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Can someone please give some perspective on Gekos ill fated statement?
vocmcp
Member Posts: 1,134 Arc User
Well as some of you know Geko's back in the news for yet another bad P1 podcast quote of his.
While I get that Geko must be every PR managers nightmare and just doesn't know how to communicate certain things I'm wondering about the context of this statement. To anyone who has listened to the podcast*, is the quote actually that bad or is it missing some important context he added?
*sorry I find podcasts lengthy and boring for the information you get out of them.
p.s. sorry about the sig Taco. I hope you can see it criticizes a management decision and not your work as a developer. Plus it's clear stated and constructive
Geko wrote:"We specifically ended the war between the Klingons and the Federation, so we wouldn't have to make content just for Klingons any more."
While I get that Geko must be every PR managers nightmare and just doesn't know how to communicate certain things I'm wondering about the context of this statement. To anyone who has listened to the podcast*, is the quote actually that bad or is it missing some important context he added?
*sorry I find podcasts lengthy and boring for the information you get out of them.
p.s. sorry about the sig Taco. I hope you can see it criticizes a management decision and not your work as a developer. Plus it's clear stated and constructive
Post edited by vocmcp on
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Oops misread the OP.
ahaha mate, I'm glad I got to read it before you deleted it. Good to know PvP is still not considered. Makes we want to spend even less....... Probably too much work on "balance" who knows......
This is just to name a few of the more glaring things they did since DR alone. Its perfectly obvious that he meant what he said: they will maintain, but not grow or support, the KDF.
Not that I'm at all happy about this.
He did seem to imply that a revamp of the Fek'iri content is in planning (after the Cardassian arc revamp), unless a Breen ARc revamp comes first. ANd he mentioned there will be some more Klingon-centric content - still faction-agnostic though. Probabpy means it will involve Klingon space (maybe Gorn/Orion stuff, or a continuation of the House Feud stuff in a context where the Federation or the Romulans would also intervene? We can only speculate.)
Is there any link to that quote? Makes me believe Geko has no idea what Star Trek is about and may have more fun designing a different game.
There is little point in making faction only missions when they take so much time and money to create. Geko could have worded it better but I understand the reasoning. It's not the answer that all the Klink players wanted to hear. Klinks make up a small portion of the playerbase and moneybase. It comes down to return on investment.
I sort of like the idea of peace because I like the Klingons, but even with what he said, I think they should put more effort into future missions so that when you play them as a Klink you can still feel like its a mission for a Klink, not just a boring mission a warrior was forced to do.
Anyone want to give me a Temporal Heavy Dreadnought pack? I'll be your friend
As a matter of fact, he said it live on camera in one of the STOked episodes back when Chris Fisher was still host. I'm at work right now, so I haven't got a link, but, yeah...the context was that alien factions are more fun for him because he can get his Star Wars geek on.
I think they only wish to do universal content (for max return on investment).
He did go on to state that there will?/might? be a mission from the Klingon "viewpoint" but it will be a universal mission for all factions.
The way they have been homogenizing everything lately, pretty soon (if not already), the only difference between the factions will be in appearance and I don't think they have any problem with that at all. It's probably their goal.
So much for diversity.
That's really disappointing of him................
I listen to the Geko podcast interviews fairly regularly, and I've never heard him mention making STO more like Star Wars. Whatever that even means...
I don't think you have much to worry about. As others have mentioned, the writing for this has been on the wall for a while now... there are just no plans to make new Klingon-exclusive content. There is a strong desire to make Klingon-centric content, but they would be open to all factions (Geko mentioned the DS9 episode where Sisko & Co. dress up as Klingons as an example of the spirit of their ideas).
Faction-exclusive stuff seems to be limited to the 1-50 leveling process, and giving the FED Romulan arc revamp, they may attempt to streamline a lot of this stuff. Given that the KDF tutorial/initial missions were already updated, I doubt this stuff will leave.
If you could provide the link, if you get the chance later, I would like to hear these comments, too.
Then he goes into a long explanation of balancing content. Gimme a bit I'll get you a short transcript of just that section.
It allows the story to be experienced with a single character, and allows there to be more of it because the developers don't have to make separate missions for every faction.
And, other than LoR and the Klingon start-at-level-one update, all the new story missions have been cross-faction for years anyway.
They can add Klingon responses and inputs to new missions to help give it more of a Klingon feel, but from this point on its going to be missions playable by all factions. Just like how the Feds can sneak beam Deferi off a Breen ship in one of the Deferi dailies and Klingons can't. Another example is Sphere of Influence, where depending on if you're Fed or KDF, the other side's flagship arrives to assist you against the Undine. Now if they made it so that a Romulan player acted as the Romulan representative instead of the Klingon or Federation it might be more interesting.
I believe separate storylines would add a lot to making the game more interesting from different perspectives. Unfortunately we don't just have a tendency to get "one size fits all" storylines but also a tendency to copy ship stats and reskin them according to faction. This just adds to making the factions more and more cosmetic while some differentiation could add so much more depth and value to the entire game. Just imagine how different gameplay could be and how interesting it could be to have several characters.
This is 100% false. He loves star trek. Hell didn't he renewed his wedding vows on the Enterprise D bridge, in full starfleet uniform, with Tasha Yar doing the ceremony last year (or was it the year before I can't remember time is kinda all one mush atm)
I don't think you can get more trek than that folks :P
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We had diversity. The players thought it was unfair that each faction had their own unique items and abilities, so now everyone gets everything. Blame the players. More than half the time its actually their fault.
Sort of like an expansion on the Tac/Sci/Eng class-specific sub-objectives in early missions.
For example:
In one mission, as a Fed, you're probably ordered, or requested, by a Fed officer to detour and save some Civvies or non-combatants, and one of them gives you a hint to make the final section a bit easier (such as sabotaging the doors to delay the incoming reinforcements), as there will be enemy reinforcements joining that fight.
But as a KDF, you're probably ordered by a KDF officer to detour and take down an incoming group of combatants before you meet up at your final objective; otherwise, those incoming combatants will make it a bit harder (those combatants would be at the final area for Feds or Romulans regardless).
And as a Romulan, you're requested/ordered by a Romulan officer to hack the security systems to turn them on the enemies in the final area, which would help soften the enemies and their reinforcements. Maybe being Romulan, a little extra sabotage with venting in some weakening gas into the room that further weakens the boss NPC and his initial escorts by the time you get to their location.
That way, while still Faction-agnostic, it at least has a bit of Faction-individuality to it. Even throw up an Accolade or two; one for competing the Faction optional, and one for just brute-forcing the entire mission, for example.
And here is where we differ somewhat ... :
But Cryptic tries to make up for it somewhat ... , for example in the FE "What's Left Behind" , Sela (correctly) addressed my toon as a Vulcan , with a specific line toward Vulcan thinking .
Needless to say that the First toon I did the mission with (a Kromulann) got no such distinction .
Source .
Yeah, same thing happened over at BSGO, so all the ships were redesigned and distorted to fit in the same box with the same abilities, firing points, etc. and suddenly no one was happy and realized how much they missed the unique aspects of their fav ships.
This will go no better.
Be careful what you wish for, you might well get it.
Well if one thing is certain Al (Captain Geko) Rivera LOVES to interact with former Star Trek actors (and somehow I think he is more concerned with how the Cryptic presentations at STLV go, and who from the list of Star Trek actors in attendance he can get to officiate something) more than he likes (or really thinks about) actually adding fun engaging gameplay that's Star trek related to STO. From Season 8.5 on it's primarily been "What can we revamp/nerf to increase monetization?" I understand that this is a business and monetization needs to be considered - but enjoyable gameplay needs to be somewhere in that equation too, or you loose the players wanted to spend money in the game. from Season 8.5 to date it really comes across as a 'monetize everything' strategy with 'offer something fun to play' WAY down on the list; and IMO it's a recipe for reduced profits in the long run - which I'm sure they'll blame on something else.
Plus of late, teh marketing has been a real joke:
- They had a blog post highlighting certain spotlighted Foundry missions THE SAME WEEK that the Foundry was completely unavailable due to post patch republishing (Great way to promote an underused feature, eh?)
- Not proofreading the copy of a Blog on the Dil Weekend; that provided erroneous info (I personally don't agree with their decision to suddenly not include Reputation Mark conversion projects; but it is a fact that the posted blog at first didn't mention that, so it seems either the community/marketing folks don't care enough to proofread; or there's a real communication issue between Cryptic and PWE (or whomever handles marketing); that doesn't help Cryptic's company image in any way.
^^
And the above types of gaffs haven't been all that unusual as Cryptic's been that way since it was founded, but you'd think after a over a decade, someone would say, "Lets do better"; unless no one in a management capacity cares - which again, certainly doesn't help the Cryptic image or reputation.
One really has to wonder if Cryptic has developed an internal corporate culture that somehow rewards incompetence. Maybe that's on\e of the reasons they keep the same Devs for 8+ years - said Devs can't get another (or better) job offer as in the game industry it's common too see Devs jump around to other companies every 2 to 3 years. Interesting that mr. Rivera likes to tout his 8+ year stint with Cryptic and STO, eh.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
By 'Players', I think you mean 'Federation players'
I can't recall the kdf ever begging for a fed console/feature...well, besides equally released content...
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Gecko: There are more ships, there’s a new klingon ship coming out very very soon.
Cookie: mooore shiiips
Gecko: my thinking is that klingons are really gonna dig it. It’s very cool. Now we’re looking at, in general one of the things that really works well for us are what we call the “bundle bundles”. You know three fed, three klingon, three romulan. Those are very expensive for us to build but they are also very popular. And so I think you can look forward to that more because, I mean with the addition of starship traits its now more important for us to make sure that when we make a new ship that we also make sure that all factions get access to at least something equivalent. Even if its basically identical except in art and some minor adjustments that all three factions need that so they* get access to the same number of starship traits. So yes there are more ships coming.
As far as content updates, the last time we did a major content update was with Legacy of Romulus. It’s been about a year. We specifically ended the war between klingons and the federation so we didn’t have to make content just for klingons any more. We do have more story content planned for the next year and some of that story content is planned to be played from the klingon perspective.
Kind of like when Sisko went on a mission to Qo’onos and dressed up as a klingon. I’m not saying you’re going to dress up as a klingon, but basically instead of being you know federation centric you’re going to go do something with the klingons. So we want to do more that side of the story as opposed to doing “this is just a klingon mission”. We haven’t released any faction-specific mission in I don’t know how long. It’s just not really worth it, so that’s why we needed to end the war so that way all our missions going forward could be faction agnostic.
However we are continuing very constantly our core content. So we are updating the federation arc, we updated the borg arc which is available to everybody, we just updated the romulan arc which everybody should be playing. That’s something that we haven’t really talked too much about because everyone is so excited about dust to dust. And then the next one we want to update is the cardassian arc. And then somewhere right after that I wanna update the fekiri arc on the klingon side. So I wanna go and update that arc.
I’m trying to get rid of all the old content from launch. Just replace it with all brand new content that we’re doing now. ‘Cause that stuff is old, that’s stuff we spent days on where we’re* spending weeks on it now, like spending ten times more time on our content, and we know how to make content better, and we’ve got voice actors and cutscenes, and so we want all our content to be that good.
But the cardassian arc will come next then either the klingon fekiri arc or maybe we’ll redo the breen featured series. There’s split opinions on which one to do next.
Cookie: I made a klingon toon and I was planning on using it more but it was very frustrating when I wanted to play with my friends and they couldn’t invite me to the team or that I couldn’t do any PVE’s with them. So I kinda stopped.
Gecko: ‘Cause your friends were federation you mean?
Cookie: Ya
Gecko: but you have a whole klingon fleet though don’t you?
Elijah and Cookie: Priority one does, ya
Cookie: but not all the friends I play with are in that fleet.
Elijah: but it’s 17% of our playerbase, so there’s really like seven people
All: laughter
Cookie: It just feels so lonely
Gecko: Ya. Well Even if I update that content, I’m not sure whether or not I can fix that problem. And generally, I mean I think that Klingons are very popular as far as the IP is concerned but when it comes right down to it, the star trek online game and its no surprise that most people want to play federation. I mean this is not a game of red vs blue. This is a game of federation vs, maybe not versus but who do you want to play and there’s so much more story about federation. There’s never been a klingon movie. And so most people choose federation first.
We released our numbers in the infographic about the percentage of people playing federation vs klingon vs romulan
Cookie: at least romulans get to play, for the most part, with feds if they choose federation
Gecko: you have to look at those numbers are slightly askew because even though whatver percentage of people, like 17 or something percent were playing romulans, the same percentage of those romulans were either federation aligned or klingon aligned. So it’s really still sort of a two faction game.
Which is why though we end the war towards the end. I wonder if we do. What if we do let you be able to team up?
Cookie: ya there should be peace now.
Gecko: once you’re level 50, just team up with players. That seems like something we should be able to do pretty easily.
Cookie: that would be so nice.
Gecko: But you know same thing with City of Heroes and City of Villains. People just played heroes, not villains. At least while it was in Cryptic’s hands. I don’t know if that changed when it moved over to Paragon. As much as some people really like to play the gritty guy or the bad guy, most players want to play the quintessential hero. It’s just want tend to be more popular, even in a game like Star Trek. Everyone wants to be Kirk or Spock, or someone like one of their favorite characters. So.
There will probably always be far less people playing klingons than there are playing federation. And so you may find less people to play with. There’s always people on Qoonos so you can always make friends. Its not like you can’t make new friends and play with more people. It’s not like that’s impossible, but if you want to keep that to a small number of people then I don’t know what to tell you.
But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to update that content. My goal is to replace all our old content with really solid voiced content. We’ll get to it all.
Cookie: Well lets both go to Qoonos and we can both make some new friends together.
Gecko. My klingon is a liberated borg over there, he’s a klingon tactical liberated borg. I don’t think he’s even in a fleet though.
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