I think there is more than enough feedback coming in. Not talking about a wave of forum rants, but they chould have noticed it in their often-quoted metrics.
Problem is - as always: the path between the guy who reads the metrics and the guy who makes decisions.
Whether or not the metrics taken alone provide adequate feedback is an open question on my mind since I think there's reason to believe that the metrics Cryptic is placing the most focus on are not the ones that support the game's long-term as opposed to short-term health. IMO forum threads and reviews have value by filling in the gaps the devs may have as to how the game experience really feels. If the short term metrics look great but the players are at or past the breaking point, then those same metrics could be masking a collapse that will occur later.
E30earnest, your response will come later in the day since I have some quasi-mathematical stuff I'll need to walk through to get yours nailed down.
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e30ernest: I still need to do the calculations I have in mind to complete your response. Your response will be up this afternoon/evening, depending on your time zone.
As an update to everyone who's been following this: There are only two sections left now--customer relations, and conclusion/action plans. I expect to finish out by the end of the week. I know...about time!!!
I am pretty sure now that I am reaching the end, that this will be the most comprehensive review of DR, unless one of the "real gaming press" sources has done something to this depth. Delta Rising: Reanimate? (Y/N)--A Review Miniseries
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
LOL no worries. It's 3AM now, so I'll read that in the morning.
In support of my theory regarding leveling for new vs old players, it does seem that the XP curve and content are indeed more advantageous to the newer players:
Now I'll be honest, if I were level 50 with all rep gear maxed when DR came out, and I had to grind my way to 60, I probably wouldn't be having much fun either. But it is what it is, and that's where the XP curve and content seemed to be balanced on.
Now I might get flogged by other players for this, but the grind problem current 50's have to reach 60 is a temporary one in my opinion. Eventually, everyone of the older players would have either made 60 or have quit. When that happens, the levelling issues a lot have been having will cease to exist.
Getting spec points however is another matter. However, I view them like T6 ship mastery traits. They (specialization) is great to have, but not an absolute necessity. The spec points doesn't seem to me like something Cryptic ever intended players to race through, but rather accumulate over time by doing other stuff in the game. Of course, players who want to max their potential will always try to get the next points as quickly as possible. That's when it becomes a chore in my opinion.
Adding spec points in my opinion is a good thing. I'd rather have a constantly growing spec point pool than to have all my game time be nulled to nothing by a future level cap increase (like what we had just now) with an even steeper curve. At least earning spec points are pegged at a specific SP level right now. I think in the future, they could add new tiers to it, or new trees. It's a much better solution to improving endgame rather than adding a new level cap.
While I would like to hope Cryptic would not intentionally alienate parts of their playerbase--as in, deciding that old players are an acceptable loss in order to bring newer, more compliant ones in, I still think that based on what we see with the new Winter Event, it is something I do wonder about.
Now, I say this and I actually find it one of the most enjoyable grinds I've had to go through in a while because Tides as an event is fun...even the complete fail instance I was in late tonight. BUT, when it comes to grinds in that event, requiring you to do several reps of an event just to unlock very SMALL items is a new low on the grind and makes me wonder. The business model is badly askew at this point, for sure.
Given how long STO has been at this level cap, that you have so many years' worth of players who will all be starting out from this position, I'm sorry--but I don't know how Cryptic could possibly not have thought of it because I think the vast majority of players are leveling from 50 and had the maxed-out rep gear, etc. To not take that into account is very poor judgment IMO.
DISCLAIMER: It is entirely possible I messed up my math here. This took me a long time to do! If I DID mess it up, please be forgiving because I still think the general point that this is making is valid, and would still check out in basic concept even if the figures are off.
On that random worst-case deflector upgrade scenario you posted...there are two things I want to point out for that. The first is going to be a closer look at the degree of unpredictability that we are talking about here. If we assume his math is correct and that 1,075,000 dilithium is the upper limit, let's translate that first into real money terms, and then into time-to-grind terms, to look at entirely cash and entirely "free" options to get that piece of gear.
The maximum cash figure comes in between $53.75 (exchange rate 200 dilithium per Zen) and $71.67 (exchange rate 150 dil per Zen), with the midpoint at $62.71.
Figured in days of grind required, the maximum is roughly between 120 and 135 days (with and without extra veteran refining).
First stop and think about those figures for a moment. That should be mind boggling enough. But let's consider one other thing here.
While I cannot provide you an actual calculation since I have not seen best-case-scenario figures, I should be able to take you conceptually to my next point. And that is that if you plot out the possible outcomes on a Bell curve--that is assuming that the metaphorical dice aren't weighted in some way that we can't see--an upper figure that high indicates that one standard deviation on this curve is a HUGE number. A standard deviation that high means we're looking at a very, very flat, very wide curve. One in which it is therefore incredibly hard to budget or have any sort of predictability or control in the system. This is a huge part of the reason why I say, without hyperbole, that the potential costs involved in upgrading to epic are insane, and completely, totally out of whack.
Obviously not every piece is going to cost you $62.71 or 120 days. And to some with a lot of disposable income to throw around, that might not SEEM crazy. But when you take every piece of gear on your ship and add it together, that is absurd.
Let's compare that to another cost, to make my point absolutely clear. This should also completely destroy any last comparison between the upgrades and the lockboxes.
Now, there is a difference depending on whether you are specifically after the Lobi ship or after the lockbox ship, but comparing to the Lobi ship should still serve well enough for illustration.
In the case of the Nicor and the Dromias, I was good with either ship. And that was actually one of the key reasons I went for it, because I knew I would be equally happy (and honestly, now that I have the Dromias I think I am actually happier with it than I would have been with the Nicor) with both the sure bet and the somewhat more volatile gamble. Let's look at the cost of a Dromias. This is the upper-end cash-only cost, assuming that you have no free Lobi from Lobi giveaways, no use of Master Key or Zen discounts or Zen stipends, and that it is either not favorable on the Exchange or you just choose not to use the strategy of only selling Master Keys or Fleet Modules.
(Remember that if you will not settle for the Lobi ship and want the lockbox one instead the best strategy after hitting the required Lobi number is to buy the highest-valued Lobi ship you can find in the store once you get the Lobi, and then do whatever you can, whether it be your favorite EC-grinding strategy, or selling Fleet Modules or Master Keys on the Exchange, to make up the deficit between the Lobi ship, which will always be valued lower because it's not as rare, and the lockbox ship you really want. At the point when you are ready to close that gap, you will be able to make a fair calculation of how much you will need to close that gap)
The T6 has a cost of 900 Lobi. The T5U (because you do not need an upgrade token to get to that level) is 800.
The average Lobi per box is estimated at 5 and to my experience this is fairly accurate. The standard deviation on this is much lower so the estimate I am going to give you here is MUCH more solid than the one I described above. This means you will need to open:
T6: 180 boxes--18 10-packs of keys required
T5U: 160 boxes--16 10-packs of keys required.
10-pack of keys: $11.25 USD a piece
1 key: $1.25 a piece
Your average price for each therefore becomes:
T6: $202.50
T5U: $180
If the law of averages doesn't play nice with you, you might get 1 more 10-pack of keys, and sell what you don't use on the Exchange, to get EC you can use to gear your ship fast. This puts your cost at:
T6: $213.75
T5U: $191.25
With a low standard deviation on the Lobi reward curve, it would take some very serious bad luck for the cost of a Lobi ship to go any higher than that.
Let's convert these high-end costs we just figured to days of grinding, assuming you want to do this without paying a cent. I am still not factoring in any event Lobi or Zen stipends you may have hanging around, or the alternate strategy of selling Master Keys on the exchange the whole way. (You'll notice that whereas the dilithium figure is the constant for the upgrades, with the lockboxes the Zen amount needed is the constant, meaning the exchange rate has the opposite effects that it did in the previous example.)
T6 Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 4,275,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 3,206,250
T5U Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 3,825,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 2,868,750
T5U Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 319 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 479 days
T6 Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 356 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 535 days
And there you have the completely F2P option for a Lobi ship, assuming you are not using the alternate strategy of selling keys on the Exchange and doing other EC grind tricks that may result in a significantly cheaper cost in grind and/or cash. Most people are going to do a combination of the two strategies, resulting in some proportion of cash and grind...and I'd guess the majority is going to be cash in most people's cases, but here's the next trick...
What proportion of a Lobi ship does that epic deflector from your example represent?
Ballpark average, that one epic deflector at absolute worst-case scenario is worth somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3rd of a Lobi ship! A more likely estimate based on that (halving the worst-case scenario to come up with a somewhat more "midpoint-based" estimate, though I am not going to vouch for that being the actual midpoint) puts that deflector at about 1/10 to 1/6th of the value of the Lobi ship. Even then that is still an absurd valuation, and that's just one piece of equipment.
And let's remember one more thing about the Lobi ship. AND the lockbox ship.
You are not gambling in ANY way on your stats. You know what bridge officers, console slots and special consoles, and ALL other stats will be on that ship. You can be exactly sure of what that ship is worth to you and whether it fits your playstyle and expectations.
But 1/10 to 1/6 of that value for one piece of equipment that you can't even be sure will give you extra mods that are worth anything much and are going to have a devil of a time even budgeting for in the first place due to the huge standard deviation we discussed up top? Absolutely nuts.
On the mods, if you want to get an idea of the difference in valuation between weapons and console mods in players' eyes, I recommend for example looking at the difference between Very Rare Mk XII's for any space weapon of your choice, and compare the lowest several on the list (I say several because there are sometimes people who do not know how to value their items when posting to the exchange), and the cheapest [Acc]x3 that you can find.
While I am not sure what my Dromias ultimately cost me, what I can tell you is that it would have come in below the maximum T5U cost I worked out there due to a variety of factors including Event Lobi and dilithium grinding, and that for whatever I did pay for it, I walked away with not just the ship, but with FULL gear. As in, ALL of my weapons and one console came straight out of the lockbox with no cost and were mostly Mk XII VR (with a few Mk XI's), and I also had enough EC from the loot and leftover Master Keys at the end that I also walked away with mostly Mk XII VR and a few Mk XI VR gear in all other slots for it basically the day I bought the ship.
In essence, what I bought wasn't just the ship. It was a generally endgame-ready ship with no additional grinding required to gear up further. (And included in what I paid for the Lobi ship was also upgraded DOFFing, dilithium mining claims, and helpful boosts of several kinds that came out of the boxes as loot.)
That is, until DR hit and I was no longer endgame-ready.
The purpose of this looooooong illustration is to show you just how OFF the Epic gear valuation really is on Cryptic's part, when you consider what I paid to get that fully endgame-ready Dromias pre-DR, and what just the gear for ANY ship would cost in dollars or grind, to be of equivalent status.
There just aren't even words for how nutty this valuation IS. Yes, you can stop and I WILL stop at Mk XIV regardless of what rarity an item works out to, and yes, I will take it very slow...but when you compare what you could do in the past to what you can do now, and--I am sorry, but remember that the vast majority of players are leveling from 50-60 and lack the leveling advantages and also lack the training by Cryptic in the much lower expectations they are now to have...I don't think you can dismiss the experience new players are having as an insignificant problem that will take care of itself in the long run.
OR through intentional attrition, which I still do not rule out as a possible strategy on the part of some at PWE/Cryptic...and honestly based on Tacofangs' comment, if someone in that equation IS thinking that way, my bet is it's more a PWE thing than a Cryptic one.
You are VERY right to say that if this is the strategy, intended or unintended, it absolutely IS a short-term strategy that will not be viable in the long run. Someone may have just severely miscalculated. Initial fast returns may be hiding the problem, as I suggested in my most recent post, and the bottom will fall out (my guess would be some time after the winter event IF no major corrections or adjustments are made, perhaps in CY15 Q2 to take a shot-in-the-dark stab at it). Or...and this is the absolute worst case that I really hope is only a slim possibility...the game is not intended to keep running in the long term and PWE is attempting to make the most short-term money that they can before shutdown. Personally I think that is the less likely scenario, but it is another one that could explain the evidence so I still bring it up.
Unfortunately I think it quite likely that there just is not enough "long run" left, unless things get fixed and fixed fast.
ON SPEC POINTS...I think that is a problem that can level out to some extent. They are not a bad idea in concept though the implementation like everything leveling-related was too extreme in terms of how slow it is. But I think that the economics are likely to destroy the game if they are not adjusted, before the furor over slow leveling has a chance to taper off.
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The T6 has a cost of 900 Lobi. The T5U (because you do not need an upgrade token to get to that level) is 800.
The average Lobi per box is estimated at 5 and to my experience this is fairly accurate. The standard deviation on this is much lower so the estimate I am going to give you here is MUCH more solid than the one I described above. This means you will need to open:
T6: 180 boxes--18 10-packs of keys required
T5U: 160 boxes--16 10-packs of keys required.
10-pack of keys: $11.25 USD a piece
1 key: $1.25 a piece
Your average price for each therefore becomes:
T6: $202.50
T5U: $180
If the law of averages doesn't play nice with you, you might get 1 more 10-pack of keys, and sell what you don't use on the Exchange, to get EC you can use to gear your ship fast. This puts your cost at:
T6: $213.75
T5U: $191.25
With a low standard deviation on the Lobi reward curve, it would take some very serious bad luck for the cost of a Lobi ship to go any higher than that.
Let's convert these high-end costs we just figured to days of grinding, assuming you want to do this without paying a cent. I am still not factoring in any event Lobi or Zen stipends you may have hanging around, or the alternate strategy of selling Master Keys on the exchange the whole way. (You'll notice that whereas the dilithium figure is the constant for the upgrades, with the lockboxes the Zen amount needed is the constant, meaning the exchange rate has the opposite effects that it did in the previous example.)
T6 Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 4,275,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 3,206,250
T5U Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 3,825,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 2,868,750
T6 Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 319 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 479 days
T5 Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 356 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 535 days
And there you have the completely F2P option for a Lobi ship, assuming you are not using the alternate strategy of selling keys on the Exchange and doing other EC grind tricks that may result in a significantly cheaper cost in grind and/or cash.
Solid calculation, although I could've told you that because I have done that dance for my Krenn. It took me about a year and I burst through 20 boxes after the first CE Event due to the huge Dilithium surplus I ended up with. The rest of the Lobi were farmed by regular Dil grind, opening a box every other day, roughly.
Those calculations ring fine, and given it is hard to calculate precisely and there are quite a few variations those figures are not unreasonable at all, the lobi seem accurate as well.
During testing we came to the conclusion that the mark upgrades were about okay but the quality was an absolute no no. The cost is not proportionate to what a Mk XIV ought to cost as a straight purchase and that's assuming you even get modifiers you want by the end of it.
This review series has been really good. Trouble is I think the devs are trying to force everyone to play DR to prove to someone that the content they made is popular even though it is actually terrible. Until their attitude changes I don't see how this is going to resolve.
Also, I don't know if you have seen this thread Gul however it does show the severe lack of communication between the devs and the players who were testing, and thus a big reason why the upgrade system is in such a bad state in my view: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1224081&page=79
Honestly, I do believe the one single thing that would improve this game would be if they actually did proper testing and listened to us testers who always seem to do a better job. I'm just certain it would cut down on many of the issues that every single update seems to suffer with. That being said when the devs make useless comments on the testing like Geko did with the Doff UI, saying there was 'No actionable feedback' when in fact there was loads of it, you start to realise it is an uphill struggle to test.
If you are talking about TNG's Starfleet, then I agree with the "sterile and pathetic" description. That said, I think STO's Starfleet is the heir to the Dominion War Starfleet seen in DS9, and like that version of Starfleet, is sometimes on the border of becoming a much darker force. Like on DS9, I am not so sure the Prime Directive or the old Starfleet's exploration mandates are in the front seat anymore, though I do not think they are quite forgotten. Sometimes the game mechanics do make it go TOO far, but given the choice between TNG and STO's versions of Starfleet, I will take STO.
That is a fair point, and yes granted I'll take STO Starfleet over TNG any day. I still think they ought to do more with the faction variety, if done right it would add a new level of immersion to the game in my view.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
So I did catch one clear calculation mistake...on the VERY last step I reversed T6 and T5U.
This has since been fixed (one of the quotes still shows the initial wrong figures though).
The "forcing people to play" thing has unfortunately infected even the Winter Wonderland...though honestly considering how much I have always despised the idea of the Q autograph race, "Tides of Ice" is quite a bit less offensive and we did at least get immediate dev communication that they realize something is broken about how it awards credit. (I should note that I also only have 2 viable alts anymore, and only one that I want a warp core for, meaning the total number of runs I *have* to do is not that high.)
But it is still a symptom of a mentality on Cryptic's part that the items in the store were ever locked this way in the first place.
The other thing I am watching...and that will get discussion in the next section since it is a pattern we have seen before, is how quickly the *fix* goes into effect. Because this is a fix that would benefit players...
(One that likely would not have occurred with better testing and listening to testing feedback, agreed. Like a lot of things.)
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The ship grind is 5 minutes per day for 25 days. 26 or 27 if you want an extra ship or two on a given character; three characters allow you to unlock all three in 27. Those numbers are constant, no matter how many characters you have. (Unless you have less than three, but you already have that many character slots without having to pay a dime.)
Tides of Ice is 10-15 minutes per hour, 10 hours if you're lucky and don't get bugged. (Less if you're really lucky, but more if you're not.) Do you want another character to get the cores/weapons/whatever else is Bind on Pickup? Go through it for another 10 hours. Rinse and repeat until your equipment/pet/outfit requirements are accessible for all the relevant characters.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
The ship grind is 5 minutes per day for 25 days. 26 or 27 if you want an extra ship or two on a given character; three characters allow you to unlock all three in 27. Those numbers are constant, no matter how many characters you have. (Unless you have less than three, but you already have that many character slots without having to pay a dime.)
Tides of Ice is 10-15 minutes per hour, 10 hours if you're lucky and don't get bugged. (Less if you're really lucky, but more if you're not.) Do you want another character to get the cores/weapons/whatever else is Bind on Pickup? Go through it for another 10 hours. Rinse and repeat until your equipment/pet/outfit requirements are accessible for all the relevant characters.
You're assuming that the player in question is able to complete the race. :-/ Even with only 5 alts at the time (I am now down to only 2 that I play), it was an impossible task for me.
I have tried every tip people have had to offer for two years for that and the race for the epohh tags, and have almost never been able to complete it. I am not a crappy player either...I am good at fighting, piloting my ship...unless, guess what, you ask me to complete a racetrack (FU Hodos system. Seriously. FU.) I am a good teammate on an STF.
But those stupid races...no. Just no. You have no idea how furious I was last year when the epohh tags got locked behind that race. I didn't say much back then but I was definitely mad about it. Last year I finally had enough with even trying it and said TRIBBLE it. (Actually, I said a whole lot of things, all of which are against forum TOS.) Best decision ever. Maybe it's different to deal with Tides of Ice if it is the ONLY event you're contending with. I have had a 4 of 5 successful completion rate thus far, which far exceeds my record with the stupid race. And at least we have acknowledgment from the devs that some of the issues preventing completion are not intended behavior and slated to be fixed.
Whereas everything about that race is intended and horrible.
How quickly they get Tides fixed is a piece I'll actually be addressing in my next segment, because that is something I am watching very closely.
But for me, it is far more feasible to handle a shooting gallery than it is to manage that race. I don't know if it is just bad spatial reasoning or bad coordination (yet as I said, I handle combat fine), but if I'd had the option to play for the ship this way instead of the race being the only choice, I would've been OK with it.
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Some more perspective on the new player experience, Berat.
I started about 2 weeks before DR hit, during the double XP lead-up event. My main leveled at an absolute blitz, hitting 50 by a quarter of the way into Rom Mystery. Silly me, I still forged ahead and cleared some content, namely Dyson and the rest of the unending Rom line, and missed out on that first completion bonus XP. Then DR dropped, and like everyone else, I jumped into the new content. I found it puzzling when, unlike prior content which was paced to massively overlevel me, I ran into a wall a few missions in and got a prompt that said, "Go grind patrols!" Unlike all the long-timers, I had the remaining untouched content to fill the gaps. I had the luxury to be able to shrug and go do something else, and have that something else not be repetitive or played out. This was doubly advantageous, as patrols are the content I like the absolute least. It still started to become a strain to fill those ever-expanding holes as I approached 60. The biggest head-scratcher was the lvl req of 59 on the last mission, which does next to nothing to get you to that ultimate goal of 60. Since my run-up to 50 was painless, and I was starting from the same functional gate as everyone else, that 51-60 portion didn't feel so much like a slog, especially not when stacked up next to the MI grind.
I decided to run an under-20 doffing alt up to level after the last XP "rebalance" (read: nerf). This time around, the 50+ XP wall really shows. I hit 50 by Terak Nor in the Cardassian arc. Now, having finished up the Cardassian arc, the Dyson arc, started my rep grinds, active doffing, clearing all the content (patrols included) in DR, I just squeaked out 53 in time to hit Zombieland in sequence. A few missions from General "We can't stop" against the Baaaaabwaaa, and here's another wall with no content to surmount it save what I didn't already burn. Had I not already done it once, I would've been greatly discouraged and off-put by the sudden tone shift. This will be a great challenge going forward for retaining new players, that disconnect between older, well-paced episodic content and the post-DR Korean grinder that rears its ugly head.
Another consideration that I don't think older players (or Cryptic, for that matter) take into account is resource availability, and what that means to the structure of content balancing. Dil / Zen costs seem to be predicated on the mindset that your average player has multiple years of play, and has a significant war chest to throw at anything new that comes down the pike. I understand the why behind it -- I have guys in my fleet with a few million dil banked, primarily through play over time, and you have to consider that when pricing new releases. But by over-aggressively positioning costs to still challenge these long-timers, you've completely shut your new players out, unless they're willing to throw significant IRL cash around. At the current dilex average, your daily refine cap of 8k will net you ~50 Zen. Your three character limit on a F2P brings that to 150/day. At that rate, you're looking at about two weeks to be able to afford one of the 2k Zen ships. All fine and good, until you consider that the newly minted player doesn't make 8k/day, even on their main, and likely won't until they're about a month in unless specifically coached. Once you factor time investments to get alts to a comfortable 8k/day level, it could be as long as 2-3 months before that newbie can afford that shiny ship. And that's assuming they never spend a bit of dil on any of the other dil sinks, ever. Six weeks is a nice average cutoff for when the honeymoon is over and a player is either going to be retained or jump ship, and that player will be challenged to clear the very first currency hurdle in that time. I could continue down the list with fleet mods, fleet projects, rep gear, all the various and sundry dil sinks, but I believe my point is made.
Lastly, as a new player, what the DR post-launch has done is made me very, very wary with my money. I'm a conscientious spender when it comes to entertainment budget, but I'm willing to invest my money in a product that's going to pay out in enjoyment over a long period of time. Having seen how wildly numbers and norms have been whipsawing, and the willingness to completely invalidate yesterday's purchase with today's slightly upgraded new shiny, I absolutely refuse to buy anything that could be rendered obsolete or worthless on a whim. I'll eat a little more grind to get what I want, if it saves me real money sunk into a bad investment. This hurts Cryptic going forward, because my dollars are exactly what they need to capture if they want to continue to grow this game and keep it as an income source in years to come.
I'm looking at this from an alt-friendliness perspective rather than difficulty. Difficulty-wise, I think I would also have an easier time handling Tides of Ice than the race.
Ironically enough, I haven't even touched Tides yet because Cryptic wants me to do it 60 times. Ties in nicely in stoleviathan's speculations about 'gamification', now that I think about it - and I've given up on specializations for the exact same reason.
Edit: Whoo, 10 per account now. That makes it a bit more manageable.
(P.S. If you think this edit is a bit hypocritical after the original post, I will defend myself simply by saying that I'm not being punished for playing alts anymore, which is currently good enough for me. :P)
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
While I would like to hope Cryptic would not intentionally alienate parts of their playerbase--as in, deciding that old players are an acceptable loss in order to bring newer, more compliant ones in, I still think that based on what we see with the new Winter Event, it is something I do wonder about.
Given how long STO has been at this level cap, that you have so many years' worth of players who will all be starting out from this position, I'm sorry--but I don't know how Cryptic could possibly not have thought of it because I think the vast majority of players are leveling from 50 and had the maxed-out rep gear, etc. To not take that into account is very poor judgment IMO.
Yeah I sure hope it was an unintentional consequence of their changes (to balance gameplay for new players) rather than an intentional sacrifice of current long-term players (because they're already hooked or spend less) since that will point to a short-term vision.
I haven't played through the winter stuff much yet (I'm only interested in the ship anyway). Is it bad?
DISCLAIMER: It is entirely possible I messed up my math here. This took me a long time to do! If I DID mess it up, please be forgiving because I still think the general point that this is making is valid, and would still check out in basic concept even if the figures are off.
On that random worst-case deflector upgrade scenario you posted...there are two things I want to point out for that. The first is going to be a closer look at the degree of unpredictability that we are talking about here. If we assume his math is correct and that 1,075,000 dilithium is the upper limit, let's translate that first into real money terms, and then into time-to-grind terms, to look at entirely cash and entirely "free" options to get that piece of gear.
The maximum cash figure comes in between $53.75 (exchange rate 200 dilithium per Zen) and $71.67 (exchange rate 150 dil per Zen), with the midpoint at $62.71.
Figured in days of grind required, the maximum is roughly between 120 and 135 days (with and without extra veteran refining).
First stop and think about those figures for a moment. That should be mind boggling enough. But let's consider one other thing here.
While I cannot provide you an actual calculation since I have not seen best-case-scenario figures, I should be able to take you conceptually to my next point. And that is that if you plot out the possible outcomes on a Bell curve--that is assuming that the metaphorical dice aren't weighted in some way that we can't see--an upper figure that high indicates that one standard deviation on this curve is a HUGE number. A standard deviation that high means we're looking at a very, very flat, very wide curve. One in which it is therefore incredibly hard to budget or have any sort of predictability or control in the system. This is a huge part of the reason why I say, without hyperbole, that the potential costs involved in upgrading to epic are insane, and completely, totally out of whack.
Obviously not every piece is going to cost you $62.71 or 120 days. And to some with a lot of disposable income to throw around, that might not SEEM crazy. But when you take every piece of gear on your ship and add it together, that is absurd.
Let's compare that to another cost, to make my point absolutely clear. This should also completely destroy any last comparison between the upgrades and the lockboxes.
Now, there is a difference depending on whether you are specifically after the Lobi ship or after the lockbox ship, but comparing to the Lobi ship should still serve well enough for illustration.
In the case of the Nicor and the Dromias, I was good with either ship. And that was actually one of the key reasons I went for it, because I knew I would be equally happy (and honestly, now that I have the Dromias I think I am actually happier with it than I would have been with the Nicor) with both the sure bet and the somewhat more volatile gamble. Let's look at the cost of a Dromias. This is the upper-end cash-only cost, assuming that you have no free Lobi from Lobi giveaways, no use of Master Key or Zen discounts or Zen stipends, and that it is either not favorable on the Exchange or you just choose not to use the strategy of only selling Master Keys or Fleet Modules.
(Remember that if you will not settle for the Lobi ship and want the lockbox one instead the best strategy after hitting the required Lobi number is to buy the highest-valued Lobi ship you can find in the store once you get the Lobi, and then do whatever you can, whether it be your favorite EC-grinding strategy, or selling Fleet Modules or Master Keys on the Exchange, to make up the deficit between the Lobi ship, which will always be valued lower because it's not as rare, and the lockbox ship you really want. At the point when you are ready to close that gap, you will be able to make a fair calculation of how much you will need to close that gap)
The T6 has a cost of 900 Lobi. The T5U (because you do not need an upgrade token to get to that level) is 800.
The average Lobi per box is estimated at 5 and to my experience this is fairly accurate. The standard deviation on this is much lower so the estimate I am going to give you here is MUCH more solid than the one I described above. This means you will need to open:
T6: 180 boxes--18 10-packs of keys required
T5U: 160 boxes--16 10-packs of keys required.
10-pack of keys: $11.25 USD a piece
1 key: $1.25 a piece
Your average price for each therefore becomes:
T6: $202.50
T5U: $180
If the law of averages doesn't play nice with you, you might get 1 more 10-pack of keys, and sell what you don't use on the Exchange, to get EC you can use to gear your ship fast. This puts your cost at:
T6: $213.75
T5U: $191.25
With a low standard deviation on the Lobi reward curve, it would take some very serious bad luck for the cost of a Lobi ship to go any higher than that.
Let's convert these high-end costs we just figured to days of grinding, assuming you want to do this without paying a cent. I am still not factoring in any event Lobi or Zen stipends you may have hanging around, or the alternate strategy of selling Master Keys on the exchange the whole way. (You'll notice that whereas the dilithium figure is the constant for the upgrades, with the lockboxes the Zen amount needed is the constant, meaning the exchange rate has the opposite effects that it did in the previous example.)
T6 Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 4,275,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 3,206,250
T5U Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 3,825,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 2,868,750
T5U Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 319 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 479 days
T6 Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 356 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 535 days
And there you have the completely F2P option for a Lobi ship, assuming you are not using the alternate strategy of selling keys on the Exchange and doing other EC grind tricks that may result in a significantly cheaper cost in grind and/or cash. Most people are going to do a combination of the two strategies, resulting in some proportion of cash and grind...and I'd guess the majority is going to be cash in most people's cases, but here's the next trick...
What proportion of a Lobi ship does that epic deflector from your example represent?
Ballpark average, that one epic deflector at absolute worst-case scenario is worth somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3rd of a Lobi ship! A more likely estimate based on that (halving the worst-case scenario to come up with a somewhat more "midpoint-based" estimate, though I am not going to vouch for that being the actual midpoint) puts that deflector at about 1/10 to 1/6th of the value of the Lobi ship. Even then that is still an absurd valuation, and that's just one piece of equipment.
And let's remember one more thing about the Lobi ship. AND the lockbox ship.
You are not gambling in ANY way on your stats. You know what bridge officers, console slots and special consoles, and ALL other stats will be on that ship. You can be exactly sure of what that ship is worth to you and whether it fits your playstyle and expectations.
But 1/10 to 1/6 of that value for one piece of equipment that you can't even be sure will give you extra mods that are worth anything much and are going to have a devil of a time even budgeting for in the first place due to the huge standard deviation we discussed up top? Absolutely nuts.
On the mods, if you want to get an idea of the difference in valuation between weapons and console mods in players' eyes, I recommend for example looking at the difference between Very Rare Mk XII's for any space weapon of your choice, and compare the lowest several on the list (I say several because there are sometimes people who do not know how to value their items when posting to the exchange), and the cheapest [Acc]x3 that you can find.
While I am not sure what my Dromias ultimately cost me, what I can tell you is that it would have come in below the maximum T5U cost I worked out there due to a variety of factors including Event Lobi and dilithium grinding, and that for whatever I did pay for it, I walked away with not just the ship, but with FULL gear. As in, ALL of my weapons and one console came straight out of the lockbox with no cost and were mostly Mk XII VR (with a few Mk XI's), and I also had enough EC from the loot and leftover Master Keys at the end that I also walked away with mostly Mk XII VR and a few Mk XI VR gear in all other slots for it basically the day I bought the ship.
In essence, what I bought wasn't just the ship. It was a generally endgame-ready ship with no additional grinding required to gear up further. (And included in what I paid for the Lobi ship was also upgraded DOFFing, dilithium mining claims, and helpful boosts of several kinds that came out of the boxes as loot.)
That is, until DR hit and I was no longer endgame-ready.
I think the numbers look right. On the off-hand, it shows how expensive this "free" game can really get. $200 for a digital item...
Got to think hard before really gambling on a lockbox ship or an epic item.
The purpose of this looooooong illustration is to show you just how OFF the Epic gear valuation really is on Cryptic's part, when you consider what I paid to get that fully endgame-ready Dromias pre-DR, and what just the gear for ANY ship would cost in dollars or grind, to be of equivalent status.
There just aren't even words for how nutty this valuation IS. Yes, you can stop and I WILL stop at Mk XIV regardless of what rarity an item works out to, and yes, I will take it very slow...but when you compare what you could do in the past to what you can do now, and--I am sorry, but remember that the vast majority of players are leveling from 50-60 and lack the leveling advantages and also lack the training by Cryptic in the much lower expectations they are now to have...I don't think you can dismiss the experience new players are having as an insignificant problem that will take care of itself in the long run.
Like I said in a previous post, I think this upgrade cost to get to "Epic" is fine only IF Cryptic adds another method to be able to gain these items separate from the upgrade system. A very rare drop (perhaps once that a random person every 20 Elite STFs or so will get) or something you will get from Elite Patrols as a mob drop would be nice.
Diversify the methods you can gain it. I am however against making it easily attainable by everyone. Ultra rare and Epic items should be named those for a reason. If someone wants to roll the dice and spend money and Dil in the process, then let them do so (good for Cryptic). If not, then others can try their luck in patrols or STFs. Either way, it will drive people to play in one way or the other, which will be good in the long-term of the game.
Also worth noting, the "set items" such as rep gear will get the same modifiers when their rarity is upgraded. At least that's what I've been reading about here. So at least when it comes to modifiers, it really isn't a total gamble. It's normal items (drops) that get random stuff.
I think the game should also be balanced so that Ultra Rare and Epic items are not needed to finish even the game's most difficult content. Those items should instead be holy grails primarily for PVP'ers who want every single advantage they can get.
OR through intentional attrition, which I still do not rule out as a possible strategy on the part of some at PWE/Cryptic...and honestly based on Tacofangs' comment, if someone in that equation IS thinking that way, my bet is it's more a PWE thing than a Cryptic one.
You are VERY right to say that if this is the strategy, intended or unintended, it absolutely IS a short-term strategy that will not be viable in the long run. Someone may have just severely miscalculated. Initial fast returns may be hiding the problem, as I suggested in my most recent post, and the bottom will fall out (my guess would be some time after the winter event IF no major corrections or adjustments are made, perhaps in CY15 Q2 to take a shot-in-the-dark stab at it). Or...and this is the absolute worst case that I really hope is only a slim possibility...the game is not intended to keep running in the long term and PWE is attempting to make the most short-term money that they can before shutdown. Personally I think that is the less likely scenario, but it is another one that could explain the evidence so I still bring it up.
Unfortunately I think it quite likely that there just is not enough "long run" left, unless things get fixed and fixed fast.
I've read several references to "Taco's comment", What was it? I think I missed that somewhere.
It is a very short-term strategy. Milking players now will only do them good a year, 2 if they're lucky. It's only a strategy viable for games they know (based on their metrics or due to IP requirements/royalties) is about to die, so they're trying to get the most back out of their investment before they shut down their servers.
ON SPEC POINTS...I think that is a problem that can level out to some extent. They are not a bad idea in concept though the implementation like everything leveling-related was too extreme in terms of how slow it is. But I think that the economics are likely to destroy the game if they are not adjusted, before the furor over slow leveling has a chance to taper off.
Future content updates will also help with the spec points too. Let's just hope they release that new content sooner rather than later.
There is now slated to be a fix on the Winter Event to reduce the grind on Tides of Ice so that you can do an account-wide store unlock by completing your 10 reps of the event on one toon instead of having to do so on every alt you have. That was the problem that happened with the event. The trouble is I suspect this will not be dealt with until this coming Thursday's patch. But you never see an emergency patch if it *benefits* the players (think how long the Mirror Invasion was allowed not to award Delta marks, versus how quickly the Tau Dewa thing was "addressed").
As an event by itself though, I do have to give Cryptic credit: Tides of Ice is really fun. I know some people don't agree but I enjoy it and my whole fleet is having a blast with it.
On the Lobi ship thing, yes, those ships and especially the luck-only ships can get very expensive. While I don't know what I paid for it, I know that it was not the "worst case" figure because I did take advantage of some discounts and a Lobi giveaway along the way, though if I have to be honest with myself I would hazard a guess that if you plotted out on a graph what I and others paid for that ship, you would have a skewed curve where the average player is paying closer to the "worst case" amount than zero.
At least personally I did think hard before starting on my "Undine ship quest," but in my case the major factor for going for it was that I knew I could make something fun out of both the Nicor and the Dromias. When the Lobi ship is not an "acceptable" outcome, that makes it harder, more expensive, and would have made me not want to try for it. For me, being able to budget with reasonable accuracy what it will take to get a 100% good outcome is important. That way I can decide, OK, this project needs to be spread out over X amount of time and I will use the following cost-mitigation strategies to get there. The one thing I DO remember for sure about the Lobi ship I got was that I did not do it overnight in one fell swoop.
And at least with the Lobi ship, if you value the box contents, and *especially* if you actually *use* the other contents besides the ship itself, that money paid does spread out to cover other items that you get along the way. The cost of an upgrade does not spread out to any other item than the one item you are sinking money into. A lockbox may award a less desirable or less sellable item. Than another box but unlike an upgrade, it will never fail to give you *something,* every single time. So while the Lobi ship is expensive I would still call it a better deal than attempting to upgrade the quality of an item because you have the certainty of what is at the end, can much more accurately budget what you need in time and/or money (and depending on Exchange conditions at any given time, there is sometimes a cheaper strategy open), and never get "zero" for your effort. (And if you ONLY value the ship IMO you are making a critical strategy error.)
Making Epic items (hell, even keep them Mk XII but have the rarity upgrade already done for you so that way you have to spend *something* to get it the rest of the way but a more reasonable and budgetable amount) extremely rare *drops in-game* would help some, though I still stand by my contention that the valuation on them is badly skewed when you compare a Lobi ship *and every other benefit from a box gained in the process* to the price of one Epic upgrade.
As to Taco's comment, someone flat-out asked him to say whether he wanted players to leave, and he said he didn't.
Whether all of PWE/Cryptic agrees with him or not is what for me is an open question. Based on how extreme the monetizing and grind have suddenly become, and the fact that we have been so long without these aspects being fixed makes it uncertain whether it is a grave miscalculation doubled down on because of groupthink/siege mentality, or if they are now shifting fully into a short-term strategy with the idea that they aren't going to try to sustain it for the next year or so.
If it is a miscalculation it is very, very bad for the devs to continue to allow things to go on as they are, because if people aren't having fun--and even if they still are but fear they won't get long enjoyment out of a purchase--it will hurt them in the end no matter how good the metrics look getting there.
At least correcting the length of the Tides of Ice grind is a baby step that shows that at least once in a while they can backtrack on something (or address unintended behavior if it wasn't supposed to act like that). But I need to see stuff like that more consistently--things fixed of scaled more properly in the first place--to shake the nagging concern that we are seeing a short-term pre-shutdown strategy play out.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
NOTE: Some parts of this section cover points you may have already seen me address in other forum posts...so if you think you've seen it before, you're probably right. Still, I hope you will enjoy reading anyway, with the perspective of more time since those posts were first written.
Obviously the first step to managing a crisis successfully is to avoid getting into one in the first place. But once a company is in that position, however it is that they got there, what they do in the moment of crisis is what makes or breaks them. And I worry that with the way things have gone, that without evidence of sustained action, change, and listening to the customer, everyone will lose.
The conditions I have described throughout this review have created a situation that has put the business unit responsible for Star Trek: Online in crisis mode: through poor business decisions, poor testing, and poor communication through most of it, even the good things that I have called out through this review are also at risk.
I would not go so far as to presume all of PWE is in this degree of financial crisis--however, recent hits to PWE's stock do suggest that if things keep going the same way for the whole company, they could wind up in a position where they start looking to make some hard choices. And Cryptic risks being one of the business units that is either closed down or divested if the overall company situation is bad enough, should the financial hemorrhaging be serious enough for them.
The important thing to remember is this. The trick to saving the one key metric--the viability of the game and the viability of Cryptic--is not in more metrics.
It's in satisfying the customer.
And while the old adage that the "customer is always right" isn't exactly the truth, what absolutely IS the truth is that customers define quality.
That means it's not about what a company wants to push on a customer. If it doesn't satisfy his or her needs as the customer perceives it, then it will not succeed.
Even the company credo or philosophy can set the tone. If your credo (or your mindset) begins with, "To maximize shareholder profit..." then you're doing it wrong. By focusing on that metric you'll only guarantee the exact opposite in the long run.
Rather, consider instead a philosophy like the one employed by FedEx, which they sum up in three words--the order of which is mission-critical: "People, Service, Profit." Treat your people fairly and give them the tools they need to work effectively, and they will provide good service. (Obviously I have no idea how Cryptic treats its people, but the philosophy is not complete without mentioning this part of it.) Keep providing good service to your customers at the top of your mind--behaving honestly, fairly, and doing quality work...remembering that quality is customer-defined, NOT something you can usually define for them...then you won't have to worry about your revenue stream. Behave responsibly when that revenue stream comes in, and invest back in your people and making sure they are fairly treated, and have the tools to do their very best work, and...well, you get the picture.
This means that focusing on metrics and profitability above all is the wrong focus.
So too is attempting to solve a failure in satisfying the customer--and that is what's happened here--as if it were a technical problem.
This example does not come from the game, but from the forums. During the absolute worst of the backlash against the devs from Delta Rising, Cryptic implemented a 500-second timer between posts on the forum, with no prior announcement or explanation as to why they were doing this. Later on someone eventually explained that they were overwhelmed with the volume of posts and unable to moderate appropriately.
While I can understand that being a concern, where I believe Cryptic went wrong was in approaching the extreme post volume as a mathematical problem to be solved in a way that EVE players will be very familiar with: time dilation (TiDi). To prevent lagging out and prevent player commands from failing to execute when a system fills up with extreme numbers of players, EVE imposes an intentional slowdown that allows the server to manage overload in an orderly manner. The amount of slowdown is directly proportional to the amount of excess load on the server. I have a very distinct feeling that someone at Cryptic calculated the "ratio of excess posts" and decided from that what factor they wanted to increase the post timing delay by, and then decided to call it a day.
What this completely failed to take into account was the human factor--and that was that players, who were already angry because of Japorigate and everything else wrong with Delta Rising, were going to perceive it as an attempt to manage the PR crisis by just shutting people up. A chilling effect, in other words. This only poured fuel on the fire.
(As a funny aside, I posted while we were still at 500 seconds and I first leveled the criticism that someone was handling a customer relations problem as if it were a technical problem, that a more reasonable timegate between posts would be 60-120 seconds. While I can't say I was responsible for the new timegate amount, I do find it rather amusing that what we ultimately got was exactly the 120 seconds I suggested as a reasonable value. However it occurred, I find, and I suspect others are finding, that this limit interferes significantly less with posting.)
I get the feeling that other problems at Cryptic are handled the same way. A metric is acting up? Devise a technical solution to fix it, that doesn't take into consideration what players want or how their experience will feel. This, needless to say, isn't the way to go about things, and Cryptic is going to have to step up their two-way engagement with players significantly to make any lasting change.
As part of illustrating this, I'm going to take a look at a couple of far higher-profile and much more serious cases than Cryptic/PWE, and the principles that governed the outcomes.
Two Case Studies of High-Profile Customer Relations Crises
Before I begin this section I want to make it clear that I am in NO WAY making any sort of comparison between the types of crises that I am describing, and the customer relations crisis that Cryptic has created for itself. I am using them because they provide such bold illustrations of much more widely applicable principles.
Obviously Cryptic has an easier job in that the decisions they make do not place their customers in any sort of real jeopardy. In a lot of ways, in this case the risks are greatest to Cryptic itself, because while we can move on, the people that produce the product run the risk of losing their jobs should a restructuring once the business unit fails not go in their favor. And in some ways, that makes remembering the applicability of the principles I am going to describe that much harder because there is not anything remotely approaching the same level of criticality that the two cases I will describe had, in terms of effects on the customers.
That said, the reason I am using these cases is because what the lessons learned from the actions of these two companies can be applied to smaller scenarios as well.
I doubt my choice of companies to contrast against each other will surprise anyone. The first is Johnson & Johnson--1982, the Tylenol tampering. The second is British Petroleum (BP)--2010, Deepwater Horizon. I won't spend a lot of time setting up the background for these cases; those of you not old enough to remember or who did not watch a lot of media coverage at the time may read here for background:
Hopefully everyone remembers that Johnson & Johnson is still going strong despite the short-term hit they had to take to weather the recall. As for BP--they are facing penalties that,while probably not strong enough to cripple the company, have caused preemptive divestiture of $38 billion in assets and you can be sure that with that, there has been job loss.
These are the three critical areas that make or break a crisis response:
1) Be HONEST and Communicate Quickly: When the Tylenol crisis hit, Johnson & Johnson never tried to deny the link between Tylenol and the Chicago-area deaths, and instead focused on how they could make sure they were doing right by the customer. Nor did they resort to silence. They got out there quickly and did not let themselves be ruled by fear of "what the media might do to them." Instead they engaged head-on and made sure that they told it to the public straight instead of letting a tiny little trickle of facts come out over time.
With Deepwater Horizon, BP was not forthright with the facts in the early part of the crisis--which meant that the media was going to fill in the narrative for them. And that might well have been even worse than the already ugly truth of the matter. Later on they did get their act together, got the mic away from CEO Tony Hayward (putting a Mississippi native in his place, who actually knew the area and the risks to the people who lived there), and got so engaged with social media that when the well was finally capped, and a CNN analyst erroneously said that something did not appear to be going right, BP literally picked up the phone and told CNN to check their latest tweet for an explanation of exactly what was really happening.
Cryptic's customer relations situation compares much more closely in terms of response type and lateness (again, not in terms of damage done) to BP's. At first, the devs simply didn't talk--they appeared to be hunkering down and hoping the problem would go away on its own. And then when they did communicate, they let only tiny bits of the facts trickle out, leading to a perception (which I believe, only because of outside information, to be erroneous) that they had blamed every player who set foot in Japori for the actions of a far, far smaller group of players than that--players who likely did something else on top of playing in a zone that was awarding an unintended high amount of XP.
Eventually we did see a communications blitz, including some new faces, and while the next part of communication still has not been handled well in many cases (and we still have to see whether the communications blitz will be an anomaly or closer to the new norm), there have been a few improvements, including one small but sustained one that I have noticed in the Gameplay Bug reporting forum--and that is that someone has recently started adding an "INVESTIGATING" tag to bugs that Cryptic is aware of and looking into.
Cryptic has got to get out of the mindset of being cagey and tightly controlling the facts, though--and just like Tony Hayward had to have his mic cut because of his insensitive remarks, some at Cryptic do need to learn how to communicate in a manner that is more considerate of others (and not take the blowback from said insensitive remarks as an excuse to just stop communicating).
I will mention something, though, that I am not sure most people aware of: in a recent instance, Geko did apologize for a poorly-judged remark when it was pointed out how it could be taken. But it is interesting to note that when those of us who pointed it out did so, the early posts calling it out did so without taking personal shots at Geko, and considering the possibility that it was a gaffe rather than malice. It's a lot easier for people to listen and accept feedback when they don't feel like they're being attacked for it, and that may well be an example of how this is true. At least for me that was my hope when I made my post then.
2) Admit mistakes and LEARN from them: Listening to the lawyers is the worst thing you can do--and right up there with it is placing the blame on others. With BP, it was all about the blame: the contractors did it, the scientists estimating the impact of the spill are wrong, and don't forget, "I'd like my life back." Not once in the critical days did BP admit fault.
Sure, the lawyers were afraid of a lawsuit. But if everyone had been realistic, they should have realized that one was going to come no matter what--but that if they did admit fault, show compassion, and be actively involved in doing the right thing, the penalty would likely be much gentler than what they created for themselves: the public going after them with a vengeance not as much because of the accident, but because of the silence, the disrespect, and the utter lack of taking responsibility. Because whatever the contractors might or might not have done, the buck should have stopped with BP--if they were going to put their name on it, it was their ultimate responsibility. Period.
Johnson & Johnson did exactly the opposite to BP--even though in their case, it absolutely was a member of the public who laced their product with poison, after it was already out of their facilities and no longer in their control. They could have easily focused on a "damage control" strategy in which they blamed everyone else, tried to minimize the crisis by focusing on how it was in a limited area only, and essentially gone to war with the public, which had every right to be upset. Instead, they actively engaged the media and undertook a nationwide product recall, which, while not "strictly" necessary, demonstrated their seriousness in containing the threat. Instead of letting lawyers tell them that taking such a drastic action would be a "fault-admitting" move, they did it anyway.
And after the crisis, Johnson & Johnson was first-to-market with the new tamper-resistant packaging--a government mandate, but the speed with which they went to market and with a functional design, showed their commitment to learning in the long term, and not leaving an opening like that again, that someone could take advantage of to the severe detriment of others.
Cryptic thankfully does not have a situation on its hands that can actually impact lives as either of the example companies, but what it does have is a situation where they are perceived to blame the players (even where I don't think they did, their slow response and zealous guarding of information made it look to many as though they did), and they often repeat the patterns that put them into this position--poor testing, slow correction to bugs once found in production, dysfunctional customer service, and typically refusing to incorporate customer feedback unless they get their backs against the wall. The only way to fix this is to make a conclusive course change not just in the short term, but in the long term. Fixing this, especially this far into the customer relations crisis, absolutely requires a sustained, long-term commitment and a pattern of better quality and better treatment of customers.
3) Correct Quickly (and don't be afraid to take a short-term hit to your dignity to do RIGHT by the customers in the long term): I really don't have to say much about this one as far as our case studies, based on what I've discussed above. Johnson & Johnson took decisive action and didn't run in fear from the hit they knew they were going to take, whereas BP let fear of communicating openly and being criticized rule them and acted slowly and much too late.
Cryptic always seems to find itself in reactive mode. But compounding this is something I know I am not the only one to notice. And that has to do with the speed of addressing player concerns and making balancing corrections that benefit versus harm the player's ability to play the game.
When the Tau Dewa exploit took place (and I do think only a few hundred out of the playerbase engaged in an exploit), we got an emergency shutdown--immediate action to stop players from doing it. And as I discussed earlier in the review, we got a very extreme action to target a very narrow problem.
But what happened when the Mirror Event wasn't rewarding Delta Marks--something players badly need? Or Tides of Ice wasn't giving completions as expected and was completely alt-unfriendly? Meh, just stick it in the patch notes for next week and let the players stew for now.
I recognize that some bugs take a longer time to find than others. I also realize that there are potential risks from a change/release management standpoint that creep in when you circumvent the normal change management process too many times. (This is even something I've had to look at on the job.) But when something significant is happening that is negatively impacting players' ability to play and have satisfaction playing, in my mind that is every bit as worthy of a hotfix as stopping malicious activity like a deliberate player exploit or a DDoS attack.
I would also add that unless truly exploitative behavior is going on, if something is rewarding more than intended, the devs should stop and honestly consider the costs to everyone (themselves included) in the long run, to accepting that they made an error but that they have now set player expectations as to what something will reward and not nerfing it or taking it out of our hide somewhere else, versus nerfing when we are already in a serious input shortage versus the resource needs they have imposed on players. Unless something is really outrageous (imagine, for instance, some hypothetical item that should give 10 EC when you vendor it, giving 1,000,000 EC instead), maybe the devs should just accept sometimes that they have made a mistake and resolve to do better next time, but take responsibility and realize that it is now too late to take back what they have done. This is maturity, in my opinion...not punishing others for one's own mistakes.
Sometimes I had to do this in customer service, if I rang someone up for the wrong price and I didn't catch it before the customer handed over their money. It was my fault (and in the customer's eyes, the company's fault) that I was not careful, while I might well make the customer aware if they were still around that I had made an error and not to expect this same price point in the future, I did not inconvenience them or punish them for what I had done. Again, it was my fault. And if that meant I caught heat from my management, then I had no one else to blame but myself--and certainly not the customer. And sometimes, I did not catch heat for it at all, because a customer for whom you do the right thing when the stuff hits the fan sometimes turns out to be the most loyal repeat customer of all.
I would not expect that to happen every time, but if something is "over-rewarding" due to dev error (such as an incorrect XP table), I think sometimes they should just walk away and try again next time--accept responsibility and not inconvenience or punish the players for it. Just accept that that one got away, it's out now and can't be put back, and try not to do it again.
One of the things that comes up in these case studies is the message that a company puts out, and the actions that it takes that affect others. But what I'd like to look at before I conclude this section on customer relations and communication is the other half of communication.
Listening and Accepting Feedback: The Other Half of Communication
First things first.
It's actually not the other half of communication.
Listening to others and adapting (constructive) feedback is far more than half of the communications process. In fact, I'd be willing to say that two-thirds is probably still an overly conservative estimate.
There are many reasons that people deafen themselves to feedback. Sometimes it's personal investment in a creation, sometimes it's groupthink, sometimes it's receiving a more threatening kind of feedback from elsewhere (say, upper management), and other times defensiveness comes from denial. But getting into that sort of mindset and then doubling down on a failed strategy pretty much guarantees things are going to get worse and may never get better.
This also goes back to what I said at the top of the post: the customer defines quality.
What you produce can be the finest product according to your terms, but if it does not satisfy the customers, then by definition it actually fails as a quality product even if its made of diamonds and platinum.
You can design the best grind mechanics possible, and customers can take exactly the time you intend to get anything done, and some may grudgingly spend money, but if that is not what the majority of customers want, it is by nature of poor quality even if it fits the intended design specifications to a T. And ultimately, failing to serve customers quality as they expect it to be means losing out.
We have got to see much more listening on Cryptic's part now that they are talking more than they used to. Let us ask questions. Cryptic should ask US how we feel about things. Don't just throw up a pro forma "Feedback Thread," actually actively engage and seek out more information about what we are saying instead of filibustering about what they want to do. User acceptance testing should not be treated as "how much can we force the customer to accept?" but as "how can we better produce what the customer will happily accept so that they'll feel good about what they're buying, and then buy some more because they enjoy the game so much?"
Without these two pieces, all of the talking in the world will be worth nothing at all, as no real communication will have ever occurred. Just a lot of words.
What Can We Do?
While ultimately the onus lies on PWE/Cryptic to fix what has happened, we should remember a few key points when talking about or interacting with the devs. These should be obvious but some behavior shows they are not, so I will restate them now for the record:
--No flaming or threatening...even when you really, really want to and you "think they've got it coming." I don't care how badly a dev has screwed up or even how rude one of them may have been. That does not provide any of us with a carte blanche to behave horribly towards them.
--Engage constructively: explain your position clearly and in a balanced manner. That means that while you should seek to explain in a detailed manner where things are wrong and why, you should also show where things are working and propose solutions instead of always just complaining. Sometimes we just need to vent. But venting should move into brainstorming solutions as soon as possible.
--Don't assume the devs hate you, but even when they TRIBBLE you off, remember they're human. I remember a few years back when people were angry about nerfing STF rewards, Dan Stahl made an unrelated post looking for fleets to do Harlem Shake videos and post them. I caught this as soon as it posted and warned him that it was poorly timed, hoping he would realize this and reconsider before it got out of hand. The post stayed up, and as expected, led to a massive blow up that then led him to lose his temper at players. I wasn't sure why at the time, but something about the way things happened was bothering me and I just had this feeling something was wrong for DStahl. Come to find out later, I was right--the night all of that went down, he was up in the middle of the night trying to comfort his daughter who was sick, and he admitted later hadn't been making the clearest of decisions. I took this same approach with Geko recently, as did some others in the same thread, and while Geko does not discuss his personal life on the forums that I'm aware of, I found that it worked better than a flaming forumer pile-on would have. Sometimes people have something going on in their lives, other times they speak too quicklywithout reading back what they're going to say and stick their foot in their mouths, and some people just don't get certain things about interpersonal relations. But it doesn't necessarily mean the dev who made a bad decision or said the wrong thing has some burning desire to do horrible things to us, and while we can express disappointment and criticism of those decisions, we should not assume they're powered by hateful intent.
--Employ positive reinforcement where it makes sense and model the appropriate behavior with each other and with the devs. When the devs do something right, tell them. When you're in customer service, it's really draining to hear nothing but how horrible you are day in and day out, and never hear a nice word from anybody. If something works, say it. Additionally, it is also helpful to model the sort of respect that you want to be given. That way if someone might not know how to deal with a situation they find themselves in, they have an example in your behavior of how to do it the right way.
One final point: Cryptic should not let fear dictate their responses. If they hold silent out of fear, players will create the exact horrible narrative they fear and possibly worse. If they communicate vaguely for fear of being disliked, the vagueness will make the customers feel insulted and that will make the backlash that much worse. If they avoid letting content be seen for testing for fear it will be unpopular, it will not only be unpopular but players will feel they've been had, on top of whatever they would have felt otherwise.
To shamelessly borrow from Dune: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
NEXT AND FINAL POST: Conclusion on Delta Rising--can it be reanimated? And some potential action plans...
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Another consideration that I don't think older players (or Cryptic, for that matter) take into account is resource availability, and what that means to the structure of content balancing. Dil / Zen costs seem to be predicated on the mindset that your average player has multiple years of play, and has a significant war chest to throw at anything new that comes down the pike.
Hey...sorry I missed your post earlier. I promise you I wasn't deliberately ignoring it; I think it came up while I was making a long post to answer Ernest's points about the upgrade system.
I think you may underestimate the war chest that all but the biggest whales have (I think from your post you know a few--but I think those are outliers). Most of us who have been in the game for a while have found that the demands on our dilithium have outstripped our earning and refining capacities...worst of all for those in a fleet, and an MMO should be encouraging fleet formation and fleet play, because that social aspect is a great draw in bringing players in and retaining them and keeping them happy enough to spend. Making things friendly for fleets and alts, and benefiting from the fun that the fleets themselves generate (that you barely have to work to do) is a GOOD strategy. But even fleets suffer under enormous cost burdens.
I understand the why behind it -- I have guys in my fleet with a few million dil banked, primarily through play over time, and you have to consider that when pricing new releases. But by over-aggressively positioning costs to still challenge these long-timers, you've completely shut your new players out, unless they're willing to throw significant IRL cash around.
Exactly: as I said above, pricing for the outliers will run off everyone BUT them, and then the population will be too low to be sustainable...and even the whales won't have fun if they have no one to show off to.
At the current dilex average, your daily refine cap of 8k will net you ~50 Zen. Your three character limit on a F2P brings that to 150/day. At that rate, you're looking at about two weeks to be able to afford one of the 2k Zen ships. All fine and good, until you consider that the newly minted player doesn't make 8k/day, even on their main, and likely won't until they're about a month in unless specifically coached. Once you factor time investments to get alts to a comfortable 8k/day level, it could be as long as 2-3 months before that newbie can afford that shiny ship. And that's assuming they never spend a bit of dil on any of the other dil sinks, ever. Six weeks is a nice average cutoff for when the honeymoon is over and a player is either going to be retained or jump ship, and that player will be challenged to clear the very first currency hurdle in that time. I could continue down the list with fleet mods, fleet projects, rep gear, all the various and sundry dil sinks, but I believe my point is made.
Made very nicely.
Lastly, as a new player, what the DR post-launch has done is made me very, very wary with my money. I'm a conscientious spender when it comes to entertainment budget, but I'm willing to invest my money in a product that's going to pay out in enjoyment over a long period of time. Having seen how wildly numbers and norms have been whipsawing, and the willingness to completely invalidate yesterday's purchase with today's slightly upgraded new shiny, I absolutely refuse to buy anything that could be rendered obsolete or worthless on a whim. I'll eat a little more grind to get what I want, if it saves me real money sunk into a bad investment. This hurts Cryptic going forward, because my dollars are exactly what they need to capture if they want to continue to grow this game and keep it as an income source in years to come.
And how patient will you remain with the grind, over time, if it does not reward?
Indeed, this will hurt Cryptic over time, having shot their "investment rating" so badly, if they do not fix things.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I'm looking at this from an alt-friendliness perspective rather than difficulty. Difficulty-wise, I think I would also have an easier time handling Tides of Ice than the race.
Ironically enough, I haven't even touched Tides yet because Cryptic wants me to do it 60 times. Ties in nicely in stoleviathan's speculations about 'gamification', now that I think about it - and I've given up on specializations for the exact same reason.
Edit: Whoo, 10 per account now. That makes it a bit more manageable.
(P.S. If you think this edit is a bit hypocritical after the original post, I will defend myself simply by saying that I'm not being punished for playing alts anymore, which is currently good enough for me. :P)
As with Tuvix, sorry about missing your post...I think it came up while I was writing a much longer response to someone else.
I admit, I have far fewer alts than a lot of people--in fact, because of the dilithium sinks, I am down to two...the two I have focused most heavily in my writing on, and for that reason I refuse to let go of either one of them. So I was only looking at 20 reps under the "old" Tides system. And for me the difficulty difference between Tides and the stupid race is HUGE. I just can't complete the race at all most times and gave up trying last year out of sheer frustration. So for me Tides was a huge boon, but I understand the frustration others had and feel they should have thought it through. Or if that was unintended behavior, addressed it before it got out of testing.
BTW, you aren't hypocritical, especially since you left the text of your pre-edited post so what you changed was obvious.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
THE VERDICT: CAN DELTA RISING BE REANIMATED--AND HOW?
It's time to ask the big question.
Can Delta Rising be saved?
After almost two months of observation and experience both in-game and on the forums, I would have to say that the answer is:
Yes, but ONLY with significant work or the game will not be sustainable in the long term.
I've speculated a lot about could-have-beens and should-have-beens along the way, but unfortunately, some decisions just can't realistically be taken back at this point, such as releasing "Mindscape" as a stand-alone and using it to buy extra development time, or setting the level cap at 60. Things like that should still be considered as lessons learned when looking at long-range planning for the game, so I do not feel any effort was wasted in bringing them up. We do need to get to where we can have a long range to plan for, though, so what I'm going to do first is provide some succinct (yeah, I can do succinct if forced ) action items that can set things on the right course for the next several months. If we get beyond that point...well, that's where the more comprehensive discussion in prior posts really comes in.
Action Items (in category order, not priority)
1) Story Progression Fix (short term): Strongly consider taking all existing missions and re-leveling them to end at Level 55. This will preserve the progression experience for new players and anyone who may be considering taking an alt through the story who might not have been willing to do so otherwise. As new content comes in, begin with Level 55 and make the spacing between it equivalent to the reset story progression; do not leave any more gaps that force players to slam the brakes on in the middle of your story.
2) Story Progression Fix (mid-term): Revamp the patrols. I have suggested earlier a way to get 5 viable full missions (including "Alliances") out of the existing patrols and I would be cool with that or a similar approach. Leave the other experiences that don't get used in the patrol revamp around in case anyone still wants to experience them, perhaps consider a wrapper mission that awards some nice XP for completing a certain number of them, but don't force all players through all of the patrols.
3) Story Progression Fix (long-term): Don't raise the level cap again with insufficient story content to get to it. If progression is going to be slower, then that many more stories will be necessary to have ready to go pre-release.
4) Testing and QA (immediate): Take Tribble feedback seriously and don't be afraid to delay implementation if testing reveals problems either in mechanics or user acceptance (and remember that "waiting it out until the users accept whatever I want" is not what user acceptance testing really means). Players are more forgiving of delays to get it right than they are of bug-ridden or unbalanced releases. Taking testing more seriously also provides more time to catch unintended mechanics before they present a far more frustrating problem to deal with in production.
5) Testing and QA (immediate): Remember that the customer defines quality. You can make the best widget in the world but if the customer can't stand it or feels they don't need it, it's not quality. Quality is what meets the customer's needs as they perceive their needs to be, and only the rarest of rare companies, like Apple, that invents a total game-changer is in any position to tell the customer what quality is and what they really want. Consistently bring this mentality to testing and QA and it is likely to start reaping results quickly. Best of all: ask the customers what they think as often as you can, and engage in conversation. Don't be defensive if perceptions differ significantly and be ready to challenge time-old preconceptions and be led into interesting new areas you might not have considered before.
6) Testing and QA (immediate): Avoid code branching/forking if at all possible. This might not always be possible to do, but this will cut down on the opportunity to have conflicting code loaded to production and the documentation horrors and bugs that result. If you get time, do consider going back and more thoroughly documenting what you already have in production because if you're like most companies, the early documentation especially could use some beefing up and it might bring to light some interactions between variables that nobody has thought of, and might help squash some bugs before they happen.
7) Testing and QA (mid/long-term): Never again forbid ANY customer from testing or circumvent the process unless there's a hotfix that needs to go out. If that customer wants to test, then whether they are a subscriber or F2P doesn't matter. Each brings a perspective that is helpful. If you fear there will be too many drive-bys with not enough feedback, consider incentivizing those who take time to fill out a comment form about what they have just experienced instead of those who just spend some time on the server. Yes, some people will pencil-whip the survey to get the goodies and if you try to control for that you'll fail, but by directly asking for feedback and incentivizing it, you'll get a good number of people who will speak up.
8) SpecPoints and Skill Points (short-term): While taking the advice in #1 will go a long way to solve the immediate problem where it relates to story progression, I still strongly recommend rebalancing the 51-60 / 60+ leveling somewhat. Either beef up XP or reduce the amount needed for a level or a SpecPoint. I see no need to go back to the 1-50 amount, but helping us some in this department will net a lot of good will and hopefully allow for an experience that both old and new players can enjoy. And for goodness' sake, when performing this balance pass, treat it as a critical matter both in terms of communicating it, and in quality-checking it. Spend extra time in both internal and external testing if necessary. In fact, I would be willing to bet you that if you skipped a normal weekly patch cycle to allow a second week of testing for this area, and IF you accepted feedback prior to going to production, it would be a very good thing for you.
9) PvE Queues (immediate): Increase rewards on Advanced and Elite--yes, again. Increase not just the dilithium and/or marks, but also the number of reputation "tokens" (Borg neural processors, isomorphic injections, etc.). Add one of those items per Normal run so that newbies and undergeared alts have a chance to progress to the gear they will need for Advanced.
10) PvE Queues (short-term): Rebalance the difficulty of the Advanced queues to come closer to what was originally promised--the direct equivalent of the old Elites. Remove fail points from Advanced.
11) Upgrade System (short-term): Reduce the costs not just for the materials but in terms of dilithium required. The current valuation is completely out of line even when a Lobi ship is your comparison instead of a normal C-Store ship.
12) Upgrade System (short-term): Either make it easier to upgrade to Epic, or introduce a few drops from Advanced events up, at Ultra Rare and Epic levels. Heck, even if you keep them at Mk XII, it would be preferable that occasionally items of all types drop that already have the rarity done for the player. I strongly believe a player will be happier to pay for Mk XIV on such an item, than to gamble with the extreme unpredictability of results in the current system. These do not have to be frequent drops but for there to be at least some chance to obtain an Epic item other than to gamble for it.
13) Upgrade System (mid/long-term): Introduce a way for players doing rarity upgrades to have absolute control over the mod they get during upgrade without introducing exorbitant costs to do so (and listen to players about the cost before settling on it!).
14) Communication (immediate): Don't let fear of criticism or fear of liability prevent communicating early, often, and engaging in constructive dialogue. Being silent or only engaging in one-way communication will actually bring about the worst-case scenarios you fear. Consider that just as I encourage players to remember that you have real lives, that you're human, and sometimes we don't know everything that's going on, and that we shouldn't go into communications with you spoiling for a fight, approaching us with a welcoming and listening attitude will go a long way too. (NOTE: I think there are some people who try to do this. And sometimes no matter what, someone is still going to have a bad day on occasion. But this is a good aim to always have in mind.)
15) Communication (immediate): Remember that it isn't communication if there is not active listening, and solid, consistent actions to back up what you say. Work on increasing two-way dialogue and listening to and incorporating customer feedback.
16) Communication and Overall Design Philosophy (immediate): Remember that the metrics don't tell the whole story. If the game does not feel right or fun to players, then making changes just to make the numbers balance may be the worst thing possible. Understand what the players feel and what they like, as much as possible and solicit feedback...realizing that sometimes it might mean hearing something tough about something that you are genuinely attached to and have put a lot of hard work into, but that if you adapt at least some of the way, the result will be better for ALL of us, yourselves included.
17) Communication and Overall Design Philosophy (immediate): Remember that sometimes when an error happens in the player's favor, as long as it's not truly outrageous or an actual hack or exploit (and you are not talking to someone who doesn't believe there was an exploit used by a few in the recent incident), it's better to just accept that the error happened and let the players have their fun. If a major error occurs that is to the player's detriment, especially if it's severe to us, it should be hotfixed if at all possible instead of treated as having lesser urgency than an error in our favor.
While I know that's a lot of points, and there is also a huge amount of other great material in the main body of the review and in the discussion surrounding each post, I feel strongly that these points above will take care of the basics and get Star Trek: Online moving in a healthy direction again. I don't want to see this thing fail and I think there is still an opportunity to fix it, but it will require some major and committed changes, and there will come a point where if nothing substantive happens, it could come to a totally unnecessary end.
Let's truly work together to reanimate Delta Rising, and the game as a whole.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the discussion not only for support, but for some very, very well thought out points that challenged me to think, and greatly improved the comprehensiveness of the review. In a real sense, you are a part of it too.
Additionally I would like to thank everyone for behaving thoughtfully and civilly through the whole thing, that while other threads crashed and burned, this one has survived for as long as it has and stayed productive the whole time through. I do ask that as discussion continues that we keep it this way. Thank you for that as well!
Thank you as well to the Christian Gaming Community, and also to the Masterverse writing group, for putting up with my greatly reduced time spent with both of you as I worked on this series--and also to certain individuals whose initials are MDK, with whom I have been outrageously slow about answering emails since I started this monster. I'm going to try to get back with all of you more often!
And finally...I want to thank any dev or community manager if you read all the way through this and survived. I know you may not speak up in this thread (even though it would gain you immediate Awesome Points ), but if you have stuck with it for this long, or came to it at the end and took the time to read all the way through, then it's my hope that it has been helpful, and however things go, I thank you very much for taking the time to read it and think about it. I hope if you find anything helpful in here that you will pass it along!
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
BTW, you aren't hypocritical, especially since you left the text of your pre-edited post so what you changed was obvious.
Well, unless it's to correct something (like poor grammar/spelling - or poor wording of a given argument, for that matter), my edits tend to be confined to the 'Edit: ' section I end up adding at the bottom of the post. :P
That said, it's been an interesting series of posts and I guess we can only hope someone important enough reads it and agrees with its content.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I've just finished reading through all this and I have to say it has remained well thought out right up until the end, so congrats on making a great review.
Might I suggest sending this to all the devs or the community managers in a PM so that they might more likely take a look at it? I suggest this because it'd be a shame to leave it to fate to whether they actually read it or not, and I do genuinely think there is a lot they could take away from this.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
Thanks for reading and I am glad you think it's useful!
I did PM it to one of the CM's...I might send it to one or two others but I am *very* hesitant to reach out directly to more than a very few because if I end up being perceived as spamming that would not bode well for the actual content of the review, I don't think.
I have linked it in my signature, though, so perhaps some others--players and devs alike--will check it out on their own.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Thanks for reading and I am glad you think it's useful!
I did PM it to one of the CM's...I might send it to one or two others but I am *very* hesitant to reach out directly to more than a very few because if I end up being perceived as spamming that would not bode well for the actual content of the review, I don't think.
I have linked it in my signature, though, so perhaps some others--players and devs alike--will check it out on their own.
I'd hope so, I'd also like to think they'd leave some comments but I guess that might be expecting too much, here's hoping though.
Good thought about putting it in your signature though.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
Admittedly there is a lot of material to sort through, especially if you include the between-post discussions (which I highly recommend), but I agree it would be really good to get some feedback and know they've read it.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Some of the Elites could be reworked; BHA and BHE are impossible to get the charges placed on. UIE is stupidly easy unless some fool can't read; beef up the Undine in that is my advice.
Undine space missions were painful before DR and dead now. Same with Voth space; recommend nerfing their advanced and elites just a bit.
Add another minute to the rescue 3 ships timer in Azure Nebula, so that newbies and PUGs stand a chance.
Halve the dil and EC costs for all upgrade stuff halved, and double the chance for a rarity upgrade.
Gotta agree with gulberat that XP for endgame content needs a HUGE buff. Even with newly boosted DR patrols it's a painful grind.
Some of the Elites could be reworked; BHA and BHE are impossible to get the charges placed on. UIE is stupidly easy unless some fool can't read; beef up the Undine in that is my advice.
Unfortunately "some fool can't read" is more common than you would think. As I mentioned before, I think that the penalty for a reading error should be put solely on the player who messed up, since it is very hard to claim something like that is somehow a teamwork fail. I rarely mess up but even the one time I mis-clicked (thankfully in UIA where it only cost marks and did not autofail the team), I would have understood and agreed with taking the penalty so the rest of the team did not have to.
I haven't gotten enough experience with UIE yet, to determine if the enemies themselves are stronger or smarter than in UIA, and my initial impression was "no or not significantly."
I can't attest to the Borg ground missions as I never tried them and based on what I have heard, likely never will.
Undine space missions were painful before DR and dead now. Same with Voth space; recommend nerfing their advanced and elites just a bit.
Undine BZ, at least, is manageable but then again I am sure that's set to Normal and scaling down to 50. For the Undine STF's they were always so horrendous on the old Elite that I am only now even considering trying one of my toons in Advanced now that he has the full Counter-Command set.
Halve the dil and EC costs for all upgrade stuff halved, and double the chance for a rarity upgrade.
That will help but I think that if a piece has not upgraded in rarity yet by the time it hits Mk XIV, if Cryptic does not implement a system of very, very rare UR and Epic quality drops from playing content to make up for it, then doubling may not be drastic enough to make the system reasonable. If, however, they are willing to allow *very* rare drops of UR and Epic Mk XII items (I will at least allow the idea that they not be Mk XIV since they could still at least make money *somewhere*), then I could accept double.
Gotta agree with gulberat that XP for endgame content needs a HUGE buff. Even with newly boosted DR patrols it's a painful grind.
And to simply boost the least satisfying content available and call it done isn't even a band-aid. It's a badly-done battlefield dressing. Much more extensive improvements need to come *quickly.*
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I just wanted to point something out from a dev communication standpoint.
Has anyone else noticed the way that commanderander is communicating clearly and owning the responsibility for his work and his communications when it comes to the way the patch notes on the Dyson BZ were written and the fact that the code had unintended consequences once implemented?
This almost made the last post in my review on customer relations, but I decided against putting it in because at the time I only had one or two posts to go by and no evidence yet of follow-through, but even though we have not seen a fix implemented I think there is enough to say that we are seeing a good model of how to communicate with and solicit help from players, from commanderander's actions in the "Dyson sphere nerf" thread.
To players and especially any devs who may be reading, I would recommend checking out commanderander's interactions with the players in that thread. It is very interesting to notice how he follows the guidelines I and others have discussed about avoiding anything that could be construed as blaming or insulting language towards the players, being open with communication, paying attention to feedback, and owning it when something doesn't go right. (EDIT: AND also not going off on anybody even though some of the players in that thread are pretty irate.) This could provide a model for other devs who may find themselves uncomfortable in this arena or who have incurred severe backlashes before.
Either check out the thread, or do a search of commanderander's most recent posts. This should not go unnoticed.
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I know this would spend extra amounts of your valuable time, but after reading your well-thought out descriptions, perhaps you could do a small tidbit on PvP?
It would be nice to get the opinion of people who don't view STO's endgame as a PvP playground.
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I know this would spend extra amounts of your valuable time, but after reading your well-thought out descriptions, perhaps you could do a small tidbit on PvP?
It would be nice to get the opinion of people who don't view STO's endgame as a PvP playground.
Oh dear...I admit it crossed my mind, but just like anything to do with the KDF faction, I have next to zero expertise or experience in that area and I since I don't relate, I wouldn't be able to explain it in an effective manner.
Still, thank you very much for your kind words.
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Hahaha, I was just about to ask you if that's what happened.
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This also goes back to what I said at the top of the post: the customer defines quality.
What you produce can be the finest product according to your terms, but if it does not satisfy the customers, then by definition it actually fails as a quality product even if its made of diamonds and platinum.
You can design the best grind mechanics possible, and customers can take exactly the time you intend to get anything done, and some may grudgingly spend money, but if that is not what the majority of customers want, it is by nature of poor quality even if it fits the intended design specifications to a T. And ultimately, failing to serve customers quality as they expect it to be means losing out.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did NOT read every post in this thread. I clicked the links to the 'Featured Reviews' and poured through your commentary, and though I don't agree with every point, I agree with much. May I also say it is obvious that you truly care about this game and have done it a service with your honest, well though-out, respectful dialogue.
The above quote was re-posted because, I think, it is the core of the issue. To put it in different terms, a customer brings a shirt to a tailor to add a pocket for pens. When the customer returns, he finds the tailor added the pockets but also let the shirt out. The tailor explains it's for the better, because people generally put on weight as they age and the extra room means the shirt will last longer. The point is fact, but it doesn't satisfy the customers expectation.
The problem is exacerbated, though, if the customer screams at the tailor, insults his/her work, then returns next week for more alterations. It creates a dysfunctional, unproductive business relationship.
In general, I avoid the official forums. In all too many cases it devolves into pettiness. Frankly, this may be my first post since Cryptic migrated to PWE's server. (EDIT: THIS WAS THE FOURTH. IT SAYS SO UNDER 'POSTS' :P ) Thank you for your post, and I hope the STOForum community allows you to be it's mouthpiece.
Comments
Whether or not the metrics taken alone provide adequate feedback is an open question on my mind since I think there's reason to believe that the metrics Cryptic is placing the most focus on are not the ones that support the game's long-term as opposed to short-term health. IMO forum threads and reviews have value by filling in the gaps the devs may have as to how the game experience really feels. If the short term metrics look great but the players are at or past the breaking point, then those same metrics could be masking a collapse that will occur later.
E30earnest, your response will come later in the day since I have some quasi-mathematical stuff I'll need to walk through to get yours nailed down.
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As an update to everyone who's been following this: There are only two sections left now--customer relations, and conclusion/action plans. I expect to finish out by the end of the week. I know...about time!!!
I am pretty sure now that I am reaching the end, that this will be the most comprehensive review of DR, unless one of the "real gaming press" sources has done something to this depth.
Delta Rising: Reanimate? (Y/N)--A Review Miniseries
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
INTRODUCTION
THE STORY
Disclaimer
Background
The Space Mission Arc
The Space Patrols
The Kobali Ground Arc
Character Development
Story Progression and Verdict
QUALITY ASSURANCE, MECHANICS, AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS
Testing and QA
Progression--The Mechanics Side, SpecGate/SPGate
The Golden Ratio: Time, Effort, and Money Versus Reward
The PvE Queues
The Upgrade System
Crypticonomics: Speculations on Market and Social Forces
(Only two more planned sections left!!!)
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In support of my theory regarding leveling for new vs old players, it does seem that the XP curve and content are indeed more advantageous to the newer players:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1316751
Now I'll be honest, if I were level 50 with all rep gear maxed when DR came out, and I had to grind my way to 60, I probably wouldn't be having much fun either. But it is what it is, and that's where the XP curve and content seemed to be balanced on.
Now I might get flogged by other players for this, but the grind problem current 50's have to reach 60 is a temporary one in my opinion. Eventually, everyone of the older players would have either made 60 or have quit. When that happens, the levelling issues a lot have been having will cease to exist.
Getting spec points however is another matter. However, I view them like T6 ship mastery traits. They (specialization) is great to have, but not an absolute necessity. The spec points doesn't seem to me like something Cryptic ever intended players to race through, but rather accumulate over time by doing other stuff in the game. Of course, players who want to max their potential will always try to get the next points as quickly as possible. That's when it becomes a chore in my opinion.
Adding spec points in my opinion is a good thing. I'd rather have a constantly growing spec point pool than to have all my game time be nulled to nothing by a future level cap increase (like what we had just now) with an even steeper curve. At least earning spec points are pegged at a specific SP level right now. I think in the future, they could add new tiers to it, or new trees. It's a much better solution to improving endgame rather than adding a new level cap.
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Now, I say this and I actually find it one of the most enjoyable grinds I've had to go through in a while because Tides as an event is fun...even the complete fail instance I was in late tonight. BUT, when it comes to grinds in that event, requiring you to do several reps of an event just to unlock very SMALL items is a new low on the grind and makes me wonder. The business model is badly askew at this point, for sure.
Given how long STO has been at this level cap, that you have so many years' worth of players who will all be starting out from this position, I'm sorry--but I don't know how Cryptic could possibly not have thought of it because I think the vast majority of players are leveling from 50 and had the maxed-out rep gear, etc. To not take that into account is very poor judgment IMO.
DISCLAIMER: It is entirely possible I messed up my math here. This took me a long time to do! If I DID mess it up, please be forgiving because I still think the general point that this is making is valid, and would still check out in basic concept even if the figures are off.
On that random worst-case deflector upgrade scenario you posted...there are two things I want to point out for that. The first is going to be a closer look at the degree of unpredictability that we are talking about here. If we assume his math is correct and that 1,075,000 dilithium is the upper limit, let's translate that first into real money terms, and then into time-to-grind terms, to look at entirely cash and entirely "free" options to get that piece of gear.
The maximum cash figure comes in between $53.75 (exchange rate 200 dilithium per Zen) and $71.67 (exchange rate 150 dil per Zen), with the midpoint at $62.71.
Figured in days of grind required, the maximum is roughly between 120 and 135 days (with and without extra veteran refining).
First stop and think about those figures for a moment. That should be mind boggling enough. But let's consider one other thing here.
While I cannot provide you an actual calculation since I have not seen best-case-scenario figures, I should be able to take you conceptually to my next point. And that is that if you plot out the possible outcomes on a Bell curve--that is assuming that the metaphorical dice aren't weighted in some way that we can't see--an upper figure that high indicates that one standard deviation on this curve is a HUGE number. A standard deviation that high means we're looking at a very, very flat, very wide curve. One in which it is therefore incredibly hard to budget or have any sort of predictability or control in the system. This is a huge part of the reason why I say, without hyperbole, that the potential costs involved in upgrading to epic are insane, and completely, totally out of whack.
Obviously not every piece is going to cost you $62.71 or 120 days. And to some with a lot of disposable income to throw around, that might not SEEM crazy. But when you take every piece of gear on your ship and add it together, that is absurd.
Let's compare that to another cost, to make my point absolutely clear. This should also completely destroy any last comparison between the upgrades and the lockboxes.
Now, there is a difference depending on whether you are specifically after the Lobi ship or after the lockbox ship, but comparing to the Lobi ship should still serve well enough for illustration.
In the case of the Nicor and the Dromias, I was good with either ship. And that was actually one of the key reasons I went for it, because I knew I would be equally happy (and honestly, now that I have the Dromias I think I am actually happier with it than I would have been with the Nicor) with both the sure bet and the somewhat more volatile gamble. Let's look at the cost of a Dromias. This is the upper-end cash-only cost, assuming that you have no free Lobi from Lobi giveaways, no use of Master Key or Zen discounts or Zen stipends, and that it is either not favorable on the Exchange or you just choose not to use the strategy of only selling Master Keys or Fleet Modules.
(Remember that if you will not settle for the Lobi ship and want the lockbox one instead the best strategy after hitting the required Lobi number is to buy the highest-valued Lobi ship you can find in the store once you get the Lobi, and then do whatever you can, whether it be your favorite EC-grinding strategy, or selling Fleet Modules or Master Keys on the Exchange, to make up the deficit between the Lobi ship, which will always be valued lower because it's not as rare, and the lockbox ship you really want. At the point when you are ready to close that gap, you will be able to make a fair calculation of how much you will need to close that gap)
The T6 has a cost of 900 Lobi. The T5U (because you do not need an upgrade token to get to that level) is 800.
The average Lobi per box is estimated at 5 and to my experience this is fairly accurate. The standard deviation on this is much lower so the estimate I am going to give you here is MUCH more solid than the one I described above. This means you will need to open:
T6: 180 boxes--18 10-packs of keys required
T5U: 160 boxes--16 10-packs of keys required.
10-pack of keys: $11.25 USD a piece
1 key: $1.25 a piece
Your average price for each therefore becomes:
T6: $202.50
T5U: $180
If the law of averages doesn't play nice with you, you might get 1 more 10-pack of keys, and sell what you don't use on the Exchange, to get EC you can use to gear your ship fast. This puts your cost at:
T6: $213.75
T5U: $191.25
With a low standard deviation on the Lobi reward curve, it would take some very serious bad luck for the cost of a Lobi ship to go any higher than that.
Let's convert these high-end costs we just figured to days of grinding, assuming you want to do this without paying a cent. I am still not factoring in any event Lobi or Zen stipends you may have hanging around, or the alternate strategy of selling Master Keys on the exchange the whole way. (You'll notice that whereas the dilithium figure is the constant for the upgrades, with the lockboxes the Zen amount needed is the constant, meaning the exchange rate has the opposite effects that it did in the previous example.)
T6 Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 4,275,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 3,206,250
T5U Dil Required:
--Exchange rate 200 Dil to Zen: 3,825,000
--Exchange rate 150 Dil to Zen: 2,868,750
T5U Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 319 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 479 days
T6 Days Required:
--Lowest dil estimate, Veteran refining: 356 days
--Highest dil estimate, normal refining: 535 days
And there you have the completely F2P option for a Lobi ship, assuming you are not using the alternate strategy of selling keys on the Exchange and doing other EC grind tricks that may result in a significantly cheaper cost in grind and/or cash. Most people are going to do a combination of the two strategies, resulting in some proportion of cash and grind...and I'd guess the majority is going to be cash in most people's cases, but here's the next trick...
What proportion of a Lobi ship does that epic deflector from your example represent?
Ballpark average, that one epic deflector at absolute worst-case scenario is worth somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3rd of a Lobi ship! A more likely estimate based on that (halving the worst-case scenario to come up with a somewhat more "midpoint-based" estimate, though I am not going to vouch for that being the actual midpoint) puts that deflector at about 1/10 to 1/6th of the value of the Lobi ship. Even then that is still an absurd valuation, and that's just one piece of equipment.
And let's remember one more thing about the Lobi ship. AND the lockbox ship.
You are not gambling in ANY way on your stats. You know what bridge officers, console slots and special consoles, and ALL other stats will be on that ship. You can be exactly sure of what that ship is worth to you and whether it fits your playstyle and expectations.
But 1/10 to 1/6 of that value for one piece of equipment that you can't even be sure will give you extra mods that are worth anything much and are going to have a devil of a time even budgeting for in the first place due to the huge standard deviation we discussed up top? Absolutely nuts.
On the mods, if you want to get an idea of the difference in valuation between weapons and console mods in players' eyes, I recommend for example looking at the difference between Very Rare Mk XII's for any space weapon of your choice, and compare the lowest several on the list (I say several because there are sometimes people who do not know how to value their items when posting to the exchange), and the cheapest [Acc]x3 that you can find.
While I am not sure what my Dromias ultimately cost me, what I can tell you is that it would have come in below the maximum T5U cost I worked out there due to a variety of factors including Event Lobi and dilithium grinding, and that for whatever I did pay for it, I walked away with not just the ship, but with FULL gear. As in, ALL of my weapons and one console came straight out of the lockbox with no cost and were mostly Mk XII VR (with a few Mk XI's), and I also had enough EC from the loot and leftover Master Keys at the end that I also walked away with mostly Mk XII VR and a few Mk XI VR gear in all other slots for it basically the day I bought the ship.
In essence, what I bought wasn't just the ship. It was a generally endgame-ready ship with no additional grinding required to gear up further. (And included in what I paid for the Lobi ship was also upgraded DOFFing, dilithium mining claims, and helpful boosts of several kinds that came out of the boxes as loot.)
That is, until DR hit and I was no longer endgame-ready.
The purpose of this looooooong illustration is to show you just how OFF the Epic gear valuation really is on Cryptic's part, when you consider what I paid to get that fully endgame-ready Dromias pre-DR, and what just the gear for ANY ship would cost in dollars or grind, to be of equivalent status.
There just aren't even words for how nutty this valuation IS. Yes, you can stop and I WILL stop at Mk XIV regardless of what rarity an item works out to, and yes, I will take it very slow...but when you compare what you could do in the past to what you can do now, and--I am sorry, but remember that the vast majority of players are leveling from 50-60 and lack the leveling advantages and also lack the training by Cryptic in the much lower expectations they are now to have...I don't think you can dismiss the experience new players are having as an insignificant problem that will take care of itself in the long run.
OR through intentional attrition, which I still do not rule out as a possible strategy on the part of some at PWE/Cryptic...and honestly based on Tacofangs' comment, if someone in that equation IS thinking that way, my bet is it's more a PWE thing than a Cryptic one.
You are VERY right to say that if this is the strategy, intended or unintended, it absolutely IS a short-term strategy that will not be viable in the long run. Someone may have just severely miscalculated. Initial fast returns may be hiding the problem, as I suggested in my most recent post, and the bottom will fall out (my guess would be some time after the winter event IF no major corrections or adjustments are made, perhaps in CY15 Q2 to take a shot-in-the-dark stab at it). Or...and this is the absolute worst case that I really hope is only a slim possibility...the game is not intended to keep running in the long term and PWE is attempting to make the most short-term money that they can before shutdown. Personally I think that is the less likely scenario, but it is another one that could explain the evidence so I still bring it up.
Unfortunately I think it quite likely that there just is not enough "long run" left, unless things get fixed and fixed fast.
ON SPEC POINTS...I think that is a problem that can level out to some extent. They are not a bad idea in concept though the implementation like everything leveling-related was too extreme in terms of how slow it is. But I think that the economics are likely to destroy the game if they are not adjusted, before the furor over slow leveling has a chance to taper off.
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During testing we came to the conclusion that the mark upgrades were about okay but the quality was an absolute no no. The cost is not proportionate to what a Mk XIV ought to cost as a straight purchase and that's assuming you even get modifiers you want by the end of it.
This review series has been really good. Trouble is I think the devs are trying to force everyone to play DR to prove to someone that the content they made is popular even though it is actually terrible. Until their attitude changes I don't see how this is going to resolve.
Also, I don't know if you have seen this thread Gul however it does show the severe lack of communication between the devs and the players who were testing, and thus a big reason why the upgrade system is in such a bad state in my view: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1224081&page=79
Honestly, I do believe the one single thing that would improve this game would be if they actually did proper testing and listened to us testers who always seem to do a better job. I'm just certain it would cut down on many of the issues that every single update seems to suffer with. That being said when the devs make useless comments on the testing like Geko did with the Doff UI, saying there was 'No actionable feedback' when in fact there was loads of it, you start to realise it is an uphill struggle to test.
That is a fair point, and yes granted I'll take STO Starfleet over TNG any day. I still think they ought to do more with the faction variety, if done right it would add a new level of immersion to the game in my view.
This has since been fixed (one of the quotes still shows the initial wrong figures though).
The "forcing people to play" thing has unfortunately infected even the Winter Wonderland...though honestly considering how much I have always despised the idea of the Q autograph race, "Tides of Ice" is quite a bit less offensive and we did at least get immediate dev communication that they realize something is broken about how it awards credit. (I should note that I also only have 2 viable alts anymore, and only one that I want a warp core for, meaning the total number of runs I *have* to do is not that high.)
But it is still a symptom of a mentality on Cryptic's part that the items in the store were ever locked this way in the first place.
The other thing I am watching...and that will get discussion in the next section since it is a pattern we have seen before, is how quickly the *fix* goes into effect. Because this is a fix that would benefit players...
(One that likely would not have occurred with better testing and listening to testing feedback, agreed. Like a lot of things.)
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The ship grind is 5 minutes per day for 25 days. 26 or 27 if you want an extra ship or two on a given character; three characters allow you to unlock all three in 27. Those numbers are constant, no matter how many characters you have. (Unless you have less than three, but you already have that many character slots without having to pay a dime.)
Tides of Ice is 10-15 minutes per hour, 10 hours if you're lucky and don't get bugged. (Less if you're really lucky, but more if you're not.) Do you want another character to get the cores/weapons/whatever else is Bind on Pickup? Go through it for another 10 hours. Rinse and repeat until your equipment/pet/outfit requirements are accessible for all the relevant characters.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
You're assuming that the player in question is able to complete the race. :-/ Even with only 5 alts at the time (I am now down to only 2 that I play), it was an impossible task for me.
I have tried every tip people have had to offer for two years for that and the race for the epohh tags, and have almost never been able to complete it. I am not a crappy player either...I am good at fighting, piloting my ship...unless, guess what, you ask me to complete a racetrack (FU Hodos system. Seriously. FU.) I am a good teammate on an STF.
But those stupid races...no. Just no. You have no idea how furious I was last year when the epohh tags got locked behind that race. I didn't say much back then but I was definitely mad about it. Last year I finally had enough with even trying it and said TRIBBLE it. (Actually, I said a whole lot of things, all of which are against forum TOS.) Best decision ever. Maybe it's different to deal with Tides of Ice if it is the ONLY event you're contending with. I have had a 4 of 5 successful completion rate thus far, which far exceeds my record with the stupid race. And at least we have acknowledgment from the devs that some of the issues preventing completion are not intended behavior and slated to be fixed.
Whereas everything about that race is intended and horrible.
How quickly they get Tides fixed is a piece I'll actually be addressing in my next segment, because that is something I am watching very closely.
But for me, it is far more feasible to handle a shooting gallery than it is to manage that race. I don't know if it is just bad spatial reasoning or bad coordination (yet as I said, I handle combat fine), but if I'd had the option to play for the ship this way instead of the race being the only choice, I would've been OK with it.
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I started about 2 weeks before DR hit, during the double XP lead-up event. My main leveled at an absolute blitz, hitting 50 by a quarter of the way into Rom Mystery. Silly me, I still forged ahead and cleared some content, namely Dyson and the rest of the unending Rom line, and missed out on that first completion bonus XP. Then DR dropped, and like everyone else, I jumped into the new content. I found it puzzling when, unlike prior content which was paced to massively overlevel me, I ran into a wall a few missions in and got a prompt that said, "Go grind patrols!" Unlike all the long-timers, I had the remaining untouched content to fill the gaps. I had the luxury to be able to shrug and go do something else, and have that something else not be repetitive or played out. This was doubly advantageous, as patrols are the content I like the absolute least. It still started to become a strain to fill those ever-expanding holes as I approached 60. The biggest head-scratcher was the lvl req of 59 on the last mission, which does next to nothing to get you to that ultimate goal of 60. Since my run-up to 50 was painless, and I was starting from the same functional gate as everyone else, that 51-60 portion didn't feel so much like a slog, especially not when stacked up next to the MI grind.
I decided to run an under-20 doffing alt up to level after the last XP "rebalance" (read: nerf). This time around, the 50+ XP wall really shows. I hit 50 by Terak Nor in the Cardassian arc. Now, having finished up the Cardassian arc, the Dyson arc, started my rep grinds, active doffing, clearing all the content (patrols included) in DR, I just squeaked out 53 in time to hit Zombieland in sequence. A few missions from General "We can't stop" against the Baaaaabwaaa, and here's another wall with no content to surmount it save what I didn't already burn. Had I not already done it once, I would've been greatly discouraged and off-put by the sudden tone shift. This will be a great challenge going forward for retaining new players, that disconnect between older, well-paced episodic content and the post-DR Korean grinder that rears its ugly head.
Another consideration that I don't think older players (or Cryptic, for that matter) take into account is resource availability, and what that means to the structure of content balancing. Dil / Zen costs seem to be predicated on the mindset that your average player has multiple years of play, and has a significant war chest to throw at anything new that comes down the pike. I understand the why behind it -- I have guys in my fleet with a few million dil banked, primarily through play over time, and you have to consider that when pricing new releases. But by over-aggressively positioning costs to still challenge these long-timers, you've completely shut your new players out, unless they're willing to throw significant IRL cash around. At the current dilex average, your daily refine cap of 8k will net you ~50 Zen. Your three character limit on a F2P brings that to 150/day. At that rate, you're looking at about two weeks to be able to afford one of the 2k Zen ships. All fine and good, until you consider that the newly minted player doesn't make 8k/day, even on their main, and likely won't until they're about a month in unless specifically coached. Once you factor time investments to get alts to a comfortable 8k/day level, it could be as long as 2-3 months before that newbie can afford that shiny ship. And that's assuming they never spend a bit of dil on any of the other dil sinks, ever. Six weeks is a nice average cutoff for when the honeymoon is over and a player is either going to be retained or jump ship, and that player will be challenged to clear the very first currency hurdle in that time. I could continue down the list with fleet mods, fleet projects, rep gear, all the various and sundry dil sinks, but I believe my point is made.
Lastly, as a new player, what the DR post-launch has done is made me very, very wary with my money. I'm a conscientious spender when it comes to entertainment budget, but I'm willing to invest my money in a product that's going to pay out in enjoyment over a long period of time. Having seen how wildly numbers and norms have been whipsawing, and the willingness to completely invalidate yesterday's purchase with today's slightly upgraded new shiny, I absolutely refuse to buy anything that could be rendered obsolete or worthless on a whim. I'll eat a little more grind to get what I want, if it saves me real money sunk into a bad investment. This hurts Cryptic going forward, because my dollars are exactly what they need to capture if they want to continue to grow this game and keep it as an income source in years to come.
I'm looking at this from an alt-friendliness perspective rather than difficulty. Difficulty-wise, I think I would also have an easier time handling Tides of Ice than the race.
Ironically enough, I haven't even touched Tides yet because Cryptic wants me to do it 60 times. Ties in nicely in stoleviathan's speculations about 'gamification', now that I think about it - and I've given up on specializations for the exact same reason.
Edit: Whoo, 10 per account now. That makes it a bit more manageable.
(P.S. If you think this edit is a bit hypocritical after the original post, I will defend myself simply by saying that I'm not being punished for playing alts anymore, which is currently good enough for me. :P)
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Yeah I sure hope it was an unintentional consequence of their changes (to balance gameplay for new players) rather than an intentional sacrifice of current long-term players (because they're already hooked or spend less) since that will point to a short-term vision.
I haven't played through the winter stuff much yet (I'm only interested in the ship anyway). Is it bad?
I think the numbers look right. On the off-hand, it shows how expensive this "free" game can really get.
Got to think hard before really gambling on a lockbox ship or an epic item.
Like I said in a previous post, I think this upgrade cost to get to "Epic" is fine only IF Cryptic adds another method to be able to gain these items separate from the upgrade system. A very rare drop (perhaps once that a random person every 20 Elite STFs or so will get) or something you will get from Elite Patrols as a mob drop would be nice.
Diversify the methods you can gain it. I am however against making it easily attainable by everyone. Ultra rare and Epic items should be named those for a reason. If someone wants to roll the dice and spend money and Dil in the process, then let them do so (good for Cryptic). If not, then others can try their luck in patrols or STFs. Either way, it will drive people to play in one way or the other, which will be good in the long-term of the game.
Also worth noting, the "set items" such as rep gear will get the same modifiers when their rarity is upgraded. At least that's what I've been reading about here. So at least when it comes to modifiers, it really isn't a total gamble. It's normal items (drops) that get random stuff.
I think the game should also be balanced so that Ultra Rare and Epic items are not needed to finish even the game's most difficult content. Those items should instead be holy grails primarily for PVP'ers who want every single advantage they can get.
I've read several references to "Taco's comment", What was it? I think I missed that somewhere.
It is a very short-term strategy. Milking players now will only do them good a year, 2 if they're lucky. It's only a strategy viable for games they know (based on their metrics or due to IP requirements/royalties) is about to die, so they're trying to get the most back out of their investment before they shut down their servers.
Future content updates will also help with the spec points too. Let's just hope they release that new content sooner rather than later.
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As an event by itself though, I do have to give Cryptic credit: Tides of Ice is really fun. I know some people don't agree but I enjoy it and my whole fleet is having a blast with it.
On the Lobi ship thing, yes, those ships and especially the luck-only ships can get very expensive. While I don't know what I paid for it, I know that it was not the "worst case" figure because I did take advantage of some discounts and a Lobi giveaway along the way, though if I have to be honest with myself I would hazard a guess that if you plotted out on a graph what I and others paid for that ship, you would have a skewed curve where the average player is paying closer to the "worst case" amount than zero.
At least personally I did think hard before starting on my "Undine ship quest," but in my case the major factor for going for it was that I knew I could make something fun out of both the Nicor and the Dromias. When the Lobi ship is not an "acceptable" outcome, that makes it harder, more expensive, and would have made me not want to try for it. For me, being able to budget with reasonable accuracy what it will take to get a 100% good outcome is important. That way I can decide, OK, this project needs to be spread out over X amount of time and I will use the following cost-mitigation strategies to get there. The one thing I DO remember for sure about the Lobi ship I got was that I did not do it overnight in one fell swoop.
And at least with the Lobi ship, if you value the box contents, and *especially* if you actually *use* the other contents besides the ship itself, that money paid does spread out to cover other items that you get along the way. The cost of an upgrade does not spread out to any other item than the one item you are sinking money into. A lockbox may award a less desirable or less sellable item. Than another box but unlike an upgrade, it will never fail to give you *something,* every single time. So while the Lobi ship is expensive I would still call it a better deal than attempting to upgrade the quality of an item because you have the certainty of what is at the end, can much more accurately budget what you need in time and/or money (and depending on Exchange conditions at any given time, there is sometimes a cheaper strategy open), and never get "zero" for your effort. (And if you ONLY value the ship IMO you are making a critical strategy error.)
Making Epic items (hell, even keep them Mk XII but have the rarity upgrade already done for you so that way you have to spend *something* to get it the rest of the way but a more reasonable and budgetable amount) extremely rare *drops in-game* would help some, though I still stand by my contention that the valuation on them is badly skewed when you compare a Lobi ship *and every other benefit from a box gained in the process* to the price of one Epic upgrade.
As to Taco's comment, someone flat-out asked him to say whether he wanted players to leave, and he said he didn't.
Whether all of PWE/Cryptic agrees with him or not is what for me is an open question. Based on how extreme the monetizing and grind have suddenly become, and the fact that we have been so long without these aspects being fixed makes it uncertain whether it is a grave miscalculation doubled down on because of groupthink/siege mentality, or if they are now shifting fully into a short-term strategy with the idea that they aren't going to try to sustain it for the next year or so.
If it is a miscalculation it is very, very bad for the devs to continue to allow things to go on as they are, because if people aren't having fun--and even if they still are but fear they won't get long enjoyment out of a purchase--it will hurt them in the end no matter how good the metrics look getting there.
At least correcting the length of the Tides of Ice grind is a baby step that shows that at least once in a while they can backtrack on something (or address unintended behavior if it wasn't supposed to act like that). But I need to see stuff like that more consistently--things fixed of scaled more properly in the first place--to shake the nagging concern that we are seeing a short-term pre-shutdown strategy play out.
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NOTE: Some parts of this section cover points you may have already seen me address in other forum posts...so if you think you've seen it before, you're probably right. Still, I hope you will enjoy reading anyway, with the perspective of more time since those posts were first written.
Obviously the first step to managing a crisis successfully is to avoid getting into one in the first place. But once a company is in that position, however it is that they got there, what they do in the moment of crisis is what makes or breaks them. And I worry that with the way things have gone, that without evidence of sustained action, change, and listening to the customer, everyone will lose.
The conditions I have described throughout this review have created a situation that has put the business unit responsible for Star Trek: Online in crisis mode: through poor business decisions, poor testing, and poor communication through most of it, even the good things that I have called out through this review are also at risk.
I would not go so far as to presume all of PWE is in this degree of financial crisis--however, recent hits to PWE's stock do suggest that if things keep going the same way for the whole company, they could wind up in a position where they start looking to make some hard choices. And Cryptic risks being one of the business units that is either closed down or divested if the overall company situation is bad enough, should the financial hemorrhaging be serious enough for them.
The important thing to remember is this. The trick to saving the one key metric--the viability of the game and the viability of Cryptic--is not in more metrics.
It's in satisfying the customer.
And while the old adage that the "customer is always right" isn't exactly the truth, what absolutely IS the truth is that customers define quality.
That means it's not about what a company wants to push on a customer. If it doesn't satisfy his or her needs as the customer perceives it, then it will not succeed.
Even the company credo or philosophy can set the tone. If your credo (or your mindset) begins with, "To maximize shareholder profit..." then you're doing it wrong. By focusing on that metric you'll only guarantee the exact opposite in the long run.
Rather, consider instead a philosophy like the one employed by FedEx, which they sum up in three words--the order of which is mission-critical: "People, Service, Profit." Treat your people fairly and give them the tools they need to work effectively, and they will provide good service. (Obviously I have no idea how Cryptic treats its people, but the philosophy is not complete without mentioning this part of it.) Keep providing good service to your customers at the top of your mind--behaving honestly, fairly, and doing quality work...remembering that quality is customer-defined, NOT something you can usually define for them...then you won't have to worry about your revenue stream. Behave responsibly when that revenue stream comes in, and invest back in your people and making sure they are fairly treated, and have the tools to do their very best work, and...well, you get the picture.
This means that focusing on metrics and profitability above all is the wrong focus.
So too is attempting to solve a failure in satisfying the customer--and that is what's happened here--as if it were a technical problem.
This example does not come from the game, but from the forums. During the absolute worst of the backlash against the devs from Delta Rising, Cryptic implemented a 500-second timer between posts on the forum, with no prior announcement or explanation as to why they were doing this. Later on someone eventually explained that they were overwhelmed with the volume of posts and unable to moderate appropriately.
While I can understand that being a concern, where I believe Cryptic went wrong was in approaching the extreme post volume as a mathematical problem to be solved in a way that EVE players will be very familiar with: time dilation (TiDi). To prevent lagging out and prevent player commands from failing to execute when a system fills up with extreme numbers of players, EVE imposes an intentional slowdown that allows the server to manage overload in an orderly manner. The amount of slowdown is directly proportional to the amount of excess load on the server. I have a very distinct feeling that someone at Cryptic calculated the "ratio of excess posts" and decided from that what factor they wanted to increase the post timing delay by, and then decided to call it a day.
What this completely failed to take into account was the human factor--and that was that players, who were already angry because of Japorigate and everything else wrong with Delta Rising, were going to perceive it as an attempt to manage the PR crisis by just shutting people up. A chilling effect, in other words. This only poured fuel on the fire.
(As a funny aside, I posted while we were still at 500 seconds and I first leveled the criticism that someone was handling a customer relations problem as if it were a technical problem, that a more reasonable timegate between posts would be 60-120 seconds. While I can't say I was responsible for the new timegate amount, I do find it rather amusing that what we ultimately got was exactly the 120 seconds I suggested as a reasonable value. However it occurred, I find, and I suspect others are finding, that this limit interferes significantly less with posting.)
I get the feeling that other problems at Cryptic are handled the same way. A metric is acting up? Devise a technical solution to fix it, that doesn't take into consideration what players want or how their experience will feel. This, needless to say, isn't the way to go about things, and Cryptic is going to have to step up their two-way engagement with players significantly to make any lasting change.
As part of illustrating this, I'm going to take a look at a couple of far higher-profile and much more serious cases than Cryptic/PWE, and the principles that governed the outcomes.
Two Case Studies of High-Profile Customer Relations Crises
Before I begin this section I want to make it clear that I am in NO WAY making any sort of comparison between the types of crises that I am describing, and the customer relations crisis that Cryptic has created for itself. I am using them because they provide such bold illustrations of much more widely applicable principles.
Obviously Cryptic has an easier job in that the decisions they make do not place their customers in any sort of real jeopardy. In a lot of ways, in this case the risks are greatest to Cryptic itself, because while we can move on, the people that produce the product run the risk of losing their jobs should a restructuring once the business unit fails not go in their favor. And in some ways, that makes remembering the applicability of the principles I am going to describe that much harder because there is not anything remotely approaching the same level of criticality that the two cases I will describe had, in terms of effects on the customers.
That said, the reason I am using these cases is because what the lessons learned from the actions of these two companies can be applied to smaller scenarios as well.
I doubt my choice of companies to contrast against each other will surprise anyone. The first is Johnson & Johnson--1982, the Tylenol tampering. The second is British Petroleum (BP)--2010, Deepwater Horizon. I won't spend a lot of time setting up the background for these cases; those of you not old enough to remember or who did not watch a lot of media coverage at the time may read here for background:
The Tylenol Crisis: How Effective PR Saved J & J
Deepwater Horizon PR Failure
How to Recover from Public Failure
Hopefully everyone remembers that Johnson & Johnson is still going strong despite the short-term hit they had to take to weather the recall. As for BP--they are facing penalties that,while probably not strong enough to cripple the company, have caused preemptive divestiture of $38 billion in assets and you can be sure that with that, there has been job loss.
These are the three critical areas that make or break a crisis response:
1) Be HONEST and Communicate Quickly: When the Tylenol crisis hit, Johnson & Johnson never tried to deny the link between Tylenol and the Chicago-area deaths, and instead focused on how they could make sure they were doing right by the customer. Nor did they resort to silence. They got out there quickly and did not let themselves be ruled by fear of "what the media might do to them." Instead they engaged head-on and made sure that they told it to the public straight instead of letting a tiny little trickle of facts come out over time.
With Deepwater Horizon, BP was not forthright with the facts in the early part of the crisis--which meant that the media was going to fill in the narrative for them. And that might well have been even worse than the already ugly truth of the matter. Later on they did get their act together, got the mic away from CEO Tony Hayward (putting a Mississippi native in his place, who actually knew the area and the risks to the people who lived there), and got so engaged with social media that when the well was finally capped, and a CNN analyst erroneously said that something did not appear to be going right, BP literally picked up the phone and told CNN to check their latest tweet for an explanation of exactly what was really happening.
Cryptic's customer relations situation compares much more closely in terms of response type and lateness (again, not in terms of damage done) to BP's. At first, the devs simply didn't talk--they appeared to be hunkering down and hoping the problem would go away on its own. And then when they did communicate, they let only tiny bits of the facts trickle out, leading to a perception (which I believe, only because of outside information, to be erroneous) that they had blamed every player who set foot in Japori for the actions of a far, far smaller group of players than that--players who likely did something else on top of playing in a zone that was awarding an unintended high amount of XP.
Eventually we did see a communications blitz, including some new faces, and while the next part of communication still has not been handled well in many cases (and we still have to see whether the communications blitz will be an anomaly or closer to the new norm), there have been a few improvements, including one small but sustained one that I have noticed in the Gameplay Bug reporting forum--and that is that someone has recently started adding an "INVESTIGATING" tag to bugs that Cryptic is aware of and looking into.
Cryptic has got to get out of the mindset of being cagey and tightly controlling the facts, though--and just like Tony Hayward had to have his mic cut because of his insensitive remarks, some at Cryptic do need to learn how to communicate in a manner that is more considerate of others (and not take the blowback from said insensitive remarks as an excuse to just stop communicating).
I will mention something, though, that I am not sure most people aware of: in a recent instance, Geko did apologize for a poorly-judged remark when it was pointed out how it could be taken. But it is interesting to note that when those of us who pointed it out did so, the early posts calling it out did so without taking personal shots at Geko, and considering the possibility that it was a gaffe rather than malice. It's a lot easier for people to listen and accept feedback when they don't feel like they're being attacked for it, and that may well be an example of how this is true. At least for me that was my hope when I made my post then.
2) Admit mistakes and LEARN from them: Listening to the lawyers is the worst thing you can do--and right up there with it is placing the blame on others. With BP, it was all about the blame: the contractors did it, the scientists estimating the impact of the spill are wrong, and don't forget, "I'd like my life back." Not once in the critical days did BP admit fault.
Sure, the lawyers were afraid of a lawsuit. But if everyone had been realistic, they should have realized that one was going to come no matter what--but that if they did admit fault, show compassion, and be actively involved in doing the right thing, the penalty would likely be much gentler than what they created for themselves: the public going after them with a vengeance not as much because of the accident, but because of the silence, the disrespect, and the utter lack of taking responsibility. Because whatever the contractors might or might not have done, the buck should have stopped with BP--if they were going to put their name on it, it was their ultimate responsibility. Period.
Johnson & Johnson did exactly the opposite to BP--even though in their case, it absolutely was a member of the public who laced their product with poison, after it was already out of their facilities and no longer in their control. They could have easily focused on a "damage control" strategy in which they blamed everyone else, tried to minimize the crisis by focusing on how it was in a limited area only, and essentially gone to war with the public, which had every right to be upset. Instead, they actively engaged the media and undertook a nationwide product recall, which, while not "strictly" necessary, demonstrated their seriousness in containing the threat. Instead of letting lawyers tell them that taking such a drastic action would be a "fault-admitting" move, they did it anyway.
And after the crisis, Johnson & Johnson was first-to-market with the new tamper-resistant packaging--a government mandate, but the speed with which they went to market and with a functional design, showed their commitment to learning in the long term, and not leaving an opening like that again, that someone could take advantage of to the severe detriment of others.
Cryptic thankfully does not have a situation on its hands that can actually impact lives as either of the example companies, but what it does have is a situation where they are perceived to blame the players (even where I don't think they did, their slow response and zealous guarding of information made it look to many as though they did), and they often repeat the patterns that put them into this position--poor testing, slow correction to bugs once found in production, dysfunctional customer service, and typically refusing to incorporate customer feedback unless they get their backs against the wall. The only way to fix this is to make a conclusive course change not just in the short term, but in the long term. Fixing this, especially this far into the customer relations crisis, absolutely requires a sustained, long-term commitment and a pattern of better quality and better treatment of customers.
3) Correct Quickly (and don't be afraid to take a short-term hit to your dignity to do RIGHT by the customers in the long term): I really don't have to say much about this one as far as our case studies, based on what I've discussed above. Johnson & Johnson took decisive action and didn't run in fear from the hit they knew they were going to take, whereas BP let fear of communicating openly and being criticized rule them and acted slowly and much too late.
Cryptic always seems to find itself in reactive mode. But compounding this is something I know I am not the only one to notice. And that has to do with the speed of addressing player concerns and making balancing corrections that benefit versus harm the player's ability to play the game.
When the Tau Dewa exploit took place (and I do think only a few hundred out of the playerbase engaged in an exploit), we got an emergency shutdown--immediate action to stop players from doing it. And as I discussed earlier in the review, we got a very extreme action to target a very narrow problem.
But what happened when the Mirror Event wasn't rewarding Delta Marks--something players badly need? Or Tides of Ice wasn't giving completions as expected and was completely alt-unfriendly? Meh, just stick it in the patch notes for next week and let the players stew for now.
I recognize that some bugs take a longer time to find than others. I also realize that there are potential risks from a change/release management standpoint that creep in when you circumvent the normal change management process too many times. (This is even something I've had to look at on the job.) But when something significant is happening that is negatively impacting players' ability to play and have satisfaction playing, in my mind that is every bit as worthy of a hotfix as stopping malicious activity like a deliberate player exploit or a DDoS attack.
I would also add that unless truly exploitative behavior is going on, if something is rewarding more than intended, the devs should stop and honestly consider the costs to everyone (themselves included) in the long run, to accepting that they made an error but that they have now set player expectations as to what something will reward and not nerfing it or taking it out of our hide somewhere else, versus nerfing when we are already in a serious input shortage versus the resource needs they have imposed on players. Unless something is really outrageous (imagine, for instance, some hypothetical item that should give 10 EC when you vendor it, giving 1,000,000 EC instead), maybe the devs should just accept sometimes that they have made a mistake and resolve to do better next time, but take responsibility and realize that it is now too late to take back what they have done. This is maturity, in my opinion...not punishing others for one's own mistakes.
Sometimes I had to do this in customer service, if I rang someone up for the wrong price and I didn't catch it before the customer handed over their money. It was my fault (and in the customer's eyes, the company's fault) that I was not careful, while I might well make the customer aware if they were still around that I had made an error and not to expect this same price point in the future, I did not inconvenience them or punish them for what I had done. Again, it was my fault. And if that meant I caught heat from my management, then I had no one else to blame but myself--and certainly not the customer. And sometimes, I did not catch heat for it at all, because a customer for whom you do the right thing when the stuff hits the fan sometimes turns out to be the most loyal repeat customer of all.
I would not expect that to happen every time, but if something is "over-rewarding" due to dev error (such as an incorrect XP table), I think sometimes they should just walk away and try again next time--accept responsibility and not inconvenience or punish the players for it. Just accept that that one got away, it's out now and can't be put back, and try not to do it again.
One of the things that comes up in these case studies is the message that a company puts out, and the actions that it takes that affect others. But what I'd like to look at before I conclude this section on customer relations and communication is the other half of communication.
Listening and Accepting Feedback: The Other Half of Communication
First things first.
It's actually not the other half of communication.
Listening to others and adapting (constructive) feedback is far more than half of the communications process. In fact, I'd be willing to say that two-thirds is probably still an overly conservative estimate.
There are many reasons that people deafen themselves to feedback. Sometimes it's personal investment in a creation, sometimes it's groupthink, sometimes it's receiving a more threatening kind of feedback from elsewhere (say, upper management), and other times defensiveness comes from denial. But getting into that sort of mindset and then doubling down on a failed strategy pretty much guarantees things are going to get worse and may never get better.
This also goes back to what I said at the top of the post: the customer defines quality.
What you produce can be the finest product according to your terms, but if it does not satisfy the customers, then by definition it actually fails as a quality product even if its made of diamonds and platinum.
You can design the best grind mechanics possible, and customers can take exactly the time you intend to get anything done, and some may grudgingly spend money, but if that is not what the majority of customers want, it is by nature of poor quality even if it fits the intended design specifications to a T. And ultimately, failing to serve customers quality as they expect it to be means losing out.
We have got to see much more listening on Cryptic's part now that they are talking more than they used to. Let us ask questions. Cryptic should ask US how we feel about things. Don't just throw up a pro forma "Feedback Thread," actually actively engage and seek out more information about what we are saying instead of filibustering about what they want to do. User acceptance testing should not be treated as "how much can we force the customer to accept?" but as "how can we better produce what the customer will happily accept so that they'll feel good about what they're buying, and then buy some more because they enjoy the game so much?"
Without these two pieces, all of the talking in the world will be worth nothing at all, as no real communication will have ever occurred. Just a lot of words.
What Can We Do?
While ultimately the onus lies on PWE/Cryptic to fix what has happened, we should remember a few key points when talking about or interacting with the devs. These should be obvious but some behavior shows they are not, so I will restate them now for the record:
--No flaming or threatening...even when you really, really want to and you "think they've got it coming." I don't care how badly a dev has screwed up or even how rude one of them may have been. That does not provide any of us with a carte blanche to behave horribly towards them.
--Engage constructively: explain your position clearly and in a balanced manner. That means that while you should seek to explain in a detailed manner where things are wrong and why, you should also show where things are working and propose solutions instead of always just complaining. Sometimes we just need to vent. But venting should move into brainstorming solutions as soon as possible.
--Don't assume the devs hate you, but even when they TRIBBLE you off, remember they're human. I remember a few years back when people were angry about nerfing STF rewards, Dan Stahl made an unrelated post looking for fleets to do Harlem Shake videos and post them. I caught this as soon as it posted and warned him that it was poorly timed, hoping he would realize this and reconsider before it got out of hand. The post stayed up, and as expected, led to a massive blow up that then led him to lose his temper at players. I wasn't sure why at the time, but something about the way things happened was bothering me and I just had this feeling something was wrong for DStahl. Come to find out later, I was right--the night all of that went down, he was up in the middle of the night trying to comfort his daughter who was sick, and he admitted later hadn't been making the clearest of decisions. I took this same approach with Geko recently, as did some others in the same thread, and while Geko does not discuss his personal life on the forums that I'm aware of, I found that it worked better than a flaming forumer pile-on would have. Sometimes people have something going on in their lives, other times they speak too quicklywithout reading back what they're going to say and stick their foot in their mouths, and some people just don't get certain things about interpersonal relations. But it doesn't necessarily mean the dev who made a bad decision or said the wrong thing has some burning desire to do horrible things to us, and while we can express disappointment and criticism of those decisions, we should not assume they're powered by hateful intent.
--Employ positive reinforcement where it makes sense and model the appropriate behavior with each other and with the devs. When the devs do something right, tell them. When you're in customer service, it's really draining to hear nothing but how horrible you are day in and day out, and never hear a nice word from anybody. If something works, say it. Additionally, it is also helpful to model the sort of respect that you want to be given. That way if someone might not know how to deal with a situation they find themselves in, they have an example in your behavior of how to do it the right way.
One final point: Cryptic should not let fear dictate their responses. If they hold silent out of fear, players will create the exact horrible narrative they fear and possibly worse. If they communicate vaguely for fear of being disliked, the vagueness will make the customers feel insulted and that will make the backlash that much worse. If they avoid letting content be seen for testing for fear it will be unpopular, it will not only be unpopular but players will feel they've been had, on top of whatever they would have felt otherwise.
To shamelessly borrow from Dune: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
NEXT AND FINAL POST: Conclusion on Delta Rising--can it be reanimated? And some potential action plans...
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Hey...sorry I missed your post earlier. I promise you I wasn't deliberately ignoring it; I think it came up while I was making a long post to answer Ernest's points about the upgrade system.
I think you may underestimate the war chest that all but the biggest whales have (I think from your post you know a few--but I think those are outliers). Most of us who have been in the game for a while have found that the demands on our dilithium have outstripped our earning and refining capacities...worst of all for those in a fleet, and an MMO should be encouraging fleet formation and fleet play, because that social aspect is a great draw in bringing players in and retaining them and keeping them happy enough to spend. Making things friendly for fleets and alts, and benefiting from the fun that the fleets themselves generate (that you barely have to work to do) is a GOOD strategy. But even fleets suffer under enormous cost burdens.
Exactly: as I said above, pricing for the outliers will run off everyone BUT them, and then the population will be too low to be sustainable...and even the whales won't have fun if they have no one to show off to.
Made very nicely.
And how patient will you remain with the grind, over time, if it does not reward?
Indeed, this will hurt Cryptic over time, having shot their "investment rating" so badly, if they do not fix things.
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As with Tuvix, sorry about missing your post...I think it came up while I was writing a much longer response to someone else.
I admit, I have far fewer alts than a lot of people--in fact, because of the dilithium sinks, I am down to two...the two I have focused most heavily in my writing on, and for that reason I refuse to let go of either one of them. So I was only looking at 20 reps under the "old" Tides system. And for me the difficulty difference between Tides and the stupid race is HUGE. I just can't complete the race at all most times and gave up trying last year out of sheer frustration. So for me Tides was a huge boon, but I understand the frustration others had and feel they should have thought it through. Or if that was unintended behavior, addressed it before it got out of testing.
BTW, you aren't hypocritical, especially since you left the text of your pre-edited post so what you changed was obvious.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
(In a few cases, one post contains multiple section headers, and clicking the second section header will take you to the same post as the prior header. This is not an error. This table of contents also corrects for an instance of a post accidentally written out of order.)
INTRODUCTION
THE STORY
Disclaimer
Background
The Space Mission Arc
The Space Patrols
The Kobali Ground Arc
Character Development
Story Progression and Verdict
QUALITY ASSURANCE, MECHANICS, AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS
Testing and QA
Progression--The Mechanics Side, SpecGate/SPGate
The Golden Ratio: Time, Effort, and Money Versus Reward
The PvE Queues
The Upgrade System
Crypticonomics: Speculations on Market and Social Forces
Customer Relations and Crisis Management
AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION...
THE VERDICT: CAN DELTA RISING BE REANIMATED--AND HOW?
It's time to ask the big question.
Can Delta Rising be saved?
After almost two months of observation and experience both in-game and on the forums, I would have to say that the answer is:
Yes, but ONLY with significant work or the game will not be sustainable in the long term.
I've speculated a lot about could-have-beens and should-have-beens along the way, but unfortunately, some decisions just can't realistically be taken back at this point, such as releasing "Mindscape" as a stand-alone and using it to buy extra development time, or setting the level cap at 60. Things like that should still be considered as lessons learned when looking at long-range planning for the game, so I do not feel any effort was wasted in bringing them up. We do need to get to where we can have a long range to plan for, though, so what I'm going to do first is provide some succinct (yeah, I can do succinct if forced
Action Items (in category order, not priority)
1) Story Progression Fix (short term): Strongly consider taking all existing missions and re-leveling them to end at Level 55. This will preserve the progression experience for new players and anyone who may be considering taking an alt through the story who might not have been willing to do so otherwise. As new content comes in, begin with Level 55 and make the spacing between it equivalent to the reset story progression; do not leave any more gaps that force players to slam the brakes on in the middle of your story.
2) Story Progression Fix (mid-term): Revamp the patrols. I have suggested earlier a way to get 5 viable full missions (including "Alliances") out of the existing patrols and I would be cool with that or a similar approach. Leave the other experiences that don't get used in the patrol revamp around in case anyone still wants to experience them, perhaps consider a wrapper mission that awards some nice XP for completing a certain number of them, but don't force all players through all of the patrols.
3) Story Progression Fix (long-term): Don't raise the level cap again with insufficient story content to get to it. If progression is going to be slower, then that many more stories will be necessary to have ready to go pre-release.
4) Testing and QA (immediate): Take Tribble feedback seriously and don't be afraid to delay implementation if testing reveals problems either in mechanics or user acceptance (and remember that "waiting it out until the users accept whatever I want" is not what user acceptance testing really means). Players are more forgiving of delays to get it right than they are of bug-ridden or unbalanced releases. Taking testing more seriously also provides more time to catch unintended mechanics before they present a far more frustrating problem to deal with in production.
5) Testing and QA (immediate): Remember that the customer defines quality. You can make the best widget in the world but if the customer can't stand it or feels they don't need it, it's not quality. Quality is what meets the customer's needs as they perceive their needs to be, and only the rarest of rare companies, like Apple, that invents a total game-changer is in any position to tell the customer what quality is and what they really want. Consistently bring this mentality to testing and QA and it is likely to start reaping results quickly. Best of all: ask the customers what they think as often as you can, and engage in conversation. Don't be defensive if perceptions differ significantly and be ready to challenge time-old preconceptions and be led into interesting new areas you might not have considered before.
6) Testing and QA (immediate): Avoid code branching/forking if at all possible. This might not always be possible to do, but this will cut down on the opportunity to have conflicting code loaded to production and the documentation horrors and bugs that result. If you get time, do consider going back and more thoroughly documenting what you already have in production because if you're like most companies, the early documentation especially could use some beefing up and it might bring to light some interactions between variables that nobody has thought of, and might help squash some bugs before they happen.
7) Testing and QA (mid/long-term): Never again forbid ANY customer from testing or circumvent the process unless there's a hotfix that needs to go out. If that customer wants to test, then whether they are a subscriber or F2P doesn't matter. Each brings a perspective that is helpful. If you fear there will be too many drive-bys with not enough feedback, consider incentivizing those who take time to fill out a comment form about what they have just experienced instead of those who just spend some time on the server. Yes, some people will pencil-whip the survey to get the goodies and if you try to control for that you'll fail, but by directly asking for feedback and incentivizing it, you'll get a good number of people who will speak up.
8) SpecPoints and Skill Points (short-term): While taking the advice in #1 will go a long way to solve the immediate problem where it relates to story progression, I still strongly recommend rebalancing the 51-60 / 60+ leveling somewhat. Either beef up XP or reduce the amount needed for a level or a SpecPoint. I see no need to go back to the 1-50 amount, but helping us some in this department will net a lot of good will and hopefully allow for an experience that both old and new players can enjoy. And for goodness' sake, when performing this balance pass, treat it as a critical matter both in terms of communicating it, and in quality-checking it. Spend extra time in both internal and external testing if necessary. In fact, I would be willing to bet you that if you skipped a normal weekly patch cycle to allow a second week of testing for this area, and IF you accepted feedback prior to going to production, it would be a very good thing for you.
9) PvE Queues (immediate): Increase rewards on Advanced and Elite--yes, again. Increase not just the dilithium and/or marks, but also the number of reputation "tokens" (Borg neural processors, isomorphic injections, etc.). Add one of those items per Normal run so that newbies and undergeared alts have a chance to progress to the gear they will need for Advanced.
10) PvE Queues (short-term): Rebalance the difficulty of the Advanced queues to come closer to what was originally promised--the direct equivalent of the old Elites. Remove fail points from Advanced.
11) Upgrade System (short-term): Reduce the costs not just for the materials but in terms of dilithium required. The current valuation is completely out of line even when a Lobi ship is your comparison instead of a normal C-Store ship.
12) Upgrade System (short-term): Either make it easier to upgrade to Epic, or introduce a few drops from Advanced events up, at Ultra Rare and Epic levels. Heck, even if you keep them at Mk XII, it would be preferable that occasionally items of all types drop that already have the rarity done for the player. I strongly believe a player will be happier to pay for Mk XIV on such an item, than to gamble with the extreme unpredictability of results in the current system. These do not have to be frequent drops but for there to be at least some chance to obtain an Epic item other than to gamble for it.
13) Upgrade System (mid/long-term): Introduce a way for players doing rarity upgrades to have absolute control over the mod they get during upgrade without introducing exorbitant costs to do so (and listen to players about the cost before settling on it!).
14) Communication (immediate): Don't let fear of criticism or fear of liability prevent communicating early, often, and engaging in constructive dialogue. Being silent or only engaging in one-way communication will actually bring about the worst-case scenarios you fear. Consider that just as I encourage players to remember that you have real lives, that you're human, and sometimes we don't know everything that's going on, and that we shouldn't go into communications with you spoiling for a fight, approaching us with a welcoming and listening attitude will go a long way too. (NOTE: I think there are some people who try to do this. And sometimes no matter what, someone is still going to have a bad day on occasion. But this is a good aim to always have in mind.)
15) Communication (immediate): Remember that it isn't communication if there is not active listening, and solid, consistent actions to back up what you say. Work on increasing two-way dialogue and listening to and incorporating customer feedback.
16) Communication and Overall Design Philosophy (immediate): Remember that the metrics don't tell the whole story. If the game does not feel right or fun to players, then making changes just to make the numbers balance may be the worst thing possible. Understand what the players feel and what they like, as much as possible and solicit feedback...realizing that sometimes it might mean hearing something tough about something that you are genuinely attached to and have put a lot of hard work into, but that if you adapt at least some of the way, the result will be better for ALL of us, yourselves included.
17) Communication and Overall Design Philosophy (immediate): Remember that sometimes when an error happens in the player's favor, as long as it's not truly outrageous or an actual hack or exploit (and you are not talking to someone who doesn't believe there was an exploit used by a few in the recent incident), it's better to just accept that the error happened and let the players have their fun. If a major error occurs that is to the player's detriment, especially if it's severe to us, it should be hotfixed if at all possible instead of treated as having lesser urgency than an error in our favor.
While I know that's a lot of points, and there is also a huge amount of other great material in the main body of the review and in the discussion surrounding each post, I feel strongly that these points above will take care of the basics and get Star Trek: Online moving in a healthy direction again. I don't want to see this thing fail and I think there is still an opportunity to fix it, but it will require some major and committed changes, and there will come a point where if nothing substantive happens, it could come to a totally unnecessary end.
Let's truly work together to reanimate Delta Rising, and the game as a whole.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the discussion not only for support, but for some very, very well thought out points that challenged me to think, and greatly improved the comprehensiveness of the review. In a real sense, you are a part of it too.
Additionally I would like to thank everyone for behaving thoughtfully and civilly through the whole thing, that while other threads crashed and burned, this one has survived for as long as it has and stayed productive the whole time through. I do ask that as discussion continues that we keep it this way. Thank you for that as well!
Thank you as well to the Christian Gaming Community, and also to the Masterverse writing group, for putting up with my greatly reduced time spent with both of you as I worked on this series--and also to certain individuals whose initials are MDK, with whom I have been outrageously slow about answering emails since I started this monster. I'm going to try to get back with all of you more often!
And finally...I want to thank any dev or community manager if you read all the way through this and survived. I know you may not speak up in this thread (even though it would gain you immediate Awesome Points
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Well, unless it's to correct something (like poor grammar/spelling - or poor wording of a given argument, for that matter), my edits tend to be confined to the 'Edit: ' section I end up adding at the bottom of the post. :P
That said, it's been an interesting series of posts and I guess we can only hope someone important enough reads it and agrees with its content.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Might I suggest sending this to all the devs or the community managers in a PM so that they might more likely take a look at it? I suggest this because it'd be a shame to leave it to fate to whether they actually read it or not, and I do genuinely think there is a lot they could take away from this.
I did PM it to one of the CM's...I might send it to one or two others but I am *very* hesitant to reach out directly to more than a very few because if I end up being perceived as spamming that would not bode well for the actual content of the review, I don't think.
I have linked it in my signature, though, so perhaps some others--players and devs alike--will check it out on their own.
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I'd hope so, I'd also like to think they'd leave some comments but I guess that might be expecting too much, here's hoping though.
Good thought about putting it in your signature though.
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Some of the Elites could be reworked; BHA and BHE are impossible to get the charges placed on. UIE is stupidly easy unless some fool can't read; beef up the Undine in that is my advice.
Undine space missions were painful before DR and dead now. Same with Voth space; recommend nerfing their advanced and elites just a bit.
Add another minute to the rescue 3 ships timer in Azure Nebula, so that newbies and PUGs stand a chance.
Halve the dil and EC costs for all upgrade stuff halved, and double the chance for a rarity upgrade.
Gotta agree with gulberat that XP for endgame content needs a HUGE buff. Even with newly boosted DR patrols it's a painful grind.
Unfortunately "some fool can't read" is more common than you would think. As I mentioned before, I think that the penalty for a reading error should be put solely on the player who messed up, since it is very hard to claim something like that is somehow a teamwork fail. I rarely mess up but even the one time I mis-clicked (thankfully in UIA where it only cost marks and did not autofail the team), I would have understood and agreed with taking the penalty so the rest of the team did not have to.
I haven't gotten enough experience with UIE yet, to determine if the enemies themselves are stronger or smarter than in UIA, and my initial impression was "no or not significantly."
I can't attest to the Borg ground missions as I never tried them and based on what I have heard, likely never will.
Undine BZ, at least, is manageable but then again I am sure that's set to Normal and scaling down to 50. For the Undine STF's they were always so horrendous on the old Elite that I am only now even considering trying one of my toons in Advanced now that he has the full Counter-Command set.
That will help but I think that if a piece has not upgraded in rarity yet by the time it hits Mk XIV, if Cryptic does not implement a system of very, very rare UR and Epic quality drops from playing content to make up for it, then doubling may not be drastic enough to make the system reasonable. If, however, they are willing to allow *very* rare drops of UR and Epic Mk XII items (I will at least allow the idea that they not be Mk XIV since they could still at least make money *somewhere*), then I could accept double.
And to simply boost the least satisfying content available and call it done isn't even a band-aid. It's a badly-done battlefield dressing. Much more extensive improvements need to come *quickly.*
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Has anyone else noticed the way that commanderander is communicating clearly and owning the responsibility for his work and his communications when it comes to the way the patch notes on the Dyson BZ were written and the fact that the code had unintended consequences once implemented?
This almost made the last post in my review on customer relations, but I decided against putting it in because at the time I only had one or two posts to go by and no evidence yet of follow-through, but even though we have not seen a fix implemented I think there is enough to say that we are seeing a good model of how to communicate with and solicit help from players, from commanderander's actions in the "Dyson sphere nerf" thread.
To players and especially any devs who may be reading, I would recommend checking out commanderander's interactions with the players in that thread. It is very interesting to notice how he follows the guidelines I and others have discussed about avoiding anything that could be construed as blaming or insulting language towards the players, being open with communication, paying attention to feedback, and owning it when something doesn't go right. (EDIT: AND also not going off on anybody even though some of the players in that thread are pretty irate.) This could provide a model for other devs who may find themselves uncomfortable in this arena or who have incurred severe backlashes before.
Either check out the thread, or do a search of commanderander's most recent posts. This should not go unnoticed.
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It would be nice to get the opinion of people who don't view STO's endgame as a PvP playground.
Missing the good ol' days of PvP: Legacy of Romulus to Season 9
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Oh dear...I admit it crossed my mind, but just like anything to do with the KDF faction, I have next to zero expertise or experience in that area and I since I don't relate, I wouldn't be able to explain it in an effective manner.
Still, thank you very much for your kind words.
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Hahaha, I was just about to ask you if that's what happened.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I did NOT read every post in this thread. I clicked the links to the 'Featured Reviews' and poured through your commentary, and though I don't agree with every point, I agree with much. May I also say it is obvious that you truly care about this game and have done it a service with your honest, well though-out, respectful dialogue.
The above quote was re-posted because, I think, it is the core of the issue. To put it in different terms, a customer brings a shirt to a tailor to add a pocket for pens. When the customer returns, he finds the tailor added the pockets but also let the shirt out. The tailor explains it's for the better, because people generally put on weight as they age and the extra room means the shirt will last longer. The point is fact, but it doesn't satisfy the customers expectation.
The problem is exacerbated, though, if the customer screams at the tailor, insults his/her work, then returns next week for more alterations. It creates a dysfunctional, unproductive business relationship.
In general, I avoid the official forums. In all too many cases it devolves into pettiness. Frankly, this may be my first post since Cryptic migrated to PWE's server. (EDIT: THIS WAS THE FOURTH. IT SAYS SO UNDER 'POSTS' :P ) Thank you for your post, and I hope the STOForum community allows you to be it's mouthpiece.