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gaalom
Member Posts: 531 Arc User
I may end up getting banned or something for this but oh well. The first dev of sto during a interview said it was important him that sto was star trek. In the recent year sto has had a very poor attitude when it comes to the customers. You post something they don't like it gets buried. You try to use gm support and you hit a wall. Now ill gripe and post about things I feel need changed because sadly I am a fan of star trek. So now for the big bad question.
Do the devs care about star trek online, as it being star trek? Or do they only care now for the paycheck? The reason I am asking is a couple reasons. Everyone agrees that Dilithium needs a overhaul in certain areas, response from the devs none. Romulans comes out 120+ dollors for a ship pack. Its almost like they do not give a damn as long as people are willing to spend the money on the store. The entire uproar over the reputation was just shafted into one thread, effectively buried. We got one response over that, and it was we are looking into it, well nothings really changed on the rep except for some small very small changes.
Not saying I am perfect but if they cared about making a fun star trek universe, that did not cost someone hundreds of dollors, then why not bother tweaking the game in areas that need it. Just a thought.
Do the devs care about star trek online, as it being star trek? Or do they only care now for the paycheck? The reason I am asking is a couple reasons. Everyone agrees that Dilithium needs a overhaul in certain areas, response from the devs none. Romulans comes out 120+ dollors for a ship pack. Its almost like they do not give a damn as long as people are willing to spend the money on the store. The entire uproar over the reputation was just shafted into one thread, effectively buried. We got one response over that, and it was we are looking into it, well nothings really changed on the rep except for some small very small changes.
Not saying I am perfect but if they cared about making a fun star trek universe, that did not cost someone hundreds of dollors, then why not bother tweaking the game in areas that need it. Just a thought.
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It would be fair to say this:
Aside from Dan Stahl, the dev team cares about making STO into their own interpretation of Star Trek. They don't care one iota about the customers' ideas on how STO should be Star Trek, and Dan exercises little to no oversight over the decisions they make. Case in point: Al Rivera has built a space combat system where escorts dominate, and he and keeps making escorts awesome and every other ship into garbage. Nobody gives him directives to follow, he just does what he likes.
As for only caring about the paycheck, they are a business, and this MMO is F2P: they gotta make it some way. But I highly doubt they care only for the money.
As seen in several spread-out interviews, they have a wide variety of trek merchandise, watch an episode of ST every lunch, and generally know a lot about the series. But they know they can't please everyone, their resources aren't unlimited, and some of the things we wish they could do? They might not know how right at the moment; it would take too long; would give little return for the work in their opinion; etc.
It's a lot of considerations to go with a business. They do what they can how they decide, doing their best to cater to the majority... who I might add, are a wildly diverse lot with many different viewpoints about what makes Star Trek ST, what makes a fun ST game, and so on.
Plus, we've only seen some of the changes: there's more to come. Cryptic has always been about gradual updates, not all-in-one things.
It probably doesn't cover everything, but that's my view on the subject.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
Your opinions aren't "everyone's" and there certainly was no "uproar" in a thread that had 17 posts in it - 5 of which were yours.
And are you the guy we had to explain to 5 different times that the Legacy Packs wasn't the Expansion that you had to pay for but rather just a C-Store bundle that you could buy for a discount or not? Your phrasing seem familiar, but I'm too lazy to do a search. Either way, the Pack is just C-Store items. No more important than any other C-Store items.
The disconnect comes where their appreciation of the series is not like yours, or mine, or any given individual's. For example, just because one person loves to see every ship in pristine screen-accurate detail, doesn't mean a given dev does, but that doesn't mean one cares about the IP any less than the other.
Just because this game isn't a sim and feature only hard canon and the most accurate models known to man doesn't mean they only care about the paycheck.
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
I might not agree with everything they do however no doubt they want the game to do well and take pride in their work.
I think the effort they put into the romulan faction and not the least the story is sort of symbolic of the road here.
They are limited by the engine and whatever state the game was in but they still have a vison for it and continue to improve.
I am very impressed by the amount of content they release for f2p players and I can tell a lot of people are really into the story of the game.
While it really helps if the developers are interested in (or even love) the material they are working on, first and foremost this is about dollar signs.
Honestly, I was amazed to find out that the expansion itself would be rolled into the ftp experience, instead of "sold" as a value added expansion like so many other games have done (WOW, DC Online, etc.)
I am part of the beta on Tribble and I can honestly say that the amount of attention and care that went into this expansion is amazing.
There is no way to make everyone happy. Some canon will slip and some details will be wrong.
But overall I think STO has done a great job of keeping the community involved, responding to their desires (when feasible) and staying true to the "spirit" of Star Trek itself.
Live Long and Prosper STO team!
That has never worked.
For any franchise.
Ever.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
This post is just perfect. Succinct and accurate, well said sir! Bolded what I consider to be the important bits that answer the (useless and badly phrased) question in the OP
Kirk's Protege.
Its a thought. I have played mmos for a long time sense I was out of high school. I have never seen such a twisted variation bent on RL money like sto is. This is also why I am asking the question. Yes this is a business but if a mmo fails to grow it dies. Explanation being if a new player come up to me today and started asking me questions about the game. I would tell him to stay 1000 miles away from sto. I could say why but people might accuse me of duplicating another thread I made. There is no hope for a new player in this game. Nothing as a player I can point at and say this is whats good.
Don't most other F2P MMO's have stuff you can buy only with RL money? Like LOTRO's mounts, which cost roughly the same as an individual Odyssey if I have my math right?
The major difference is that some of the more costly items in other MMO's are purely vanity items, not really worth the purchase but there anyway. In STO, every item can make a difference, from simple respecs to a new ship. And the 'actual' vanity items for STO are there at a fraction of the cost of the aforementioned mount.
You may not like the pricing, but compared to other MMO stores, STO's is relatively practical.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
system Lord Baal is dead
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
The answer, just like the late 90s and early 2000s NBA, is still ... Allen Iverson.
not every one has to every form of travel when you get one free one that dose the same as all the other 21 mount nice try :rolleyes:
system Lord Baal is dead
It's not uncommon in MMOs for people to pay a lot of money just for vanity issues - at least in STO the ships have a function other then just vanity for around the same price.
If you think all the mounts are the same except for cosmetics, then you didn't play LOTRO for very long, because that's quite wrong.
World of ********: battle chest $10, cataclysm $20, pandas $40 +$15/month. So in order to play the game 1-90 you have to pay a minimum of $70. Sto's minimum :$0. WoW also has a cash shop for pets and mounts for $20+
Star wars: the old republic: free to play, but there's a pay wall for raid loot. Unknown if you can convert in game currency to cartel coins, because **** that game. Also not sure if they ever changed their matrix to get rid of the XP penalty for free players.
I played wow for 7 years, bought each expansion as it came out. Add in the sub fees and I've spent over $1500 on it. By contrast I've spent less than 400 on sto.
You are thinking with your heart and not your head. Run the numbers, do research. The game may not be what you want and that's OK, rip apart its mechanics to your hearts content so we can get games with better mechanics. Just be objective about why you don't like it instead of crying like a child.
Let the stupid suffer
You know, way back in the day when I used to guide for EverQuest, a couple of the devs and a bunch of the GM's actually logged into my server to see for themselves what amounted to a massive, player-driven, boondoggle that ground the entire server to a halt (and represented one hell of an example of early emergent gameplay in the process). After the dust had temporarily settled, a few of us sat around the guide- and GM-only zone chatting for a while since the petition queue had thankfully quieted down.
Granted, it was EQ, but given the folks involved, what they later went on to do, and their own feelings on the subject, I feel safe saying this represents developers' general feelings on the idea of "for the money, versus for the art".
As a business, any MMO's primary goal is to make money. That's what keeps publishers and execs from pulling the plug, keeps the devs and customer service folks employed, and keeps players playing. You can't have an MMO that's not drawing enough revenue to pay for its own operation and fund ongoing/future development and content releases.
This happens by keeping players happy -- or at least, happy enough to keep playing. You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you do strive to please as many as you can, as much as you can. MMO's, as a business model, are either in an upward spiral or a downward spiral, and there's not much in-between. Either the player base is happy and growing, which draws increasing amounts of revenue and funds future development to keep the player base growing; or, it's unhappy and shrinking, which means less revenue for future development and further losses in the player base.
So, the short of it is, absolutely developers care about the material and the game they develop. If it's not for love of the craft, you can be damn sure it's for the love of continued revenue since the way to guarantee a failed MMO is to disconnect from the player base and content -- something SoE learned themselves all too well beginning with Shadows of Luclin through Gates of Discord. "For the money" versus "for the art" is a patently false, circular, and self-defeating dichotomy.
Now, I'd go so far as to say nobody plays STO without being a Trek fan. If not, there are other, more expansive, and with all due respect higher-quality science-fiction MMO's, or MMO's in general, to play. As Trek fans, the way to our wallets is making a Trek MMO, and if you lack confidence the developers are Trek fans themselves you can rest easy on the fact they know the way to our wallets, and the best way to talk Trek is to be a Trek fan.
Spock's Brain.
I almost forgot the other part of your post, you think that $120 is too much for 8 account wide ships, 1 account wide shuttle, 30 master keys, Bridge Officer, uniform, etc. A quick look at the current cost of items on the store and I estimate it comes to 18,000 Zen worth of gear. I'm guessing the $ to Zen exchange rate, but I can see why they say it's worth $181.
Now you could argue that 2500 Zen is too much for a T5 Ship, and I would agree with you there. Which is why I pay partly with cash and partly with dilithium for new ships.
But why do you care about the LoR pack anyway? It doesn't sound as if you're interested Cryptics Romulan story.
Hey. That's my line.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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What this thread boils down to, if you read between the lines, is another "Trek Feel" thread. I really tire of these.
Centurion maximus92
12th Legion, Romulan Republic
12th Fleet
=\/= ================================ =\/=
I can see it now...the music rises, sharp short beats accentuating the tension.
The first question, the question that must never be answered gets asked...who is the Doctor?
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"