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Do the Devs actually play the game?
daedalus304
Member Posts: 1,049 Arc User
This is a serious question, not an attack at the devs, not an insult or anything.
but aside from the selected few in the forums.
what devs who made the game actually play it?
We players are in this game right now, we know the balancing aspect far more than you do, we play it we know it, we experience it.
and we have a far larger field of view on this topic. When Developers talk about balancing they are either going by general whiteplate papers which are just the things they see when editing files, DPS source refferences which they gather over time. or just hearsay from the few devs who do play it.
Now tell me do Devs really play the game they make?
My opinion...no....if they did they would have overhauled each class in general to actually freaking matter, they'd have adjusted the AI of enemies and made the game far more balanced.
but now its like a bank loan, you wait too long to pay it off and the interest doubles, tripples, to the point you will never be able to pay it off.
but aside from the selected few in the forums.
what devs who made the game actually play it?
We players are in this game right now, we know the balancing aspect far more than you do, we play it we know it, we experience it.
and we have a far larger field of view on this topic. When Developers talk about balancing they are either going by general whiteplate papers which are just the things they see when editing files, DPS source refferences which they gather over time. or just hearsay from the few devs who do play it.
Now tell me do Devs really play the game they make?
My opinion...no....if they did they would have overhauled each class in general to actually freaking matter, they'd have adjusted the AI of enemies and made the game far more balanced.
but now its like a bank loan, you wait too long to pay it off and the interest doubles, tripples, to the point you will never be able to pay it off.
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they all take KDF luch boxes to work and sleep in KDF jammeys
And a few fly Fed escorts
Cant you tell ?........ :P
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
You claim that you (players) have a more in depth/special understanding of the game, and how it functions. While that is true in some respects, devs ALSO have a more in depth/special understanding of the game and how it functions. So, while I as a player may think "Jeez, why is this like this?", my developer side will understand the reason it's like that, and why it may need to be that way.
Ive yet to see the playerbase agree on balance.
players tend to be very emotional (we play the game for fun rather than some logical approach) and are biased by getting attached to certain aspects of it. throw a random topic into the mix and you will get a wide range of answers. take all of that and then have the two very different aspects in pve and pvp and it becomes one big mess.
im not saying everything is as balanced as it could be, but there is no holy grail, no magic solution because even if you found it, no one would agree on it when you did.
ok I'll give you most of that, but still the question remains....why the hell is this game so freaking DPS heavy? I have seen engineers who cannot tank because even with their threat scaling spec, threat scaling consoles and decent powers, they cannot get the attention of the enemy without doing significant dps.
and Sci is a joke now, the AI are not close to smart anymore, its just DPS DPS DPS, wait....no there are a FEW ai npc's which do some decent tactics, but only in KASE and being the spheres.
the only real class that actually matters right now is Tac, mainly because enough firepower makes de-buffs useless against enemies.
so the question remains, why not just get rid of the pretense of three separate and unique classes and just dive into the "Bland Tac" class?
In all reality
I believe PvP and PvE need to be seperated
one hard copy of the game used for each
Then Balence the powers for both until you have a fun and blaenced game on both sides
To try and balence both at the same time I say is impossible, because people ( PvP ) play much differnty over a programed AI ( PvE )
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
While you have some good questions, he can't answer them. He's an environment artist and doesn't deal with game mechanics and balance issues.
Mine Trap Supporter
that stuff drives me nuts, ruins all the fun...
because i see it every day, on my Ship, and once i notice errors like that.... i can't stop looking at it.
this game is very OCD heavy to me... not just with Ships, but also things like Plasma Fire enveloping the whole Ship, or even framerate drops because of certain ability FX (that Console thing the Nebula Class uses just for example...) and how Ability FX look so Hello Kitty in general and not like Star Trek (icons, patterns, glows everywhere...) why can't i just have the things on screen that are actual Ship effects? Do not want my ship to glow PINK on brace for impact! Do not need odd RINGS whirling around my Ship with every ability...
and that nonesense costs frames too, and even produces FX drop in busy maps.
(i bet you, if you would just remove all those silly rings, glows and icons people could actually see those STF Borg Cube instakill Topedos coming at them!).
then there are still those white blobs in Red Alerts...
things like that could make me go nuts... i want to play a STAR TREK game, not Hello Kitty with a Star Trek skin!
*breathe 1 2 3 breathe 1 2 3*
Usually when I sign on my dev account I get bombarded with chat and pm's, which is great! I love chatting with the community, but it's hard to actually play and focus on the game when that is happening. So that's why I'm on my personal account most of the time, besides in game events.
I'm in game almost every other night
Environment Artist on Neverwinter Online
Find me on Twitter
Wish they did that in every title and in this one where pvp and pve were in the same game. As it is right now we have imbalance issues like keeping the crew dead after you rez and skills on cooldown in pve because there is no separate code for pvp encounters. Or nerfing science abilities to the point where many of them are just plain so bad no one ever chooses them meanwhile Attack Patterns and Evasive patterns are the same skill and often turn into an I win button against the other types of ships. Or making sensor analysis take too long to do any meaningful damage. Or not separating the distictive differences between the various science ships that technically made them great for those specific situations, ie the intrepid being able to do more deflector abilities more often because it and the bellerophon both have 2 deflectors, something you almost never find on any other science ship in the genre.
So I too have to wonder, not if they play the game, but why there is so much bias towards Tactical and Escorts in this title as if science ships were never able to defend themselves or prevent their destruction despite numerous examples of just that in the lore on both TV and the movies and why science skills don't seem to behave anything like those skills on the series or movies much less the books.
I am sure they would love to wave the magic wand as we would, but like most things it is not as easy as it sounds....
What I would like to know now they made this topic how Dev's feel about playing truth this game with an fleet for instance, all the big Dill prizes .
I must agree with some players you grind for the embassy, Star base, Your char needs Dilithium to upgrade the diplomatic side off the romulans and you grind for the STF to get that gear as well.
I don't even like to start a ALT because off all the work you have to do again and again and over and over, what does a developer see different than it's pretty annoying you have to work more then to have fun ?
Hope a Dev could answer this...
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
Can I be on your friends list?
There have been a few dev comments here and there that, quite reasonably, say that there just isn't enough time with work etc to play other games but I think its crucial to be aware of what developments are going on inside other areas of the market - and not just read about them in the gaming media.
I hold it as a fact that the most successful games are the ones which build upon established features and design while making new innovative tweaks. Sometimes its the small things that really make a gameplay difference, and most of the time, these are not the things being reported in the gaming media. Yet these things can help keep people playing and if our devs were exposed to them, from a gameplay standpoint, I think we could learn to benefit from absorbing good ideas.
Essentially, forum feedback requesting feature X work like feature Y in game Z could be going to waste as the dev in charge of X doesn't know what its like in game Z.
that sounds like you are saying that the Dev's are "Casual Players"...
....
ok now i have to know! who is the dev with the MOST lvl 50 Characters and how many?
(can you beat my 10 lvl 50s?
you have me beat!......for now
I play a bunch of other games as well. Just finished tomb raider and now I'm on god of war before the new gears comes out. I play tons of games from multiple genres across every console
Environment Artist on Neverwinter Online
Find me on Twitter
They Used to, but eventually got fed up with all the bugs and left for other games...
Sometimes there are days where you go home after a long day of work and you just don't want to even think about anything you were working on that day, so sometimes that is true. However most of the time the work you're doing on the game does not resemble playing the game at all. Playing the game you're working on can actually be a nice way to relax and put things back in perspective.
The game looks very different when you're staring at a wall of code on your monitor, or testing a half-implemented new feature or bug, compared to just playing it for fun.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
Not to mention that sometimes it's nice to see your work in finished form.
Nice to know but don't you get tired playing all the stories over and over again ?
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
Well I give the STO team a big pat on the back for sharing the game with us, that way we are all STO Players right...
But even if you do play the game isn't it nice to come online as a Dev and walk around as a enemy and see players have fun in trying to get you ?
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
The things I care about, are what ship I'm flying (I love my Nova, but I outleveled it
That last point is one of the reasons I don't play my own games more. There isn't much exploration to be done when you've built the world in the first place. I love Star Trek, and I love STO, but I have trouble going home and spending time looking at the same game I just spent 9-10 hours looking at.
My greatest joy in playing a game I work on is interacting with players themselves. Most of the time if you see me in game (on my dev account), I'm not playing. I'm hanging out in ESD, or DS9 and chatting with players about whatever.
Not really. When it comes time for me to replay a mission I don't look at it with my 'player goggles' like I do for the first run through. Instead I put on my 'dev artist nit picky goggles' and find bugs, art that needs updating and what have you. Or maybe a second play through will spark a new idea or mechanic I could bring up with fellows devs for later projects down the road.
Environment Artist on Neverwinter Online
Find me on Twitter
http://sto.perfectworld.com/about/foundry/foundry-spotlight
What exploration? :P
Well there is always the Foundry.
since F2P, there has been significant power creep with regards to passive healing, be it from various doff passives, crit proc shield heal or the placate rep passives, the 10 res mod rep passive, the embassy console issuing heals, ships with perfect healer station setups like the ody, recluse, orb and wells, the item sets all the way from borg to maco with the drastically better then normal shields they have, and now the fleet elite shields that grant caped shield resistance to anyone easily.
the on crit heal has ruined crits by the way, i do every thing i can to remove crit chance from my builds now. its impossible to deliverer torps through a hole i just made if i got a crit and filled that hole for him, saving him from my torps. GREAT design there devs, christ.
damage has increased to compensate, but ONLY spike damage, not pressure. 5 tac console escorts, 5 forward weapon escorts, every one having 3 times as much crit chance and severity then they did befor F2P, that all keeps pace pretty well with all the healing power creep.
any damage that isnt spike though, like BEAM ARRAYS, they do a net of 0 damage in pvp now. first you got shields cuting the damage down to 50-76% of what is listed, thanks to OUT OF CONTROL resistance levels, and then theres the hugely buffed regen, the proc heals, distributing your shields, EPtS cycling, and the ocatinal heal like TSS directly countering even the strongest gradual damage as it happens. on escorts even, a cruiser's weapons are harmless to a typical escort.
spike damage, like from beam overload or cannon rapid fire dual heavy cannons can remove a shield faceing in about a second, from a single fireing cycle. all other energy weapons, even dual cannons that supposedly have the same dps as dual heavy cannons, apply their damage over 3 or 4 seconds, its damage that cant be applied faster then it can be countered, often JUST from distributing your shields. these weapons are thus shooting through all 4 shield facing before they have the same effect as DHCs had in a single fireing cycle. most escorts kill thier targets with 50-75% of their shields left, if someone were to actually die from pressure they would have 0% shields left.
now before you get any wile ideas about nerfing DHCs, remember that doing that will remove death from PVP. its the only thing that works, with healing the way it is. DHC damage is basically balanced with the healing and resistance there is now, nerfing one would totally ruin everything.
the other weapons that deal pressure damage, single cannons and beam arrays and dual beam banks, need a buff. or undo all the power creep, your choice guys. these weapons have been marginalized out of useful existence. i used to be able to make incredibly dangerous tac/cruisers, now its makes no difference if i even fire energy weapons. i proposed changing the fireing cycle of beams and single cannons and dual beam banks to that of a DHC like fireing cycle, effectively eliminating the pressure damage that no longer does anything from the game, and making them deal damage like a DHC. only with their current DPS of course. this would take care of their ineffectiveness, everyone's complaints about power drain, and wouldn't make any difference in pve because the raw DPS wouldn't change. the borg already use a single cannons that fires like a DHC, and beams that fire less often would look more canon. best of all this would make non escorts deal more then 0 damage with energy weapons again.
it wasn't always like this, pre F2P, even pre season 6 cruiser pressure could force healing attention, drive away escorts, just cause some sort of reaction at all. in my escort, cruisers are just harmless boxes of hitpoints, throwing heals. im never in any danger when i fight one. the only thing im worried about is a sci ship debuffing me, or another escort shooting at me. with the sci ships there are now, theres almost no reason to bring a healer cruiser to pvp at all, or any cruiser for that mater. except kdf cruisers, with DHCs they deal effective damage too.
let 'beam arrays are fine' captain gecko know that all is not well with cruiser weapons at the moment. please. cruisers, everyone's favorite trek ships, don't work anymore, and thus haven't been selling well. how can you let this go on, from a business standpoint?
Taco, you seem like my type of player, I also primarily want to fly the ship I like, have the crew I feel comfortable with enjoy exploring through content and don't overally care if something brings me few % more or less power.
And you should really consider a fleet Nova if you like the ship!
Now that we have your dev. attention on this tread, I'd like to abuse this opportunity to ask you to make the Klingon helmets & coats from the J.J. movie availible as a uniform pack!