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.
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.
You obviously didn't read my posts. I've seen many people claim that the BBB is corrupt and self-serving and irrelevant, and yet in the last couple years it has gotten Microsoft to refund back to me roughly $150 in stolen microsoft points plus give me a free year of xbox live gold and also got 2K to give me Bioshock infinite + season pass to make up for a game that costs 25% of bioshock infinite + season pass not working for a month ... a year after I bought it and had already played it 250 hours.
Seems to me like it's an organization which can and does help consumers. That has been my personal, albeit limited, experience with the organization. Perhaps Microsoft and 2K are just more consumer conscious than other companies.
And as I said earlier - perhaps I should be asking for a refund on the Elachi Escort I won, becuase it's supposed to be the 'grand prize' of the current lockbox, but it's inferior to the lobi store offerring.
They're taking the cloak off the lobi store offering, and it's debatable whether a non-battle cloak on a cruiser boat makes it better than a much more potent escort style ship in the first place.
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.
No, I didn't buy the ship. The last thing I bought on the Lobi store was the tal shiar battle cruiser which I sold and then bought the adapted destroyer I wanted and made 25mil ec profit on the deal.
Am I only allowed to have an opinion if I bought the terrible ship (the non-battle cloak doesn't help it much lol)?
I looked up the ship on this site and I also looked it up on STOWiki. On both the ship did not have a cloak. I was surprised to find it had one when I bought it and then found out it was a mistake and going to be removed. Everything in game is subject to change, they in no way are doing something wrong or ill willed towards the players with this. They are correcting a mistake and removing the cloak. In the future if you are worried about this, you should wait a week or two before buying something in case they feel the need to change things, because it could happen.
Sadly, self-entitlement and the inability to take responsibility for one's own action (or in this case, INaction) is to blame here. It's sadly the by-product of a culture trained from a young age to not think for themselves and to never take responsibility for their actions.
It's a fairly well documented fact that only a small portion of people who play online games visit the associated forums, facebook, twitter, etc. Many times you will find people visiting those places for the first time when they have a problem.
When in game channels started telling people that the ship had a cloak, lots of people were swayed to grab it who otherwise wouldn't have purchased it. The only reason they made the expensive purchase was because the ship had something they wanted.
Could they have come to the forums and seen the posts? Sure ... but again the vast majority of players don't come to the forums unless they need help with something, and a very large majority who need help ask for it in game and still don't come to the forums.
It's not about whether they could have known. Cryptic should have done a proper QA pass on the ship before pushing it live. If their Ship editor dev tool is anything like a unit editor dev tool I work with, there are a bunch of things which you can set values to, and cloak and battle cloak are likely just two boxes on that list that you can set to 0 (off) or 1 (on). It is the space of a few minutes tops to confirm that the ship meets the specifications sheet.
This is assuming, of course, that Cryptic has best practices like spec sheets and such.
It was a good analogy, as far as it goes. The part that's missing is all the excited people who got given the all you can eat buffet plate who ran outside yelling to everyone to come get in on this great deal and all the extra people who came in and ordered the steak dinner because it came with the buffet.
It's a fairly well documented fact that only a small portion of people who play online games visit the associated forums, facebook, twitter, etc. Many times you will find people visiting those places for the first time when they have a problem.
Very true - Not Cryptics problem however, they provided the means for people to keep themselves informed and up to date, if people choose to ignore it, it's their own problem.
If you ignore a one way traffic sign and end up in a car crash - who is to blame?? - you for ignoring the sign.
When in game channels started telling people that the ship had a cloak, lots of people were swayed to grab it who otherwise wouldn't have purchased it. The only reason they made the expensive purchase was because the ship had something they wanted.
It is also well know in game chat channels are full of rumors, gossip, misinformation and gold sellers - It is up to the player to check all information BEFORE spending any money and Cryptic did provide all information.
Could they have come to the forums and seen the posts? Sure ... but again the vast majority of players don't come to the forums unless they need help with something, and a very large majority who need help ask for it in game and still don't come to the forums.
Ok, I will rephrase;
Say you own a car, but it breaks down. Now do you a) have it taken to a garage be fixed, or b) old George down the road talks about cars all the time, never owned one, is not a mechanic but says he loves cars and can fix anything.
It's not about whether they could have known. Cryptic should have done a proper QA pass on the ship before pushing it live.
Yes, I agree 100% - Question, how long have you played Cryptic games?? As it is 3 years for me... I'm still trying to figure out if they have a QA department with what goes live.
Restaurants change their menus all the time, and they aren't responsible for what people that don't work for them tell other people, nor are they obligated to serve items that aren't listed on the current menu as part of a meal.
If customer "A" walks in and orders something because his friend "timmy" said it came with "x" and he doesn't get "x" the restaurant is going to tell him that what he wants is no longer available with what he ordered and the menu clearly states what currently comes with what he ordered.
Analogy doesn't work since the ship had the cloak when the people bought it. Cloak is being retroactively removed. Should be a very simple matter to just put in an option to give the ship back for its lobi cost and let folks get a different ship if they want. Makes customers happy and happy customers spend more money.
Very true - Not Cryptics problem however, they provided the means for people to keep themselves informed and up to date, if people choose to ignore it, it's their own problem.
If you ignore a one way traffic sign and end up in a car crash - who is to blame?? - you for ignoring the sign.
It is also well know in game chat channels are full of rumors, gossip, misinformation and gold sellers - It is up to the player to check all information BEFORE spending any money and Cryptic did provide all information.
Ok, I will rephrase;
Say you own a car, but it breaks down. Now do you a) have it taken to a garage be fixed, or b) old George down the road talks about cars all the time, never owned one, is not a mechanic but says he loves cars and can fix anything.
do you go with A or B ?
Official Site or Gossip chat ??
Something called "Common sense" would apply here
Yes, I agree 100% - Question, how long have you played Cryptic games?? As it is 3 years for me... I'm still trying to figure out if they have a QA department with what goes live.
To the bulk of your post, I would say that people usually believe their fleet mates, especially if they've been together a long time. Most of the people I know who bought the ship bought it because fleet people said it had a cloak. Food for thought.
To the bulk of your post, I would say that people usually believe their fleet mates, especially if they've been together a long time. Most of the people I know who bought the ship bought it because fleet people said it had a cloak. Food for thought.
I'm not saying do not trust fleet mates, but do ask where the information came from.
Fleet mate tells you "A", you ask where did "A" come from, they say another player - well, who was the other player? where did they get the information from?
When the information turns out not to be "A" but it is "B" - who was to blame, the trusted fleet mate who told you "A", or the source the fleet mate used that was not the official site.
Ever play that game at school, where 10 or more of you line up, one person whispers a comment to the first person and it get passed down the chain.... what comes out the other end is normally nothing like what went in at the start.
There is a reason schools and parents teach that game - so we learn to check any information we are given, as what others tell us - they may honestly believe, but it may not be true.
As for fleet mates talking about this new cloaking ship - they should have checked the information BEFORE passing it on... as incorrect information being passed on is known as gossip .
As someone who purchased the Elachi Battleship shortly after release and has been using the cloak I'm annoyed it has been taken away and feel like anyone who bought it before the cloak was taken away should get a pitiful 100 zen refund or a free mk xii console because I purchased it AFTER I learned it had a cloak and it was part of the reason I paid to get that ship.
However, as a rational human being I also acknowledge two things:
1) The Elachi battleship "shouldn't" have had a cloak in the first place.
2) The cloak effect looked terrible because the ship is bigger than the cloaking "shimmer" effect.
Still, I personally believe that if Cryptic wanted players to believe the company cares about players then the players who already bought the ship should have got "something" in exchange for taking away the cloak ... regardless of whether it was something the ship "should" have had to begin with.
In the immortal words of Captain Sisko: "It may not be what you believe, but that doesn't make it wrong."
Don't believe the lies in this forum. I am NOT an ARC user. I play STO on Steam or not at all.
To the bulk of your post, I would say that people usually believe their fleet mates, especially if they've been together a long time. Most of the people I know who bought the ship bought it because fleet people said it had a cloak. Food for thought.
You didn't even need someone telling you it had a cloak - you could just see it by yourself when teamed with one. People just had to follow the most basic and usually bulletproof rule of "what you see is what you get" to realize that the Monbosh could cloak.
In the meantime cryptic failed several times to do anything against this misinterpretation.
The dev putting the shipstats together let it slip through.
QA did let the ship go live with the cloak.
There was no hotfix to remove cloak.
For the full week the ship -with its cloak- stayed available in the lobi store.
No general announcement (news entry, ingame+launcher announcement) was made about the issue.
Stumbling on branflakes posts on the forums was the only way to learn about the rouge cloak in the last week.
Under those circumstances, just removing the cloak is not adequate. Instead Cryptic should look at the only comparable case -the Andorian Phasers- and offer a refund option.
You didn't even need someone telling you it had a cloak - you could just see it by yourself when teamed with one. People just had to follow the most basic and usually bulletproof rule of "what you see is what you get" to realize that the Monbosh could cloak.
In the meantime cryptic failed several times to do anything against this misinterpretation.
The dev putting the shipstats together let it slip through.
QA did let the ship go live with the cloak.
There was no hotfix to remove cloak.
For the full week the ship -with its cloak- stayed available in the lobi store.
No general announcement (news entry, ingame+launcher announcement) was made about the issue.
Stumbling on branflakes posts on the forums was the only way to learn about the rouge cloak in the last week.
Under those circumstances, just removing the cloak is not adequate. Instead Cryptic should look at the only comparable case -the Andorian Phasers- and offer a refund option.
Who had to "Stumble" - Bran was quoted in quite a few threads for days, there were several discussions in the General, Fleetyards and in the PvP sub forums - you did not have to look very hard or very far.... I get the feeling, you did not look at all and now blame someone else for your mistake.
I will concede however, I think important information could be given out in game - or at the very least, for 24 hours there should have been a login message to check the forums.
But it was and always has been, your responsibility to regularly check the forums before spending real money and there always has been the "subject to change" clause.
So what you're saying is: Whenever something new is released, everyone should watch the forums, dev blogs, twitter, youtube, hours of podcasts, video panels, facebook and whatever other backchannels the devs use to communicate with the playerbase for a few days, so you can be sure that an item that costs the equivalent of about $160 in keys doesn't get changed after you buy it?
Sorry, but if a company introduces an item like this on a live realm, and expect people to shell out money for it, I expect that there aren't any slip-ups and it doesn't get a core ability taken away a week after it's release, just because some lazy-TRIBBLE dev couldn't double-check his work after a copy/paste routine. Period.
And this expectation is unrealistic, irrational, self-centered childishness. You are saying that customers have no responsibility to research the $160 purchase they are making, while holding Cryptic to a standard of perfect performance and absolute accountability. In other words, you are holding them to a higher standard than you hold yourself, which is the hallmark of immature behavior.
More to the point, there's not even a legal issue at play here - you don't "own" the Monbosh, or anything else in game, it's all Cryptic's property that you have licensed. Furthermore, even if you did own it outright, the $160 figure for the ship is a crazy number, because it basically assumes you bought keys and got no other value out of them, which isn't the case at all - there were plenty of other items in those boxes (including possibly the Elachi escort) which all had value, whether you really wanted them or not. And if you didn't want those items? Then what you should've done instead of spending money for 100+ keys for just the Lobi is you should've bought about 70 keys, sold them on the exchange, and used the EC to buy a Monbosh. If you feel like you got ripped off, that means YOU screwed up, not Cryptic. If you don't bother to research what you're buying and/or the best way to get it, you deserve what you get.
No there wasn't, there was no need to take the game down early to remove it, when they had scheduled downtime coming. Especially since it's not overall that important.
For the full week the ship -with its cloak- stayed available in the lobi store.
No general announcement (news entry, ingame+launcher announcement) was made about the issue.
No general announcement was ever made that it was intended to have a cloak. Why would you advertise an obvious error in your coding in that sort of way. They don't advertise things like the Tour the Universe Exploit or the Voldemort bug either, but they remove those.
Stumbling on branflakes posts on the forums was the only way to learn about the rouge cloak in the last week.
On launch day there were no fewer than 3 threads talking about how people thought the ship had a cloak when it shouldn't.
It was in all these posts that people were told in no uncertain terms that it was being removed. This information inevitably would have disseminated into the game. If anyone was in doubt about whether it was intended or not.
They could have checked the forums for themselves before they bought it, it's called due diligence.
If you aren't going to do this, I know a guy with some lovely timeshares in Marbella for this time of year that he'd be willing to sell you.
Under those circumstances, just removing the cloak is not adequate. Instead Cryptic should look at the only comparable case -the Andorian Phasers- and offer a refund option.
The situation with the Andorian Phasers was completely different because they downgraded the weapons after people had bought them. That was a deliberate thing in order to allow the purchase of Fleet Versions later on.
Not everyone bought this ship with Lobi, if they did offer refunds you would suddenly have a way of converting EC into Lobi Crystals drastically increasing it's value on the exchange.
Call me cynical but I suspect this is the more sinister reasoning behind wanting a "legitimate" refund more than because it's the "right thing" which really it isn't.
Still, I personally believe that if Cryptic wanted players to believe the company cares about players then the players who already bought the ship should have got "something" in exchange for taking away the cloak ... regardless of whether it was something the ship "should" have had to begin with.
There's only one thing I would actually like: The Subspace Transceiver Console to act like a typical hangar pet item - HUD, standard craft controls, etc. That's one of the reasons I bought the ship (beyond the other benefits it has, like decent turn rate, etc), but as it stands I'm not going to reduce my effectiveness by wasting a console slot on it.
THAT, I think, should concern people a little more than the fact that it ended up coming with an unintended cloaking ability that rightfully got removed.
And this expectation is unrealistic, irrational, self-centered childishness. You are saying that customers have no responsibility to research the $160 purchase they are making, while holding Cryptic to a standard of perfect performance and absolute accountability. In other words, you are holding them to a higher standard than you hold yourself, which is the hallmark of immature behavior.
More to the point, there's not even a legal issue at play here - you don't "own" the Monbosh, or anything else in game, it's all Cryptic's property that you have licensed. Furthermore, even if you did own it outright, the $160 figure for the ship is a crazy number, because it basically assumes you bought keys and got no other value out of them, which isn't the case at all - there were plenty of other items in those boxes (including possibly the Elachi escort) which all had value, whether you really wanted them or not. And if you didn't want those items? Then what you should've done instead of spending money for 100+ keys for just the Lobi is you should've bought about 70 keys, sold them on the exchange, and used the EC to buy a Monbosh. If you feel like you got ripped off, that means YOU screwed up, not Cryptic. If you don't bother to research what you're buying and/or the best way to get it, you deserve what you get.
They made a mistake when they made it. Even though it was not stated that it should have a cloak at all.
No there wasn't, there was no need to take the game down early to remove it, when they had scheduled downtime coming. Especially since it's not overall that important.
No general announcement was ever made that it was intended to have a cloak. Why would you advertise an obvious error in your coding in that sort of way. They don't advertise things like the Tour the Universe Exploit or the Voldemort bug either, but they remove those.
On launch day there were no fewer than 3 threads talking about how people thought the ship had a cloak when it shouldn't.
It was in all these posts that people were told in no uncertain terms that it was being removed. This information inevitably would have disseminated into the game. If anyone was in doubt about whether it was intended or not.
They could have checked the forums for themselves before they bought it, it's called due diligence.
If you aren't going to do this, I know a guy with some lovely timeshares in Marbella for this time of year that he'd be willing to sell you.
The situation with the Andorian Phasers was completely different because they downgraded the weapons after people had bought them. That was a deliberate thing in order to allow the purchase of Fleet Versions later on.
Not everyone bought this ship with Lobi, if they did offer refunds you would suddenly have a way of converting EC into Lobi Crystals drastically increasing it's value on the exchange.
Call me cynical but I suspect this is the more sinister reasoning behind wanting a "legitimate" refund more than because it's the "right thing" which really it isn't.
I hereby entrust the shining light of common sense to you chosen two - as I'm proper fed up explaining this over and over.
My head has banged it's last wall....
Go forth my children and be beacons of hope - that personal responsibility, common sense and intellect may be abundant throughout the known world - Banish the darkness of stupidity, self entitlement and passing the buck!
You didn't even need someone telling you it had a cloak - you could just see it by yourself when teamed with one. People just had to follow the most basic and usually bulletproof rule of "what you see is what you get" to realize that the Monbosh could cloak.
In the meantime cryptic failed several times to do anything against this misinterpretation.
The dev putting the shipstats together let it slip through.
QA did let the ship go live with the cloak.
There was no hotfix to remove cloak.
For the full week the ship -with its cloak- stayed available in the lobi store.
No general announcement (news entry, ingame+launcher announcement) was made about the issue.
Stumbling on branflakes posts on the forums was the only way to learn about the rouge cloak in the last week.
Under those circumstances, just removing the cloak is not adequate. Instead Cryptic should look at the only comparable case -the Andorian Phasers- and offer a refund option.
Exactly my points, all lined up nicely. It's just the right thing to do. It costs them nothing ... some little virtual crystals that don't really exist and of which there are an infinite supply. Let the player give back the ship and its associated gagets and get their lobi crystals back and voila, everyone's happy.
Take a potentially bad PR situation and turn it into a PR win. This is community management 101 really.
Take a potentially bad PR situation and turn it into a PR win. This is community management 101 really.
An 11 page thread on the forum is not a bad PR situation. You are making this sound more important than it is, probably in the hope of getting some undeserved refund or compensation.
i didnt buy any of the elachi ships at all but the ships having cloak the rommies and th kdf use was suprising and glad some that that feature from them is gone. i think it slipped by QA ad the devs didnt want to do anything with a subspace cloak they presumably had
Every time a new ship comes out there is a Dev Blog, before it is available, that explains all the stats of the ship.
I don't see why Cryptic needs to hand hold adults who don't want to read it. And I don't think they should make special compensation for those who didn't read it, as that is a disservice to humanity as a whole. We have enough problems with people not taking accountability for their actions, and then having fake outrage when their own terrible behaviour bites them in the butt.
Let this teach them a lesson, and if they decide not to learn it, I hope it happens to them again and again, because stupid lazy incompetent people deserve no less.
The customer isn't always right, in fact more times than not they are a greedy jerk that think they can toss a tantrum and get their way, even when its counter to the product or service being sold. Society should smack these people down hard, like their mom's should of.
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.
It is not "bait and switch". Bait and switch is when a company advertises a product which it does not have in stock or has in stock only in extremely limited amounts at a low price and then tries to pressure customers who are looking to buy the product into buying a higher priced, similar item.
It is not even misleading advertising, since all the advertising for the ship never mentioned a cloak.
It is simply Cryptic fixing a bug or design flaw which players were using to their advantage, just like when they fixed the shield stacking bug or the subspace integration circuit design flaw.
Comments
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.
You obviously didn't read my posts. I've seen many people claim that the BBB is corrupt and self-serving and irrelevant, and yet in the last couple years it has gotten Microsoft to refund back to me roughly $150 in stolen microsoft points plus give me a free year of xbox live gold and also got 2K to give me Bioshock infinite + season pass to make up for a game that costs 25% of bioshock infinite + season pass not working for a month ... a year after I bought it and had already played it 250 hours.
Seems to me like it's an organization which can and does help consumers. That has been my personal, albeit limited, experience with the organization. Perhaps Microsoft and 2K are just more consumer conscious than other companies.
They're taking the cloak off the lobi store offering, and it's debatable whether a non-battle cloak on a cruiser boat makes it better than a much more potent escort style ship in the first place.
No, I didn't buy the ship. The last thing I bought on the Lobi store was the tal shiar battle cruiser which I sold and then bought the adapted destroyer I wanted and made 25mil ec profit on the deal.
Am I only allowed to have an opinion if I bought the terrible ship (the non-battle cloak doesn't help it much lol)?
i agree, mainly because im hungry and want all i can eat atm
Do you even Science Bro?
It's a fairly well documented fact that only a small portion of people who play online games visit the associated forums, facebook, twitter, etc. Many times you will find people visiting those places for the first time when they have a problem.
When in game channels started telling people that the ship had a cloak, lots of people were swayed to grab it who otherwise wouldn't have purchased it. The only reason they made the expensive purchase was because the ship had something they wanted.
Could they have come to the forums and seen the posts? Sure ... but again the vast majority of players don't come to the forums unless they need help with something, and a very large majority who need help ask for it in game and still don't come to the forums.
It's not about whether they could have known. Cryptic should have done a proper QA pass on the ship before pushing it live. If their Ship editor dev tool is anything like a unit editor dev tool I work with, there are a bunch of things which you can set values to, and cloak and battle cloak are likely just two boxes on that list that you can set to 0 (off) or 1 (on). It is the space of a few minutes tops to confirm that the ship meets the specifications sheet.
This is assuming, of course, that Cryptic has best practices like spec sheets and such.
It was a good analogy, as far as it goes. The part that's missing is all the excited people who got given the all you can eat buffet plate who ran outside yelling to everyone to come get in on this great deal and all the extra people who came in and ordered the steak dinner because it came with the buffet.
Very true - Not Cryptics problem however, they provided the means for people to keep themselves informed and up to date, if people choose to ignore it, it's their own problem.
If you ignore a one way traffic sign and end up in a car crash - who is to blame?? - you for ignoring the sign.
It is also well know in game chat channels are full of rumors, gossip, misinformation and gold sellers - It is up to the player to check all information BEFORE spending any money and Cryptic did provide all information.
Ok, I will rephrase;
Say you own a car, but it breaks down. Now do you a) have it taken to a garage be fixed, or b) old George down the road talks about cars all the time, never owned one, is not a mechanic but says he loves cars and can fix anything.
do you go with A or B ?
Official Site or Gossip chat ??
Something called "Common sense" would apply here
Yes, I agree 100% - Question, how long have you played Cryptic games?? As it is 3 years for me... I'm still trying to figure out if they have a QA department with what goes live.
Analogy doesn't work since the ship had the cloak when the people bought it. Cloak is being retroactively removed. Should be a very simple matter to just put in an option to give the ship back for its lobi cost and let folks get a different ship if they want. Makes customers happy and happy customers spend more money.
First time I've ever bust out laughing reading these forums !!!!
LMAO
To the bulk of your post, I would say that people usually believe their fleet mates, especially if they've been together a long time. Most of the people I know who bought the ship bought it because fleet people said it had a cloak. Food for thought.
my steak needs more croutons.....
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
I'm not saying do not trust fleet mates, but do ask where the information came from.
Fleet mate tells you "A", you ask where did "A" come from, they say another player - well, who was the other player? where did they get the information from?
When the information turns out not to be "A" but it is "B" - who was to blame, the trusted fleet mate who told you "A", or the source the fleet mate used that was not the official site.
Ever play that game at school, where 10 or more of you line up, one person whispers a comment to the first person and it get passed down the chain.... what comes out the other end is normally nothing like what went in at the start.
There is a reason schools and parents teach that game - so we learn to check any information we are given, as what others tell us - they may honestly believe, but it may not be true.
As for fleet mates talking about this new cloaking ship - they should have checked the information BEFORE passing it on... as incorrect information being passed on is known as gossip .
Food for thought, back at ya
However, as a rational human being I also acknowledge two things:
1) The Elachi battleship "shouldn't" have had a cloak in the first place.
2) The cloak effect looked terrible because the ship is bigger than the cloaking "shimmer" effect.
Still, I personally believe that if Cryptic wanted players to believe the company cares about players then the players who already bought the ship should have got "something" in exchange for taking away the cloak ... regardless of whether it was something the ship "should" have had to begin with.
Don't believe the lies in this forum. I am NOT an ARC user. I play STO on Steam or not at all.
You didn't even need someone telling you it had a cloak - you could just see it by yourself when teamed with one. People just had to follow the most basic and usually bulletproof rule of "what you see is what you get" to realize that the Monbosh could cloak.
In the meantime cryptic failed several times to do anything against this misinterpretation.
The dev putting the shipstats together let it slip through.
QA did let the ship go live with the cloak.
There was no hotfix to remove cloak.
For the full week the ship -with its cloak- stayed available in the lobi store.
No general announcement (news entry, ingame+launcher announcement) was made about the issue.
Stumbling on branflakes posts on the forums was the only way to learn about the rouge cloak in the last week.
Under those circumstances, just removing the cloak is not adequate. Instead Cryptic should look at the only comparable case -the Andorian Phasers- and offer a refund option.
Who had to "Stumble" - Bran was quoted in quite a few threads for days, there were several discussions in the General, Fleetyards and in the PvP sub forums - you did not have to look very hard or very far.... I get the feeling, you did not look at all and now blame someone else for your mistake.
I will concede however, I think important information could be given out in game - or at the very least, for 24 hours there should have been a login message to check the forums.
But it was and always has been, your responsibility to regularly check the forums before spending real money and there always has been the "subject to change" clause.
And this expectation is unrealistic, irrational, self-centered childishness. You are saying that customers have no responsibility to research the $160 purchase they are making, while holding Cryptic to a standard of perfect performance and absolute accountability. In other words, you are holding them to a higher standard than you hold yourself, which is the hallmark of immature behavior.
More to the point, there's not even a legal issue at play here - you don't "own" the Monbosh, or anything else in game, it's all Cryptic's property that you have licensed. Furthermore, even if you did own it outright, the $160 figure for the ship is a crazy number, because it basically assumes you bought keys and got no other value out of them, which isn't the case at all - there were plenty of other items in those boxes (including possibly the Elachi escort) which all had value, whether you really wanted them or not. And if you didn't want those items? Then what you should've done instead of spending money for 100+ keys for just the Lobi is you should've bought about 70 keys, sold them on the exchange, and used the EC to buy a Monbosh. If you feel like you got ripped off, that means YOU screwed up, not Cryptic. If you don't bother to research what you're buying and/or the best way to get it, you deserve what you get.
Cryptic owes you nothing.
They made a mistake when they made it. Even though it was not stated that it should have a cloak at all. No there wasn't, there was no need to take the game down early to remove it, when they had scheduled downtime coming. Especially since it's not overall that important.
No general announcement was ever made that it was intended to have a cloak. Why would you advertise an obvious error in your coding in that sort of way. They don't advertise things like the Tour the Universe Exploit or the Voldemort bug either, but they remove those.
On launch day there were no fewer than 3 threads talking about how people thought the ship had a cloak when it shouldn't.
It was in all these posts that people were told in no uncertain terms that it was being removed. This information inevitably would have disseminated into the game. If anyone was in doubt about whether it was intended or not.
They could have checked the forums for themselves before they bought it, it's called due diligence.
If you aren't going to do this, I know a guy with some lovely timeshares in Marbella for this time of year that he'd be willing to sell you.
The situation with the Andorian Phasers was completely different because they downgraded the weapons after people had bought them. That was a deliberate thing in order to allow the purchase of Fleet Versions later on.
Not everyone bought this ship with Lobi, if they did offer refunds you would suddenly have a way of converting EC into Lobi Crystals drastically increasing it's value on the exchange.
Call me cynical but I suspect this is the more sinister reasoning behind wanting a "legitimate" refund more than because it's the "right thing" which really it isn't.
There's only one thing I would actually like: The Subspace Transceiver Console to act like a typical hangar pet item - HUD, standard craft controls, etc. That's one of the reasons I bought the ship (beyond the other benefits it has, like decent turn rate, etc), but as it stands I'm not going to reduce my effectiveness by wasting a console slot on it.
THAT, I think, should concern people a little more than the fact that it ended up coming with an unintended cloaking ability that rightfully got removed.
I hereby entrust the shining light of common sense to you chosen two - as I'm proper fed up explaining this over and over.
My head has banged it's last wall....
Go forth my children and be beacons of hope - that personal responsibility, common sense and intellect may be abundant throughout the known world - Banish the darkness of stupidity, self entitlement and passing the buck!
Good luck and Gods Speed to you both
Exactly my points, all lined up nicely. It's just the right thing to do. It costs them nothing ... some little virtual crystals that don't really exist and of which there are an infinite supply. Let the player give back the ship and its associated gagets and get their lobi crystals back and voila, everyone's happy.
Take a potentially bad PR situation and turn it into a PR win. This is community management 101 really.
An 11 page thread on the forum is not a bad PR situation. You are making this sound more important than it is, probably in the hope of getting some undeserved refund or compensation.
No this isn't a bad PR situation. This is a cash grab people trying to turn their EC bought item which functions as designed into something else.
This is nothing like a bad PR situation. This is pure, unmitigated avarice under the pretense of social justice.
I don't see why Cryptic needs to hand hold adults who don't want to read it. And I don't think they should make special compensation for those who didn't read it, as that is a disservice to humanity as a whole. We have enough problems with people not taking accountability for their actions, and then having fake outrage when their own terrible behaviour bites them in the butt.
Let this teach them a lesson, and if they decide not to learn it, I hope it happens to them again and again, because stupid lazy incompetent people deserve no less.
The customer isn't always right, in fact more times than not they are a greedy jerk that think they can toss a tantrum and get their way, even when its counter to the product or service being sold. Society should smack these people down hard, like their mom's should of.
It is not "bait and switch". Bait and switch is when a company advertises a product which it does not have in stock or has in stock only in extremely limited amounts at a low price and then tries to pressure customers who are looking to buy the product into buying a higher priced, similar item.
It is not even misleading advertising, since all the advertising for the ship never mentioned a cloak.
It is simply Cryptic fixing a bug or design flaw which players were using to their advantage, just like when they fixed the shield stacking bug or the subspace integration circuit design flaw.
nothing to see here....
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----