obtaining end-game gear should not be based on my luck, the daily horoscope or wheather I walked in the room with the right or left foot first. :P
And pretty much this:
I always failed and still fail to see how the time gates bring problems in the game or as you mentioned require logging on daily basis, other that the players forcing themselves into this driven by the must have it all now, or being the first to have it. IMHO this is wrong, any game should be primarily about having fun and being as good as you can at it and not something that you'll pressure yourself into doing just to show others that you're first/best etc.
This is just my opinion on this, though.
What's bad about it? It requires Dilithium and energy credits.
Cryptic should take out the dilithium requirements for items, and the energy credit item requirements.
Reputation system should only cost you marks. No other requirements, just marks.
Because before it, you sure did not need to give 30k dilithium up if a purple prototype tech dropped.
You make the "14 year old" thing sound like an insult. He also didn't call the whole community that. He said there are bound to be 14 year olds better than the average player. It's the PvPers who assumed he was calling them 14 year olds. I think his point was more that 14 year olds are, on the whole, going to have an edge against older players if a system allows skill to dominate too much. He's not accusing PvPers of being 14. He's accusing 14 year olds of being the most innately skilled on the whole and saying skill needs to be handicapped to get more people PvPing.