to be fairer to everyone on the other side of the coin.
PWE could use these systems to help keep track of bugs and revisions and make sure everything is ready. its commonly used by most programing teams (to keep sanity)
that way users and the team would know if its already linked to another bug, or not a bug or tracked
you may already use these systems or others in house. of course RCS doesn't to be made public but imagine the frustration remove but having a REAL uservisable bug system.
Though it boggles my mind that you thought that you didn't need to communicate with your customer base. Boggles my mind. I didn't even do Tau Dewa, and I was concerned because to me and many of us it appeared to be just an arbitrary decision because you didn't like what we were doing.
Secondly I'm not sure if I'd call any of this an exploit. The bugs have been in place for months now. The fact that no one used it before was simply because we didn't have to, but everyone knew... everyone... that you could do this. The fact that the developing team didn't know this also boggles the mind. How do you not know your own game? It's not like people suddenly discovered this and took advantage. Most people that actually played the game knew this.
Generally though in my mind, it just screams incompetance by the developing team. Thinking they didn't need to communicate coupled with the obvious that they don't even know their own game just bothers me to no end.
I'm sorry, but if anyone in my company decided to have this level of lack of customer service combined with the lack of knowing my own products, in conjunction with their inability to provide their customer base with a quality product. I'd be firing people
But I guess this is the MMO community, where all of the above is not only accepted but expected.
I know it's not general custom for you to discuss exploits on the forums. But I am very glad you have taken the time to discuss this in more detail. As you've pointed out yourself, a lot of us were using these systems so it's nice to actually get some hard facts on what you considered 'exploitative' behaviour and what you were willing to consider 'acceptable' use.
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!!
I agree 100%. The fact the penalization was graded on a curve was forgiving enough. If anything, this dilemma called to attention that Cryptic needs to more thoroughly vet their builds they want to send to holodeck.
Stop setting release dates months in advance. Finding a massive, game-breaking bug that takes 5 months to find, reproduce and fix, but the game is given a hard deadline of 4 months is nonsensical.
It shows an unwillingness to thoroughly debug your release, and an unwillingness to be patient. If you want players to be patient for you, then please extend us the same courtesy and be patient with your QA and Developer Team to investigate and fix bugs and be willing to delay releases more, and raise the threshold of 'acceptable' bug to be in the game.
This exploit discovered in Tau Dewa should be seen as a warning I have been preaching for a few years now.
And if the rumors are true that this bug has been documented and sent to QA from Tribble, then I find that unacceptable. Remove Tribble entirely or overhaul how you test your builds from the ground up, and eat the financial drain it causes.
This is not a mistake we want to see happen again.
Very true. I can understand if some bugs pop out, it happens. However this was not a small one. If tested right, they would saw this from the start. Or got better idea from the testing sites when they was testing.
To me setting a release date isn't a good thing. Unless you tested it throughly to where you at least got 90% of it done and ready for release. This way you minimize less damage from what bugs you have. WoW faced this over Cata expansion. It was hashed and rushed beyond belief. Most of the story didn't even match up. They rushed it out way too soon. Thus created a bad game at least in my opinion. I quit the game not long afterwards. Due to part of that, and other reasons.
For the players who got penalized. They should be grateful they got a few points taken away. They could been banned from the game. I actually saw that before from other games. They take exploiting very serious.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
I'm willing to bet PWE has a larger legal war chest than anyone on these forums.
Better Call Saul:D
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
No is called a games TOS and they reserve the right to change any portion of the game without notification or reimbursment to the player.
need to read the tos before you play a game and understand them in full
Actually the terms of service, specifically paragraph 8, subsction 4 go into z-store purchases and reimbursement. In this case, according to their own TOS they are actually commiting fraud.
Some people actually think there were mobs that gave 17 times more XP per kill and are happy to see those "exploiters" quit.
They were not getting 17 times more XP per kill and that was never stated anywhere. Elite mode was giving out 5x exp bonus, instead of 2x, an actual difference of 2.5x but because these players had such high DPS and were in content where they could repeatedly destroy ships for exp they were gaining exp 17 times faster than the average player.
Forget all the lawsuits. My concern now is that Stephen D'Angelo should have more than 2 posts on these forums
Communicate with your player base...its a wonderful thing, we're just fans after all.
Fleet Admiral Thomas Winston James a.k.a. The Grayfox Fleet Leader of:
Liberty Task Force/Liberty Honor Guard
Pride of the Federation/Pride of the Empire
Liberty Guardians U.S.S. Liberty, NX-42813-L, T-6 Legendary Odyssey Class
I addressed the boycott issue in another thread already.
1: We don't have a cohesive community that can agree to a boycott.
2: We don't have the media attention that is necessary to have concessions made in our favor.
3: No media will want to cover this episode because STO players have a long history of crying foul. If they picked their battles better, maybe the media would raise their eyebrows and think this was something with merit to it.
4: There aren't enough of a majority of players who can agree on what specific concessions they want.
A boycott is just a buzzword used to instill fear, but in practical application a boycott would have absolutely 0 chance of making any meaningful change in the game.
Very true. WoW did create a stir once by changing something. Then the player base all fussed on the forums. If I remember right it even created a media story. And then the game makers changed their decision on it. Been a long time ago, so I can't remember what that fuss was about.
Our player base isn't that united to create something like that player base to that magnitude.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
That's nice. The only law that applies to STO is U.S. Federal Law and the laws of the State of California (where Cryptic and PWE are based out of).
yes. thats the sad part of the story. with 1 exception...they made a localisation of their game for my country, so they targeting my countrys market. what means, theoretically, they must respect the law. they are just not important enough that someone make a lawsuite on them... but I enjoy it when googles or apple TOS getting invalidated
I do find it funny that there were thread after thread of people saying that Cryptic needs to reply to this issue, or the forums will rage, and now that they did, why is the rage still going?
I do find it funny that there were thread after thread of people saying that Cryptic needs to replay to this issue, or the forums will rage, and now that they did, why is the rage still going:(
?
because nothing changed...they are still just crying exploit when there was clearly no exploit.
No is called a games TOS and they reserve the right to change any portion of the game without notification or reimbursment to the player.
need to read the tos before you play a game and understand them in full
Game TOS's can and have been found to be unconscionable and unenforceable before. One of the more prominent examples, involving Second Life, dealt with the purchase of in-game assets with real money and the subsequent revocation of those purchases without recompense or communication. The issue here, though obviously involving monetary amounts a couple orders of magnitude lower, isn't necessarily that much different. Whether anyone can find an attorney willing to work pro bono or who is willing to shell out the expenses to pursue this over such a small amount is another question. I really hope they do.
yes. thats the sad part of the story. with 1 exception...they made a localisation of their game for my country, so they targeting my countrys market. what means, theoretically, they must respect the law. they are just not important enough that someone make a lawsuite on them... but I enjoy it when googles or apple TOS getting invalidated
Emphasised the single most important word in your post.
If I have a problem with EvE Online and want to bring lawyers into it, I'm pretty sure the country of Iceland does not care about American law. When I click the EULA for that game, I agree I am a virtual guest of Iceland. Same goes for any other game. You are a guest, and your avenues of legal discourse are extremely limited, if not non-existant.
Otherwise there would be no international trade of anything, and human civilization would grind to a halt.
If you have an international dispute with PWE and Cryptic, you will lose. This theory of yours has been debunked over and over again in reality.
I do find it funny that there were thread after thread of people saying that Cryptic needs to reply to this issue, or the forums will rage, and now that they did, why is the rage still going?
because they could have given out 100,000 zen and free T6 canon ships and people would still rage
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Actually the terms of service, specifically paragraph 8, subsction 4 go into z-store purchases and reimbursement. In this case, according to their own TOS they are actually commiting fraud.
Read the ToS you quote before doing so -- please.
i did but missed that portion anyways if thats the case then they need to address this quickly before it goes to far.
anyways i hope cooler heads prevail.....im on the forum hoping for cooler heads.....i made a funny
Emphasised the single most important word in your post.
If I have a problem with EvE Online and want to bring lawyers into it, I'm pretty sure the country of Iceland does not care about American law.
If you have an international dispute with PWE and Cryptic, you will lose. This theory of yours has been debunked over and over again in reality.
ha! the thing you dont know is, that they have an office here in europe and doing business here. sure, murrican law is so TRIBBLE its not worth to even try, but things change if you bring your office to europe
The development team became aware of a potential leveling exploit on Wednesday morning this week. After initial investigations, we decided to shut down access to the maps that were being used for this power-leveling to perform a deeper investigation.
The investigation uncovered several different bugs in the game that were combining to allow players to level at approximately 17x the rate that players were leveling anywhere else in the game. This was definitely not intended behavior. Fixes for the various bugs went live with the update on Thursday morning, and we opened up the blocked maps.
During the investigation, we pulled data on every players behavior, and then we zeroed in on the players who were gaining levels at unreasonable rates. All of these players were on the maps under investigation. We found that quite a few players dabbled in these maps, but it was really a very small number of players who decided to take advantage of the bugs in excess. In fact, in the end there were around 300 characters (spanning around 250 accounts) that crossed the line from being efficient into taking significant advantage of the bugs. 300 is a very small number from the hundreds of thousands of characters playing.
This raises the question of what an exploit is. Ill loosely define an exploit is any unintended behavior in the game that a player can use to gain significant advantage over others. How does a player know something is unintended? That is definitely open to interpretation and was a huge focus of the discussion in the dev team. In this case, we feel that the difference in leveling speed between playing other content in the game and playing the content that was singled out this week was so large that it is reasonable for players to think this is too good to be something the dev team intended to happen. We find exploits regularly, but it is uncommon to find one that was used to achieve enough of an advantage to require taking action.
Once deciding that there was an exploit, the question is whether action is required or not, which means looking at who dabbled and who took advantage? This was done with an intensive data analysis. In the end, we decided that the vast majority of players were being fairly reasonable in their use of the maps to level, but there was a space in the data between players who gained up to 10 specialization points using the exploit, and those who gained more than 10 specialization points. I decided to make this the cut-off line and anyone who got more than 10 points on those maps had the excess points removed from their characters. For example, a character earning 15 points, 12 of which were on the exploitable maps, would lose 2 specialization points, and a character earning 60 points all of which were on exploitable maps would lose 50 points.
I have looked into the claim that some players were not using the exploit maps, but so far every claim I have come across has not held up under data pulls. If anyone still thinks they lost specialization points when they should not have should please file a CS ticket. CS tickets get a tracking number that can ensure we take care of everyone with a concern.
Im certain that at least some of the players feel they were acting in the right. That errors the dev team makes should be fair game. There are likely some others who feel that I drew the line in the wrong place, either too high or too low. It is challenging to walk the line between protecting the player base that wants the game to be fair, and allowing players to be efficient and game the game. In this case, a judgment was made and the line was drawn in order to protect the integrity of the game for the hundreds of thousands of players who did not and cannot do this going forward. Reviewing the data further, I still feel it was a good place to draw it.
Our communication on this issue was apparently unclear. Ill finish up this afternoon by apologizing for not being more clear about what happened. We normally do not post about actions taken to correct exploits, and I did not expect this correction to require more than a simple post. I was mistaken and I hope this clarifies what happened for those that want a more complete story.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.
Stephen DAngelo
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online
Thank you stephendangelo.
I have to say, it did take you guys longer than I personally believe to address this issue. I would also like to give some feedback to your team to maybe improve their communication a bit with these issues so we can get official word quicker. However I am sure this is already been discussed internally.
However, I thank you for coming here to explain the situation, what happened and the route you took, I have to personally say, regarding your decision with the specialisation, I honesty do feel for you, that was a no win scenario decision.
Now lets get on and enjoy Star Trek Online shall we
Thank you Mr. EP, even if you will not see this post most likely, for taking the time to personally explain the situation and making everyone aware as to what brought about the decision.
I did take part in solo elite patrols in Argala as well as assisted fleet members with their story mission patrols as they couldn't kill the HP walls alone. So I will accept any and all spec points that I have lost as I would have been gaining xp at a rate that was not intended.
The only thing I would like to bring to your and anyone else within the company's attention is that the game is very limited in missions and other content to gain xp through. This makes the game very repetitive and very stagnant. I do not know if anyone else agrees with me, but I am all for taking longer to level and gain stuff as long as there is enough varying content to support it.
Once again thank you for addressing the issue and informing the community as to why your decision. Hopefully we will see more of this from the staff, and hopefully we will see an increase in content to keep players interest in the game.
Executive Officer of the 1279th Imperial Assault Command
Fleet Admiral Mason
First, I want to say thank you for communicating with us Stephen. I know you're an introvert and I understand how hard it must be to speak up with a community that is as infamously vitrolic as ours.
But I feel it necessary to break down a number of issues that are not addressed at this time
The first of these is the primary reason that this story brewed. It was described to us at STLV by CaptGeko that the new level cap was supposed to take as long as the Lv 1 - 50 leveling process did. I'm forced to point to the current content in Delta Rising to show how that has bombed and created this very issue.
1) There is not a sufficient amount of content to reach Lv 60 just using Delta Rising content.
This is important because you wanted a slow leveling process but you did not provide enough content to enable this process. Less missions means less EXP for the players. Which means we had to search for a leveling alternative to enjoy the story of Delta Rising. That led to the TD exploit you quashed.
And the issue remains: there is not enough experience in Delta Rising to reasonably allow people to progress through the story chain without being bored and meeting your expectations.
You want us to have a slow leveling system? Fine. But you got to meet the players halfway and provide enough content for us to enjoy that slow leveling system. We know you can do it, you made ~40 missions for Legacy of Romulus. Where are the 40 missions for this new leveling scheme in Delta Rising?
NO ONE in this game should have been scouring the rest of the game for EXP just to enjoy the expansion.
2) The lack of communication is fueling the anger.
Stephen, if you had made your post as soon as action was needed on this exploit, you should have immediately posted what you did today then and there. Much of the anger of today is the frustration of being kept out of the loop. We all had questions: "What specifically was the exploit?" and when new details came out the question became "Was this a bug or an exploit?"
'
I would also say you need to work with the PWE Community Managers more. We have seen repeatedly (such as the Red Matter Capacitor Promo Code being changed w/out informing Smirk) that Cryptic and Community Management seem to be not talking to each other. Our CMs AND the players have the right to know whats going on.
I would also, personally, ask that you, Stephen D'Angelou please start talking with the community. Daniel Stahl used to do Engineering reports. Don't make promises. Just talk about the state of the game and ask for our feedback on things that the dev team is considering (but make no promises, I can't stress that enough). It would go along way to rebuilding the trust.
3) Taking things away is never a good punishment.
Many innocents were hurt today in your decision to take away those spec point and many who were guilty got away with it. I've seen friends who've not hit 60 get hit with this Spec Point removal and people who maxed out the spec tree still have it maxed. Your internal metrics are inaccurate and it is not the first time.
I would, in the future, choose to simply stop the exploit instead of taking away and stopping the exploit. There will be a lot less collateral damage and the players won't (a) feel cheated or (b) unfairly punished when they, well, are unfairly punished.
Lastly I must return to point one, because (4) We now have a situation where leveling up is going to be a problem because the content in Delta Rising is insufficient and EXP from defeats is too low.
The first thing you can do to address this is to raise the rewards on Ground Combat. At present defeating a single Vaadwaur solider gives ~7 EXP while defeating a ship of equal level is ~300. Bring the ground numbers up the space ones (~300 for both).
In addition, not only are EXP rewards low, but Delta Marks (DMs) are of extremely low quantity (5-7 per mission on Kobali vs 30-40 on New Romulus). Plus there is the reduction of the Dilithium in PVE queues. I'm sorry, but if this is the new standard, people won't stay after analyzing their own Player Heirarchy Cost Analysis Matrix.
Delta Rising has been all stick and no carrot. Content is too few, EXP is too few, Dilithium is too few, EC grinding was nerfed, Mark Rewards are too low... Can you start to see why even some of Cryptic's staunchest defenders are saying "You done screwed up?"
Now, I say all these things because it needs to be gotten across: players are feeling cheated and legitimately so. The devs who are in the know don't talk to us anymore, the rewards from the game are dropping, and the HUUUGE expansion turned out to be 10 missions and 3 PVE queues that we can't level up to play with a bunch of mediocre patrols you had claimed just last season STO wasn't going to do anymore because they weren't up to snuff.
I'm sorry, Stephen. But you are sitting in the Captain's Chair and the buck stops with you. I don't expect changes overnight, but I would like to see these issues addressed. They may not all be to my liking, but I want to see the dev team sit down together and talk about this. Because we are your customers. We can choose to walk away. We can choose to stop paying for STO. Many already are. If you want to stop losing more and possibly bring back those who left, you ALL at Cryptic Studios and Perfect World US to need stop, sit down and discuss why your clients, even the loyal ones are finding this update hard to swallow.
I say this, not to be mean or degrading, but to point out we came here to have fun and what we got instead was more grind to get to the fun stuff. I have been accused in the past of being a Cryptic lackey because of my support for you guys. I even defended this patching of this exploit. But that does not mean I agree with it.
STO is a great game, and I want to see it go on for many more years. But in the here and now, the staff needs to take a look at what went wrong in Delta Rising and try to correct the many errors that occurred.
ha! the thing you dont know is, that they have an office here in europe and doing business here. sure, murrican law is so TRIBBLE its not worth to even try, but things change if you bring your office to europe
Having an office is not the same as having servers physically located there.
STO's servers are not physically located in Europe -- otherwise most of that lockbox money and voice acting budget would be reassigned to plane tickets and hotel stays.
If you access a server in America, you are a virtual guest here.
If I access a server in Europe, I am a virtual guest there. I waive most, if not all forms of legal discourse according to American law. It does not matter if there is an American branch in that country, wherever the server is located, that is where the laws apply.
It has always been that way since the dawn of the internet, it has been challenged and upheld several times.
This raises the question of what an exploit is. Ill loosely define an exploit is any unintended behavior in the game that a player can use to gain significant advantage over others. How does a player know something is unintended? That is definitely open to interpretation and was a huge focus of the discussion in the dev team. In this case, we feel that the difference in leveling speed between playing other content in the game and playing the content that was singled out this week was so large that it is reasonable for players to think this is too good to be something the dev team intended to happen. We find exploits regularly, but it is uncommon to find one that was used to achieve enough of an advantage to require taking action.
What about Dyson Ground? I always think that the time vs rewards are ridiculous and broken. And they are, compared to the rest of the game. Everyone knows why. People constantly comment on it. So....huh?
Having an office is not the same as having servers physically located there.
STO's servers are not physically located in Europe -- otherwise most of that lockbox money and voice acting budget would be reassigned to plane tickets and hotel stays.
If you access a server in America, you are a virtual guest here.
If I access a server in Europe, I am a virtual guest there. I waive most, if not all forms of legal discourse according to American law. It does not matter if there is an American branch in that country, wherever the server is located, that is where the laws apply.
It has always been that way since the dawn of the internet, it has been challenged and upheld several times.
omg...you realy believe that?! I was suspecting already...but now I think you have totally no idea what you are talking about. thats a bit shocking now tbh
omg...you realy believe that?! I was suspecting already...but now I think you have totally no idea what you are talking about. thats a bit shocking now tbh
I not only believe that, I know it to be true. If a country has a problem with STO's way of doing business, they have the option of blacklisting Cryptic and PWE from being accessed from within their borders.
The only legal discourse people overseas are given are purely financial in scope. Chargebacks, arbitration, etc., and usually done through a third party (like Paypal or any of the major credit card companies), not between governments.
Comments
PWE could use these systems to help keep track of bugs and revisions and make sure everything is ready. its commonly used by most programing teams (to keep sanity)
Revision_Control_System
also
bugzilla.org or simiar is used by some of the biggest names and teams in programming.
sample screenshot.
that way users and the team would know if its already linked to another bug, or not a bug or tracked
you may already use these systems or others in house. of course RCS doesn't to be made public but imagine the frustration remove but having a REAL uservisable bug system.
I'm willing to bet PWE has a larger legal war chest than anyone on these forums.
maybe in your country. In mine the law has a higher priority than any TOS.
Though it boggles my mind that you thought that you didn't need to communicate with your customer base. Boggles my mind. I didn't even do Tau Dewa, and I was concerned because to me and many of us it appeared to be just an arbitrary decision because you didn't like what we were doing.
Secondly I'm not sure if I'd call any of this an exploit. The bugs have been in place for months now. The fact that no one used it before was simply because we didn't have to, but everyone knew... everyone... that you could do this. The fact that the developing team didn't know this also boggles the mind. How do you not know your own game? It's not like people suddenly discovered this and took advantage. Most people that actually played the game knew this.
Generally though in my mind, it just screams incompetance by the developing team. Thinking they didn't need to communicate coupled with the obvious that they don't even know their own game just bothers me to no end.
I'm sorry, but if anyone in my company decided to have this level of lack of customer service combined with the lack of knowing my own products, in conjunction with their inability to provide their customer base with a quality product. I'd be firing people
But I guess this is the MMO community, where all of the above is not only accepted but expected.
Very true. I can understand if some bugs pop out, it happens. However this was not a small one. If tested right, they would saw this from the start. Or got better idea from the testing sites when they was testing.
To me setting a release date isn't a good thing. Unless you tested it throughly to where you at least got 90% of it done and ready for release. This way you minimize less damage from what bugs you have. WoW faced this over Cata expansion. It was hashed and rushed beyond belief. Most of the story didn't even match up. They rushed it out way too soon. Thus created a bad game at least in my opinion. I quit the game not long afterwards. Due to part of that, and other reasons.
For the players who got penalized. They should be grateful they got a few points taken away. They could been banned from the game. I actually saw that before from other games. They take exploiting very serious.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
That's nice. The only law that applies to STO is U.S. Federal Law and the laws of the State of California (where Cryptic and PWE are based out of).
Better Call Saul:D
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Actually the terms of service, specifically paragraph 8, subsction 4 go into z-store purchases and reimbursement. In this case, according to their own TOS they are actually commiting fraud.
Read the ToS you quote before doing so -- please.
They were not getting 17 times more XP per kill and that was never stated anywhere. Elite mode was giving out 5x exp bonus, instead of 2x, an actual difference of 2.5x but because these players had such high DPS and were in content where they could repeatedly destroy ships for exp they were gaining exp 17 times faster than the average player.
Details, matter. Ugh.
Communicate with your player base...its a wonderful thing, we're just fans after all.
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Pride of the Federation/Pride of the Empire
Liberty Guardians
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Very true. WoW did create a stir once by changing something. Then the player base all fussed on the forums. If I remember right it even created a media story. And then the game makers changed their decision on it. Been a long time ago, so I can't remember what that fuss was about.
Our player base isn't that united to create something like that player base to that magnitude.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
yes. thats the sad part of the story. with 1 exception...they made a localisation of their game for my country, so they targeting my countrys market. what means, theoretically, they must respect the law. they are just not important enough that someone make a lawsuite on them... but I enjoy it when googles or apple TOS getting invalidated
because nothing changed...they are still just crying exploit when there was clearly no exploit.
Game TOS's can and have been found to be unconscionable and unenforceable before. One of the more prominent examples, involving Second Life, dealt with the purchase of in-game assets with real money and the subsequent revocation of those purchases without recompense or communication. The issue here, though obviously involving monetary amounts a couple orders of magnitude lower, isn't necessarily that much different. Whether anyone can find an attorney willing to work pro bono or who is willing to shell out the expenses to pursue this over such a small amount is another question. I really hope they do.
Emphasised the single most important word in your post.
If I have a problem with EvE Online and want to bring lawyers into it, I'm pretty sure the country of Iceland does not care about American law. When I click the EULA for that game, I agree I am a virtual guest of Iceland. Same goes for any other game. You are a guest, and your avenues of legal discourse are extremely limited, if not non-existant.
Otherwise there would be no international trade of anything, and human civilization would grind to a halt.
If you have an international dispute with PWE and Cryptic, you will lose. This theory of yours has been debunked over and over again in reality.
because they could have given out 100,000 zen and free T6 canon ships and people would still rage
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
i did but missed that portion anyways if thats the case then they need to address this quickly before it goes to far.
anyways i hope cooler heads prevail.....im on the forum hoping for cooler heads.....i made a funny
ha! the thing you dont know is, that they have an office here in europe and doing business here. sure, murrican law is so TRIBBLE its not worth to even try, but things change if you bring your office to europe
Thank you stephendangelo.
I have to say, it did take you guys longer than I personally believe to address this issue. I would also like to give some feedback to your team to maybe improve their communication a bit with these issues so we can get official word quicker. However I am sure this is already been discussed internally.
However, I thank you for coming here to explain the situation, what happened and the route you took, I have to personally say, regarding your decision with the specialisation, I honesty do feel for you, that was a no win scenario decision.
Now lets get on and enjoy Star Trek Online shall we
I did take part in solo elite patrols in Argala as well as assisted fleet members with their story mission patrols as they couldn't kill the HP walls alone. So I will accept any and all spec points that I have lost as I would have been gaining xp at a rate that was not intended.
The only thing I would like to bring to your and anyone else within the company's attention is that the game is very limited in missions and other content to gain xp through. This makes the game very repetitive and very stagnant. I do not know if anyone else agrees with me, but I am all for taking longer to level and gain stuff as long as there is enough varying content to support it.
Once again thank you for addressing the issue and informing the community as to why your decision. Hopefully we will see more of this from the staff, and hopefully we will see an increase in content to keep players interest in the game.
Fleet Admiral Mason
But I feel it necessary to break down a number of issues that are not addressed at this time
The first of these is the primary reason that this story brewed. It was described to us at STLV by CaptGeko that the new level cap was supposed to take as long as the Lv 1 - 50 leveling process did. I'm forced to point to the current content in Delta Rising to show how that has bombed and created this very issue.
1) There is not a sufficient amount of content to reach Lv 60 just using Delta Rising content.
This is important because you wanted a slow leveling process but you did not provide enough content to enable this process. Less missions means less EXP for the players. Which means we had to search for a leveling alternative to enjoy the story of Delta Rising. That led to the TD exploit you quashed.
And the issue remains: there is not enough experience in Delta Rising to reasonably allow people to progress through the story chain without being bored and meeting your expectations.
You want us to have a slow leveling system? Fine. But you got to meet the players halfway and provide enough content for us to enjoy that slow leveling system. We know you can do it, you made ~40 missions for Legacy of Romulus. Where are the 40 missions for this new leveling scheme in Delta Rising?
NO ONE in this game should have been scouring the rest of the game for EXP just to enjoy the expansion.
2) The lack of communication is fueling the anger.
Stephen, if you had made your post as soon as action was needed on this exploit, you should have immediately posted what you did today then and there. Much of the anger of today is the frustration of being kept out of the loop. We all had questions: "What specifically was the exploit?" and when new details came out the question became "Was this a bug or an exploit?"
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I would also say you need to work with the PWE Community Managers more. We have seen repeatedly (such as the Red Matter Capacitor Promo Code being changed w/out informing Smirk) that Cryptic and Community Management seem to be not talking to each other. Our CMs AND the players have the right to know whats going on.
I would also, personally, ask that you, Stephen D'Angelou please start talking with the community. Daniel Stahl used to do Engineering reports. Don't make promises. Just talk about the state of the game and ask for our feedback on things that the dev team is considering (but make no promises, I can't stress that enough). It would go along way to rebuilding the trust.
3) Taking things away is never a good punishment.
Many innocents were hurt today in your decision to take away those spec point and many who were guilty got away with it. I've seen friends who've not hit 60 get hit with this Spec Point removal and people who maxed out the spec tree still have it maxed. Your internal metrics are inaccurate and it is not the first time.
I would, in the future, choose to simply stop the exploit instead of taking away and stopping the exploit. There will be a lot less collateral damage and the players won't (a) feel cheated or (b) unfairly punished when they, well, are unfairly punished.
Lastly I must return to point one, because
(4) We now have a situation where leveling up is going to be a problem because the content in Delta Rising is insufficient and EXP from defeats is too low.
The first thing you can do to address this is to raise the rewards on Ground Combat. At present defeating a single Vaadwaur solider gives ~7 EXP while defeating a ship of equal level is ~300. Bring the ground numbers up the space ones (~300 for both).
In addition, not only are EXP rewards low, but Delta Marks (DMs) are of extremely low quantity (5-7 per mission on Kobali vs 30-40 on New Romulus). Plus there is the reduction of the Dilithium in PVE queues. I'm sorry, but if this is the new standard, people won't stay after analyzing their own Player Heirarchy Cost Analysis Matrix.
Delta Rising has been all stick and no carrot. Content is too few, EXP is too few, Dilithium is too few, EC grinding was nerfed, Mark Rewards are too low... Can you start to see why even some of Cryptic's staunchest defenders are saying "You done screwed up?"
Now, I say all these things because it needs to be gotten across: players are feeling cheated and legitimately so. The devs who are in the know don't talk to us anymore, the rewards from the game are dropping, and the HUUUGE expansion turned out to be 10 missions and 3 PVE queues that we can't level up to play with a bunch of mediocre patrols you had claimed just last season STO wasn't going to do anymore because they weren't up to snuff.
I'm sorry, Stephen. But you are sitting in the Captain's Chair and the buck stops with you. I don't expect changes overnight, but I would like to see these issues addressed. They may not all be to my liking, but I want to see the dev team sit down together and talk about this. Because we are your customers. We can choose to walk away. We can choose to stop paying for STO. Many already are. If you want to stop losing more and possibly bring back those who left, you ALL at Cryptic Studios and Perfect World US to need stop, sit down and discuss why your clients, even the loyal ones are finding this update hard to swallow.
I say this, not to be mean or degrading, but to point out we came here to have fun and what we got instead was more grind to get to the fun stuff. I have been accused in the past of being a Cryptic lackey because of my support for you guys. I even defended this patching of this exploit. But that does not mean I agree with it.
STO is a great game, and I want to see it go on for many more years. But in the here and now, the staff needs to take a look at what went wrong in Delta Rising and try to correct the many errors that occurred.
~Sirboulevard
Fleet Engineering Lead - EWOC Fleet
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
Having an office is not the same as having servers physically located there.
STO's servers are not physically located in Europe -- otherwise most of that lockbox money and voice acting budget would be reassigned to plane tickets and hotel stays.
If you access a server in America, you are a virtual guest here.
If I access a server in Europe, I am a virtual guest there. I waive most, if not all forms of legal discourse according to American law. It does not matter if there is an American branch in that country, wherever the server is located, that is where the laws apply.
It has always been that way since the dawn of the internet, it has been challenged and upheld several times.
What about Dyson Ground? I always think that the time vs rewards are ridiculous and broken. And they are, compared to the rest of the game. Everyone knows why. People constantly comment on it. So....huh?
omg...you realy believe that?! I was suspecting already...but now I think you have totally no idea what you are talking about. thats a bit shocking now tbh
I not only believe that, I know it to be true. If a country has a problem with STO's way of doing business, they have the option of blacklisting Cryptic and PWE from being accessed from within their borders.
The only legal discourse people overseas are given are purely financial in scope. Chargebacks, arbitration, etc., and usually done through a third party (like Paypal or any of the major credit card companies), not between governments.