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poofygummy
Member Posts: 16 Arc User
So I have been toying around with the idea of creating a list of things that bug me personally a lot, since apparently nobody at Cryptic has the common sense to solve these issues or nobody thinks they are worth solving. When i read the comments under a forum post concerning the completely unrelated Elachi event i finally saw that the entire community around STO has devolved into people figuratively screaming at each other, Cryptic, or the world in general either cursing the devs to hell and back or being 'Cryptic-apologists' and saying that things aren't that bad.
I regretfully have to disagree with the latter side after carefully weighing the pro and con arguments for some months now.
After reading through my (admittedly incredibly long) post you should be able to form a picture yourself. I myself am nobody important and the arguments i bring forth should be judged based solely upon their own merit, and not my personal feelings or the personal hatred or love towards Cryptic any of you may have.
Please do keep in mind though, that i LOVE STO and do not intend to bash it, its creators, or the continuous effort of the development team in any way. It is, even as it is, the one MMO that can grip not only with psychological dependency through grinding, but also with a captivating universe a lot of people can enjoy, be they trekkies or not.
It is exactly because of this that i felt compelled to post. The recent developments are akin to someone's love interest who has a wonderful talent for singing suddenly deciding to do meth instead of singing. I have seriously contemplated switching studies mid-way to become a game designer instead just so i could remind people to not do the mistakes done by Cryptic recently. It might be easy to be smart in hindsight, or to judge from the outside, but keep in mind that that does not make the issues highlighted below any less important.
Now for the actual post:
These are game or immersion-breakingly annoying errors, bugs, or issues, that have not been addressed yet, despite reports being submitted.
These are things that are not immediately game breaking if left as is, but seriously hamper player/customer satisfaction through creating frustration or breaking immersion. While not directly bugs in the code, these things are of vital importance if a satisfied and happily consuming userbase is to be maintained.
These are some ideas to consider in order to improve player satisfaction before making yet another major investment into something else.
I regretfully have to disagree with the latter side after carefully weighing the pro and con arguments for some months now.
After reading through my (admittedly incredibly long) post you should be able to form a picture yourself. I myself am nobody important and the arguments i bring forth should be judged based solely upon their own merit, and not my personal feelings or the personal hatred or love towards Cryptic any of you may have.
Please do keep in mind though, that i LOVE STO and do not intend to bash it, its creators, or the continuous effort of the development team in any way. It is, even as it is, the one MMO that can grip not only with psychological dependency through grinding, but also with a captivating universe a lot of people can enjoy, be they trekkies or not.
It is exactly because of this that i felt compelled to post. The recent developments are akin to someone's love interest who has a wonderful talent for singing suddenly deciding to do meth instead of singing. I have seriously contemplated switching studies mid-way to become a game designer instead just so i could remind people to not do the mistakes done by Cryptic recently. It might be easy to be smart in hindsight, or to judge from the outside, but keep in mind that that does not make the issues highlighted below any less important.
Now for the actual post:
- ☐The ability trays are virtually unusable. Unless fixed by applying a custom saved loadout (which does not work every time) the abilities and items reset with every map reload. At this point i do not even know where the problem exactly is, be it UI, underlying game mechanics, server side, or something else, i can only ascertain that it does in fact not work.
- ☐It is literally impossible to complete the "Operation Gamma" story mission on advanced difficulty. The DPS any shuttle might have at that point simply does not match up to the hull-strength of the workerbees. This change is simply completely illogical as the difficulty of prior and later missions does not approach this level.
- ☐Some advanced difficulty patrol missions in the Delta Quadrant are STILL impossible to complete alone. The maximum possible DPS output of one ship is simply not enough. This would be acceptable on Elite, but not on advanced. As far as i have figured Advanced is supposed to be completable alone with good gear.
- ☐The new KDF scarf available from the Holiday Item Vendor is bugged, or somehow incorrect. The item displayed upon right-click, and on the box differs from the item that is actually acquired in the tailor. It is also not possible to equip it together with other winter items in the Off-Duty slot.
- ☐The XP system is completely and abhorrently broken. I have seen the posts of the developers defending it, but even in theory the numbers don't add up. The mission rewards are THE major source of XP for every player up to level 65. XP gained from kills or other sources is negligible. Making it necessary for people to grind the same mission dozens of times to finally reach the point where they can engage in the missions from the final levels for example.
The old system had an actual system to it. On advanced difficulty, players would level as the story progressed. Mission prompts followed one after the other, and one always got enough XP to qualify for the next mission. I don't know when you dropped this concept, but it was a GOOD concept, as it meant that players would constantly be challenged by stronger enemies, and get new story content unlocked, and by the time they ran out of story, they were ready to take on every part of the endgame.
Since about the Breen Invasion chapter, mission prompts do not always automatically show up, and one is often left wondering what exactly would come next in the story ("There was a gateway discovered on New Romulus? What?").
It only becomes really ridiculous however, when the player is forced to endlessly grind missions in order to actually unlock the final elements of the story, as is the case around lvl60. I do understand your stated reasons for the changes (and i can guess some of the unstated ones) but i implore you to consider your customers here for a second. At the moment if you put up a vote about who is satisfied with the leveling system around lvl60, from my personal experience about 90% of the people would state that it is as awful as it gets. You, Cryptic of course have the freedom of the author but i put it to you: Is it really a wise choice to completely disregard the opinion of your players? - ☐The icons in the ship selector as well as shield/hull maps for several Fleet-Ships do not match the actual ship since Delta Rising. An example is the Fleet Science Vessel Retrofit.
- ☐The tailor menu is absolutely confusing and horrible. The categorization of items into Uniform or Off-Duty has at this point become completely arbitrary. Which colors are possible for which items is also ridiculously restricted and sometimes does not even match up for items of the very same set. The reflectiveness of items of the same set is also often arbitrary leading to slightly off colors in the end (ex: Clubwear).You will not be able to force the users to have aesthetically and visually pleasing clothing anyways, because you allow them to be almost fully nude 2 foot tall green muscly aliens. So you might as well allow them to color their helmets in more than 10 colors.
- ☐The spawn points in "Badlands" are broken. If someone dies in the final fight in the shuttlebay, they will respawn at the beam-in location.
- ☐In the "Galorndon Core System Patrol" mission the spawn of the Hirogen is bugged. They respawn every time the player dies, which leads to a small armada of Hirogen battleships facing the player after a few deaths.
- ☐The borders for "The Fast and the Flurrious" are incredibly annoyingly restrictive. Unlike in real life, in a game people do not have a real feeling of where their body parts are in relation to their surroundings. That information is only conveyed through the camera. When taking a curve the exact borders of the curve are not visible due to the perspective and the contestant gets disqualified as soon as they so much as come near the border in certain places. So unless one got a feeling for where the actual borders are through a lot of frustration, it's nigh impossible to complete the race.
- ☐A large part of the missions for the Romulan Faction displays both the dialogue for Federation characters and the redundant Romulan-Federation dialogue for Romulan characters. (ex: "Sphere of Influence")
- ☐The ever present docking procedure message for ROM-FED characters at ESD is an annoyance.
- ☐Same goes for the welcoming message on DS9 for Klingon characters who have already singlehandedly reconquered the station.
- ☐The Cooperative Liberator-Weapon gets forgotten about after a single use. This is the most atrocious thing STO has ever done to the StarTrek Franchise. To put this in perspective:
It is now clear that all of the borg drones are able to be liberated to function like normal individuals again. It is also clear that some of them even retain their former personality.
It is also clear that the Liberator device is not a hitherto untested prototype. The Collective have been using it for a long time.
And after we successfully liberated thousands and thousands of drones on those cubes who will be very grateful later on, we go right back to the Regulus Sector to simply murder others. Now we can't pretend anymore that we are slaughtering truly evil people or mindless drones. We are effectively murdering thousands of mind-controlled individuals without any second thoughts.
This basically equates to having a planet mind-controlled by something while knowing that an ally has a cure, and instead opting to carpet-bomb the entire damn place. Precisely the type of thing Starfleet captains would heroically try to prevent. This needs to be fixed. - ☐After relogging from Q's Winter Wonderland as well as leaving the Winter Invasion map, the players get dropped to ESD or The First City respectively. The Winter Wonderland transfer being the second option in the dialogue box with Q and thus requiring to be manually selected every time makes this quite annoying.
- ☐The doctor at DS9 is in a completely arbitrary and illogical place. Even if DS9 should be reworked at some point in the future, even for the meantime it would be a great convenience to give that doctor one of the empty rooms on the rotunda.
- ☐Upon transferring maps the ground texture takes a lot longer to load than every other texture, which often leads to characters walking around in mid air upon teleportation. This is particularly prevalent at NewRomulus. As the "Fastest Game on Ice" proves, it is possible to set up loading screens when teleporting, which would immediately solve the issue.
- ☐The corridors in any FED-spaceship are gi-normous. It's not about them being "unrealistic", but more about them being simply stupidly large. The only ship where the corridors work somewhat is the new Intrepid interior. Everything else is just horrible to look at. Two story high hallways which are thus empty and bleak looking since there's absolutely nothing in the top half. Also, there are some ships that would fit into their own interior map multiple times.
- ☐Having the escape hatches simply be decals on the ship like the windows is nice for changing their styles, but as they are not flat "illuminated" objects like the windows, it creates a visually really displeasing effect when their shine is completely unlike the rest of the hull. This is especially glaring with darker hulls or shields. A solution would be to only include the borders of the escape pods in the decal, not the pods themselves.
- ☐Semi transparent helmets. The ones tried in "Sphere of Influence"were a disaster, because they seemed to attach to the suit instead of the head of the character. As with the Vedek hood and the knitted hat however it's proven that perfectly face alligned, moving head-covering is possible. Why not make some a similar helmet with semi transparent visors?
- ☐More realistic (more varied) body proportions. Even the smallest bust size for females leaves them looking like something a 12 year old drew up. Ironically enough the proportions for males have more range and (apart from fatness) are more realistic too.
- ☐You really should make more hair options. Really. I would pay money if i had other options than Klingon hairdo, blading guy, seven different combing-options of glued-to-the-skull hair, and variants on a buzz/crewcut.
NOTE:
Zero and Salami are completely right in that i do not fully understand the content creation process at Cryptic in every detail. However, please do not hold me for a fool. Any amateur can create a 3D mesh for a hairstyle in the matter of a few hours (Especially if it's like the ridiculously oversimplified ones currently in game). For texturing and alpha mapping, one could add maybe another entire day (and we're still talking about amateurs). Even if it has to be counter-checked by CBS rep.s for lore-friendliness (Which i highly doubt would be a problem since the game now takes place in almost the entire galaxy, so a few more hairstyles should not be of such massive concern, especially since the series' contained more than STO does.) and quality checked (which is a ridiculous idea seeing how every second tailor item clips through half of the others.) and integrated and scaled into the tailors mesh editor to scale with head sizes, i seriously doubt that this all would take more than another half a day of work for a single mesh. In other words a completely new hairstyle for the tailor would definitely NOT take an entire week to finish as someone had stated, especially not for highly qualified designers like the ones working at Cryptic. - ☐More beta testing. I am not talking about valuing the free beta testing community you have on the Tribble Server more and actually using this invaluable resource to test out whether mechanics changes and tweaks are working, in order to optimize things.
I am talking about pre-beta testing. Basically taking a look at the elements you have added in the context of the game, and seeing if there are any completely obvious ****ups. The prime example for this was the C47 launch. I think i speak for most honest players when i say: the redesigned C47 was absolutely breathtaking. Stunning design in every bit. The new ships in ESD were aesthetically placed and harmonious. But somewhere along the line the brightness of the skybox-ESD got changed a bit, and cutting a hole into this skybox object where the playable map is, was forgotten about. Which left us with a stunning black wall in the middle of the ship selector area.
Things like this are easily avoided if one would just call over someone from a different department to look over the completed work for a few minutes before pushing the update onto the servers. - ☐DS9's proportions. Either the interior of DS9 is waaay too small, or the exterior is waaay too big. The windows where the balcony level of the promenade is supposed to be are as tall as the saucer section of an advanced escort (with 9 floors) meanwhile on the interior they are as tall as about 4-5 humans.
- ☐3rd party content. Now this is a major one. Basically what i am suggesting as a solution to all your "designing XY takes too long" problems: Release a 3D editor to the public. There could be a contest every month, but instead of screenshots people could send in 3D models. The winning ones (the ones most approved by quality control and CBS) could become a part of the game. Suddenly one would have no more situations like where Ch
Post edited by poofygummy#9278 on
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Comments
You do realize that literally hundreds of people have been farming Advanced Arguala System Patrol Solo from level 50-60?
Corrected the mistake now.
^^^^
this.
Here is another prime example:
talaxian race launch, day 1 had more things broken than were working. Had anyone actually CREATED a character of this type during testing, it would have been obviously broken.
All of the Missions and Patrols can be Soloed on Elite, or at least I can (and have)
It isn't very SP/min efficient like doing it as a group and the difficulty curve is all over the damn place, to be sure; but they're beatable... and I'm still only using Mk XII-VR gear, no idea if my skill spec is still decent (not changed it since the revamp, what 2-3 years ago?)
Just because they're not exactly a cakewalk, doesn't mean they're "impossible solo"... I mean that IS the point in the higher difficulties. Well that and the drops, but as Rep Gear generally is the only reasonably viable stuff for STF as well as PvE (Solo or otherwise) then tends to make drops pointless.
i adjusted the TRIBBLE in that quote to get straight to the point, it has nothing to do with bugs or issues, thats just merely window dressing in an attempt to divert your point here.
you dont like the fanboys? thats your choice, but you dont need to create a thread about it to voice your displeasure. no one cares about whine and cheese.
so you state you love the game and dont intend to bash it and yet in your conclusion you go out your way to state you dont like the direction taken about the game and apparent "mistakes" for choice decisions, nevermind the bugs and issues, the game design clearly serves its purpose until it dont, when that happens the doom mongers win the fight and your no longer here, none of us are.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.