Keep in mind, for every 1 "Fix bugs!" post on this forum there are probably 10 "Make new ships!" or "Content is boring, add more content!" posts. So it is not just short term profit that they are developing towards, it is the will of the community. (Thats democracy, live with it)
Well in my experience it's the opposite for every "Make new ships!" or "Content is boring, add more content!" posts there are far more "Fix bugs!" posts, especially recently. I said it in my original post, I love this game, I wouldn't play it if I didn't but there is room for improvement, there always will be my suggestion would be an aforementioned bugzilla report and work on existing problems in game before introducing the new content.
I understand that not all the bugs will be fixable but easy to find information on the matter is not at hand, if I search for an issue I'm having I rarely find a 'we're aware of it and are looking at fixing it' post, usually I find a looooong thread with people experiencing the same issue and patiently (and granted, impatiently) waiting for a response. It's more disheartening when I find/post a thread about an issue I'm having only to be told it's been happening for a few seasons, it's the things like that that I believe should be top of the bugzilla post, either marked with a 'no fix' 'fix coming to tribble for testing' fix coming to holodeck' or 'no fix yet' attached, heck even a 'we're not planning on fixing this because of the problems it would cause elsewhere' would satisfy me.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
I've been regularly complaining about the massive built up of bugs since S6 now, they fix only a small portion of what comes out from updates and leave a giant mess in the game. Having to explain why things are so bugged and don't work to new players generally results in new players going, cya..
Its so bad that I'd say cryptic needs to assign one person to work on and maintain an official game play bug list and stay on top of it. The person needs to do nothing but bugs (and poke the right people to fix them) and not get distracted by content pushes. Honestly most of the stuff has simply not been fixed or looked into, it shouldn't be too tough to get a huge chunk solved.
The only thing which matters is the customers buying stuff, anything else is secondary. There is no interest in user retention (Gekos own words in the latest podcast). If it doesn't make money it isn't on the "Schedule" (TM).
Hey, aexreal. Can you provide a link to the podcast?
First page someone asked about engineer reports. Those were removed for the state of the game blogs due to the engineering report had so many things listed that were coming soon, coming later, coming tomorrow, etc etc etc. There was no actual "ETA's" on them for the most part and schedules change so it did more harm than good.
As for taking time to squash ALL the bugs? It's 100% impossible. MMO's tend to ALWAYS have bugs because of balancing, code being added that conflicts with another piece of code unintentionally, code works till thousands use it then it goes belly up etc. There can never be a 100% bug free mmo except those that are dead. Then they're bug free because you can't play them anymore :P
The complexity of bugs in a game with millions of lines of code is insane. Some bug fixes are pretty simple to squash, some that even LOOK simple to the player may be insanely hard to fix so it's pushed as long as it's not causing extreme game play issues. And some are so small but take a bit to recode that for the time being, leaving it alone to tackle bigger issues is more important.
Ultimately sure, from some players perspective they aren't fixing squat (or fixing very little). From those that know how much of a pain in the toosh bug hunting and squashing can be in an MMO environment they get that sometimes bugs can be a pain and are more lenient in letting small ones that are easily avoidable go by. For a bit anyways
As for a public bug tracker? I'd actually be okay with it but you'd need mods just to make sure there isn't repeats upon repeats upon repeats. And no exploits posted for obvious reasons
But to have as many bugs as STO does, doesn't that mean that the coding has been rushed or not done properly in the first place?
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
They seem pretty good about fixing game-breaking bugs, but the small and medium problems are just ignored and left to rot and everywhere you look there is more than one bug. Look at all the bugs that are being fixed as part of the carrier UI, probably 30 have been documented, another 30 that were forgot to mention, in one subsystem.
And not only bugs, a lot of this stuff is just incomplete work from abandoned projects. A bunch of major systems in STO are simply unfinished and it makes it very hard to get full enjoyment out of it. PVP case in point.
As to the OP, I dont know how much of this is from chasing the next project/sale or whatever, but it is pretty clear that they are rushing stuff out before its done (LOR rollout anyone?) and then just kind of moving on to the next thing.
They seem pretty good about fixing game-breaking bugs, but the small and medium problems are just ignored and left to rot and everywhere you look there is more than one bug. Look at all the bugs that are being fixed as part of the carrier UI, probably 30 have been documented, another 30 that were forgot to mention, in one subsystem.
And not only bugs, a lot of this stuff is just incomplete work from abandoned projects. A bunch of major systems in STO are simply unfinished and it makes it very hard to get full enjoyment out of it. PVP case in point.
As to the OP, I dont know how much of this is from chasing the next project/sale or whatever, but it is pretty clear that they are rushing stuff out before its done (LOR rollout anyone?) and then just kind of moving on to the next thing.
The carrier ui is brand-spanking-new. of course they're going to fix it immediately, it's part of the 'attract-new-players-to-the-game' content I was talking about a few pages back.
Well, I understand what you are trying to say, but the problem is that they do NOT fix any bugs.
The only bugs that go fixed ASAP are bugs that would potentially help other players, and not in an unbalancing way. And with every new patch, comes new and fresh bugs and broken stuff piled on the existing bugs that have and will never be fixed. It is essentially a house of cards. It is going to collapse.
Never have played such a bug riddled MMO before, and ive played many. Unfortunately, it is the only Trek MMO around, so I do not have much of a choice
If your talking about the Nukara tribble emergency fix the issue was not that it was giving Fleet marks every 6 seconds. the issue was with the season 5 Radan tribble......
so you if you had one of these you could get 5 unrefined dilithium every 6 seconds, 50 dilith a min, 3000 dilith in an hour, but you get the point I would call that a game breaking bug worse case secenario would have been if a lot of people who had that tribble had found out about it the dilithium market would have crashed.
There's no guarantee new players will spend money either. Some in this thread have mentioned they're put off toward buying anything due to the numerous bugs. New players could very well take the same stance.
TBH, it shouldn't be a shock to anyone that companies like PWE are favoring short term profit over long term. MMOs are a finicky market and games may or may not be around long enough to recoup the initial development costs.
Tho true the new players will likely spend more money on future purchases than a player whose been playing since launch and already has bought most of the items in the store. Also a new player is less likely to notice the lack of star cluster daily missions that a seasoned KDF player has been playing for years, that the newest season has bugged and made unavailable, and therefore quits the game.
But still the shineys get attention while gamebreakers like the launcher window opening up miles off the players desktop get almost no attention by the devs.
I agree with everyone on this thread the bug need to be fixed ASAP.
However this is just like every other MMO ive encountered its a money grab and they are more concerned about the short term profit then a long term cash flow.
So it does not surprise me that cryptic is not investing time or a little cash on fixing the issues within the game but more concerned with the next lock box or shiny for us to buy.
In the end this game will slowly decay and die not because of player interest as someone said this is star trek , however it will decay and die because cryptic would not fix the bugs and issues that make the game unplayable (Hive elite).
If its not concerning the bottomline which is the bottom dollar then i doubt they will do anything about and i dont think players would boycott the game so that the message of please fix the game for us would be sent to cryptics and PWEs' wallets.
Anyways its all about the bottomline and how much cash they can fleece from the player base as a whole.
I start playing the game and paying it every month.....
Then it went free to play....
I keep paying the game every month....
Then some updates came.....
I asked for help.....
It did not came, where in fact came in a form of "copy+paste".... very unprofessional....
Then more bugs come....
I stop paying the game......
Now I play for free......
More bugs coming.....
Soon I stop playing even if they pay me to play.....
And that my trek friends it is the harsh cold true....
What's the worst in all this? I may have to stop playing a game that I really love and care about.
Well at least I always have EVE online, at least there, I am respected by the company.
Can I have your stuff when "soon" arrives?
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Absolutely! I'll even give you the lion's share, as I have too much stuff already!
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
The old well coding is hard so they have no responsibility card is mute.
If you were a car developer and people were burning inside your flawed design, could you just come out and say "well it's complex work".
Or a doctor treating patients or a food company making people sick? Well it's really hard to do...
If you aren't able to do the work you are getting paid for, find something else to do.
That aside you certainly get the feeling the problem is what they decide to not work on.
In addition to bad decision making.
They could have unlocked all reptuations and fleet stores and what not on tribble way back.
Instead people had to play up to those levels live and THEN file a report for the waiting to start.
With a little smarter plays those bugs would have been gone prior to the release and not sitting there for 8 months.
It seems like if we weren't raising complaints over bugs they'd totally ignore them - unless it gives the players an advantage or it's a newly released c-store item with a bug.
The only thing which matters is the customers buying stuff, anything else is secondary. There is no interest in user retention (Gekos own words in the latest podcast). If it doesn't make money it isn't on the "Schedule" (TM).
And I'm going to suggest -- again -- that Cryptic give us an occasional opportunity to "Ask Cryptic QA".
There is a perception that Cryptic QA is bad, not doing their jobs, etc and I think hearing from THAT group would be helpful to understand what they do, how they do it, and even what kind of volume they're dealing with.
We get to hear from Dan Stahl and Brandon, we hear from artists and systems relatively often... as far as I know we don't really hear much from core programmers, UI programmers, QA, and some of the other less glamorous parts of game development at Cryptic.
Heck, let's even hear from the Marketing types so we get more insight into how those decisions come into play.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
I get the feeling that the DEVs at Cryptic have their hands tied to some degree, perhaps a lot.
Before PWE involvement the forums were far more active with DEV responses, as soon as PWE arrived the DEVs responses declined noticeably. I think it is clear that the DEVs headed by Dan Stahl are clearly fans of Star Trek and of the genre, you only have to look at videos of the inside of their office to see all the Trek memorabilia scattered around.
To me they seem to be a very talented bunch of Trekies with a penchant for MMOs that truly love what they are doing, but they have responsibilities to their families more than to their customers as it should be. This means that they tow the line, they satisfy sales targets before they satisfy their own game wish list.
In order to grow sales they have to make the product look more appealing, this they do well with numerous blogs, facebook posts, advertising and lots of shiny new stuff for us to buy being rolled out on a weekly to monthly basis.
Fixing broken things is only a priority when it endangers the ongoing success of the game. Sales targets are monthly targets, they do not disappear once achieved, if anything they increase with each quarter or season. The only way to maintain the health of the game is to strike a balance between sales and maintenance/QA. It is on this latter point that many of us feel they have failed to some degree.
As I said in my OP, the company managers and directors need to have the balls to stand up to the parent company and demand they are given the time to add the necessary polish to the game in order to keep the existing customers happy as well as attract and retain new customers.
I find it interesting that the original title of my OP which was "PWE Sacrificing Gameplay for Profit" has been edited to remove the words PWE. This shows a real fear of rocking the boat and upsetting the paymasters, and perhaps proves my point that the board will not stand up to PWE for fear of reprisals.
I disagree with your entire stance here, as I believe it functions under a major misconception. PWE gives STO a budget - as they give all of Cryptic's games and teams, as well as all their other games and teams, a budget - and tells them to make money using the FTP system.
At that point it's Jack and Dan who decide which sections of STO get the most budget. X amount is budgeted to making more Lockboxes and events, Y amount goes to making more C-Store stuff, Z amount goes to making new missions, etc. It's Dan who decides if the game needs more ship artists, environment artists, writers, or STO QA members. Dan dictates the priorities of the team working for him.
Stop trying to blame PW for everything you don't like. The buck stops with Dan. He's the man who decides where the money goes. He's the man who decides if more money is going to QA or C-Store. Dan pushes for more ships, and more events, and the like. If things aren't getting done on the back end it's because Dan isn't allocating the resources to get them done. There's no doubt that Dan wants STO to make the most money it can - his year-end bonus is probably based on how well his STO division did in the year, just like many other executives in all corporate industries.
STO wasn't some garden of delight pre PW nor is it some weed-filled mess now. That's just the common illusion people have when they start thinking about the "good all days" of anything. Let's keep it all in perspective here. STO was converting to FTP before PW purchased them. Under Atari we went a year with virtually no Dev interaction, no support, and nothing but Dan making forum promises he knew he couldn't keep while the team secretly converted STO to FTP.
And Devs certainly aren't told to not post here by PW. The only difference between now and then is that in the past Cryptic had several more extroverted Devs who didn't mind getting dirty. Heretic and Logan where happy to talk about what they were doing, and Gozer was willing to argue with anyone on the forum about anything. The only old Dev who doesn't spend much time here any more is Dan.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
This is an excellent idea. Why not have a blog from each department head once a month. Would take them, what, 30 min to write, it doesn't have to be a wall of text just bullet points itemising the kind of work they are doing. I am sure it would be an extremely popular addition to the website and would alleviate much of the criticism that the DEVs often unfairly receive.
The downside to this is twofold:
A) 30 minutes to write something and get it on the website is a very liberal estimate. It would take more time to write even something small.
The uproar when something someone is working on doesn't make the cut or is generally disliked by the masses without getting all the details
Transparency is good to a point but too much of it works against you as a developer.
The downside to an "Ask QA" is that somebody's been pulled off actual testing of continuous development to interact with the players a little...
And TBH, most players only care about QA when something's broken.
Still, I can see the benefit of talking about the QA process at Cryptic. Anything that fights the perception that QA doesn't know what it's doing or that they're focused on the wrong priorities is a good thing, and it would also open opportunities for suggestions.
I think we really need good reasons to feel optimistic about QA, rather than pessimistic.
I'm not actually suggesting that QA doesn't know what they're doing or that they are working on the wrong things. I'm suggesting that we the players have little or no idea and because of that there's no check on negative speculations.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
Comments
Well in my experience it's the opposite for every "Make new ships!" or "Content is boring, add more content!" posts there are far more "Fix bugs!" posts, especially recently. I said it in my original post, I love this game, I wouldn't play it if I didn't but there is room for improvement, there always will be my suggestion would be an aforementioned bugzilla report and work on existing problems in game before introducing the new content.
I understand that not all the bugs will be fixable but easy to find information on the matter is not at hand, if I search for an issue I'm having I rarely find a 'we're aware of it and are looking at fixing it' post, usually I find a looooong thread with people experiencing the same issue and patiently (and granted, impatiently) waiting for a response. It's more disheartening when I find/post a thread about an issue I'm having only to be told it's been happening for a few seasons, it's the things like that that I believe should be top of the bugzilla post, either marked with a 'no fix' 'fix coming to tribble for testing' fix coming to holodeck' or 'no fix yet' attached, heck even a 'we're not planning on fixing this because of the problems it would cause elsewhere' would satisfy me.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
Its so bad that I'd say cryptic needs to assign one person to work on and maintain an official game play bug list and stay on top of it. The person needs to do nothing but bugs (and poke the right people to fix them) and not get distracted by content pushes. Honestly most of the stuff has simply not been fixed or looked into, it shouldn't be too tough to get a huge chunk solved.
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Nothing to do anymore.
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Hey, aexreal. Can you provide a link to the podcast?
But to have as many bugs as STO does, doesn't that mean that the coding has been rushed or not done properly in the first place?
And not only bugs, a lot of this stuff is just incomplete work from abandoned projects. A bunch of major systems in STO are simply unfinished and it makes it very hard to get full enjoyment out of it. PVP case in point.
As to the OP, I dont know how much of this is from chasing the next project/sale or whatever, but it is pretty clear that they are rushing stuff out before its done (LOR rollout anyone?) and then just kind of moving on to the next thing.
The carrier ui is brand-spanking-new. of course they're going to fix it immediately, it's part of the 'attract-new-players-to-the-game' content I was talking about a few pages back.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
If your talking about the Nukara tribble emergency fix the issue was not that it was giving Fleet marks every 6 seconds. the issue was with the season 5 Radan tribble......
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Radan_Tribble
so you if you had one of these you could get 5 unrefined dilithium every 6 seconds, 50 dilith a min, 3000 dilith in an hour, but you get the point I would call that a game breaking bug worse case secenario would have been if a lot of people who had that tribble had found out about it the dilithium market would have crashed.
Tho true the new players will likely spend more money on future purchases than a player whose been playing since launch and already has bought most of the items in the store. Also a new player is less likely to notice the lack of star cluster daily missions that a seasoned KDF player has been playing for years, that the newest season has bugged and made unavailable, and therefore quits the game.
But still the shineys get attention while gamebreakers like the launcher window opening up miles off the players desktop get almost no attention by the devs.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
However this is just like every other MMO ive encountered its a money grab and they are more concerned about the short term profit then a long term cash flow.
So it does not surprise me that cryptic is not investing time or a little cash on fixing the issues within the game but more concerned with the next lock box or shiny for us to buy.
In the end this game will slowly decay and die not because of player interest as someone said this is star trek , however it will decay and die because cryptic would not fix the bugs and issues that make the game unplayable (Hive elite).
If its not concerning the bottomline which is the bottom dollar then i doubt they will do anything about and i dont think players would boycott the game so that the message of please fix the game for us would be sent to cryptics and PWEs' wallets.
Anyways its all about the bottomline and how much cash they can fleece from the player base as a whole.
Then it went free to play....
I keep paying the game every month....
Then some updates came.....
I asked for help.....
It did not came, where in fact came in a form of "copy+paste".... very unprofessional....
Then more bugs come....
I stop paying the game......
Now I play for free......
More bugs coming.....
Soon I stop playing even if they pay me to play.....
And that my trek friends it is the harsh cold true....
What's the worst in all this? I may have to stop playing a game that I really love and care about.
Well at least I always have EVE online, at least there, I am respected by the company.
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Can you split his stuff with me?
making a new shiny toy for profit is easy.
draw your conclusion here: __________
If you were a car developer and people were burning inside your flawed design, could you just come out and say "well it's complex work".
Or a doctor treating patients or a food company making people sick? Well it's really hard to do...
If you aren't able to do the work you are getting paid for, find something else to do.
That aside you certainly get the feeling the problem is what they decide to not work on.
In addition to bad decision making.
They could have unlocked all reptuations and fleet stores and what not on tribble way back.
Instead people had to play up to those levels live and THEN file a report for the waiting to start.
With a little smarter plays those bugs would have been gone prior to the release and not sitting there for 8 months.
It seems like if we weren't raising complaints over bugs they'd totally ignore them - unless it gives the players an advantage or it's a newly released c-store item with a bug.
Wich is pretty much what keeps the money flowing, fact is people
do have a choice , you just might not like the outcome.
Bollocks, like usual on this forum
There is a perception that Cryptic QA is bad, not doing their jobs, etc and I think hearing from THAT group would be helpful to understand what they do, how they do it, and even what kind of volume they're dealing with.
We get to hear from Dan Stahl and Brandon, we hear from artists and systems relatively often... as far as I know we don't really hear much from core programmers, UI programmers, QA, and some of the other less glamorous parts of game development at Cryptic.
Heck, let's even hear from the Marketing types so we get more insight into how those decisions come into play.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
At that point it's Jack and Dan who decide which sections of STO get the most budget. X amount is budgeted to making more Lockboxes and events, Y amount goes to making more C-Store stuff, Z amount goes to making new missions, etc. It's Dan who decides if the game needs more ship artists, environment artists, writers, or STO QA members. Dan dictates the priorities of the team working for him.
Stop trying to blame PW for everything you don't like. The buck stops with Dan. He's the man who decides where the money goes. He's the man who decides if more money is going to QA or C-Store. Dan pushes for more ships, and more events, and the like. If things aren't getting done on the back end it's because Dan isn't allocating the resources to get them done. There's no doubt that Dan wants STO to make the most money it can - his year-end bonus is probably based on how well his STO division did in the year, just like many other executives in all corporate industries.
STO wasn't some garden of delight pre PW nor is it some weed-filled mess now. That's just the common illusion people have when they start thinking about the "good all days" of anything. Let's keep it all in perspective here. STO was converting to FTP before PW purchased them. Under Atari we went a year with virtually no Dev interaction, no support, and nothing but Dan making forum promises he knew he couldn't keep while the team secretly converted STO to FTP.
And Devs certainly aren't told to not post here by PW. The only difference between now and then is that in the past Cryptic had several more extroverted Devs who didn't mind getting dirty. Heretic and Logan where happy to talk about what they were doing, and Gozer was willing to argue with anyone on the forum about anything. The only old Dev who doesn't spend much time here any more is Dan.
The downside to this is twofold:
A) 30 minutes to write something and get it on the website is a very liberal estimate. It would take more time to write even something small.
Transparency is good to a point but too much of it works against you as a developer.
And TBH, most players only care about QA when something's broken.
Still, I can see the benefit of talking about the QA process at Cryptic. Anything that fights the perception that QA doesn't know what it's doing or that they're focused on the wrong priorities is a good thing, and it would also open opportunities for suggestions.
I think we really need good reasons to feel optimistic about QA, rather than pessimistic.
I'm not actually suggesting that QA doesn't know what they're doing or that they are working on the wrong things. I'm suggesting that we the players have little or no idea and because of that there's no check on negative speculations.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek