The Choose you own mod should not come to this game
1st. of all the dpsers will calculate what the best mod is for more dps
2nd. i removes the fun of RNG
3rd. the exchange whill get heavily inflated with expensive items
1st: And your point is? This is neither a positive nor a negative. That you view it as a negative is just as "elitist" (just in a different way) than the DPS community is accused of being.
2nd: Don't you mean that it removes the annoyance of having to craft hundreds or thousands of the same item over and over and over and over trying to get the one you want?
3rd: If anything, the items that are expensive now on the Exchange would become cheaper as the market becomes extremely saturated with them.
Captain, long range sensors are picking up a massive Wall of Text headed on a collision course.
First, heres the TL;DR: We have removed a ton of items from the game, but nothing should have changed for your characters. Be on the lookout for inventory slots containing a black box that cannot be moved or deleted. Also be on the lookout for items have either incorrectly changed into a different item, or have the wrong mark level, quality, or mods. Please report any of these issues to us in this thread so that we can fix them on Tribble as quickly as we can.
And now for the Wall o Text:
As a part of the Season 10 update, weve made a very large, but hopefully invisible change to the items in your inventories. This change should arrive on Tribble sometime today. Explaining this change will require a little bit of history and a brief look into how we make items in Star Trek Online.
When Star Trek Online was first developed, we made the decision to make every permutation of every item in the game as a separate item object. For example, we made one Phaser Sniper Rifle item for every mark level, quality and mod combination that could possibly exist. If we imagine that there are 12 mark levels, 4 qualities (Common, Uncommon, Rare and Very Rare), each getting a different number of mods, and then 5 mods on top of that (Damage, Crit Chance, Crit Severity, Knockback and Damage Over Time), with Knockback and Damage Over Time only being allowed to appear once per item no matter how many mods it can have, we get
Add all of that together, and we have 624 different Phaser Sniper Rifles. But we also have 6 different damage types that all have their own Sniper Rifles, which itself is just one of 12 different types of ground weapons. In total, this adds up to 44,928 different items for Ground Weapons alone.
Theres more than just ground weapons of course, we also had to make items for all the different types of Ground Armor and Ground Shields. Then we move on to Space, where we have nearly as many Space Weapons, plus Shields, Deflectors, Engines, Warp Cores, Consoles
Its a ton of data. Fortunately, we did not have to generate all of this data by hand; we made tools that automated the process of making these items. But these tools, and the sheer number of items we had to create using them did not come without other costs. Server startup times on Star Trek Online were significantly slower than our other games, and any tool we created that had to interact with our item data was hindered by the sheer amount of data it had to process.
We knew this was a problem, but it was a problem we lived with for four years, until we started talking about increasing the level cap for Delta Rising. We were facing the prospect of adding two new mark levels of equipment on top of what we already have, which would cause an even further increase in the number of items we have. Additionally, we wanted to rework crafting and create a new item upgrade system. Both of those tasks were going to be very difficult to accomplish with our current method of making items.
We decided to invest the necessary time to make a new item system to help accomplish all of the above tasks. We took a very hard look at how we were creating items, and built a new set of parameterized Dynamic Items that could accomplish the same goals as our old automated item creation tools. The idea was that instead of needing 624 different Phaser Sniper Rifles, we could create just one Phaser Sniper Rifle that has a set of rules that tell us things like how many and what mods it gets based on quality, and how powerful it is based on its mark level. The quality, mark level and mods on the item would no longer be stored on the items we created as developers, but would instead be stored in the database on the server.
With these new Dynamic Items, adding in Mark 13 and Mark 14 was easy. Upgrading an item from Mark 10 to Mark 11 was as simple as adding 1 to the mark level of that item in the database. Similarly, the new crafting system could now very easily vary the mark level, quality and mods of any items being created.
This was great! We accomplished our main goal of making our Crafting and Upgrade systems possible to develop, while also enabling us to easily add higher mark levels and qualities with relative ease compared to how we had to do it before. But that still left us with two big problems: First, all of the items in your inventories were from the old system, and would not work in the new Crafting and Upgrade systems. Second, we still had hundreds of thousands of items choking our servers load times and slowing down development of the game.
These two problems, as it turned out, were interconnected. We needed to allow you to upgrade any item you wanted to, whether it was one of the new Dynamic Items or not, but we also wanted to remove all of the old items from the game now that they are no longer needed. To facilitate this, we created a conversion system.
When you attempt to upgrade an item, if it is not already a Dynamic Item, we try to transform it into one. Once the item is transformed into a Dynamic Item, it can be upgraded as normal. If the conversion is successful, none of the stats on the item will have changed. The only indication that anything has changed at all, in fact, is a subtle change in the items icon.
For the most part, this system already works well. The vast majority of items in the game can be converted and upgraded successfully. Those items that do not convert successfully can usually be fixed with a simple repair operation, and we can then update the conversion process to account for any mistakes we made.
Weve been using this conversion system ever since the Crafting and Upgrade system launched more than half a year ago, and it is finally time to take the next step. The change we are pushing to Tribble today will remove over 160,000 items from our data, and will add automated conversion to the new Dynamic Items for any data that we deleted.
What this means for you is that the games overall size will be a few hundred megabytes smaller than it would have been without this change, and loading times should be slightly faster. What this means for us is that development will be faster and easier, and we can that much more rapidly and efficiently bring you more content.
However, there is the chance that we missed something important in our item conversion process. If we did miss something, it would manifest in one of two ways: Either the item will appear as a black box in your inventory that cannot be moved or deleted, or the item will either be incorrect as a whole, or will have incorrect quality, mark level or mods. If you see any of those problems on Tribble, please let us know immediately in this thread.
We want to make sure that once Season 10 arrives on Holodeck that all of your items are exactly as you left them. Weve done a substantial amount of testing to try to make sure we didnt miss anything. However, the sheer amount of data makes it physically impossible for us to test every single item we deleted, which is why were asking for your help and understanding. We have done our best to make this change as seamless as possible, but we want to be as certain as we can be that we did this right.
And if you lasted this long into the post, thank you for reading my massive Wall o' Text! Let me know if you have any questions, I'll do my best to address any concerns.
Will the script be able to handles some of the strange things like different versions of the same items. For example I have the very original Shar of Impossibilities and it shows to be a Very Rare Item but I have seen others folks with newer versions that are EPIC Items. This is just one example of several items I have that are like this where they changed at some point but the exisiting ones that people had did not.
I'm curious if this will break legacy kits (pre-S9 crafting ones, Borg kit, etc) - as well as other non-upgradeable items. Still using alot of these on some characters.
just copied all my toons over to tribble to see if something got messed up. here are my findings:
- klink alt, checked ship loadout and inventory: everything's there !
- rom alt, checked ship loadout and inventory: everything's there !
- fed sci alt, checked ship loadout and inventory: everything's there !
- main toon (fed tac), checked everything that toon holds. all ship loadouts (in terms of gear), every single boffs' equipment, inventory and bank: everythings there.
on some ships gear is not showing if that ship is not readied, but when choosing it every piece of equipment shows up where it should.
oberservations: heavy crescent wave cannon (elachi silent enemy set, lobi-items) still not got an additional mod after upgrade from rare to very rare. afaik it's the same with the torpedo, so probably also with the console . plz look into it, may even before next major update.
My issue is really with the visuals. It might to seem very relevant over all but to some/many it is.
For instance there are 3 versions of plasma weapons.
1) The (to me) ugly and muddy/blurry, low res generic ones that I would never use.
2) The nice Romulan Rep versions.
3) The Super Nice Looking Dilithium Vendor Romulan weapons that me an all my BOs use.
If my #3's turn into #1s then I will be incredibly upset and would likely take it to social media, create sigs and try and promote unrest at every opportunity. If they turned into #2s I would bear a grudge and complain for some time.
Would it be possible to allow a visual option in the upgrade window?
Now for what its worth, all my weapons look fine on Tribble and I have no issues but I'm pretty sure that some people are going to have issues with some of them.
Your original post explains why the Exchange became a two tiered system. The Exchange was coded to handle the old items, but you haven't updated it to handle the new ones. Right now ALL crafted gear ends up being filtered under Lieutenant regardless of mark. I hope this behavior is being fixed as part of this update.
Finally decided to make a sig.
I see allot of them with a character, and ship.
though I'm not sure which ship to put on there...
I'll think about it. This will do for now.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The Choose you own mod should not come to this game
1st. of all the dpsers will calculate what the best mod is for more dps
2nd. i removes the fun of RNG
3rd. the exchange whill get heavily inflated with expensive items
I'm not sure about #1 and #3, but respectfully disagree with you on #2. In support of my argument, I direct your attention to this thread.
Very informative post, transparent and useful Btw nice change, this should lighten the datas exchange between sto clients and server and the client itself i guess :cool:
Some of those have been fixed internally. I know QA has had their eye on that list, because they've sent me several bugs from that.
A few additions for you: Last I checked the pre-rep [Borg] weapons didn't work right(the ground ones just don't upgrade, the space ones lose [Borg]). Personal mobility shields lose their Mobility function when upgraded. the 2014-15 nanopulse batleth can't be upgraded. the older ones can.
While you're at it, can you rebalance item mods? There was a dev who said he was gonna work on it (in particular, making it so [Dmg] isn't completely terrible) but he's since left the company.
Since this should, in theory, just involve tweaking some numbers on the mods themselves, rather than editing everything that has a mod on it, hopefully it wouldn't be too difficult.
I really hope this addresses the issue of the Chroniton Dual Beam Bank not gaining a mod or DPS improvement when upgrading from rare to very rare at MK IVX... :rolleyes:
Very informative post, OP. And thank you for continuing the trend of more of the Dev Team appearing and posting here on the "Official" forums. Much appreciated.
I have gotten into the habit of running the Force Verify option in the Launcher about once a month. It has seemed to prevent some of the more common problems posted about here, As well as appearing to make my game and my connection run smoother. I still get lag and rubberbanding, but they are reduced in frequency, duration, and severity. I check Force Verify before heading off to work and when I return I am good to go. A couple of questions follow.
- Will using the Force Verify option in the Launcher window catch the changes you are planning on implementing without my having to actively intervene on some of my older items?
- Should I be careful about using old items which are/were unique? Such as the items available in certain boxed editions of the game or coming from versions of the game purchased online from certain retailers?
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
What is this going to do to Mark 'infinity' items? Will it convert all of them to XII as a previous poster experienced or will they be converted to a level appropriate mark? What about those few items that are fused into a ship's weapon slot? We can't take those out to upgrade them, what happens then?
Overall I think this change will be a good things but, as the saying goes, the Devil is in the details.
What is this going to do to Mark 'infinity' items? Will it convert all of them to XII as a previous poster experienced or will they be converted to a level appropriate mark? What about those few items that are fused into a ship's weapon slot? We can't take those out to upgrade them, what happens then?
Overall I think this change will be a good things but, as the saying goes, the Devil is in the details.
I now wonder about personal mobility shields. In the present system those break when upgraded and revert to a standard shield. will this update eradicate them from the game for good?
What is this going to do to Mark 'infinity' items? Will it convert all of them to XII as a previous poster experienced or will they be converted to a level appropriate mark?
I copied a character who still had some Mk infinity gear over and it's still Mk infinity until slotted in the upgrade system.
So far I haven't had a single piece of equipment with issues, including oddballs like those Mk X anti-Borg weapons from Defera, but I haven't tried out everything that couldn't be upgraded on holodeck.
I now wonder about personal mobility shields. In the present system those break when upgraded and revert to a standard shield. will this update eradicate them from the game for good?
I haven't gotten the assignment for one since this was announced. It's a conspiracy.
...and I just now realized I didn't even consider the obvious solution of buying one from the exchange. Tinfoil hat must've been on too tight.
I copied a character who still had some Mk infinity gear over and it's still Mk infinity until slotted in the upgrade system.
So far I haven't had a single piece of equipment with issues, including oddballs like those Mk X anti-Borg weapons from Defera, but I haven't tried out everything that couldn't be upgraded on holodeck.
I haven't gotten the assignment for one since this was announced. It's a conspiracy.
...and I just now realized I didn't even consider the obvious solution of buying one from the exchange. Tinfoil hat must've been on too tight.
Check personal constantly. That's where it spawns. It's availability might change based on map, not sure, some personal missions only spawn if you're at a certain map.
I can confirm that the Personal Mobility Shield has the same issue on Tribble as it does on Holodeck. I got the assignment for one today, waited for it to complete, copied the character over to Tribble with the shield in her inventory. It was still a Personal Mobility Shield until I tried to upgrade it, then it changed to a standard Personal Shield.
(Getting the assignment after my last post...heh.)
I just noticed today that the Omega Rep Personal shield I had in my bank, turned into a Klingon Honor Guard personal shield,... is that the kind of thing you mean? LOL.
"Go play with your DPS in the corner, I don't care how big it is." ~ Me "There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
Just stumbled across this thread. Pleasantly surprised and welcome the dev communication.
Still daunted by the prospect but as long as we can fix/reclaim lost or incorrect items then fingers crossed and hope it works out. Understand if there are 'some' discrepancies just hope it's not a clusterf**k.
Thanks for the detailed explanation devs, I really appreciate it.
For those asking about various attributes, here's a simple way I could imagine they are stored now (techie detail):
struct Item
{
ItemType type; // eg: ground weapon, armor, shield, kit
ItemClass subType; // eg: plasma vs tetryon weapon, shield type (covariant vs resilient), specific kit module
int markLevel;
int techPoints;
int rarityPercent; // This might be calculated
Flags itemMods; // could be bit flags, or higher level representation
}
Where ItemType probably contains detailed item type specific information, such as base weapon DPS, base shield capacity, etc..
and ItemClass might contain a list of effects common to that item, such as +HP for medical tricorder kit.
Of course I probably left out stuff, and I could be completely wrong, but that's where I'd start if I wanted a more dynamic system.
Simply put: the new system, such as I outlined above, can store all the information currently needed for an item, and can be easily extended for more stuff.
Want to add a new mod? Just add a new Flags entry, and wire it into the RNG if needed.
TBH, I'm surprised this wasn't done from the beginning, as it seems to obvious now. However you live and learn.
Data migration is always a pain, but I'm glad they have this new system.
I did notice that icon change before, the MK numbers are a little more crisp in the dynamic version.
EDIT: Does this mean the [Borg] weapons will eventually be fixed finally? I would love for them to get added to the Omega rep store. We have ship weapons for all the other reps.
I would like to add to my very small complement of existing Borg weapons. :-)
Comments
1st: And your point is? This is neither a positive nor a negative. That you view it as a negative is just as "elitist" (just in a different way) than the DPS community is accused of being.
2nd: Don't you mean that it removes the annoyance of having to craft hundreds or thousands of the same item over and over and over and over trying to get the one you want?
3rd: If anything, the items that are expensive now on the Exchange would become cheaper as the market becomes extremely saturated with them.
Will the script be able to handles some of the strange things like different versions of the same items. For example I have the very original Shar of Impossibilities and it shows to be a Very Rare Item but I have seen others folks with newer versions that are EPIC Items. This is just one example of several items I have that are like this where they changed at some point but the exisiting ones that people had did not.
Just wanted to say a big "Thank You!" for taking the time to thoroughly explain what's going on in the game....
It's always cool to get an under the hood level look at what some of these changes involve and how they help.
I'll definitely have to copy my char over and do a quick inventory check prior to Season 10
Captain Ariel Trueheart Department of Temporal Investigations
U.S.S. Valkyrie - NCC 991701
=/\= ================================= =/\=
All in all though, sounds great.
- klink alt, checked ship loadout and inventory: everything's there
- rom alt, checked ship loadout and inventory: everything's there
- fed sci alt, checked ship loadout and inventory: everything's there
- main toon (fed tac), checked everything that toon holds. all ship loadouts (in terms of gear), every single boffs' equipment, inventory and bank: everythings there.
on some ships gear is not showing if that ship is not readied, but when choosing it every piece of equipment shows up where it should.
oberservations: heavy crescent wave cannon (elachi silent enemy set, lobi-items) still not got an additional mod after upgrade from rare to very rare. afaik it's the same with the torpedo, so probably also with the console
so far seems to work as it should, nice work!
For instance there are 3 versions of plasma weapons.
1) The (to me) ugly and muddy/blurry, low res generic ones that I would never use.
2) The nice Romulan Rep versions.
3) The Super Nice Looking Dilithium Vendor Romulan weapons that me an all my BOs use.
If my #3's turn into #1s then I will be incredibly upset and would likely take it to social media, create sigs and try and promote unrest at every opportunity. If they turned into #2s I would bear a grudge and complain for some time.
Would it be possible to allow a visual option in the upgrade window?
Now for what its worth, all my weapons look fine on Tribble and I have no issues but I'm pretty sure that some people are going to have issues with some of them.
Your original post explains why the Exchange became a two tiered system. The Exchange was coded to handle the old items, but you haven't updated it to handle the new ones. Right now ALL crafted gear ends up being filtered under Lieutenant regardless of mark. I hope this behavior is being fixed as part of this update.
But are actually Mark XI. So... will they be turned into Mark XI items? or will I lose my old Mark XI Caustic Plasma Beams?
See image of what I am talking about in link.
http://s14.postimg.org/8gu3zd2ip/says_1_thing_2.jpg
I see allot of them with a character, and ship.
though I'm not sure which ship to put on there...
I'll think about it. This will do for now.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
My character Tsin'xing
You are going to destroy everything that we own in-game. :eek:
And replace it with absolutely identical replacement gear. :cool:
And no one will be able to tell the difference?
Sounds great! Thanks for the warning about the potential malfunction, that is appreciated.
Since this should, in theory, just involve tweaking some numbers on the mods themselves, rather than editing everything that has a mod on it, hopefully it wouldn't be too difficult.
My character Tsin'xing
I have gotten into the habit of running the Force Verify option in the Launcher about once a month. It has seemed to prevent some of the more common problems posted about here, As well as appearing to make my game and my connection run smoother. I still get lag and rubberbanding, but they are reduced in frequency, duration, and severity. I check Force Verify before heading off to work and when I return I am good to go. A couple of questions follow.
- Will using the Force Verify option in the Launcher window catch the changes you are planning on implementing without my having to actively intervene on some of my older items?
- Should I be careful about using old items which are/were unique? Such as the items available in certain boxed editions of the game or coming from versions of the game purchased online from certain retailers?
i was planning on an updated copy of my character soon though. hopefully, this change is golden.
Overall I think this change will be a good things but, as the saying goes, the Devil is in the details.
There are several of those "black boxes" in the 7th and 8th slot of our fleet bank. About 9 only in one slot. We are the "Diplomatic Solutions Beta"
If you could remove or fix them, one thousand thanks in advance.
My character Tsin'xing
I copied a character who still had some Mk infinity gear over and it's still Mk infinity until slotted in the upgrade system.
So far I haven't had a single piece of equipment with issues, including oddballs like those Mk X anti-Borg weapons from Defera, but I haven't tried out everything that couldn't be upgraded on holodeck.
I haven't gotten the assignment for one since this was announced. It's a conspiracy.
...and I just now realized I didn't even consider the obvious solution of buying one from the exchange. Tinfoil hat must've been on too tight.
My character Tsin'xing
(Getting the assignment after my last post...heh.)
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
Still daunted by the prospect but as long as we can fix/reclaim lost or incorrect items then fingers crossed and hope it works out. Understand if there are 'some' discrepancies just hope it's not a clusterf**k.
For those asking about various attributes, here's a simple way I could imagine they are stored now (techie detail):
struct Item
{
ItemType type; // eg: ground weapon, armor, shield, kit
ItemClass subType; // eg: plasma vs tetryon weapon, shield type (covariant vs resilient), specific kit module
int markLevel;
int techPoints;
int rarityPercent; // This might be calculated
Flags itemMods; // could be bit flags, or higher level representation
}
Where ItemType probably contains detailed item type specific information, such as base weapon DPS, base shield capacity, etc..
and ItemClass might contain a list of effects common to that item, such as +HP for medical tricorder kit.
Of course I probably left out stuff, and I could be completely wrong, but that's where I'd start if I wanted a more dynamic system.
Simply put: the new system, such as I outlined above, can store all the information currently needed for an item, and can be easily extended for more stuff.
Want to add a new mod? Just add a new Flags entry, and wire it into the RNG if needed.
TBH, I'm surprised this wasn't done from the beginning, as it seems to obvious now. However you live and learn.
Data migration is always a pain, but I'm glad they have this new system.
I did notice that icon change before, the MK numbers are a little more crisp in the dynamic version.
EDIT: Does this mean the [Borg] weapons will eventually be fixed finally? I would love for them to get added to the Omega rep store. We have ship weapons for all the other reps.
I would like to add to my very small complement of existing Borg weapons. :-)