I think apathy is sort of where its at at this point don't you ?
That's where I'm heading... I still hold out hope that some of the worst offenders as far as recent changes or design decisions might enjoy a course correction, but that's beginning to feel like misplaced optimism (if operating under a holding pattern could be called such). The game itself is good, but it's been hobbled with a few of the recent changes, some of which make other features uninteresting or (for my purposes) unavailable. It could be worse, it could be better, but it has been heading more towards the former than the latter of late (I used to log in daily).
Oh, and that quote down there isn't meant as a crack about Geko... it's just a really funny typo (with a link that explains the humor). Just because I don't like some of the things the guy does doesn't mean I dislike the guy himself... to my knowledge, I've never met him.
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
You don't get anywhere if you use Twitter to contact individuals.
If you want an actual result you have to contact a company. Wipe the rabid foam from your chin, formulate a complaint in a reasonable way and tweet it to Perfect World themselves. Companies who ignore legitimate complaints on Twitter are "under the microscope" more than they are if they ignore legitimate complaints on their own forums because Twitter is much more "public" and their industry peers pay more attention to it.
I had a huge problem with my internet provider, their customer service was unwilling to budge and I was very dissatisfied. As a last resort I tweeted that I was thinking about cancelling my service because I had had a bad experience with their customer service staff. Their first response was to suggest that I sent them a DM about the issue. I said no and continued the discussion in public & it was resolved within 15 minutes.
I'm not saying that kind of result would happen here. It's beyond ridiculous to expect it. I'm just suggesting that companies react differently when they're under the public spotlight of Twitter.
But to get back to the beginning - a personal attack on Twitter? You're not getting any results that way.
You don't get anywhere if you use Twitter to contact individuals.
... words ..
But to get back to the beginning - a personal attack on Twitter? You're not getting any results that way.
You're a little out of touch with both the value and intent. It wasn't a personal attack.
Most companies track their standing in social media and media in general on a quarterly basis. Public perception of a company and it's products are impacted by this. While you and I can argue the value of this type of activity, company boards take a dim view of customers interacting with employees outside of the company's domain.
For future reference, utilize a hashtag #STO with your post for better recognition and impact. Both the post and the subsequent reply would have been of more value with it.
As for having no effect, you might want to listen to this weeks podcast over at Massively.
There is a limit to how far they can push it. This kind of effort is killing other MMO's.
We want STO to survive.Get creative. We'll wait, 'cause we love Star Trek, and we're suckers for punishment.
With a lot of Cryptic's decisions, it all feels like the old maxim of "charge what the market will bear". Fleets worked, suggesting that the playerbase would tolerate 1-2 year grinds for the best abilities. 3-packs worked (double the price of a ship for a minor reskin...) suggesting that players would pay for new abilities on a ship they "already owned". So I can see how the unpopular aspects of DR have their roots in things released over the last 2 1/2 years. If the 3-packs had failed, or there had been no takeup of fleets, I suspect that Cryptic would have *had* to choose a different path.
It's not unique to MMOs, either; I am much reminded of the price rises and rules overhauls which were a factor in my leaving minature gaming years ago. And yet, Warhammer rolls on a decade after many forum-dwellers were confidently predicting its implosion in the face of power creep, biased developers and inflating prices.
As to Geko's note, I would love to understand their business logic better. Most people, in my experience, have some sort of cost / benefit logic to their actions (but it may not be the same as mine...) but as a company, they have no obligation to do so.
It amazes me how, when someone speaks the truth in its most direct form, it's somehow a "temper tantrum," according to some people.
I'm not telling him he sucks. I only told him that he has (rightfully) earned the scorn of people who were genuinely willing to help make this a great game. I also asked him, confronted with that fact, if he's willing to change his pattern of bad behavior. Not all ideas are good ideas, but Geko has summarily dismissed some really *great* ideas and bug reports, too. Does that not bother you enough to at least ask him why he treats us with such contempt?
I'm sorry, but the podcasters have failed to confront him on this. I understand they want to be on good terms. After all, who doesn't? I'm saying, however, that they shouldn't let inexcusable comments slide. True friends don't stay silent when someone does something nasty; they help the person realize their mistake. It's not always nice, unfortunately, but it's NECESSARY!
I said I expected Geko to block me, because I've learned that's who he is as a person. And you know what? That's pretty danged sad!
I'm not expecting a pleasant conversation, but I welcome it, and it would prove me wrong about him. NOTHING would please me more than to be wrong about him!
I appreciate that some of y'all disagree with *how* I said it, but I still maintain that it *needed* to be said. Him trying to insulate himself from snark like mine, and stuff WAY more nasty only hurts HIM. Giving people the impression that he thinks he's perfect only hurts HIM. I don't want that! I don't think ANY sane and caring person does! Am I wrong?
I've never been the most diplomatic person when it comes to speaking my mind. I think that much has become obvious. :P
(Are you going to stop insulting your customer base and dismissing LEGITIMATE criticism?)
Again, accusatory, confrontational language.
Where is the invitation to a rational debate or discussion that you claim this is ?
I sure as heck don't see it.
If that 2nd line is supposed to be "an invitation" it's one of the most darned unfriendly ones I've ever seen.
Why would anyone want to have a discussion with someone whose entire "invitation" is an attack, an accusation and seems to be spoiling for a
confrontation over things ?
I fear your "truth" will have the opposite effect to what you want.
Unless what you wanted was to give Geko even more reasons to avoid his players.
- Hippie
It would prove my point, actually: That Geko can't stand someone being mean to him *at all*.
Now, please stop being a weenie.
PS. I'm having a conversation with you, and you're not exactly being nice to me, so I guess *some* people will engage regardless, yes?
I found your Tweet perfect. It's short and to the point. By the sounds of things he needs to be a man and face the music. Whether it was told to him in a garage, Twitter, a wrestling ring, Argala Patrol Sector.....it needed to be said. I found it confrontational but legitimate. I have a copy of the Butt-Hurt on the Internet Report form in case you don't have one if/and when the dude responds.
I found your Tweet perfect. It's short and to the point. By the sounds of things he needs to be a man and face the music. Whether it was told to him in a garage, Twitter, a wrestling ring, Argala Patrol Sector.....it needed to be said. I found it confrontational but legitimate. I have a copy of the Butt-Hurt on the Internet Report form in case you don't have one if/and when the dude responds.
Oh, do please send it! I don't think Geko rises to that level by any means, but I know a LOT of Twitterers who do! XD
The amount of people "upgrading" and patrol farming are the feedback
Money talks, of course.
However what they tried to claim in the past how they respect star trek IP etc. is just where we call bs.
I don't know if there is an internet quotable law on it yet but it would seem the more vulgar and absurd the lie, the more believable it becomes to average joe.
Like they have a hard time accepting someone would lie that much, it's easier to grasp developers believe what they are saying, rather than accepting a world of manipulating *insert curses* robbing you for being naive.
/edit
ps. I'd probably do exactly what the developers do if I were them though. Try and sell copy-pasted text for insane amounts then slap the biggest bs story together after
"oh yeah I totally did that for YOUR sake, YOU asked for it", "so now you owe my millions of dil, per character, PLUS what you owe for that HUGE favour I just did"
But then unfortunately for them the world still has people like you and me in it
I don't know if there is an internet quotable law on it yet but it would seem the more vulgar and absurd the lie, the more believable it becomes to average joe.
You may have heard of this quote:
"One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."
- Joesph Goebbels, "Aus Churchills L
[REDACTED] Exploit Action Update | 01.13.2015, 09:56 AM
Hey folks,
Lets talk a bit about the [REDACTED] exploit. There are two stages to the process of removing an exploit and handling actions for players who participated. Stage 1 fix the issue and ensure players can no longer partake in the exploit. That change is out as of today in patch [REDACTED].
Stage 2 With the exploit removed, we can work towards finalizing our data review and assigning appropriate actions. We have a lot of information! We know who used it, who they invited, how many times they exploited, when they participated, credits gained, and whether they gained a crafting pattern from reverse-engineering. We are still reviewing the data and determining the appropriate action for those who took undue advantage of the exploit. We wont be taking action today, but well wrap it up in the next week or so.
On the plus side, most players didn't partake in the exploit at all allowing us to focus on the few who did. It may seem silly to thank you for not using an exploit, but we really appreciate you taking the time to raise our awareness of the issue through a variety of channels. It demonstrates your commitment to the game and to keeping the game fun, and fair for everyone. So thank you for not using the exploit.
-[REDACTED]
I redacted the exploit name and the dev's name but this is from another mmo that some may recognize. This is how you communicate to the community on problems. Granted this game's (not STO) customer support is marginally better than STO's but at least the few times I have interacted with them and the Dev's they've always take care of my concerns and never treated me like I was just a number or paycheck to them.
I think there is a lesson here that some both in the game community and the game's HQ could learn from, but then again we don't really live in a perfect world, no pun intended.
My theory on the issue here:
Cryptic Studios sees themselves as a game development house. They develop the game as if its a piece of software, an artistic tech product. They see the publisher's role as marketing, sales, PR, community management. They did this with Atari., They do it with PWE. They lean on the idea of the publisher and studio having separate functions.
In a well done game, the studio absorbs all of those functions. Marketing should not be something applied at the end of the process, used to sell a product. Marketing should be in charge of game balance with the goal of creating a user-delighting, public crowd pleasing product.
EDIT: I was snarky, yes, but in no way did I use ANY foul language. Nothing I said was dishonest, either. If he doesn't like hearing the truth, then as someone who DOES have to deal with customers on occassion, he'll have to quit because there's no longer ANY confidence that he'll do the right thing or say what he means when asking for feedback.
I'm not sure how that will help, one way or another. Acting like a child is never helpful.
If only, it will only show him he is right in what he says and does.
The point of my posting that wall of text was that is how a Dev should interact with the game's community. No where in that message does the Dev call people names or accuse the whole player-base of being cheats. Like I said, I've chatted with the Dev in that message on previous occassions in their "dev tracker" forum where you can actually have a conversation with the Devs without having to use some arcane search function to find them. They at least make themselves available to the community. They also are willing to listen to whatever idea the community has on the game and it's systems.
I was involved in some of the beta testing for that game, so I feel more connected to it than STO which I have a connection to having grown up watching Star Trek it in all it's incarnations.
EDIT: took out last line, made absolutely no sense to me, lol, must be the flu meds.
i appreciate the approach (even if i want to see him here and not elsewhere!). but then i have to think off all the stuff added since s6 and all promises regarding pvp! i can't stand it. so many wrong turns made and promises broken, as a customer idc about their feelings, just as they don't care about mine/"ours" !
i love trek, indeed i always refer to picard as like my stepfather (but so to punkrock in general, so yeah ...).
fool me once, fool me twice, fool me 20 times?!?!.... yeah..... no!
since dr hit, the last bit of what did hold me here seems lost. though i still lurk around and f.e. level my crafting schools, because hope is a bit**.... THIS FAR, NOT FURTHER BABBLE (tm since s6)!
idc who's responsible, the progression-policy is bulls imho!
Saw an interviewer once being very polite to Bush Junior. When asked why, he replied: "I may not like the man, but I respect the Office." That's how I see it. You may not like Geko, but being an obnoxious brat on his own channel, that is simply not done. The man is the Lead Dev of STO. When addressing him directly, do what that interviewer did: respect his position enough to be polite.
You, otoh, came off like a 12-year-old, just having done something naughty, and gleefully telling his chums about it. And to think that such a tweet would all immediately win us over, that's even more immature.
In a well done game, the studio absorbs all of those functions. Marketing should not be something applied at the end of the process, used to sell a product. Marketing should be in charge of game balance with the goal of creating a user-delighting, public crowd pleasing product.
Once upon a time, back in the heyday of id software, that's how every game maker did things. Then the giant mega-corporations found out that there was money to be made, and we gamers completely lost control, as corporate marketing slime was applied in a thick coat over everything.
Most of you will agree that politics and gaming should be firmly separated, (although games like COD and America's Army undoubtedly serve as recruiting tools for the military), yet the very example of what has happened to the world of gaming is a solid argument for the anti-corporate political struggle.
In a way I feel for Geko, but on the other hand, he's collecting the paycheck and the flak comes with it.
Though successful, Titov believes his team could have done better. "Throughout all of this, I think the biggest mistake we consistently made was that we were arrogantly deaf to problems raised by a vocal minority of players," Titov told Gamasutra. "For a long time our strategy was very simple - we looked at a massive amount of data we had mined and if it looked generally okay, it meant that things were going well, and if someone started discussing problems on the forums or on social media we generally ignored them. There was a lot of hate out there on the web being aimed toward us, the studio, and the game. Today, I realize that there was plenty of reason for that hate, but at the time, we were foolish and thought that we didn't have to listen to or respond to 'haters.'"
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Looking for a new fleet? Drop by the in-game chat channel, "tenforwardforum", and say hi to the members of A Fleet Called Ten Forward (Fed) and The Orion Pirates (KDF). If you already have a fleet you are happy with, please feel free to drop by our chat channel if you are looking for a friendly bunch of helpful people to socialize with.
Cryptic Studios sees themselves as a game development house. They develop the game as if its a piece of software, an artistic tech product. They see the publisher's role as marketing, sales, PR, community management. They did this with Atari., They do it with PWE. They lean on the idea of the publisher and studio having separate functions.
In a well done game, the studio absorbs all of those functions. Marketing should not be something applied at the end of the process, used to sell a product. Marketing should be in charge of game balance with the goal of creating a user-delighting, public crowd pleasing product.
This article on the WWZ team seems relevant to this threads original discussion.
That pretty much is the sum of what is going on right now. They need to stop looking at the "data" since all that is is numbers. Engage people, find out in a meanigful way what the concerns are. Stop all the name calling, that never got me anywhere when I was younger and it still holds true now.
I remember my grandmother telling me, "you catch more flies with honey, than you do with vinegar," and there is a lot of vinegar flowing on the forums right now.
That pretty much is the sum of what is going on right now. They need to stop looking at the "data" since all that is is numbers. Engage people, find out in a meanigful way what the concerns are. Stop all the name calling, that never got me anywhere when I was younger and it still holds true now.
I remember my grandmother telling me, "you catch more flies with honey, than you do with vinegar," and there is a lot of vinegar flowing on the forums right now.
Just my .00002 dil
IMHO, one of the smarter things I've seen done in an MMO (which I didn't understand at the time) was this:
A dev once took flak for the playable classes in his game being numerically imbalanced from a theorycrafting perspective.
He said something to the effect that the spreadsheet was the beginning of wisdom, not the end. (It reminds me of Spock's statement from The Undiscovered Country: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.") He went on to explain that a spreadsheet or design balance was only the begining of balance. Two classes might have NUMERICAL parity but that might not be reflected in play because certain button combos or resource types might not be as fun. As a consequence, the dev said, he followed how popular the various classes were and would tune them to be IMBALANCED until they were roughly equally popular.
I don't think this kind of thinking is totally alien to Cryptic but I think it could be applied more deeply to their design process.
Good on paper first, then wreck the paper balance to achieve good in practice, and then the outliers need to be tended to as well.
In some ways, an upset vocal minority on the forum is the same thing as a handful of players doing 10 million DPS. If somebody (even a small number) is hitting numbers that high, you have to curve things -- perhaps everything -- to prevent DPS outliers like that. Likewise, if a group of people are unhappy enough (even a small number of them) and that unhappiness is pronounced enough, you have to curve the design to limit how unhappy the outliers are and to draw your pool of customers towards the center of the happiness curve while trying to improve the median level of happiness.
If the "hate" is so blantently false and easy to dismiss, how is it the developers are gone from their own forum and no longer communicating with the players at all
Because it's all in our heads, we imagined the problems, and our points are so far attached from reality it's hilarious.
How come I don't see anyone laughing?
Thing is, more or less every last single complaint ever made for half a decade has been spot on. Some more problematic or meanigful than others, but they were all valid, and they all hurt the developers emotionally, personally.
Where I start laughing is, when they seemingly don't understand that when you go for the cash grab, with "upgrading", crafting and 800 patrol missions, nerfing exp, marks, dil and EC - AND you somehow manage to STILL expect respect, street credibility and celebration.
These people must really have a low opinion of their players to imagine that ever happening.
So yes at this point, anything even remotely negative, or rather anything that isn't high end butt kissing, is on auto-dismissal per default.
Stop posting on your own forum, if that isn't denial, nothing ever will be.
So going back to the more vulgar the lie and having to keep it up - I didn't know of the historic reference, I just took note of it by seeing it done, I'd say what choice they got?
Also why the DR signatures hit home with them because more than just the 1 subject in itself it exposed the overall mentality.
Although I can empathize with what he says, he should have said it here. I don't follow every social network to get information for a game that has its own forum.
For the most part I sympathize with the position he is in. It speaks volumes in that he could not post it here, his choice to use reddit as his forum was likely one where he would face a more respectful audience.
It's not just my fault / It is my fault / I report to people too.
I've lost track of how many time's I have heard that complaint during a project post-morten. People with positions several paygrades removed make decisions we as developers have to implement, regardless of the unintended consequences.
It sucks.
He has to work with a 5-year old platform that suffers from bad planning, high staff turn overs, poor documentation and a fixed release schedule - regardless of the problems found in testing.
It sucks big time.
He has to contend with a very vocal fan base that has little tolerance for the slightest errors.
I feel for the guy.
Question:So who do I direct my complaints to? I am a paying customer. QA can't listen. Support doesn't return my emails. I still don't have some of the items I paid for. The game was effectively broken upon release, taking 5 weeks to solve loadouts for many. FIVE WEEKS. And don't get me started on the petri-dish experiments with XP and progression.
When your told to do something your know is detrimental or wrong, your role as a professional is to provide and demonstrate alternatives that can achieve the new requirements with minimal disruption to your client base.
My Two Bits
Admiral Thrax
Completely agree with this one. That's the problem. There are no solutions coming out from them, if they had said something like "we're sorry you can no longer play because we adjusted the xp so low that we're seeing people leave the game because of it" it would be a different story. Just recently for example Blizzard adjusted some things that made it impossible to play certain aspects of their title World of ********. They knew these things were causing people problems and they were professionals about it and made some changes.
That doesn't happen in this game and apparently being a professional is too much work because the management here just takes whatever they do for granted and doesn't do a single thing about it when they know it's affecting everything, like the XP ratios for Spec grinding.
And no grinding like this is insane, it's not normal gameplay in the west, we've got to get these developers out of the habit of making these games korean we are not korean players.
Cryptic Studios sees themselves as a game development house. They develop the game as if its a piece of software, an artistic tech product. They see the publisher's role as marketing, sales, PR, community management. They did this with Atari., They do it with PWE. They lean on the idea of the publisher and studio having separate functions.
In a well done game, the studio absorbs all of those functions. Marketing should not be something applied at the end of the process, used to sell a product. Marketing should be in charge of game balance with the goal of creating a user-delighting, public crowd pleasing product.
Atari was well known for forcing unwanted features on development so they can slap a label on a box in the last weeks. They did this every single time. Bug fixing was cancelled, the whole game went unfinished, just so Atari could have 20,000 fetch or kill quests.. Atari did well, oh wait, bankrupt. Every game they pushed out had horrible launches, this is what happens when accountants control an art. It happens still with EA a lot, and PWE is no different.
On the reverse, back in the day, the artists ruled supreme, every MMO was 300% over budget, pushed back 5 times with a massive scope and inability to deliver on it.
There needs to be a combination with good communication between the two departments, for an industry hellbent on duplicating WoWs success they sure overlook the most major part of their success, and that was a good launch, probably the first MMO to ever launch well.
And no grinding like this is insane, it's not normal gameplay in the west, we've got to get these developers out of the habit of making these games korean we are not korean players.
Even beyond that, it's ridiculous to have a patrol awarding 4 times more than an endgame mission, with usually less time invested.
As for grinding, 6000stf/1500argala (without xp buff) for a lvl60 to complete the spec point (including command). Even if you don't think the spec tree should be completed by the average player, that's still 75stf/19 argala per point.
Per character.
For the most part I sympathize with the position he is in. It speaks volumes in that he could not post it here, his choice to use reddit as his forum was likely one where he would face a more respectful audience.
Most devs never post on the forum, and post on reddit. That was always true, even way before DR.
The current situation probably didn't help, but Geko have no love for our feedback. Especially when it's negative. That's no secret, he told us about it several time. He have his precious metric for all the feedback he wants. He told us about that to, nothing new.
With how reddit works, he can bask on positive feedback all day, while negative feedback is downvoted to oblivion. And then, claim Reddit is more mature because of that (in his tweet). I don't see anything mature about it, only biased feedback.
Comments
That's where I'm heading... I still hold out hope that some of the worst offenders as far as recent changes or design decisions might enjoy a course correction, but that's beginning to feel like misplaced optimism (if operating under a holding pattern could be called such). The game itself is good, but it's been hobbled with a few of the recent changes, some of which make other features uninteresting or (for my purposes) unavailable. It could be worse, it could be better, but it has been heading more towards the former than the latter of late (I used to log in daily).
Oh, and that quote down there isn't meant as a crack about Geko... it's just a really funny typo (with a link that explains the humor). Just because I don't like some of the things the guy does doesn't mean I dislike the guy himself... to my knowledge, I've never met him.
If you want an actual result you have to contact a company. Wipe the rabid foam from your chin, formulate a complaint in a reasonable way and tweet it to Perfect World themselves. Companies who ignore legitimate complaints on Twitter are "under the microscope" more than they are if they ignore legitimate complaints on their own forums because Twitter is much more "public" and their industry peers pay more attention to it.
I had a huge problem with my internet provider, their customer service was unwilling to budge and I was very dissatisfied. As a last resort I tweeted that I was thinking about cancelling my service because I had had a bad experience with their customer service staff. Their first response was to suggest that I sent them a DM about the issue. I said no and continued the discussion in public & it was resolved within 15 minutes.
I'm not saying that kind of result would happen here. It's beyond ridiculous to expect it. I'm just suggesting that companies react differently when they're under the public spotlight of Twitter.
But to get back to the beginning - a personal attack on Twitter? You're not getting any results that way.
Free Tibet!
You're a little out of touch with both the value and intent. It wasn't a personal attack.
Most companies track their standing in social media and media in general on a quarterly basis. Public perception of a company and it's products are impacted by this. While you and I can argue the value of this type of activity, company boards take a dim view of customers interacting with employees outside of the company's domain.
For future reference, utilize a hashtag #STO with your post for better recognition and impact. Both the post and the subsequent reply would have been of more value with it.
As for having no effect, you might want to listen to this weeks podcast over at Massively.
With a lot of Cryptic's decisions, it all feels like the old maxim of "charge what the market will bear". Fleets worked, suggesting that the playerbase would tolerate 1-2 year grinds for the best abilities. 3-packs worked (double the price of a ship for a minor reskin...) suggesting that players would pay for new abilities on a ship they "already owned". So I can see how the unpopular aspects of DR have their roots in things released over the last 2 1/2 years. If the 3-packs had failed, or there had been no takeup of fleets, I suspect that Cryptic would have *had* to choose a different path.
It's not unique to MMOs, either; I am much reminded of the price rises and rules overhauls which were a factor in my leaving minature gaming years ago. And yet, Warhammer rolls on a decade after many forum-dwellers were confidently predicting its implosion in the face of power creep, biased developers and inflating prices.
As to Geko's note, I would love to understand their business logic better. Most people, in my experience, have some sort of cost / benefit logic to their actions (but it may not be the same as mine...) but as a company, they have no obligation to do so.
I'm not telling him he sucks. I only told him that he has (rightfully) earned the scorn of people who were genuinely willing to help make this a great game. I also asked him, confronted with that fact, if he's willing to change his pattern of bad behavior. Not all ideas are good ideas, but Geko has summarily dismissed some really *great* ideas and bug reports, too. Does that not bother you enough to at least ask him why he treats us with such contempt?
I'm sorry, but the podcasters have failed to confront him on this. I understand they want to be on good terms. After all, who doesn't? I'm saying, however, that they shouldn't let inexcusable comments slide. True friends don't stay silent when someone does something nasty; they help the person realize their mistake. It's not always nice, unfortunately, but it's NECESSARY!
I said I expected Geko to block me, because I've learned that's who he is as a person. And you know what? That's pretty danged sad!
I'm not expecting a pleasant conversation, but I welcome it, and it would prove me wrong about him. NOTHING would please me more than to be wrong about him!
I appreciate that some of y'all disagree with *how* I said it, but I still maintain that it *needed* to be said. Him trying to insulate himself from snark like mine, and stuff WAY more nasty only hurts HIM. Giving people the impression that he thinks he's perfect only hurts HIM. I don't want that! I don't think ANY sane and caring person does! Am I wrong?
I've never been the most diplomatic person when it comes to speaking my mind. I think that much has become obvious. :P
Thank you for your time.
It would prove my point, actually: That Geko can't stand someone being mean to him *at all*.
Now, please stop being a weenie.
PS. I'm having a conversation with you, and you're not exactly being nice to me, so I guess *some* people will engage regardless, yes?
Oh, do please send it! I don't think Geko rises to that level by any means, but I know a LOT of Twitterers who do! XD
And thank you.
Check your Inbox.
Oh YAY! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!
Money talks, of course.
However what they tried to claim in the past how they respect star trek IP etc. is just where we call bs.
I don't know if there is an internet quotable law on it yet but it would seem the more vulgar and absurd the lie, the more believable it becomes to average joe.
Like they have a hard time accepting someone would lie that much, it's easier to grasp developers believe what they are saying, rather than accepting a world of manipulating *insert curses* robbing you for being naive.
/edit
ps. I'd probably do exactly what the developers do if I were them though. Try and sell copy-pasted text for insane amounts then slap the biggest bs story together after
"oh yeah I totally did that for YOUR sake, YOU asked for it", "so now you owe my millions of dil, per character, PLUS what you owe for that HUGE favour I just did"
But then unfortunately for them the world still has people like you and me in it
You may have heard of this quote:
"One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."
- Joesph Goebbels, "Aus Churchills L
Pull the other one, laddybuck.
My theory on the issue here:
Cryptic Studios sees themselves as a game development house. They develop the game as if its a piece of software, an artistic tech product. They see the publisher's role as marketing, sales, PR, community management. They did this with Atari., They do it with PWE. They lean on the idea of the publisher and studio having separate functions.
In a well done game, the studio absorbs all of those functions. Marketing should not be something applied at the end of the process, used to sell a product. Marketing should be in charge of game balance with the goal of creating a user-delighting, public crowd pleasing product.
If only, it will only show him he is right in what he says and does.
I was involved in some of the beta testing for that game, so I feel more connected to it than STO which I have a connection to having grown up watching Star Trek it in all it's incarnations.
EDIT: took out last line, made absolutely no sense to me, lol, must be the flu meds.
i love trek, indeed i always refer to picard as like my stepfather (but so to punkrock in general, so yeah
fool me once, fool me twice, fool me 20 times?!?!.... yeah..... no!
since dr hit, the last bit of what did hold me here seems lost. though i still lurk around and f.e. level my crafting schools, because hope is a bit**.... THIS FAR, NOT FURTHER BABBLE (tm since s6)!
idc who's responsible, the progression-policy is bulls imho!
Saw an interviewer once being very polite to Bush Junior. When asked why, he replied: "I may not like the man, but I respect the Office." That's how I see it. You may not like Geko, but being an obnoxious brat on his own channel, that is simply not done. The man is the Lead Dev of STO. When addressing him directly, do what that interviewer did: respect his position enough to be polite.
You, otoh, came off like a 12-year-old, just having done something naughty, and gleefully telling his chums about it. And to think that such a tweet would all immediately win us over, that's even more immature.
As you were!
Once upon a time, back in the heyday of id software, that's how every game maker did things. Then the giant mega-corporations found out that there was money to be made, and we gamers completely lost control, as corporate marketing slime was applied in a thick coat over everything.
Most of you will agree that politics and gaming should be firmly separated, (although games like COD and America's Army undoubtedly serve as recruiting tools for the military), yet the very example of what has happened to the world of gaming is a solid argument for the anti-corporate political struggle.
In a way I feel for Geko, but on the other hand, he's collecting the paycheck and the flak comes with it.
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That pretty much is the sum of what is going on right now. They need to stop looking at the "data" since all that is is numbers. Engage people, find out in a meanigful way what the concerns are. Stop all the name calling, that never got me anywhere when I was younger and it still holds true now.
I remember my grandmother telling me, "you catch more flies with honey, than you do with vinegar," and there is a lot of vinegar flowing on the forums right now.
Just my .00002 dil
IMHO, one of the smarter things I've seen done in an MMO (which I didn't understand at the time) was this:
A dev once took flak for the playable classes in his game being numerically imbalanced from a theorycrafting perspective.
He said something to the effect that the spreadsheet was the beginning of wisdom, not the end. (It reminds me of Spock's statement from The Undiscovered Country: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.") He went on to explain that a spreadsheet or design balance was only the begining of balance. Two classes might have NUMERICAL parity but that might not be reflected in play because certain button combos or resource types might not be as fun. As a consequence, the dev said, he followed how popular the various classes were and would tune them to be IMBALANCED until they were roughly equally popular.
I don't think this kind of thinking is totally alien to Cryptic but I think it could be applied more deeply to their design process.
Good on paper first, then wreck the paper balance to achieve good in practice, and then the outliers need to be tended to as well.
In some ways, an upset vocal minority on the forum is the same thing as a handful of players doing 10 million DPS. If somebody (even a small number) is hitting numbers that high, you have to curve things -- perhaps everything -- to prevent DPS outliers like that. Likewise, if a group of people are unhappy enough (even a small number of them) and that unhappiness is pronounced enough, you have to curve the design to limit how unhappy the outliers are and to draw your pool of customers towards the center of the happiness curve while trying to improve the median level of happiness.
Because it's all in our heads, we imagined the problems, and our points are so far attached from reality it's hilarious.
How come I don't see anyone laughing?
Thing is, more or less every last single complaint ever made for half a decade has been spot on. Some more problematic or meanigful than others, but they were all valid, and they all hurt the developers emotionally, personally.
Where I start laughing is, when they seemingly don't understand that when you go for the cash grab, with "upgrading", crafting and 800 patrol missions, nerfing exp, marks, dil and EC - AND you somehow manage to STILL expect respect, street credibility and celebration.
These people must really have a low opinion of their players to imagine that ever happening.
So yes at this point, anything even remotely negative, or rather anything that isn't high end butt kissing, is on auto-dismissal per default.
Stop posting on your own forum, if that isn't denial, nothing ever will be.
So going back to the more vulgar the lie and having to keep it up - I didn't know of the historic reference, I just took note of it by seeing it done, I'd say what choice they got?
Also why the DR signatures hit home with them because more than just the 1 subject in itself it exposed the overall mentality.
Completely agree with this one. That's the problem. There are no solutions coming out from them, if they had said something like "we're sorry you can no longer play because we adjusted the xp so low that we're seeing people leave the game because of it" it would be a different story. Just recently for example Blizzard adjusted some things that made it impossible to play certain aspects of their title World of ********. They knew these things were causing people problems and they were professionals about it and made some changes.
That doesn't happen in this game and apparently being a professional is too much work because the management here just takes whatever they do for granted and doesn't do a single thing about it when they know it's affecting everything, like the XP ratios for Spec grinding.
And no grinding like this is insane, it's not normal gameplay in the west, we've got to get these developers out of the habit of making these games korean we are not korean players.
Atari was well known for forcing unwanted features on development so they can slap a label on a box in the last weeks. They did this every single time. Bug fixing was cancelled, the whole game went unfinished, just so Atari could have 20,000 fetch or kill quests.. Atari did well, oh wait, bankrupt. Every game they pushed out had horrible launches, this is what happens when accountants control an art. It happens still with EA a lot, and PWE is no different.
On the reverse, back in the day, the artists ruled supreme, every MMO was 300% over budget, pushed back 5 times with a massive scope and inability to deliver on it.
There needs to be a combination with good communication between the two departments, for an industry hellbent on duplicating WoWs success they sure overlook the most major part of their success, and that was a good launch, probably the first MMO to ever launch well.
Completed Starbase, Embassy, Mine, Spire and No Win Scenario
Nothing to do anymore.
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As for grinding, 6000stf/1500argala (without xp buff) for a lvl60 to complete the spec point (including command). Even if you don't think the spec tree should be completed by the average player, that's still 75stf/19 argala per point.
Per character.
One word : ridiculous.
Most devs never post on the forum, and post on reddit. That was always true, even way before DR.
The current situation probably didn't help, but Geko have no love for our feedback. Especially when it's negative. That's no secret, he told us about it several time. He have his precious metric for all the feedback he wants. He told us about that to, nothing new.
With how reddit works, he can bask on positive feedback all day, while negative feedback is downvoted to oblivion. And then, claim Reddit is more mature because of that (in his tweet). I don't see anything mature about it, only biased feedback.