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Is the Foundry in any danger?
khreg
Member Posts: 379 Arc User
I know this is an odd question to ask, but it seems possible. With all the tweaks and nerfing and a seemingly concerted effort to funnel players toward the DR content (the Tau Dewa debacle), might the Foundry someday be compromised or even "brought down for maintenance"?
The more I think about it, the more it seems possible given such an open revolt to the new content. The Foundry is really "the game" to me. I only venture into the general play field to grind crystals in Defera space or drop-hunt in Beta Ursae for stuff to sell for EC's on occasion. Other than that, I'm here.
Any rumblings of Cryptic casting an eye on our little sandbox?
The more I think about it, the more it seems possible given such an open revolt to the new content. The Foundry is really "the game" to me. I only venture into the general play field to grind crystals in Defera space or drop-hunt in Beta Ursae for stuff to sell for EC's on occasion. Other than that, I'm here.
Any rumblings of Cryptic casting an eye on our little sandbox?
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I don't think the Foundry is in any danger from the reasons you specify. Really the biggest threat to the Foundry is one of obscurity. There are a lot of players who have never tried the Foundry, or who have an aversion to non-official content. There's also the ever looming issue of individuals attempting to exploit the Foundry for their own personal gains. That alone has sucked more than a few development hours from the Foundry.
Unfortunately, much of that good stuff is buried under 'exploitative' material that people turn to when the regular system fails (see the current riot about the Delta Rising mess). Cryptic has done a pretty good job of addressing this in the past (many of the 'grinder' missions are slowly falling off the lists), but your can bet your hat that people will continue to try to exploit the Foundry for an 'easy' button - whether it be for fast EC or XP.
Two things need to happen to bring the Foundry to it's full potential:
1. It needs to be 'monitized' - as much as I hate to say this, it is the only way it will ever get the attention it needs from both Cryptic and the playerbase. If it were a system that turned a profit, you can bet PWE would give it priority handling - the inevitable next step would require them to make it as widely available as possible to the players to maximize income from it.
2. It needs to be integrated more seamlessly into the game. The interface we have right now is choking the life out of the Foundry. 50 missions shown at a time when thousands are waiting to be played? Terrible. The fact that there is only one gateway - that most people ignore do to the stigma of 'fanfic'? Terrible. Open up the entire galaxy for access! This solution would address these problems with a simple UI change: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=943411.
Because sadly, right now, new writing talent (and old!) is being turned off from making new FREE content for Cryptic because of the obscurity issue. How is anyone going to find a new mission currently unless they already know what it is? Especially considering that even the 'search' function is currently hidden to the average player.
Again, finding someway of having the Foundry be able to turn a profit is really the only way to save it in the long run. How that would be accomplished without killing it outright is a problem for people way smarter than me.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
This is incredibly untrue. D'Angelo has actually been scheduling dev time for Tacofangs and ZeroniousRex to add assets.
-We have three or four devs who have gotten really into adding stuff for us. In the past couple months we've seen the first update to the costume list since the Foundry launched, we got a ton more Delta Rising stuff right away than we did from LoR (we're only now getting those costumes). Thomas the Cat went the extra mile to get us all of the Odyssey variants. We continually get ship additions thanks to Zero and I think JamJamz. And lest we forget, Taco has added two big batches of new assets for us and has been talking about doing more batches (space stations, last we heard). This is far more attention than the Foundry has ever received at any one time. We've also been able to have more positive interaction with these devs (mostly via twitter) than ever before!
-Zero, who oversees the Foundry, made a comment in a recent interview that they would have to pry the Foundry "out of my cold dead fingers"
-Taco revealed to us last week (he was hanging in the chatroom during the Foundry Roundtable) that he had actually been assigned time to do Foundry work, something which we believe has not happened for quite a long time. He did say he was going to use some of this time to go finish Club 47, but we should be ok with that, cause he says as soon as that gets done he'll put the whole ESD map in the Foundry.
-Don't forget, our EP Stephen D'Angelo, was on the team that first developed the tool.
Now, it's not like we don't face challenges. As my colleagues have alluded to, we need a far better search interface. Personally I believe the main benefit to this would be to allow "grinders" to co-exist with story missions in a way where neither would interfere with the other. There are also honest to god exploits that ruin everything for everybody.
But I think overall we are in a really good place. We need to remember that the best resource we have as a community is each other. I firmly believe that the Foundry community is the absolute best community in this game, with the absolute best people. So, take the time to help new authors, play and review new missions, and ask for reviews on yours, participate in the challenges, come chat with us at StarbaseUGC.com or come listen to the show (check my sig) and just in general encourage each other.
This. I'm finding some pretty damn good missions by my lonesome, but yeah....needs to be easier to find all of your hard work than it is now.
Found a few stories that don't even reward, and they've been stellar.
If you're finding some good, but obscure missions, make a post about them! Start a "Diamonds in the Rough" thread somewhere, that way we can get the mission names out there and get these folks some plays.
aside from as others have mentioned about devs love of it, i believe they also justified the removal of explorations clusters by saying "foundry content is better".
To remove both would be the worst decision ever.
but i do think a revamp of its mission select UI and possibility it design could be helpful in bringing more people to try it.
"It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
I am keeping a list of the missions I play. Problem is I haven't made any extensive notes on them (just a * by certain names where the mission was worthy of a re-play).
I'll make an effort to go back and make notes and start making posts. Great idea.
I have volunteered to learn how so I can add more in my off time, as many of our Dev team has done in their off time.
Never fear, the Foundry is not in danger, although some seasonal launches may cause longer downtime for republication then others in correlation to their technical difficulty level with republication = Like when ESD was redesigned.
I just wanted to say thanks again to all the folks at Cryptic who are volunteering their time for the Foundry. It's very much appreciated!
Because it doesn't matter how many new things the Foundry has if no one can find new content.
The UI idea I threw together (http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=943411) took me all of half a day purely from great suggestions from our excellent Foundry community here on the Forums. Why hasn't this or something similar been implemented? It's what's really holding the Foundry back from it's massive potential right now.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
Fair enough and I applaud your personal effort, but why is there no standardized process in place that takes care of the implementation of content?
Take the fact that the interior for the new ESD or other elements that are above the average quality of what is available in the foundry, aka rather poor, are still not implemented. There are a ton of exterior and interior maps that should be available to foundry author, apart from other items, but no, let them play with the old junk...
There is a ton of stuff that just doesn't work in the foundry, why not remove it so that authors, especially new ones, don't try invain to get it to work?
I have accepted that the foundry is nothing but a ten year old dev tool, therefor has a useless UI, but why keep it that way? Why not give us the version of the foundry the devs use to create new content?
It's hard to imagine the amount of broken, redundant and outdated code that is crippling the foundry in its current state, which always leads to stuff getting broken by any new additions. You can't honestly want to tell us that that is acceptable to you?
Adding maps is a great deal more time consuming than adding assets so we don't get those as frequently. As to ESD, it hasn't been implemented because it isn't yet complete. Club 47 is still being rebuilt, and I for one would much rather have the completed version instead of the current incomplete version.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1279121
If you take that bait...
They are all in the game already, have all been used in the dev's foundry version and if there actually were a dedicated employee force taking care of our foundry, this would be an absolute non-issue not even worth mentioning.
In the game and prepped for the Foundry are two very different things, and there are a lot of steps involved with cleaning out an existing map (which has a ton of undesirable stuff hooked up to make it work in-game) and adding all of the dependencies that the Foundry requires.