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Why The STO Devs Are Great (But Could Still Improve)
sarek93
Member Posts: 274 Arc User
First, I want to be very blunt: this is not a "I love Cryptic soooo much" cop out post. I am not a Cryptic apologist. They are not paying me to say they are awesome. I Tribble test stuff; I post feedback about what I like and dislike; I've been harshly critical and heaped praises when both were warranted.
No, the reason I'm posting this is a QR to all the posts I keep seeing pop up about how the devs are unresponsive, don't care about the player base, or ignore everyone. I would argue that, in fact, the devs in STO are some of the most responsive in the MMO industry right now and that they do in fact care about what players say even if they can't implement every idea.
I play many MMOs. Without naming names, I suggest you go look at forums for other MMOs and look at their dev tracker. There are normally 2-3 posts per day and almost always they are by the Community Managers or Community team. Look at STO. The dev tracker is almost always 1-2 pages for a single day. And the posts aren't just Trendy and Smirk (who are excellent) posting about how awesome [REDACTED] will be while giving little to no actual information.
TacoFangs, AdjudicatorHawk, Callevista, JHeinig (spelling might be wrong there), Geko, and many more of the devs can be found posting in sub-forums throughout the STO forum. They are responding to player questions, trying to communicate about what they can, and asking questions about what could be made better. I challenge you to find another mainstream MMO with such a large player base that has the same level of player-dev interaction (have you truly lived in STO if you haven't /danced with Taco on ESD on Tribble).
So, to the devs, here's to being one of the most interactive dev teams I've come across in the MMO world.
No, the reason I'm posting this is a QR to all the posts I keep seeing pop up about how the devs are unresponsive, don't care about the player base, or ignore everyone. I would argue that, in fact, the devs in STO are some of the most responsive in the MMO industry right now and that they do in fact care about what players say even if they can't implement every idea.
I play many MMOs. Without naming names, I suggest you go look at forums for other MMOs and look at their dev tracker. There are normally 2-3 posts per day and almost always they are by the Community Managers or Community team. Look at STO. The dev tracker is almost always 1-2 pages for a single day. And the posts aren't just Trendy and Smirk (who are excellent) posting about how awesome [REDACTED] will be while giving little to no actual information.
TacoFangs, AdjudicatorHawk, Callevista, JHeinig (spelling might be wrong there), Geko, and many more of the devs can be found posting in sub-forums throughout the STO forum. They are responding to player questions, trying to communicate about what they can, and asking questions about what could be made better. I challenge you to find another mainstream MMO with such a large player base that has the same level of player-dev interaction (have you truly lived in STO if you haven't /danced with Taco on ESD on Tribble).
So, to the devs, here's to being one of the most interactive dev teams I've come across in the MMO world.
"Insufficient facts always invite danger." - Spock
Post edited by sarek93 on
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With all that said though it does seem like they dropped the ball with Risa and 9.5 and the forum goers noticed and have been vocal about it. I would really like to see more comms from D'Angelo and Geko on the forums though.
1. Obviously, D'Angelo and Geko are under no obligation to communicate on the forums or otherwise, but it is a stark departure from DStahl's occasional forum posts and semi-annual state of the game updates. A little more communication (whether in the form of dev blogs, forum posts, etc.) would be nice.
2. Taco has lamented that he misses the days when little sneak peak images could be leaked. While I agree he's right that it led to too much "you promised" let down posts, I feel we've reached the other extreme now where everything is so tightly controlled you see the ball drop a lot with things like 9.5 and Risa. Maybe some sneak peaks should occur, but not to the extent they used to. Perhaps when something is in internal testing and not always the proof of concept?
3. The product manager has not been doing as good a job as he/she could. 9.5 has just launched with a whimper (seriously? no lead up blogs) and the launch of the Xindi lockboxes has gotten no publicity (i.e. no contents or ship stats have been given out, yet I assume they will go live with the patch today). This is bad! There needs to be wayyyyy better scheduling with the blogs for this stuff. You can't keep having these failures to communicate. The sneak peaks sometimes backfired but they at least were something. A balance needs to be found between no communication and sneak peaks all the time.