It can't be bait-and-switch unless something is advertises and then changed. The ship was never advertised with a cloak.
As far as the BBB, they are a zero-power organization that hasn't had any influence in business since the early 80s - pre-internet era. The BBB is the same group that gave the Hamas, a terrorist organization, an A rating simply because their fees were paid - and that's really what the BBB is about: pay the dues and get the good ratings.
1.) Something doesn't have to be advertised to be bait. Once it became common knowledge via in-game chats and channels that the ship had the ability to cloak, that ability became bait for people to drop the huge amount of lobi on it.
2.) If you think the BBB is a zero-power organization, then you don't live in the same world I live in, because on the rare occasion when customer service and patience have failed and I've filed complaints, those complaints got action to be taken.
It's a poor state of affairs when people throw their money at something with no real idea of exactly what they're buying.
I can't imagine buying ANYTHING without being absolutely certain that I know what I am buying first.
When a fleet mate flys STF with says hey watch this and cloaks you can pretty well assume thats working as intended so you spend somedollars open a few more boxs than you wanted and you get one 2weeks later they take your cloak and tell you tough titties was never supposed to have one........and don't even get me started on the console nerf to please the 30-40 guys who still pvp in this game
When a fleet mate flys STF with says hey watch this and cloaks you can pretty well assume thats working as intended so you spend somedollars open a few more boxs than you wanted and you get one 2weeks later they take your cloak and tell you tough titties was never supposed to have one........and don't even get me started on the console nerf to please the 30-40 guys who still pvp in this game
Your problem is that you used the word ASSUME in your post.
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.
Bait and Switch only applies if they were advertising it was something and gave a completely different and inferior product. For example, selling an iPhone 4 and giving an iPhone 2. I guess every Nerf related to lockbox items would be called a Bait-and-Switch in your opinion
Yeah thats a fair quote but how would you feel if your mate buys an Iphone 2 gets and Iphone 4 when he opens the box so you go to the store and buy one yourself 2 weeks later they sneak in in the night and put a I phone 2 under your pillow and take a dump on your chest does that sound anymore fair .....
it's called Bait-and-Switch, and it's potentially grounds for at least a BBB complaint if not more. It's irrelevant that it was "unintended" to the BBB. The fact that consumers can only get Lobi by opening lock boxes which requires keys which cost money and the fact that some consumers were directly influenced to purchase this item using currency which is tied to real world money because of something it had which is now being removed ... the BBB will take those complaints and they will dock PWE/Cryptic's business rating.
Not that it could really be rated any lower than it already is, mind you.
Also LoL at all the Cryptic Fanboys to the rescue in this thread. It's funny to see people who have their head up "BranFlakes" TRIBBLE. The guy spent a couple years writing fluff PR pieces to lure traffic @massively to STO and got himself a nice cushy job out of it. He's Stahl's version of the mouth of Sauron.
Well, go on....make your complaint - and nothing changes. If only I had a dollar for every time people threatened class actions and BBB complaints....
Just a note but this is a mmo, which of course means they can change things to add balance. This isn't really the case, as it was a accident it had it in the first place but even if it was suppose to have it, they have a right to remove it for balance. It's still really a great ship so I do not see the reason to be upset about this change. I would rather see this then changing the boff slots or the stats of the ship.
1.) Something doesn't have to be advertised to be bait. Once it became common knowledge via in-game chats and channels that the ship had the ability to cloak, that ability became bait for people to drop the huge amount of lobi on it.
2.) If you think the BBB is a zero-power organization, then you don't live in the same world I live in, because on the rare occasion when customer service and patience have failed and I've filed complaints, those complaints got action to be taken.
I'll bite.
However, please note the source of your "bait" claim, your fellow players through various communications channels.
AKA "Word of mouth" advertising.
At this point, for the BBB to be able to take action, you'd have to prove to the BBB's satisfaction that the Monbosh BB was intentionally released with a cloak, that Cryptic intentionally failed to advertise, and Cryptic fully expected that the "word of mouth" advertising would be enough to meet their hidden agenda/goal.
HOWEVER the fact that a forum post (perhaps multiple posts) was made on the day of release stating that said "feature" was an error, and will be rectified at the earliest "scheduled" correction time, aka "next patch" would (IMO most likely) indicate to the BBB that Cryptic is either very very good at covering it's tracks, or that it actually is an honest mistake and that Cryptic perhaps erred in not holding an hour+ unscheduled downtime in the middle of "player prime time" - thursday is the start to quite a few people's weekend - just to remove the cloak for a ship...
Remember this next lockbox release when the game is pulled down for a maintenance because of the expected QA issue that comes with every new ship release...
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
I really enjoy it when they take it to the T.V. court shows and make fools of themselves on national television. :P
The last time I filed a BBB complaint was march 28th of this year. At that time, MLB 2K12 had not been working for 28 days and all support e-mails, phone calls and website requests had gone unanswered. I filed the complaint and 6 hours later I had an e-mail from @Ronnie2k apologizing for the problem and by way of apology asking if they could gift me a steam code for another game published by 2K for while it was not working.
The only game I didn't have already from them on steam was Bioshock Infinite, which had just released, and was double the cost of what MLB 2K12 had been at release, and I told him as much and figured the offer would certainly not cover that, but a few minutes later I had a response with a code not only for Bioshock Infinite but also the season pass for all DLC.
The previous time I used the BBB was in 2011 when someone hijacked my xbox live account and spent my 12000 xbox live points that I had sitting around for whenever I felt like buying something. After initial contact several times with Microsoft support resulted in them claiming the points were accessed via my xbox from my ip address and spent by me, I contacted the BBB. Lo and behold a "supervisor" took a second look and whoops, those points were spent from some IP address in Eastern Europe and quite obviously not by me since my xbox had never downloaded or accessed any of the things I had supposedly purchased. Very sorry about that sir and can we give you a bonus 1 year gold subscription to make up for this mistake?
Consumer advocacy avenues exist for a reason. When consumers have legitimate issues which companies fail to address, they are the recourse that consumers have prior to legal action. Generally a small claims court filing is very cheap and will go unanswered (so you win by default) because it costs a company more to send a lawyer to appear than to simply pay whatever small amount you're after in compensation.
As far as it goes with this ship, there are probably a non-trivial number of people who decided to buy it after learning from other people in game that it had a cloak. Cryptic did not notify anyone in game or via the launcher that this was unintended, and so the loss of the cloak is going to come as a surprise and a disappointment to many of those people.
The right thing for them to do is put an NPC in a couple locations where people can go hand that ship back in and get their lobi crystals back. They lose the ship (and whatever associated gadgets it came with) and get their crystals back to use on whatever they like. This is what a company that actually cares about its customers and reputation would do.
Unfortunately, Cryptic seems to be more of a company that wants to push the sale of lockbox keys and so they will be quite happy to see thousands of keys worth of lobi crystals dumped into ships which are bound and quite happy that the people who have the kind of money to amass 800 lobi crystals in the first place are probably likely to just dump some more money into zen and buy more keys and keep on feeding their profit margin. Doing the right thing probably doesn't occur to a company which has as its core business model a predatory lottery system.
A single developer could create this npc during the current downtime and have it ready for QA testing to go live in the next patch, assuming Cryptic has proper dev tools.
The fanboys will all come in with various diatribes that amount to Caveat Emptor, and they are of course correct that the buyer should beware and do his due dilligence, but the sad truth is that there are multitudes of undocumented "features" in this game.
For example, when you create a Romulan character and play up to the point where you must choose Federation or KDF, you are told that you will be able to fly both Warbirds AND the career type ships for the faction you choose. You don't find out that you cannot fly the T5 or Fleet variants of that faction until you get there.
I'm sure any of us who have played since before launch could sit here all day listing various things which exist in game that are not documented or advertised, and also things which no longer exist which once did.
In this case ... people who dropped 800 lobi on this ship specifically because it had the cloak probably have too much lobi on their hands, and it really is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things ... but still the right thing to do would be to allow them to turn the ship back in for a refund with this retroactive removal. It's impossible to know what motivated someone's purchase, but there was lots of excited talk in various in game channels about the cloak, so it's a safe bet that it's a non-trivial number of people.
cyrptic should man up and offer a refund to everyone who spent lobi on the ship
that woud be the fair and honest thing to do
If the ship was not soposed to have a cloak it should not have had one on it in the first place
Thats cryptics fault alone for not properly testing there product
customers should not have features on products bought, removed once purchased without a fair offer of compensation
No I didnt buy one its too ulgy
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
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
The main thing your failing to understand is that sometimes things do and need to change. If a ship was put out that was just way over powered compared to all the other ships in game they would need to change it or it would create major problems. That's the nature of playing mmo's, sometimes things change.
I have one of these ships myself and while it was nice having the cloak, I understand it wasn't suppose to be there and now it's being removed. It has a excellent turn rate and good boff stations. I am going to keep using it and enjoying the ship.
I am not a Cryptic Fanboy, I just have played other mmo's and understand that things do and well change.
As far as it goes with this ship, there are probably a non-trivial number of people who decided to buy it after learning from other people in game that it had a cloak.Cryptic cannot control what players talk about - no matter what they did or did not do, those players would have talked about the cloak either way, Cryptic DID NOT ADVERTISE A CLOAKCryptic did not notify anyone in game or via the launcher that this was unintended,They told people on their forums - IT IS THE PLAYERS RESPONSIBILITY TO CHECK THEM FOR THE LATEST INFORMATION and so the loss of the cloak is going to come as a surprise and a disappointment to many of those people.THis is cryptics problem why??? They advertised the ship with the words "SUBJECT TO CHANGE" attached to the blog, they gave out updated information on the forums - Bran said FIVE TIMES to my reckoning that the ship should not have a cloak - this was just in 1 thread. Other forum users quoted him in other threads.
The right thing for them to do isignore you all - it is not Cryptics fault players are too LAZY to keep up to date on the current information, or would rather listen to in game gossip / misinformation . I spend less than 10 minutes most days on here, keeping up to date - IT'S NOT HARD.put an NPC in a couple locations where people can go hand that ship back in and get their lobi crystals back. They lose the ship (and whatever associated gadgets it came with) and get their crystals back to use on whatever they like. This is what a company that actually cares about its customers and reputation would do.
Unfortunately, Cryptic seems to be more of a company that wants to push the sale of lockbox keys and so they will be quite happy to see thousands of keys worth of lobi crystals dumped into ships which are bound and quite happy that the people who have the kind of money to amass 800 lobi crystals in the first place are probably likely to just dump some more money into zen and buy more keys and keep on feeding their profit margin. Doing the right thing probably doesn't occur to a company which has as its core business model a predatory lottery system.
A single developer could create this npc during the current downtime and have it ready for QA testing to go live in the next patch, Really?? So you have seen the game code, you've looked at all the assets, you know EXACTLY what every line of code does and how it will have a knock on effect to the rest of the game. Well, as you are so smart and can out shine any Cryptic employee why don't you knock out the required patch and send it to them for testing !?assuming Cryptic has proper dev tools.
The fanboys will all come in with various diatribes that amount to Caveat Emptor, and they are of course correct that the buyer should beware and do his due dilligence, but the sad truth is that there are multitudes of undocumented "features" in this game.
For example, when you create a Romulan character and play up to the point where you must choose Federation or KDF, you are told that you will be able to fly both Warbirds AND the career type ships for the faction you choose. You don't find out that you cannot fly the T5 or Fleet variants of that faction until you get there.
I'm sure any of us who have played since before launch could sit here all day listing various things which exist in game that are not documented or advertised, and also things which no longer exist which once did.
In this case ... people who dropped 800 lobi on this ship specifically because it had the cloak probably have too much lobi on their hands, and it really is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things ... but still the right thing to do would be to allow them to turn the ship back in for a refund with this retroactive removal. It's impossible to know what motivated someone's purchase, but there was lots of excited talk in various in game channels about the cloak, so it's a safe bet that it's a non-trivial number of people.
My answers are in green after the red section it applies to.
Wow - could you please tell me how it feels to have NEVER made a mistake in your life? I don't know what that feels like.
:rolleyes:
He's not a company and his mistakes didn't cost everyone who dumped 800 lobi onto this ship 154 lockbox keys (using 5.2 lobi per lockbox as my average, which is the number I've seen others use on the forum here. Feel free to assume the real average is 15 crystals per box (ROFL if you actually do) and that it only took 50 keys) to the tune of $1 - $1.25 a pop.
Most of the people who bought the ship because they found out it had a cloak will now be out anywhere from $50 - $150 depending on their "luck" with the lockbox lottery.
So you can make snarky quotes but the guy you are aiming that snarky quote at is right. The proper thing to do is have the lobi folks buy this ship back, even if only for a limited time. When you make a "mistake" that can cost someone the guaranteed reward part of $150 spent on the lockbox lottery, you ought to do something to make it right.
The thing is though they should still sell a version that has the cloak, in fact any ship should be able to have a cloak. This was totally proven in the classic episode where they stole the Romulan cloak and then at the end got away from the Romulan's by using the cloak.
If you want to pay for it, you should be able to cloak. That way no one can complain all they can do is pull out their credit card and buy it....
Wow - could you please tell me how it feels to have NEVER made a mistake in your life? I don't know what that feels like.
:rolleyes:
If you go to a steakhouse and order a Rare steak and it comes out very well done are you going to eat it or ask for what you ordered ?
Roll's eye's back at you
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
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
My answers are in green after the red section it applies to.
I've worked in development and in game development. A remarkable amount of stuff can be accomplished with proper dev tools, and it seems fairly logical that Cryptic has a dev tool for setting up NPCs as shops, because it wouldn't make sense for each one to be hand coded, ergo if I had access to their dev tools, yes I could and would gladly do the work for them.
They're not likely to give me access to their in house dev tools unless they hire me though, and since I'm not going to go the Branflakes route of writing propaganda on Massively for them for a couple years and since I'm already employed elsewhere in development, I think that possibility is probably not likely.
Whilst I do think this is a trivial matter and hardly worth a post I must say that your post above is very well written and informative. Having read it I find myself agreeing with you that the right thing to do is to offer a refund to those that feel short changed in a similar way they did for the Andorian Phasers.
Thank you for the compliment. You manged to say precisely what I was trying to much more succinctly.
If you go to a steakhouse and order a Rare steak and it comes out very well done are you going to eat it or ask for what you ordered ?
Roll's eye's back at you
If said Steakhouse had "Steak order SUBJECT TO CHANGE" at the end of the menu, I'd have to eat what they brought out - and that would be my own stupid fault for buying something that is "SUBJECT TO CHANGE".
But as food places don't have that, it really is a stupid way to get your point over.
Oh and by the way - this post is SUBJECT TO CHANGE :P
The thing is though they should still sell a version that has the cloak, in fact any ship should be able to have a cloak. This was totally proven in the classic episode where they stole the Romulan cloak and then at the end got away from the Romulan's by using the cloak.
If you want to pay for it, you should be able to cloak. That way no one can complain all they can do is pull out their credit card and buy it....
Whoah! A canon argument. It's getting serious up in here.
Wow, why the heck are people complaining about the Monbosh having the cloak it was never meant to have, removed?
Sorry guys, but at no point was this thing advertised as supposed to be having a cloaking device. While it may have been taken as a "happy mistake", it's still that: a mistake.
Wow, why the heck are people complaining about the Monbosh having the cloak it was never meant to have, removed?
Sorry guys, but at no point was this thing advertised as supposed to be having a cloaking device. While it may have been taken as a "happy mistake", it's still that: a mistake.
Wow, why the heck are people complaining about the Monbosh having the cloak it was never meant to have, removed?
Sorry guys, but at no point was this thing advertised as supposed to be having a cloaking device. While it may have been taken as a "happy mistake", it's still that: a mistake.
Okay ... so it was a mistake. What's wrong with refunding the people who bought it because it could cloak their 800 lobi? Cryptic long since already had the money paid out for the zen that bought those keys that opened the lockboxes that had the lobi in it ... so they lose nothing by doing right by their players.
No displays of common sense permitted here I'm afraid - the Great Entitled have spoken and neither Crypric nor any of it's employees are therefore permitted to make a mistake.
And how very quickly those who are complaining forget that this time last week we were receiving FREE ships/costumes from this game.
Stupid self-entitlement 'something for nothing' culture! :mad:
What do "free" underselling and rarely used ships have to do with people dropping 800 lobi for a ship because they found out it had a cloak?
Oh ... that's right. Nothing.
It's a trivial matter to just have the lobi vendors refund that particular ship for X time and let those people who spent a bunch on lockbox keys use their lobi in some way that makes them happy. It is, in fact, in Cryptic's best interests to do so since it costs somewhere between $50-$150 in master keys to amass 800 lobi crystals, depending on your particular "luck", and people spending that kind of money on a video game for pixels are the customers you want to keep happy and spending more.
But go ahead and keep on saying that they should be left unhappy and stuck with something they no longer want. It's not like future development of content depends on revenues or anything.
If said Steakhouse had "Steak order SUBJECT TO CHANGE" at the end of the menu, I'd have to eat what they brought out - and that would be my own stupid fault for buying something that is "SUBJECT TO CHANGE".
But as food places don't have that, it really is a stupid way to get your point over.
Oh and by the way - this post is SUBJECT TO CHANGE :P
I understand your point
But its a terrible buisness pratice that only makes customers angry and close there wallets in the future and worse spread bad reccomendations to future customers which a angry customer WILL do
Which is bad for the game in the long run
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
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
it's called Bait-and-Switch, and it's potentially grounds for at least a BBB complaint if not more. It's irrelevant that it was "unintended" to the BBB. The fact that consumers can only get Lobi by opening lock boxes which requires keys which cost money and the fact that some consumers were directly influenced to purchase this item using currency which is tied to real world money because of something it had which is now being removed ... the BBB will take those complaints and they will dock PWE/Cryptic's business rating.
Not that it could really be rated any lower than it already is, mind you.
Also LoL at all the Cryptic Fanboys to the rescue in this thread. It's funny to see people who have their head up "BranFlakes" TRIBBLE. The guy spent a couple years writing fluff PR pieces to lure traffic @massively to STO and got himself a nice cushy job out of it. He's Stahl's version of the mouth of Sauron.
This is just laugh-out-loud funny. The BBB is an irrelevant self-promoting organization that is.... well, irrelevant. I can't stress that point enough.
In this case, the buyer didn't do his homework. Just as there is corporate responsibility, there is also consumer responsibility. In this case the consumer failed to exercise theirs.
Cryptic never advertised a cloak, so there is no bait, therefore no bait and switch.
__________________________________
STO Forum member since before February 2010. STO Academy's excellent skill planner here: Link I actually avoid success entirely. It doesn't get me what I want, and the consequences for failure are slim. -- markhawman
Okay ... so it was a mistake. What's wrong with refunding the people who bought it because it could cloak their 800 lobi? Cryptic long since already had the money paid out for the zen that bought those keys that opened the lockboxes that had the lobi in it ... so they lose nothing by doing right by their players.
Your argument is flawed, because it's hinging on the notion that the cloak was intended.
It was not.
As such, they are in fact "doing right by their players" by fixing their mistake and removing the cloak.
Sorry, but there is no way anyone complaining about wanting to keep the cloak is not gonna come off as kind of whiney about this.
Like I said, at no point was this thing advertised as having a cloaking device. If that's why you bought it, tough cookies, dude. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. Now you can go back to having a well rounded battleship instead of a ship that was somewhat stronger that it was supposed to be thanks to a little mistake.
There is no "bait and switch" going on here. Whoever is using that term doesn't know what that phrase means and should go back to the books.
Okay ... so it was a mistake. What's wrong with refunding the people who bought it because it could cloak their 800 lobi? Cryptic long since already had the money paid out for the zen that bought those keys that opened the lockboxes that had the lobi in it ... so they lose nothing by doing right by their players.
so you bought the ship purely on other peoples word of mouth about the cloak.
would you have demanded a refund if you bought it then and it didnt have a cloak?
probably.
and their answer would be- "it didnt say it had it. your fault for buying it"
same thing applies here.
itd be like looking at a used car that says it has a factory radio, and when you look inside it has an awesome sound system so buy it instantly, then before getting it they uninstall the radio and put the factory radio back in.
What's wrong with refunding the people who bought it because it could cloak
I will tell you what is wrong with it, it would be rewarding people who are lazy and idle or just plain stupid.
Let me break this down for you, the time between the server coming up and the forum post about the cloak on it - fine, those who spent real money then, I feel sorry for, but once that forum post was up and Cryptic said it should not be on there - anyone who bought it then, was either too lazy or idle to check the current information and deserves what they got.
The people who fall under the "stupid" section are those who whine about ships being canged in general, as all ships, INCLUDING THIS ONE and a very simple message at the end of the Dev blog introducing it.... SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to throw real money at something that has not been play tested - you also deserve what you get.
I do not believe Cryptic should reward anyone who falls in to the above areas, it was sold under subject to change, it was never advertised as having a cloak - so if you bought it for the cloak, tough luck, you're a idiot. If you bought it on someone else's say so due to the cloak and never did you're own research, tough luck, you're a sheep following a idiot. And if you bought it the second it came out because you just have to have the newest, latest shiney over powered toy, tough luck it was subject to change.
If you start to compare a cloaking Galaxy-X to a current lockbox cruiser, I seriously question your understanding of game mechanics
The Gal-X isn't an up-to-date ship and it doesn't have the cloak. If you want a cloaking Galaxy-X, you need to pay 4.500 Zen and you basically get an 8-console cruiser, which effectively makes it a T3 ship with a bit more hull and one more weapon slot.
Let me just pull you off that high horse you are on. I never compared the Gal-X to a lockbox ship, I merely corrected the OP statement that it wasn't the only cloakable Fed cruiser.
I even forgot about the Adapted cruiser that someone else mentioned, so that is 2 other cruisers that Feds can use that have a cloak.
My Gal-X never cost me 4500zen, it was 2500 at the time, and still is afaik.
Comments
1.) Something doesn't have to be advertised to be bait. Once it became common knowledge via in-game chats and channels that the ship had the ability to cloak, that ability became bait for people to drop the huge amount of lobi on it.
2.) If you think the BBB is a zero-power organization, then you don't live in the same world I live in, because on the rare occasion when customer service and patience have failed and I've filed complaints, those complaints got action to be taken.
When a fleet mate flys STF with says hey watch this and cloaks you can pretty well assume thats working as intended so you spend somedollars open a few more boxs than you wanted and you get one 2weeks later they take your cloak and tell you tough titties was never supposed to have one........and don't even get me started on the console nerf to please the 30-40 guys who still pvp in this game
"Points to the Adapted Battlecruiser." Its a Cruiser, it has cloak, and has been out well before the Monbosh.
Yeah thats a fair quote but how would you feel if your mate buys an Iphone 2 gets and Iphone 4 when he opens the box so you go to the store and buy one yourself 2 weeks later they sneak in in the night and put a I phone 2 under your pillow and take a dump on your chest does that sound anymore fair .....
Well, go on....make your complaint - and nothing changes. If only I had a dollar for every time people threatened class actions and BBB complaints....
I had all my carriers nerfed so
But yeah cloaking does bring up the point if not all ships that can't cloak are obsolete now
I'll bite.
However, please note the source of your "bait" claim, your fellow players through various communications channels.
AKA "Word of mouth" advertising.
At this point, for the BBB to be able to take action, you'd have to prove to the BBB's satisfaction that the Monbosh BB was intentionally released with a cloak, that Cryptic intentionally failed to advertise, and Cryptic fully expected that the "word of mouth" advertising would be enough to meet their hidden agenda/goal.
HOWEVER the fact that a forum post (perhaps multiple posts) was made on the day of release stating that said "feature" was an error, and will be rectified at the earliest "scheduled" correction time, aka "next patch" would (IMO most likely) indicate to the BBB that Cryptic is either very very good at covering it's tracks, or that it actually is an honest mistake and that Cryptic perhaps erred in not holding an hour+ unscheduled downtime in the middle of "player prime time" - thursday is the start to quite a few people's weekend - just to remove the cloak for a ship...
Remember this next lockbox release when the game is pulled down for a maintenance because of the expected QA issue that comes with every new ship release...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
I didn't buy the ship so I don't have a personal dog in the fight, nor any complaint of my own to make.
The last time I filed a BBB complaint was march 28th of this year. At that time, MLB 2K12 had not been working for 28 days and all support e-mails, phone calls and website requests had gone unanswered. I filed the complaint and 6 hours later I had an e-mail from @Ronnie2k apologizing for the problem and by way of apology asking if they could gift me a steam code for another game published by 2K for while it was not working.
The only game I didn't have already from them on steam was Bioshock Infinite, which had just released, and was double the cost of what MLB 2K12 had been at release, and I told him as much and figured the offer would certainly not cover that, but a few minutes later I had a response with a code not only for Bioshock Infinite but also the season pass for all DLC.
The previous time I used the BBB was in 2011 when someone hijacked my xbox live account and spent my 12000 xbox live points that I had sitting around for whenever I felt like buying something. After initial contact several times with Microsoft support resulted in them claiming the points were accessed via my xbox from my ip address and spent by me, I contacted the BBB. Lo and behold a "supervisor" took a second look and whoops, those points were spent from some IP address in Eastern Europe and quite obviously not by me since my xbox had never downloaded or accessed any of the things I had supposedly purchased. Very sorry about that sir and can we give you a bonus 1 year gold subscription to make up for this mistake?
Consumer advocacy avenues exist for a reason. When consumers have legitimate issues which companies fail to address, they are the recourse that consumers have prior to legal action. Generally a small claims court filing is very cheap and will go unanswered (so you win by default) because it costs a company more to send a lawyer to appear than to simply pay whatever small amount you're after in compensation.
As far as it goes with this ship, there are probably a non-trivial number of people who decided to buy it after learning from other people in game that it had a cloak. Cryptic did not notify anyone in game or via the launcher that this was unintended, and so the loss of the cloak is going to come as a surprise and a disappointment to many of those people.
The right thing for them to do is put an NPC in a couple locations where people can go hand that ship back in and get their lobi crystals back. They lose the ship (and whatever associated gadgets it came with) and get their crystals back to use on whatever they like. This is what a company that actually cares about its customers and reputation would do.
Unfortunately, Cryptic seems to be more of a company that wants to push the sale of lockbox keys and so they will be quite happy to see thousands of keys worth of lobi crystals dumped into ships which are bound and quite happy that the people who have the kind of money to amass 800 lobi crystals in the first place are probably likely to just dump some more money into zen and buy more keys and keep on feeding their profit margin. Doing the right thing probably doesn't occur to a company which has as its core business model a predatory lottery system.
A single developer could create this npc during the current downtime and have it ready for QA testing to go live in the next patch, assuming Cryptic has proper dev tools.
The fanboys will all come in with various diatribes that amount to Caveat Emptor, and they are of course correct that the buyer should beware and do his due dilligence, but the sad truth is that there are multitudes of undocumented "features" in this game.
For example, when you create a Romulan character and play up to the point where you must choose Federation or KDF, you are told that you will be able to fly both Warbirds AND the career type ships for the faction you choose. You don't find out that you cannot fly the T5 or Fleet variants of that faction until you get there.
I'm sure any of us who have played since before launch could sit here all day listing various things which exist in game that are not documented or advertised, and also things which no longer exist which once did.
In this case ... people who dropped 800 lobi on this ship specifically because it had the cloak probably have too much lobi on their hands, and it really is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things ... but still the right thing to do would be to allow them to turn the ship back in for a refund with this retroactive removal. It's impossible to know what motivated someone's purchase, but there was lots of excited talk in various in game channels about the cloak, so it's a safe bet that it's a non-trivial number of people.
that woud be the fair and honest thing to do
If the ship was not soposed to have a cloak it should not have had one on it in the first place
Thats cryptics fault alone for not properly testing there product
customers should not have features on products bought, removed once purchased without a fair offer of compensation
No I didnt buy one its too ulgy
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
I have one of these ships myself and while it was nice having the cloak, I understand it wasn't suppose to be there and now it's being removed. It has a excellent turn rate and good boff stations. I am going to keep using it and enjoying the ship.
I am not a Cryptic Fanboy, I just have played other mmo's and understand that things do and well change.
My answers are in green after the red section it applies to.
He's not a company and his mistakes didn't cost everyone who dumped 800 lobi onto this ship 154 lockbox keys (using 5.2 lobi per lockbox as my average, which is the number I've seen others use on the forum here. Feel free to assume the real average is 15 crystals per box (ROFL if you actually do) and that it only took 50 keys) to the tune of $1 - $1.25 a pop.
Most of the people who bought the ship because they found out it had a cloak will now be out anywhere from $50 - $150 depending on their "luck" with the lockbox lottery.
So you can make snarky quotes but the guy you are aiming that snarky quote at is right. The proper thing to do is have the lobi folks buy this ship back, even if only for a limited time. When you make a "mistake" that can cost someone the guaranteed reward part of $150 spent on the lockbox lottery, you ought to do something to make it right.
If you want to pay for it, you should be able to cloak. That way no one can complain all they can do is pull out their credit card and buy it....
If you go to a steakhouse and order a Rare steak and it comes out very well done are you going to eat it or ask for what you ordered ?
Roll's eye's back at you
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
I've worked in development and in game development. A remarkable amount of stuff can be accomplished with proper dev tools, and it seems fairly logical that Cryptic has a dev tool for setting up NPCs as shops, because it wouldn't make sense for each one to be hand coded, ergo if I had access to their dev tools, yes I could and would gladly do the work for them.
They're not likely to give me access to their in house dev tools unless they hire me though, and since I'm not going to go the Branflakes route of writing propaganda on Massively for them for a couple years and since I'm already employed elsewhere in development, I think that possibility is probably not likely.
Thank you for the compliment. You manged to say precisely what I was trying to much more succinctly.
If said Steakhouse had "Steak order SUBJECT TO CHANGE" at the end of the menu, I'd have to eat what they brought out - and that would be my own stupid fault for buying something that is "SUBJECT TO CHANGE".
But as food places don't have that, it really is a stupid way to get your point over.
Oh and by the way - this post is SUBJECT TO CHANGE :P
Whoah! A canon argument. It's getting serious up in here.
Sorry guys, but at no point was this thing advertised as supposed to be having a cloaking device. While it may have been taken as a "happy mistake", it's still that: a mistake.
Their desire for an I win ship probably.
Okay ... so it was a mistake. What's wrong with refunding the people who bought it because it could cloak their 800 lobi? Cryptic long since already had the money paid out for the zen that bought those keys that opened the lockboxes that had the lobi in it ... so they lose nothing by doing right by their players.
What do "free" underselling and rarely used ships have to do with people dropping 800 lobi for a ship because they found out it had a cloak?
Oh ... that's right. Nothing.
It's a trivial matter to just have the lobi vendors refund that particular ship for X time and let those people who spent a bunch on lockbox keys use their lobi in some way that makes them happy. It is, in fact, in Cryptic's best interests to do so since it costs somewhere between $50-$150 in master keys to amass 800 lobi crystals, depending on your particular "luck", and people spending that kind of money on a video game for pixels are the customers you want to keep happy and spending more.
But go ahead and keep on saying that they should be left unhappy and stuck with something they no longer want. It's not like future development of content depends on revenues or anything.
I understand your point
But its a terrible buisness pratice that only makes customers angry and close there wallets in the future and worse spread bad reccomendations to future customers which a angry customer WILL do
Which is bad for the game in the long run
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
This is just laugh-out-loud funny. The BBB is an irrelevant self-promoting organization that is.... well, irrelevant. I can't stress that point enough.
In this case, the buyer didn't do his homework. Just as there is corporate responsibility, there is also consumer responsibility. In this case the consumer failed to exercise theirs.
Cryptic never advertised a cloak, so there is no bait, therefore no bait and switch.
STO Forum member since before February 2010.
STO Academy's excellent skill planner here: Link
I actually avoid success entirely. It doesn't get me what I want, and the consequences for failure are slim. -- markhawman
Your argument is flawed, because it's hinging on the notion that the cloak was intended.
It was not.
As such, they are in fact "doing right by their players" by fixing their mistake and removing the cloak.
Sorry, but there is no way anyone complaining about wanting to keep the cloak is not gonna come off as kind of whiney about this.
Like I said, at no point was this thing advertised as having a cloaking device. If that's why you bought it, tough cookies, dude. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. Now you can go back to having a well rounded battleship instead of a ship that was somewhat stronger that it was supposed to be thanks to a little mistake.
There is no "bait and switch" going on here. Whoever is using that term doesn't know what that phrase means and should go back to the books.
so you bought the ship purely on other peoples word of mouth about the cloak.
would you have demanded a refund if you bought it then and it didnt have a cloak?
probably.
and their answer would be- "it didnt say it had it. your fault for buying it"
same thing applies here.
itd be like looking at a used car that says it has a factory radio, and when you look inside it has an awesome sound system so buy it instantly, then before getting it they uninstall the radio and put the factory radio back in.
sold as advertised.
Do you even Science Bro?
I will tell you what is wrong with it, it would be rewarding people who are lazy and idle or just plain stupid.
Let me break this down for you, the time between the server coming up and the forum post about the cloak on it - fine, those who spent real money then, I feel sorry for, but once that forum post was up and Cryptic said it should not be on there - anyone who bought it then, was either too lazy or idle to check the current information and deserves what they got.
The people who fall under the "stupid" section are those who whine about ships being canged in general, as all ships, INCLUDING THIS ONE and a very simple message at the end of the Dev blog introducing it.... SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to throw real money at something that has not been play tested - you also deserve what you get.
I do not believe Cryptic should reward anyone who falls in to the above areas, it was sold under subject to change, it was never advertised as having a cloak - so if you bought it for the cloak, tough luck, you're a idiot. If you bought it on someone else's say so due to the cloak and never did you're own research, tough luck, you're a sheep following a idiot. And if you bought it the second it came out because you just have to have the newest, latest shiney over powered toy, tough luck it was subject to change.
Let me just pull you off that high horse you are on. I never compared the Gal-X to a lockbox ship, I merely corrected the OP statement that it wasn't the only cloakable Fed cruiser.
I even forgot about the Adapted cruiser that someone else mentioned, so that is 2 other cruisers that Feds can use that have a cloak.
My Gal-X never cost me 4500zen, it was 2500 at the time, and still is afaik.