Try paragraph two. When you find something that lets you cheat at a game, and you use it, it's your fault for cheating, not someone else's fault for being a sucker.
I sure wouldn't want to play chess with quite a lot of you - you'd apparently think it was fair play to move pieces around the board while I wasn't looking. After all, if you weren't supposed to do it the pieces would be nailed down, right?
How petty, narrow-minded, and condescending. Good job?
Alright, I'll say it. I'm sorry for speeding through your thin content. I'm sorry for finding the fastest way to level my toons. I'm sorry I had the sheer unmitigated gaul to crank out enormous amounts of dps in the first place. I'm sorry I transgressed and allied myself with similarly powerful captains to attain mastery of my ship in less than one hour. I'm sorry I skipped over Neelix's dialogue in the new episodes. I'm sorry I didn't seem as appreciate of the voice talent - I really was, the truth is I just sped through it all because I really am proud of the way the game progressed. But, I'm not sorry I will be taking an extended break from the game. I'm not sorry that I will be keeping my wallet closed because sir, you have called me and my fellow captains cheaters and exploiters. We didn't exploit, we used a valid game mechanic that your team implemented. Please, don't blame or punish us for operating within the ones and zeros that you set forth. I'm glad we got to hear from you, but I'm not glad it was in this way. I hope you can get it together because from what I've been hearing all over this game, my discontent is not unique. You have a serious problem on your hands and taking things from your players that they earned (no matter what path they took) is wrong provided they did not breach the terms of use - and we did not. You should have listened to your testers when they identified a potential no-no. You did not. This is not our fault.
Try paragraph two. When you find something that lets you cheat at a game, and you use it, it's your fault for cheating, not someone else's fault for being a sucker.
I sure wouldn't want to play chess with quite a lot of you - you'd apparently think it was fair play to move pieces around the board while I wasn't looking. After all, if you weren't supposed to do it the pieces would be nailed down, right?
Worst analogy ever ... if both of us had no idea how to play chess, while being blindfolded ... then you might be on to something, though [First one, making a wrong move = Cheater] ... but I'm not sure you have any idea what you're even talking about, sounds like you're assuming someone found a "CHEAT-Button" and pushed it ...
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
Alright, I'll say it. I'm sorry for speeding through your thin content. I'm sorry for finding the fastest way to level my toons. I'm sorry I had the sheer unmitigated gaul to crank out enormous amounts of dps in the first place. I'm sorry I transgressed and allied myself with similarly powerful captains to attain mastery of my ship in less than one hour. I'm sorry I skipped over Neelix's dialogue in the new episodes. I'm sorry I didn't seem as appreciate of the voice talent - I really was, the truth is I just sped through it all because I really am proud of the way the game progressed. But, I'm not sorry I will be taking an extended break from the game. I'm not sorry that I will be keeping my wallet closed because sir, you have called me and my fellow captains cheaters and exploiters. We didn't exploit, we used a valid game mechanic that your team implemented. Please, don't blame or punish us for operating within the ones and zeros that you set forth. I'm glad we got to hear from you, but I'm not glad it was in this way. I hope you can get it together because from what I've been hearing all over this game, my discontent is not unique. You have a serious problem on your hands and taking things from your players that they earned (no matter what path they took) is wrong provided they did not breach the terms of use - and we did not. You should have listened to your testers when they identified a potential no-no. You did not. This is not our fault.
Sincerely,
A former player.
I have said the exact same thing since the shutdown of Tau Dewa but sadly our voices will not be heard as CRYPTIC will now look at the levels of the playerbase and say "look they are all nowhere near maxed level! THIS WAS A GREAT IDEA! now we have a whole year beofre they need something else to do besides slowly grind the levels!"
Here is the problem I see with expecting us to know that it was an exploit.
1) No one have ever been to level 60 before and had no idea what sp we should be getting on elite.
2) Most of us have been level 50 for so long we haven't seen skill points as it all has been turned into expertise. I wouldn't have noticed what amount it was suppose to be as I have 7mil sitting on my main that I barely play. What is 500 skill points after having earned 20 mil and have spent over 12 mil in a few years?
3) After they changed the rate of leveling with Season 5, seeing elite mode with mobs produce high skill points does not seem out of the ordinary.
right now, it would simply be better to just let it burn itself out, eventually players will come back. but one of the major problems with this game and cryptic is the obvious gaping hole where communication is sucked into it and the only way to get anything is if you saw it like that and the devs have this convenient bridge to cross the maw to chat with specific people. not saying to open channels to the point of changing or influencing the plans, not like that but rather just being a bit more open with the community. since brandon disappeared, the quality of how things are handled has degraded quite a bit in and around the forum this is just the latest example that stephen has to come out to play nice to placate the community because it seems the community team are not around to try themselves.
obviously something is not right there just as much as the unintended exploit needed a look into. if this can happen once, it could happen again and again, this time the whole thing got away lucky, next time it could be even worse. its time to consider how cryptic has been organized so this doesnt need to happen twice.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
His Excellency Mr. D'Angelo in his very SECOND post ever addresses the peons.
Being a cynic I'll venture to say that the PWE Overlords in Beijing aren't happy with the metrics.
So Mr. D'Angelo had to get out of his cushy comfort zone and address the unwashed masses.
What's the matter, the new grind fest & fleecing model of DR doesn't work as intended?
I'll venture to say that if sales were going well Mr. D'Angelo wouldn't be here, as it is - he has to patch up the holes before more of the rodents escape.
[...]
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.
[...]
My Reference - Number is 141023-000605. When you pull my data you will find half a dozen tells with another account which made me aware of how exactly the exploit works. That happened 10/21/2014 from 13:45 'till 13:55 Central European time. If you check my activity you 'should' see me participating in a 'lot' of borg sectorspace encounters.
If that and making sure to have a legacy 8 hour skill bonus running makes me a cheater, thank you very much for calling me out.
edit: Oh almost forgot. I also replayed the whole frakking storyline in the weeks before the expansion so I could turn them in for a boost. Maybe that put me over the 'line'.
And just to be sure, I am not mad about loosing a couple spec points, that would be inconvenient at best. I am mad because as usual there are quite a few people around who pulled multiple of their chars through that particular rabbit hole and are left untouched so they can gloat about it.
I would take the penalty without saying anything if I would feel fair treated. But I know others using that mechaning to bring up multiple chars and some of their specialization. They made much more xp than I. But my mistake was to take just a single char, I did not level the others.
I lost just 3 of 18 specialization points but I have some doubts about your statistics. I got my first 4 level by handing in older story content, getting 6 more by playing the new story missions on elite. So doing 13 levels in TD seems to be impossible for me...
Your xp rewards were set to 5 times on elite than normal when it should only have been 2.
Then go on to say people lvl'd 17 times faster.
Why do you think this is? Because they found this totes awesome sneaky exploit? Go look a the dps leader boards cryptic, get out a calculator, do the math. This isn't hard.
The XP/level errors in the Tau Dewa patrols were on Tribble for months. Many players bug reported these and even raised these on the very rare occasions when Devs actually showed their faces in the TTS channel.
Nothing was done. This stayed as part of the build until go live. The fact that you had been told and did nothing about it makes this fair game.
If you found a suitcase of money on the street and then took it to the police. The police say they don't want to do anything about it and you can keep it so you do. The police then come around to your house and arrest/charge you for stealing money.
The XP/level errors in the Tau Dewa patrols were on Tribble for months. Many players bug reported these and even raised these on the very rare occasions when Devs actually showed their faces in the TTS channel.
Nothing was done. This stayed as part of the build until go live. The fact that you had been told and did nothing about it makes this fair game.
If you found a suitcase of money on the street and then took it to the police. The police say they don't want to do anything about it and you can keep it so you do. The police then come around to your house and arrest/charge you for stealing money.
I think you would be pretty pissed off.
I have made a thread to address this issue, others may have too. Here is my post:
I'm sorry, but this new "difficulty" isn't really difficulty. It's just more grind and lazy. People complained about it on Tribble. The complaints were very legit. But they were ignored and holo deck has to experience the ruined game play that only Tribble had to experience. For those who are not effected by this, let me spell it out, people were leaving CE Advanced 66% completed. PvE mission made unplayable. But there was a thread for feedback on the new "difficulty". They listened. They will make changes now. But what they have done was used Holodeck as a test server when they ran the same test on Tribble and got the same feedback. Yes, I know, MMOGs are normally incomplete and buggy. But this was something that could have been prevented if only they listened to their beta-testers.
how many HOURES of pure xp grinding should it take us to gain a SINGLE level?
7. Give or take depending on your DPS. But a 10k boat can expect to need to solo grind about 7 hours to gain one level over 60. This is pretty easy to figure out. Did it earlier on my main and it worked out to 131xp per min on Normal. Did not have the time to try Elite but we know by now that xp over time drops significantly on Elite.
7. Give or take depending on your DPS. But a 10k boat can expect to need to solo grind about 7 hours to gain one level over 60. This is pretty easy to figure out. Did it earlier on my main and it worked out to 131xp per min on Normal. Did not have the time to try Elite but we know by now that xp over time drops significantly on Elite.
Hehe, now Cryptic Clown Cohort can waltz in and tell you to find a job/sidejob and for 7 hours on even the minimal wage you can buy all the zen you need and convert it into dil.
Hehe, now Cryptic Clown Cohort can waltz in and tell you to find a job/sidejob and for 7 hours on even the minimal wage you can buy all the zen you need and convert it into dil.
It's sad when this fact is true, however lvling speed isn't dictated by Dilithium ownership. You'd still have to grind that 7hrs whether in a Scimitar or Failboat running 10K dps with lots of expenisve gear and no idea how to play.
The length of the grind vs the reward payout is one of the things that this explosion about lvling has missed mentioning.
Currently unless you spend a good few hours in the game you get very little reward for your time in progression or items or currency in any form. It's mind boggling that currently the rewards for DOFF missions are greater than actual missions over the course of an hour.
Chris Robert's on SC:
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
It's sad when this fact is true, however lvling speed isn't dictated by Dilithium ownership. You'd still have to grind that 7hrs whether in a Scimitar or Failboat running 10K dps with lots of expenisve gear and no idea how to play.
The length of the grind vs the reward payout is one of the things that this explosion about lvling has missed mentioning.
Currently unless you spend a good few hours in the game you get very little reward for your time in progression or items or currency in any form. It's mind boggling that currently the rewards for DOFF missions are greater than actual missions over the course of an hour.
Yep DR is a boring grind that is not any different than any of the others since they released them in season 7. As well the severe lack or no accountability at all within Cryptic on their short comings is also more apparent here. As it started with the KDF and PvP its just spiraling out of control even to the federation side now. They better start making some internal as well as transparent changes we can see or this game won't make it to another update imo.
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 for the concise and informative post.
If nothing else, we can only hope this debacle will teach Cryptic/PWE a few lessons.
Please keep the community informed. It doesn't have to be chapter and verse, just a simple sticky with the bare facts or just an acknowledgement. I'm sure there would be many willing to do this job for free, if someone on the payroll doesn't have time.
Don't release bugged content. This whole issue was of your own creation. You have a test server and people willing to test content and report bugs, use it. TALK to players, ask them to find exploits and oddities before they appear on holodeck, again people are willing to do this for FREE.
The Op pointed out they find a lot of exploits but generally don't close them because they are not heavily used.
The mistake wasn't letting the exploit go uncorrected. It was under estimating how much it would be used.
Under estimated or not, if it's an exploit no matter how small it is, then is should be closed off. What compounds the issue more so with this particular one is that people who tested it on tribble had already informed/advised them that is was an issue and many of them even had the foresight to understand this is how it would be used. Yet they chose to ignore such warnings again!
With how often Cryptic have dropped the Nerf bat this year its no wonder people are upset. I'm making more XP from doffing every four hours than I do running content on any difficulty level. So I along with a few others in my fleet are expecting them to swing the bat again shortly.
And it doesn't alter the fact that THERE IS NOT enough content in DR to level to 60. I've played through it on my Fed main on elite whilst the XP multiplier was supposedly borked and still had to repeat a couple of patrol missions to unlock the next level. And by the time I'd completed the story line I was almost three levels short of 60. So its no wonder people made the decision to use a particular mission to level knowing this.
As for the EP making this post, well I can only surmise that given the up roar on the forums over the last few days and the sheer number of "I quit" threads that have appeared and been closed. Its nothing more than a poor desperate attempt at damage control. As always cryptic closes off anything that helps give the player a leg up, whilst blatantly ignoring the serious issues, such as getting the mac client working again.
Given the unrest in the player base and given the nature of my own position I see no other alternative but to put the question of "Is this how PWE operates its subsidiary's?" to the PWE investor relations people. Because if this issue is anything to go buy then forget me investing anything else into PWE, if anything I'll be looking to off load any remaining shares I have and go look for something else. I cant see how the handling of this, is anything less than incompetent.
On a more personal note I will agree that all the people that have tore a strip out of Trendy really should be ashamed of your selves! She doesn't deserve the treatment and insults that people on this very forum have thrown her way over the past week or so
.... alright. I just read Stephen Angelo's post. By his maths and explanation of the spec point removal process; I exploited and cheated my way through the entirety of DR, as 4 of my 16 points were removed and he states that anything over 10 points earned specifically by exploitation would be removed. Therefore having finished all the story missions, only 2 spec points I earned were legal.
I am unhappy about this revelation.
The exploit has been revealed to be running TD patrols in a group using the match level mechanic to vastly boost the xp awarded. I confess! I ran the TD patrols. Using the radiation wrapper mission. On normal. Alone. Once a day. I ran Argala in a group with level matching on three different occasions. I ran Argala a few times solo on elite. It was tedious and dull, so I stopped doing that. But the Argala mission wasn't considered part of the exploit. Previous to DR launching, I completed the storyline and patrol missions I had left undone in the Alpha Quadrant, I didn't hand them in until DR went live. That got me to level 53, is that also considered to have been an exploit?
The additional XPs I earned outside of the DR missions was from Red Alerts across the galaxy, a steady trickle of doffing missions and a few STFs run on normal. Since the XP nerf and the removal of spec points, I haven't leveled my main or any other character through DR once. I've felt no desire to compete with the ever increasing demands on time or resources for what seem to be ever diminishing rewards and enjoyment.
I am one of the alleged 250 players, with one of the alleged 300 characters who are guilty, in your eyes, of cheating. That you then go on to say that your metrics do not lie and that every single appeal has been turned down after evidence of foul play is revealed is actually quite insulting.
To be frank, Mr. Angelo, I'm sick of your disingenuous assertions. I will be spending my money somewhere else from this point forward.
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.
Well that's proof, if we acutally needed it, that the developers don't bother with the feedback given by the testers. It does beg the question why bother with tribble at all?
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.
Given what you have done in this situation was there really any need to shut down the maps? You effectively went down the road of collective punishment, something I can't stand. You punished the vast majority for the very ssmall number of players. Could you not have left the maps open for the majority and still do what you did during maintanence and the dealing with thjose minority of players.
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.
Using your definition of an exploit means it was wrong of you, as in Cryptic not you personally, to call the use of the mail system as an exploit. Instead it was using something as intended that had unintended side effects and the people up above should have owned up to their own inability to fix the system so it was going to have to be changed.
However, like this instance, it seem to be Cryptic S.O.P to blame the players and call them exploiters instead of holding up your own hands and saying "Sorry guys we messed up and need to sort this out", again I am using your defanition of an exploit. The "Q" post showed that attitude nicely. It was a classic example of how not to communicate with your customers.
By the way. How exactly does this give a "significantadvantage over other players"? I could just about understand it if Cryptic had bothered with making a decent PvP system in this game. Given that they don't I don't see how it would cause a problem.
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.
As with naming and shaming we only have your word for it. Normally I would accept that in other games from the higher ups as they have proven themselves to be honest, the ones I have dealt with anyway. However Cryptic has lost the trust of a lot of its' playerbase.
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.
See my comment on testing feedback. If it made it live and unaltered then it is reasonable to presume it was working as intended. It would be an error if there was never any feedback on it in the testing phase and someone found out about it and then the word spread.
Given how quickly you got it fixed one it went live is another level of proof that it seems that the devs just ignore feedback. This could have been sorted before DR went live and we would have had none of this mess. Therefore I ask for a second tim, though still not expecting and answer: What is the point of testing on tribble as it seems you don't bother with feedback?
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
Again it seems the higher ups at Cryptic just can not accept resposibility for a balls up. There is no apparently about it. Your communication on this matter was unclear. Did the "Q" post even go through a proof read by anyone who has any experience with customer service?
I used to work taking orders over the phone for a rather large shopping channel if I said anything along the lines of that post to a customer I would have been sacked on the spot, no ifs, buts, or maybes about it.
This last part is like not appologising while trying to make it look like you are. Along the lines of "Sorry but...." which means you are making an excuse. When appologising should just be along the lines of "Sorry I/we messed up and I/we will try not to make the same mistake again".
.... alright. I just read Stephen Angelo's post. By his maths and explanation of the spec point removal process; I exploited and cheated my way through the entirety of DR, as 4 of my 16 points were removed and he states that anything over 10 points earned specifically by exploitation would be removed. Therefore having finished all the story missions, only 2 spec points I earned were legal.
Nerft everything to hell in a handbasket, then punish players for trying to escape your straight up miserable content.
Nerf EXP to 1 point per day if you want, for all the good that is going to do
Do we really seem like battery hens you can put in a little box and control?
Leveling ON OUR OWN, away from your content, is symptomatic of the weakests release you've produced to date - the leveling is not the problem, cryptic and the expansion are.
It makes the game un-playble.
Leveling in japori, people were grouping up manually, talking and teaming but god forbid something happens we didn't write in our pitiful metrics. Our petty little metrics.
I mean you can throw the blame whatever you want, metrics will be fine but this is your doing
Can't say I care much at this point, we've coped with 2 years of you deleting our content we were enjoying and using, out of love for star trek.
If there is anyone in your office left that thinks people are looking forward to re-playing 600 story missions to max level you need a serious wake-up call.
But you are right this is the time to draw a line, I've just about had enough of all of you
Wow the nerve if the EP. I re read the OP and he just comes across as talking down to people.
And the people thanking him? Are they unable to see the smug condescending tone of his words?
Oh "apparently" it wasn't clear?
Wow what a real winner.
This guy seriously wins [redacted] of the year award. Wow. Thanks for fracturing the community while simultaneously ruining the game. Bravo. You even made it easy for pwe to figure out whose head to make roll.
Comments
How petty, narrow-minded, and condescending. Good job?
Alright, I'll say it. I'm sorry for speeding through your thin content. I'm sorry for finding the fastest way to level my toons. I'm sorry I had the sheer unmitigated gaul to crank out enormous amounts of dps in the first place. I'm sorry I transgressed and allied myself with similarly powerful captains to attain mastery of my ship in less than one hour. I'm sorry I skipped over Neelix's dialogue in the new episodes. I'm sorry I didn't seem as appreciate of the voice talent - I really was, the truth is I just sped through it all because I really am proud of the way the game progressed. But, I'm not sorry I will be taking an extended break from the game. I'm not sorry that I will be keeping my wallet closed because sir, you have called me and my fellow captains cheaters and exploiters. We didn't exploit, we used a valid game mechanic that your team implemented. Please, don't blame or punish us for operating within the ones and zeros that you set forth. I'm glad we got to hear from you, but I'm not glad it was in this way. I hope you can get it together because from what I've been hearing all over this game, my discontent is not unique. You have a serious problem on your hands and taking things from your players that they earned (no matter what path they took) is wrong provided they did not breach the terms of use - and we did not. You should have listened to your testers when they identified a potential no-no. You did not. This is not our fault.
Sincerely,
A former player.
Worst analogy ever ... if both of us had no idea how to play chess, while being blindfolded ... then you might be on to something, though [First one, making a wrong move = Cheater] ... but I'm not sure you have any idea what you're even talking about, sounds like you're assuming someone found a "CHEAT-Button" and pushed it ...
1) No one have ever been to level 60 before and had no idea what sp we should be getting on elite.
2) Most of us have been level 50 for so long we haven't seen skill points as it all has been turned into expertise. I wouldn't have noticed what amount it was suppose to be as I have 7mil sitting on my main that I barely play. What is 500 skill points after having earned 20 mil and have spent over 12 mil in a few years?
3) After they changed the rate of leveling with Season 5, seeing elite mode with mobs produce high skill points does not seem out of the ordinary.
Blaming the players is in bad form.
obviously something is not right there just as much as the unintended exploit needed a look into. if this can happen once, it could happen again and again, this time the whole thing got away lucky, next time it could be even worse. its time to consider how cryptic has been organized so this doesnt need to happen twice.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
His Excellency Mr. D'Angelo in his very SECOND post ever addresses the peons.
Being a cynic I'll venture to say that the PWE Overlords in Beijing aren't happy with the metrics.
So Mr. D'Angelo had to get out of his cushy comfort zone and address the unwashed masses.
What's the matter, the new grind fest & fleecing model of DR doesn't work as intended?
I'll venture to say that if sales were going well Mr. D'Angelo wouldn't be here, as it is - he has to patch up the holes before more of the rodents escape.
My Reference - Number is 141023-000605. When you pull my data you will find half a dozen tells with another account which made me aware of how exactly the exploit works. That happened 10/21/2014 from 13:45 'till 13:55 Central European time. If you check my activity you 'should' see me participating in a 'lot' of borg sectorspace encounters.
If that and making sure to have a legacy 8 hour skill bonus running makes me a cheater, thank you very much for calling me out.
edit: Oh almost forgot. I also replayed the whole frakking storyline in the weeks before the expansion so I could turn them in for a boost. Maybe that put me over the 'line'.
And just to be sure, I am not mad about loosing a couple spec points, that would be inconvenient at best. I am mad because as usual there are quite a few people around who pulled multiple of their chars through that particular rabbit hole and are left untouched so they can gloat about it.
I lost just 3 of 18 specialization points but I have some doubts about your statistics. I got my first 4 level by handing in older story content, getting 6 more by playing the new story missions on elite. So doing 13 levels in TD seems to be impossible for me...
Then go on to say people lvl'd 17 times faster.
Why do you think this is? Because they found this totes awesome sneaky exploit? Go look a the dps leader boards cryptic, get out a calculator, do the math. This isn't hard.
The XP/level errors in the Tau Dewa patrols were on Tribble for months. Many players bug reported these and even raised these on the very rare occasions when Devs actually showed their faces in the TTS channel.
Nothing was done. This stayed as part of the build until go live. The fact that you had been told and did nothing about it makes this fair game.
If you found a suitcase of money on the street and then took it to the police. The police say they don't want to do anything about it and you can keep it so you do. The police then come around to your house and arrest/charge you for stealing money.
I think you would be pretty pissed off.
...#LLAP...
basicly THIS
NEVE EVER do this again!
NOONE could know this was an exploit fixing it ok
stealiong palytiem from players NO GO!
Actually, there was an exploit going on, but it is not what everyone is flaming Cryptic for.
7. Give or take depending on your DPS. But a 10k boat can expect to need to solo grind about 7 hours to gain one level over 60. This is pretty easy to figure out. Did it earlier on my main and it worked out to 131xp per min on Normal. Did not have the time to try Elite but we know by now that xp over time drops significantly on Elite.
Hehe, now Cryptic Clown Cohort can waltz in and tell you to find a job/sidejob and for 7 hours on even the minimal wage you can buy all the zen you need and convert it into dil.
It's sad when this fact is true, however lvling speed isn't dictated by Dilithium ownership. You'd still have to grind that 7hrs whether in a Scimitar or Failboat running 10K dps with lots of expenisve gear and no idea how to play.
The length of the grind vs the reward payout is one of the things that this explosion about lvling has missed mentioning.
Currently unless you spend a good few hours in the game you get very little reward for your time in progression or items or currency in any form. It's mind boggling that currently the rewards for DOFF missions are greater than actual missions over the course of an hour.
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Care to wager they'll nerf doff missions next?
Thank you for the concise and informative post.
If nothing else, we can only hope this debacle will teach Cryptic/PWE a few lessons.
Please keep the community informed. It doesn't have to be chapter and verse, just a simple sticky with the bare facts or just an acknowledgement. I'm sure there would be many willing to do this job for free, if someone on the payroll doesn't have time.
Don't release bugged content. This whole issue was of your own creation. You have a test server and people willing to test content and report bugs, use it. TALK to players, ask them to find exploits and oddities before they appear on holodeck, again people are willing to do this for FREE.
Under estimated or not, if it's an exploit no matter how small it is, then is should be closed off. What compounds the issue more so with this particular one is that people who tested it on tribble had already informed/advised them that is was an issue and many of them even had the foresight to understand this is how it would be used. Yet they chose to ignore such warnings again!
With how often Cryptic have dropped the Nerf bat this year its no wonder people are upset. I'm making more XP from doffing every four hours than I do running content on any difficulty level. So I along with a few others in my fleet are expecting them to swing the bat again shortly.
And it doesn't alter the fact that THERE IS NOT enough content in DR to level to 60. I've played through it on my Fed main on elite whilst the XP multiplier was supposedly borked and still had to repeat a couple of patrol missions to unlock the next level. And by the time I'd completed the story line I was almost three levels short of 60. So its no wonder people made the decision to use a particular mission to level knowing this.
As for the EP making this post, well I can only surmise that given the up roar on the forums over the last few days and the sheer number of "I quit" threads that have appeared and been closed. Its nothing more than a poor desperate attempt at damage control. As always cryptic closes off anything that helps give the player a leg up, whilst blatantly ignoring the serious issues, such as getting the mac client working again.
Given the unrest in the player base and given the nature of my own position I see no other alternative but to put the question of "Is this how PWE operates its subsidiary's?" to the PWE investor relations people. Because if this issue is anything to go buy then forget me investing anything else into PWE, if anything I'll be looking to off load any remaining shares I have and go look for something else. I cant see how the handling of this, is anything less than incompetent.
On a more personal note I will agree that all the people that have tore a strip out of Trendy really should be ashamed of your selves! She doesn't deserve the treatment and insults that people on this very forum have thrown her way over the past week or so
I am unhappy about this revelation.
The exploit has been revealed to be running TD patrols in a group using the match level mechanic to vastly boost the xp awarded. I confess! I ran the TD patrols. Using the radiation wrapper mission. On normal. Alone. Once a day. I ran Argala in a group with level matching on three different occasions. I ran Argala a few times solo on elite. It was tedious and dull, so I stopped doing that. But the Argala mission wasn't considered part of the exploit. Previous to DR launching, I completed the storyline and patrol missions I had left undone in the Alpha Quadrant, I didn't hand them in until DR went live. That got me to level 53, is that also considered to have been an exploit?
The additional XPs I earned outside of the DR missions was from Red Alerts across the galaxy, a steady trickle of doffing missions and a few STFs run on normal. Since the XP nerf and the removal of spec points, I haven't leveled my main or any other character through DR once. I've felt no desire to compete with the ever increasing demands on time or resources for what seem to be ever diminishing rewards and enjoyment.
I am one of the alleged 250 players, with one of the alleged 300 characters who are guilty, in your eyes, of cheating. That you then go on to say that your metrics do not lie and that every single appeal has been turned down after evidence of foul play is revealed is actually quite insulting.
To be frank, Mr. Angelo, I'm sick of your disingenuous assertions. I will be spending my money somewhere else from this point forward.
Well that's proof, if we acutally needed it, that the developers don't bother with the feedback given by the testers. It does beg the question why bother with tribble at all?
Given what you have done in this situation was there really any need to shut down the maps? You effectively went down the road of collective punishment, something I can't stand. You punished the vast majority for the very ssmall number of players. Could you not have left the maps open for the majority and still do what you did during maintanence and the dealing with thjose minority of players.
Using your definition of an exploit means it was wrong of you, as in Cryptic not you personally, to call the use of the mail system as an exploit. Instead it was using something as intended that had unintended side effects and the people up above should have owned up to their own inability to fix the system so it was going to have to be changed.
However, like this instance, it seem to be Cryptic S.O.P to blame the players and call them exploiters instead of holding up your own hands and saying "Sorry guys we messed up and need to sort this out", again I am using your defanition of an exploit. The "Q" post showed that attitude nicely. It was a classic example of how not to communicate with your customers.
By the way. How exactly does this give a "significantadvantage over other players"? I could just about understand it if Cryptic had bothered with making a decent PvP system in this game. Given that they don't I don't see how it would cause a problem.
As with naming and shaming we only have your word for it. Normally I would accept that in other games from the higher ups as they have proven themselves to be honest, the ones I have dealt with anyway. However Cryptic has lost the trust of a lot of its' playerbase.
See my comment on testing feedback. If it made it live and unaltered then it is reasonable to presume it was working as intended. It would be an error if there was never any feedback on it in the testing phase and someone found out about it and then the word spread.
Given how quickly you got it fixed one it went live is another level of proof that it seems that the devs just ignore feedback. This could have been sorted before DR went live and we would have had none of this mess. Therefore I ask for a second tim, though still not expecting and answer: What is the point of testing on tribble as it seems you don't bother with feedback?
Again it seems the higher ups at Cryptic just can not accept resposibility for a balls up. There is no apparently about it. Your communication on this matter was unclear. Did the "Q" post even go through a proof read by anyone who has any experience with customer service?
I used to work taking orders over the phone for a rather large shopping channel if I said anything along the lines of that post to a customer I would have been sacked on the spot, no ifs, buts, or maybes about it.
This last part is like not appologising while trying to make it look like you are. Along the lines of "Sorry but...." which means you are making an excuse. When appologising should just be along the lines of "Sorry I/we messed up and I/we will try not to make the same mistake again".
Timeout every time... Cookies should not be the problem cause i accept them
unhappy??
ANGRY!
this is BS
big SH**storm over you Angelo
same if I'm not compansated for YOUR error
you wanna make money? make PLAYERS happy
You yourself should have a quick read through this thread: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1269231
It's quite civil, 150+ different STO players (Customers) have replied to a simple question, one I believe every company ask it's customers?
Edit: Removed wording that may be interpreted as counter productive.
Would you recommend STO to a friend?
Problem is cryptic's side.
Nerft everything to hell in a handbasket, then punish players for trying to escape your straight up miserable content.
Nerf EXP to 1 point per day if you want, for all the good that is going to do
Do we really seem like battery hens you can put in a little box and control?
Leveling ON OUR OWN, away from your content, is symptomatic of the weakests release you've produced to date - the leveling is not the problem, cryptic and the expansion are.
It makes the game un-playble.
Leveling in japori, people were grouping up manually, talking and teaming but god forbid something happens we didn't write in our pitiful metrics. Our petty little metrics.
I mean you can throw the blame whatever you want, metrics will be fine but this is your doing
Can't say I care much at this point, we've coped with 2 years of you deleting our content we were enjoying and using, out of love for star trek.
If there is anyone in your office left that thinks people are looking forward to re-playing 600 story missions to max level you need a serious wake-up call.
But you are right this is the time to draw a line, I've just about had enough of all of you
And the people thanking him? Are they unable to see the smug condescending tone of his words?
Oh "apparently" it wasn't clear?
Wow what a real winner.
This guy seriously wins [redacted] of the year award. Wow. Thanks for fracturing the community while simultaneously ruining the game. Bravo. You even made it easy for pwe to figure out whose head to make roll.
A [redacted] AND [redacted]. Winning combo.