The development team became recently aware of a potential exploit with Tau Dewa and after initial investigation decided to shut down access to the maps that were being used by the exploiters in order for the team to perform a deeper investigation.
We uncovered some bugs in the game that were being used by a very select few players for exploitation. Fixes to these bugs have gone live today that should remove the exploit. Details of the changes can be found in the release notes.
A lot of players were on the maps, but very few people took advantage of this. We have identified this extremely small number of players have taken appropriate action.
I really apologize for the inconvenience of closed maps during the investigation and for the bugs that led to the scramble around those maps. The team was focused on it, and due to the nature of the exploit, I did not want to discuss the details heavily. Now that everything is fixed, I wanted to let everyone know a little more about what was going on.
~LaughingTrendy
Just ran that through Google translate and this is what came back :
"The players weren't playing the game in the way that PWE\Cryptic wanted. To fix this problem we've sucked the last possible remaining bits of enjoyment out the game. Now players should be much more focused on the activities PWE\Cryptic find acceptable, namely grinding away for almost zero reward and opening their wallets to avoid the grinding."
Lame.... and the real bugs.... nothing... a zillion of accounts yet suffering from traits and power tray reset and they have done NOTHING. I've lost about 600 bought zen on mail system failure and nothing is done yet... i'm sure I've lost my masterkeys on the mail system bug vortex of nothingness.
Oh noes, I just found a major exploit in the game. People pay thousands of bucks for these little digital keys and get nothing in return. I think we need to quarantine the c-store immediately until this can be addressed.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
What do you guys not get about "tons were in there, a few find an exploit" they arent talking about the vast majority of people power leveling, clearly something else was found they didnt like
I blame this solely on you for not knowing your own game.
Very true statement. If they really knew the game well, they'd take a whole season to fix bugs because it's extremely buggy and full of things people abuse. Heck, there are still one shot kills in the game, and it's so bad now that you might as well go into a PvP match without shields.
I keep saying it, season 10.5 should be for bug fixing.
No ones dare to play crystalline catastrophe, because of one simple reason: No one can survive this mission anymore o.O
I admit the new content is beautiful, the voice acting and the voyager stuff is an amazing thing, thanks for this work Dev's... but.... we can't play anything if this thing is full of bugs... i am right?
Rigorous testing is an essential part of program engineering.
As of now DEVs considered anyone above 60 to have used some sort of "exploit" to get there...sorry for those who raced to get there and started specializing...bad move from crytpic in taking away points indiscriminately...harm is already done and dont think they can fix it.
As for me so glad I have none and so glad I waited ALL bugs to get fixed. They should have done their homewwork and fixed MAJOR issues brought up at tribble rather than ignore and launched a half TRIBBLE expansion...LOTS of peeps will be pissed with a good reason....however, what do you expected from Cryptic. If you have been here for the past 9.5 seasons dont believe for a minute things would go smooth...for those who were expecting bugs and not dedicated much time into it...good call but so sorry for all the bad development of this expansion caused to other players ...:mad:
Delta Grinding is a flop, a complete an utter mess, you can tell it was rushed with little to know thought other then 'How much money can we squeeze out of our customers this update'.
They don't care about longevity of the game, they don't care about the Star Trek name tag.
The only thing they do care about is Annual Gross Profit... THAT'S IT!!!
Delta Grinding is a flop, a complete an utter mess, you can tell it was rushed with little to know thought other then 'How much money can we squeeze out of our customers this update'.
They don't care about longevity of the game, they don't care about the Star Trek name tag.
The only thing they do care about is Annual Gross Profit... THAT'S IT!!!
D,
I'm cancelling my monthly subscription as of today, and won't be spending another dime on this game until I see some improvements. As it is, I don't see myself even playing a month from now if the last two weeks is any indication of what we can expect from the developers and Cryptic.
Delta Grinding is a flop, a complete an utter mess, you can tell it was rushed with little to know thought other then 'How much money can we squeeze out of our customers this update'.
They don't care about longevity of the game, they don't care about the Star Trek name tag.
The only thing they do care about is Annual Gross Profit... THAT'S IT!!!
D,
This expansion has been a disaster. Makes me long for the good old days of the LoR expansion. Might have been buggy, but not to the point of penalizing players for playing the game as intended.
To the devs, please stop skimming through the gameplay bug reports and picking just 10 each week to deal with each week. The whole power leveling thing was reported in Tribble. The upgrade problems we are still having were also reported. We have bugs from as far back as 2012-13 still very much visible by everyone in the game (The [Stl] mod in deflectors, fleet alert/SB Incursion wrapper accolades broken, etc).
Very simple, they don't want you to know the nature of the exploit because you could use that information to try to run a similar exploit. Idea's breed more ideas....
These guys found a way to game the system.... they were told the stop, but kept doing it. Knowing how they gamed the system would allow you to look around for other ways/places to pull off the same or similar hack.
Also, for all of you with poor reading comprehension skills.... they don't care that you used the patrols to level up quickly.... That should be clear.
Hehe, game the system in a system that's a game... that's kind of funny. :P
In all seriousness, I might not have known exactly what the exploit was before seeing the Patch Notes, but looking at the first eight bullet points and noting that those are changes from what had been in place... it's not a difficult thing to figure out what was going on. Read through them as if you were going the opposite direction, where:
a certain NPC contact suggested you run Patrols to level up,
certain Patrols didn't scale up to player level properly,
XP wasn't reduced for defeating lower-level NPCs,
teaming provided a larger XP boost,
and you get free dilithium for gaining a pseudo-level once you hit Level 60/Specialization 60.
See what the likely problem was? Of course, once we all grind our way to level 60, the XP scaling differences for varying levels becomes a moot point; for another 50 Specialization Points worth of pseudo-levels we will all be the same "level" anyway... which is why the teaming XP is being "adjusted" as well.
Of course, the vastly diminished progression rewards for Delta Rising's Episode play is also to blame, since that is why players sought an alternative. We've got 60 levels and then another 50 pseudo-levels worth of gathering Specialization Points... it's not like reducing the rate of progress was necessary in the first place, merely the dilithium reward for over-leveling. :rolleyes:
Yes, IMHO, glad you asked. They can keep their dilithium for clearing Level 60/Specialization 60 and just make it less boring to level up... you know, like before Delta Rising. Seriously, add 10 levels and 60 total Specialization Points to the new level cap and then nerf progress? [SARCASM] Fun! [/SARCASM]
The new content is decent, they just need to re-think the rewards so that it's worthwhile to keep playing once the Episodes run out.
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
The mad thing is though that if there really was some sort of dilithium exploit going on there, they basically decided to deal with it right before a dilithium weekend...when everyone is going to be swimming in the stuff anyway!
Just look at the mines and you'll see hundreds of players "farming" the stuff, and i can pretty much guarantee players have been hoarding marks up for this weekend.
I mean even if players find an exploit to farm the stuff they can only refine to their daily limit anyway so nobody is going to get too rich quickly.
Oh noes, I just found a major exploit in the game. People pay thousands of bucks for these little digital keys and get nothing in return. I think we need to quarantine the c-store immediately until this can be addressed.
What I find to be exploitive behavior is charging me for a ship one month, only to raise the difficulty level of mobs and introduce a whole new ship level just a few months later.
Then charging me again to upgrade the ship you sold me at full price earlier.
I understand that the game needs to make money, But in all fairness, this expansion seems a tad on the extreme side. All in line with the history of what Mr D'Angelo has brought to the game. (nerf player rewards, increase dilithium requirement and grind.)
It's yet again increased the amount of dilithium a players needs to just play content.
Free to play? Not with the ever increasing demand for refined dilithium, whilst the refinement cap stays firmly at the same level it was originally introduced at, before all these new dilithium sinks.....
How much dilithium do you really NEED to squeeze out of us? Where will you draw the line?
I mean it takes dilithium to upgrade gear, then when you complete, it takes even more dilithium to get that same gear sprung from being held hostage from some crazy time gate.
Isn't it enough to charge us the dilithium for the upgrade in the first place? It's not like we don't need it in about a zillion other places, like fleet holdings, or the rep system. It's not like we don't need to upgrade EVERYTHING.
You've made endgame more challenging to compel us to upgrade, while reducing rewards, so you know we'll be upgrading, you know we'll be converting zen, but do you really HAVE TO double dip too?
This is the dilithium exploit as I see it, not players trying to circumvent some of it by being clever and getting as much bang for their buck by using in game methods YOU put in the game in the first place.
The development team became recently aware of a potential exploit with Tau Dewa and after initial investigation decided to shut down access to the maps that were being used by the exploiters in order for the team to perform a deeper investigation.
We uncovered some bugs in the game that were being used by a very select few players for exploitation. Fixes to these bugs have gone live today that should remove the exploit. Details of the changes can be found in the release notes.
A lot of players were on the maps, but very few people took advantage of this. We have identified this extremely small number of players have taken appropriate action.
I really apologize for the inconvenience of closed maps during the investigation and for the bugs that led to the scramble around those maps. The team was focused on it, and due to the nature of the exploit, I did not want to discuss the details heavily. Now that everything is fixed, I wanted to let everyone know a little more about what was going on.
~LaughingTrendy
If you want to drive people away from the game, you're doing a pretty damned good job of it
Very late...and unfortunately if what I heard in Zone chat by Tau Dewa that I will NOT be repeating under any circumstances is true, it is actually correct that a small group of players ruined it for everybody, and NOT everyone who power leveled. (And no, I will NOT answer by PM if asked either. If you happen pick up the same thing I did from someone else in Zone somewhere, that's on you.)
But because of the late, poor response, Cryptic allowed a firestorm and made the majority of players feel blamed for what happened...AND on top of that, the patch was buggy and shorted people out of specialization points and reduced XP on people who had nothing to do with the issue. So even with Cryptic potentially telling the truth exactly according to what laughingtrendy has stated, the disastrously late and worse-bugged response has only made a bad situation far worse.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Delta Grinding is a flop, a complete an utter mess, you can tell it was rushed with little to know thought other then 'How much money can we squeeze out of our customers this update'.
They don't care about longevity of the game, they don't care about the Star Trek name tag.
The only thing they do care about is Annual Gross Profit... THAT'S IT!!!
D,
absolutely agree, seems to play a beta with all these bugs
I like playing the game but i cannot play like this. I only do between 5-8k Dps. Missions that took 10 to 15 min are taking 40-50 min. It is not fun.
Tell me about it,
They just sold me a science ship with two tac consoles !:rolleyes:
And the other, lets just say the Dauntless is generally considered a fail by those with advanced knowledge of game mechanics.
I can debuff to my heart's content, but that's all I bring to the table. Unless I rely on exotic particle gen damage, but at these hitpoint levels, That'll be all I'm good for then, I'd have to skill HEAVILY in particle gens, not debuffing.
Very late...and unfortunately if what I heard in Zone chat by Tau Dewa that I will NOT be repeating under any circumstances is true, it is actually correct that a small group of players ruined it for everybody, and NOT everyone who power leveled. (And no, I will NOT answer by PM if asked either. If you happen pick up the same thing I did from someone else in Zone somewhere, that's on you.)
But because of the late, poor response, Cryptic allowed a firestorm and made the majority of players feel blamed for what happened...AND on top of that, the patch was buggy and shorted people out of specialization points and reduced XP on people who had nothing to do with the issue. So even with Cryptic potentially telling the truth exactly according to what laughingtrendy has stated, the disastrously late and worse-bugged response has only made a bad situation far worse.
Yup, exactly what I thought. But combine it with cryptics history of bad communication and there was every reason to assume they were lying/blaming everyone.
Glad to hear they weren't, but they NEED to start fixing their reputation. Things will only keep getting worse if they don't.
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
The mad thing is though that if there really was some sort of dilithium exploit going on there, they basically decided to deal with it right before a dilithium weekend...when everyone is going to be swimming in the stuff anyway!
Just look at the mines and you'll see hundreds of players "farming" the stuff, and i can pretty much guarantee players have been hoarding marks up for this weekend.
I mean even if players find an exploit to farm the stuff they can only refine to their daily limit anyway so nobody is going to get too rich quickly.
Depends on the nature of the exploit and the ease of getting new characters into it. I can imagine a worst case scenario that is pretty bad mathematically speaking, but still within the 8k/character limit.
And that's not even touching the fact that some exploits hitting neverwinter have involved refined astrals. Sto and neverwinter have similar code. I'm confident this exploit wasn't one such, but when dealing with exploits you shouldn't assume limits are a barrier.
Yeah, I rushed through all the Delta Quadrant... stuff... at a fast pace. I'm sure it was fun (for someone) and all, but for me it was nearly unplayable. The Forbidden Zone (Tau Dewa) was the only way I could level (because of the gaps) and be able to enjoy it (no freighters with 100k HP and no Graphic Lag). This expansion was WAY over-hyped and hasn't even come close to the expectations that the PR Team at Cryptic got us to all believe.
I've finished the Delta Quadrant on one Character. I have doubts about ever taking another character there. Not when I need help from my fleet to finish ONE (forced) Patrol mission there. It's just not worth the headache.
Thank you for the attempted apology Trendy. It's nice to see that we at least got an "Official Response" from someone even if it's not the response most of us wanted.
If anyone owes the community at large any kind of apology, it would be Trendy and Smirks BOSS. The people who ACTUALLY make the decisions on what happens in the game. Not the 'Community Management Specialist'.
Again, thanks for the attempt Trendy, but you're not the one who owes us the apology in my opinion.
So patrols were exploits?Guess that was the best kept secret in game this whole time .SOme would have bet the devs put them in game .
Obviously they weren't, because lots of people did the patrols like crazy - but the statement is that only a small number of people did actually exploit something.
Doing the patrols was a necessary prerequisite, but not a sufficient one.
A fictional exploit for you:
"If you play PvP, and fight until shortly before the win, but then stop fighting and instead leave the map by going to the edges and responding "Warp Out" to the "there is nothing out there" message popup all active skill point bonuses will reset to an unused state but reward their full bonus points directly to you"
Reaction by the devs - they close all PvP maps.
That doesn't mean tha anyonet hat PvPed did exploit something by PvPing. Only the people that actually did this special thing did exploit something. But the stop gap is - no one gets to PvP, so anyone that was going to exploit couldn't. The situation can't be maintained, because people that just want to PvP don't get to, so another fix is released as ASAP that removes the exploit and enables people to PvP again.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Comments
Punishing people for trying not to pay as much cash: WRONG in every way.
Just ran that through Google translate and this is what came back :
"The players weren't playing the game in the way that PWE\Cryptic wanted. To fix this problem we've sucked the last possible remaining bits of enjoyment out the game. Now players should be much more focused on the activities PWE\Cryptic find acceptable, namely grinding away for almost zero reward and opening their wallets to avoid the grinding."
Shame on you Cryptic, I was expecting more =(
really?:rolleyes:
Very true statement. If they really knew the game well, they'd take a whole season to fix bugs because it's extremely buggy and full of things people abuse. Heck, there are still one shot kills in the game, and it's so bad now that you might as well go into a PvP match without shields.
I keep saying it, season 10.5 should be for bug fixing.
I admit the new content is beautiful, the voice acting and the voyager stuff is an amazing thing, thanks for this work Dev's... but.... we can't play anything if this thing is full of bugs... i am right?
Rigorous testing is an essential part of program engineering.
In honor of this debacle, I've changed my signature.
Now to wait for the next total failure the Devs to make...
As for me so glad I have none and so glad I waited ALL bugs to get fixed. They should have done their homewwork and fixed MAJOR issues brought up at tribble rather than ignore and launched a half TRIBBLE expansion...LOTS of peeps will be pissed with a good reason....however, what do you expected from Cryptic. If you have been here for the past 9.5 seasons dont believe for a minute things would go smooth...for those who were expecting bugs and not dedicated much time into it...good call but so sorry for all the bad development of this expansion caused to other players ...:mad:
CRYPTIC DON'T DESERVE EITHER...
Delta Grinding is a flop, a complete an utter mess, you can tell it was rushed with little to know thought other then 'How much money can we squeeze out of our customers this update'.
They don't care about longevity of the game, they don't care about the Star Trek name tag.
The only thing they do care about is Annual Gross Profit... THAT'S IT!!!
D,
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Please keep the QQ to a minimum.
>>>PUNISH THE FEDs<<<
>>>Positive Feedback from a PvE HERO<<<
I'm cancelling my monthly subscription as of today, and won't be spending another dime on this game until I see some improvements. As it is, I don't see myself even playing a month from now if the last two weeks is any indication of what we can expect from the developers and Cryptic.
This expansion has been a disaster. Makes me long for the good old days of the LoR expansion. Might have been buggy, but not to the point of penalizing players for playing the game as intended.
To the devs, please stop skimming through the gameplay bug reports and picking just 10 each week to deal with each week. The whole power leveling thing was reported in Tribble. The upgrade problems we are still having were also reported. We have bugs from as far back as 2012-13 still very much visible by everyone in the game (The [Stl] mod in deflectors, fleet alert/SB Incursion wrapper accolades broken, etc).
Hehe, game the system in a system that's a game... that's kind of funny. :P
In all seriousness, I might not have known exactly what the exploit was before seeing the Patch Notes, but looking at the first eight bullet points and noting that those are changes from what had been in place... it's not a difficult thing to figure out what was going on. Read through them as if you were going the opposite direction, where:
- a certain NPC contact suggested you run Patrols to level up,
- certain Patrols didn't scale up to player level properly,
- XP wasn't reduced for defeating lower-level NPCs,
- teaming provided a larger XP boost,
- and you get free dilithium for gaining a pseudo-level once you hit Level 60/Specialization 60.
See what the likely problem was? Of course, once we all grind our way to level 60, the XP scaling differences for varying levels becomes a moot point; for another 50 Specialization Points worth of pseudo-levels we will all be the same "level" anyway... which is why the teaming XP is being "adjusted" as well.Of course, the vastly diminished progression rewards for Delta Rising's Episode play is also to blame, since that is why players sought an alternative. We've got 60 levels and then another 50 pseudo-levels worth of gathering Specialization Points... it's not like reducing the rate of progress was necessary in the first place, merely the dilithium reward for over-leveling. :rolleyes:
Yes, IMHO, glad you asked. They can keep their dilithium for clearing Level 60/Specialization 60 and just make it less boring to level up... you know, like before Delta Rising. Seriously, add 10 levels and 60 total Specialization Points to the new level cap and then nerf progress? [SARCASM] Fun! [/SARCASM]
The new content is decent, they just need to re-think the rewards so that it's worthwhile to keep playing once the Episodes run out.
Just look at the mines and you'll see hundreds of players "farming" the stuff, and i can pretty much guarantee players have been hoarding marks up for this weekend.
I mean even if players find an exploit to farm the stuff they can only refine to their daily limit anyway so nobody is going to get too rich quickly.
What I find to be exploitive behavior is charging me for a ship one month, only to raise the difficulty level of mobs and introduce a whole new ship level just a few months later.
Then charging me again to upgrade the ship you sold me at full price earlier.
I understand that the game needs to make money, But in all fairness, this expansion seems a tad on the extreme side. All in line with the history of what Mr D'Angelo has brought to the game. (nerf player rewards, increase dilithium requirement and grind.)
It's yet again increased the amount of dilithium a players needs to just play content.
Free to play? Not with the ever increasing demand for refined dilithium, whilst the refinement cap stays firmly at the same level it was originally introduced at, before all these new dilithium sinks.....
How much dilithium do you really NEED to squeeze out of us? Where will you draw the line?
I mean it takes dilithium to upgrade gear, then when you complete, it takes even more dilithium to get that same gear sprung from being held hostage from some crazy time gate.
Isn't it enough to charge us the dilithium for the upgrade in the first place? It's not like we don't need it in about a zillion other places, like fleet holdings, or the rep system. It's not like we don't need to upgrade EVERYTHING.
You've made endgame more challenging to compel us to upgrade, while reducing rewards, so you know we'll be upgrading, you know we'll be converting zen, but do you really HAVE TO double dip too?
This is the dilithium exploit as I see it, not players trying to circumvent some of it by being clever and getting as much bang for their buck by using in game methods YOU put in the game in the first place.
If you want to drive people away from the game, you're doing a pretty damned good job of it
But because of the late, poor response, Cryptic allowed a firestorm and made the majority of players feel blamed for what happened...AND on top of that, the patch was buggy and shorted people out of specialization points and reduced XP on people who had nothing to do with the issue. So even with Cryptic potentially telling the truth exactly according to what laughingtrendy has stated, the disastrously late and worse-bugged response has only made a bad situation far worse.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
absolutely agree, seems to play a beta with all these bugs
Don't want people to "exploit" something that is in game, don't leave it there when numerous people reported it in Tribble.
"A lack of preparation on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part"
And I hope that the small group of individuals weren't punished. All they're really guilty of is playing the game the best way they could.
Follow me on Twitter: @ZEFilms_STO
Some may say a good player exploits present game mechanics to excel at the game.
In one case, we hail them as heroes for their knowledge of the game, in the other, we condemn them as "exploiters".
It all falls on which side of the fence affects Cryptic's bottom line.
Tell me about it,
They just sold me a science ship with two tac consoles !:rolleyes:
And the other, lets just say the Dauntless is generally considered a fail by those with advanced knowledge of game mechanics.
I can debuff to my heart's content, but that's all I bring to the table. Unless I rely on exotic particle gen damage, but at these hitpoint levels, That'll be all I'm good for then, I'd have to skill HEAVILY in particle gens, not debuffing.
Yup, exactly what I thought. But combine it with cryptics history of bad communication and there was every reason to assume they were lying/blaming everyone.
Glad to hear they weren't, but they NEED to start fixing their reputation. Things will only keep getting worse if they don't.
While I agree with the general sentiment...
Depends on the nature of the exploit and the ease of getting new characters into it. I can imagine a worst case scenario that is pretty bad mathematically speaking, but still within the 8k/character limit.
And that's not even touching the fact that some exploits hitting neverwinter have involved refined astrals. Sto and neverwinter have similar code. I'm confident this exploit wasn't one such, but when dealing with exploits you shouldn't assume limits are a barrier.
I've finished the Delta Quadrant on one Character. I have doubts about ever taking another character there. Not when I need help from my fleet to finish ONE (forced) Patrol mission there. It's just not worth the headache.
Thank you for the attempted apology Trendy. It's nice to see that we at least got an "Official Response" from someone even if it's not the response most of us wanted.
If anyone owes the community at large any kind of apology, it would be Trendy and Smirks BOSS. The people who ACTUALLY make the decisions on what happens in the game. Not the 'Community Management Specialist'.
Again, thanks for the attempt Trendy, but you're not the one who owes us the apology in my opinion.
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord
Obviously they weren't, because lots of people did the patrols like crazy - but the statement is that only a small number of people did actually exploit something.
Doing the patrols was a necessary prerequisite, but not a sufficient one.
A fictional exploit for you:
"If you play PvP, and fight until shortly before the win, but then stop fighting and instead leave the map by going to the edges and responding "Warp Out" to the "there is nothing out there" message popup all active skill point bonuses will reset to an unused state but reward their full bonus points directly to you"
Reaction by the devs - they close all PvP maps.
That doesn't mean tha anyonet hat PvPed did exploit something by PvPing. Only the people that actually did this special thing did exploit something. But the stop gap is - no one gets to PvP, so anyone that was going to exploit couldn't. The situation can't be maintained, because people that just want to PvP don't get to, so another fix is released as ASAP that removes the exploit and enables people to PvP again.