My feeling are still set on doom!
The big crystalline event over for some time and I don't see the queues popping any faster. The public channels are slow and there is more talking and spamming, than participating in something. As for the ship sales I dont plan to buy the same ships for second, or third time, while the ships that I bought a few months ago collect internet data rust in the space dock BIG NO...NO... CRYPTIC.....
You do not need to look hard to find positive comparisons. I can simply look down the list of months on the chart you provided and see that only 7 months out of the 33 months listed had a higher player average then this March - and 4 of those 7 were Expansion Pack release bumps.
Peak players includes people who login for the reward then immediately log out again. Cryptic doing back-to-back giveaways has kept the login count up.
Average players shows the number of people staying in the game. That trend is on a steady decline. March is an anomaly in the trend line, probably a result of giving away enough dilithium for people to do something.
Dec 13: 1,879.7 | Dec 14: 1,774.9 | -104.8
Jan 14: 1,999.5 | Jan 15: 1,946.1 | -53.4
Feb 14: 2,307.3 | Feb 15: 2,209.7 | -97.6
Mar 14: 1,744.7 | Mar 15: 2,060.6 | +315.9
If you mousover the weekly numbers in the chart (which are peak), the dropoff is very pronounced. March looks like a dead-cat bounce.
They can change EP but you know I kind of see the entire team as broken and he is going to depend on the same call it un-inspired performance from the same people.
The workers don't set the course. The problem is upper management. Until they develop different revenue streams, the game will continue its deathmarch. Unfortunately Cryptic bosses would make any alternative revenue streams into supplemental revenue streams, so they would not actually fix anything.
The workers don't set the course. The problem is upper management. Until they develop different revenue streams, the game will continue its deathmarch. Unfortunately Cryptic bosses would make any alternative revenue streams into supplemental revenue streams, so they would not actually fix anything.
Moneygrab > Gameplay everyday
This has been the problem for a long time with STO, narrow sighted revenue stream. Double down on store ships then lock box ships, then pack ships making them more and more ridiculously expensive every time until you hit the wall and start sliding down.
There is a crater in the wall now, and nobody has had the foresight to see it coming, unless "crafting" was supposed to be that saviour but it is so blatant in its money-grabbiness that only the most loyal will pump cash into that.
By now I'm sure a lot of the starbase money has dried up, they should have had a new system in the works well over a year ago to supplement it; ship interiors or some type of player housing seems like the most obvious missing thing in the game.
We had a period of dark times during pre-DR and DR with a whole lot of crypric hate, but now with the new executive producer (I think that is his title?) and his bringing of the Delta Recruits, Sector Space Revamp, more than usual bug fixes (at least its what it looks like to me), and the T6 iconic ships which people have been asking for since as long as I've been playing the game, the people on the forums have been less enraged with cryptic, pwe, etc.
I think the game is coming around, Im excited to see where it is headed in the next year or two.
IMO TOO PREMATURE...to call it "coming around"...the new EP has not done much except for following what D'angelo outlined. The game still suffers from lots of GRINDING going nowhere but a blackhole with a slim chance that some day you will finally get to END game.
Also the SPEC system leveling is crappy and keeps being tweaked for adjustments. Its good they keep tweaking it but ultimately perhaps better to revert back to pre DR scale of leveling.
Worst...PvP..continues deader than pre DR and still is the ugly red-head step child of Cryptic. I know most dont play PvP but its indication of something that continues broken and a measurement of how really broken and forgotten this part of the game continues to be.
My fleets continues to diminish in membership which means not many interested in playing the massive grind fest online. I really hope there are some real changes to SPEC leveling, tone down the grinding orgy and work in some ways to revamp the forgotten PvPs. You can always put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig .
Small design upgrades like the new space system might help...IMO Delta recruitment seems like another gimmick to keep players "in tune" and show the bigger bosses that "metrics are high for player participation". Im not naive to say all is "rosy and cheeky" but just cautiously will see where this goes...The real probs of the game remain to be fixed and to be continued.
The Delta Recruit rewards are cute but ultimately aren't much more than that, the updated Iconics amount to 'pay $30-35 for something you already have for one extra boff slot and a questionable trait,' and while the Sector Space thing may be a useful UI update I'd be surprised to hear anyone getting genuinely excited over it. Meanwhile the new queues are still just more gogogo DPS races, the grind is still ludicrous, and the power creep just keeps chugging along. Sounds like more of the same to me.
I am super-duper excited for it, just wish it was coming out at the same time as delta recruits so I could go through like a total fresh start to the game.
Recruit, galaxy sector space revamp and this kind of stuff is in NO WAY related to the numerous issues the players had with DR. I don't see how it makes DR better. I mean, it's nice, it's appreciated and all, but it doesn't change that DR is TRIBBLE IMO.
Do we still have level gap for 50-60 ? Yes. Is there still powergap between 50 and 60 ? yes
Do we still have an alt unfriendly spec system ? Yes. Is spec mandatory for alts ? No
Is the spec system still as xp hungry as before ? Yes, in fact, worse, since they added more to it. would it be "progression" if it was over with in 1 month ? no - is spec mandatory for playing the game? no
Are the STF still reward not enough XP for the spec ? Yes, even if it was updated slightly. would it be hellishly boring if you ran ... 50 stfs to cap spec, then back to forums complaining about no reason to do STFs? yeah
Are the patrol/DOFF still superior to anything else when it comes to earning XP for the spec ? Yes, they merely added a CD on patrols, which is a nerf. Again.. why does spec have to be something you MUST have now, instead of an progressional reward for playing the game at a reasonable pace?
Are the upgrind system still as costly ? Yes. Eh, I dont find it costly.. plenty of ways to make fast dil.
Are the upgrind system still the random stuff it was ? Yes, random quality upgrade, random mod. As opposed to just bothering wth it 1 time per item you need. Might as well just have a vendor selling everything with every possible mod then.
Are the T5-T5u obsoletes ? Many of them, and as time goes, more every day. As of today, the galaxy, neg'var (spelling?) and DD are joining the bugship and intrepid in the list of obsolete ship compared to upgraded version on the Cstore. Less powerful? yes Obsolete? In no way.
As I say, nice stuff to come. Nothing new for the TRIBBLE they made with DR. I totally expect a spec tree revamp in the years to come, but that's it.
As for why there is less whine ? Some people accepted the change. Either they still don't like it, but stopped complaining, or it doesn't bother them anymore. Some of them left (I have some names from the forum I haven't seen since DR, and they complained a lot). And I suspect many, like myself, are spending less time on this game, and play something else.
I just dont get the complaining about it.. Sounds like people just want all the new shinies with no paying, and no time Investment.. Also called insta-gratification.
In PvE, there is no real mandatory requirements.. You dont need full spectrees or mk 14 epic stuff on new T6 ships with broken traits..
Regular T5 ships equipped with mk 8-10 common to rare gear can do 99% of all content ingame. The remaining 1% PvE content is for advanced or elite players.. Hence the name
I'm cautiously optimistic, so I'll continue my Gold subscription and watch how things unfold with the Recruit event & maybe S10, if there is not a LTS sale before then. Of course, once they have my LTS cash, there is diminished financial incentive for them to keep me interested, but here's hoping... :P
Expendables Fleet: Andrew - Bajoran Fed Engineer Ken'taura - Rom/Fed Scientist Gwyllim - Human Fed Delta Tac Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
Yeah, you keep saying this over and over and over and over everywhere on the forum, but the real truth is that you really have no idea about it, neither does anyone else unless it's a Cryptic/PWE employee or an insider.
So claiming either way as a fact is simply false due to lack of real insight.
the real truth is that the time it takes ideas to get from the drawing board to the game is around 6 months, thats including previous work on their time tables, why dont you do some research first before you "claim" this and that.
edited after next post.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
It really won't be coming around until they either stop the xp grind or make the specializations an account wide system. Plus the delta recruitment is designed for you to make more alts but if you can't do much with ones you do have why would you want to make more?
Well talk for yourself, I put enough money into the game already and not putting a dime more into it. I'm sick of all the power creep, all the grind and nerfing of all that would have made all the grinding less of a hassle. I'm tired of the bugs that keep coming back and aren't fixed while a piece of cloth for a toon will get fixed. I was quite mad at having a few hundred of dollars worth of ships become obsolete overnight and having to pay yet more to get them a little better but not better than the new fancy ships. I'm sick of "new season" coming before they are ready and are riddle with bugs which get fixed when enough ppl complain about them in the forum.
All in all, I liked the game at first for the star trek feel, now it doesn't feel like star trek anymore. I hardly ever play anymore and I'm moving on to other game which give me more satisfaction and less aggravation. Will I ever come back, not the way things are going now, maybe if they stop wanting to create new expansion and really balance how things are at the moment but I'm not holding my breath and I will put my money somewhere else in the meantime.
[Terilynn] You've mentioned that some of the new material is targeted to be up on the Tribble Test Server in early May. What material might we see before then?
[dStahl] We plan to have the first half of the Romulan backstory available for a closed beta later this month, with the rest of the Romulan and Klingon additions available for testing in early May.
Then try this as well for season 8, note: i couldnt find anything earlier then this, no mention before hand but the chances are they started after the summer event that year otherwise there are several months unaccounted for. also there is no way an expansion would take just a month especially in cryptics case:
Did you play (if you were able to) the Featured Episode? I enjoyed the episode but the execution was abysmal. This was the FEATURED EPISODE, it supposed to be a big deal. This doesn't bode well.
the real truth is that the time it takes ideas to get from the drawing board to the game is around 6 months, thats including previous work on their time tables, why dont you do some research first before you "claim" this and that.
edited after next post.
I read the other reply and I'll respond on this one here for the sake of less quoting. :P
First of all - I didn't make any claims, you did. All I said was that unless either of us is an insider in Cryptic or PWE, neither of us can really claim anything.
Secondly - in your other reply you're quoting things from before and around the launch of LoR, which was the game's first and biggest expansion by far. Not even DR which is suposed to be an expansion came anywhere close in content quantity and quality as LoR. Which, as you said, makes sense to have taken at least that much.
The thing is - various projects require various times of pre-preparation, or making it from the drawing board to live server, in different companies, at different points of development and under different circumistances. That something has to be on the drawing board 6 months before release, without exclusions is not by any chance a fact. For some it's 6 months. For others 2. For something else, a year. Etc, etc.
Could it be possible that all of this we're seeing was planned and set into motion under D'Angelo? Yes, it's very possible and I'm not denying that.
Is it also possible that they swapped D'Angelo with Ricossa in order to try and save the game from the trainwreck he made for the entire timespan of his reign as EP? That's a distinct possibility as well.
So theoretically, under some circumistances, it's possible that Ricossa saw D'Angelo's plans for the following period, said "My God!" and threw them in the garbage setting a new direction that is suposed to start fixing the epic mess D'Angelo and DR left behind. Especially if you observe how 90% of stuff under D'Angelo was badly received by the playerbase and generally hurt the playing experience, while 90% of the stuff that has come under Ricossa has been well received by the playerbase and helped improve the game experience.
Those events are too diametrically oposite for me to believe them to be the product of the same mind, especially since I know D'Angelo from his first attempt as EP back in 2012. And still, I'm not claiming to know either way, just a gut feeling I have.
In conclusion, what I'm saying is that unless they work at Cryptic or PWE, noone on this forum knows if what we're seeing today are D'Angelo's leftovers or a forced new dircetion by the current EP. To claim either way without any direct evidence is just pure speculation at best.
We also don't know for how long the EP transfer has been prepared before it was announced and for how long the new EP's ideas and directions have been implemented in the game. If you remember from when D'Angelo became the EP for the second time - Stahl was nowhere to be found in STO some 4-5 moths before that. It is very possible that D'Angelo was slowly taking over the reigns before they decided it was a good time to officially announce it.
Comments
Realistically I'm expecting more like a 5/4/2 or maybe 4/4/3.
My character Tsin'xing
The big crystalline event over for some time and I don't see the queues popping any faster. The public channels are slow and there is more talking and spamming, than participating in something. As for the ship sales I dont plan to buy the same ships for second, or third time, while the ships that I bought a few months ago collect internet data rust in the space dock BIG NO...NO... CRYPTIC.....
Peak players includes people who login for the reward then immediately log out again. Cryptic doing back-to-back giveaways has kept the login count up.
Average players shows the number of people staying in the game. That trend is on a steady decline. March is an anomaly in the trend line, probably a result of giving away enough dilithium for people to do something.
Dec 13: 1,879.7 | Dec 14: 1,774.9 | -104.8
Jan 14: 1,999.5 | Jan 15: 1,946.1 | -53.4
Feb 14: 2,307.3 | Feb 15: 2,209.7 | -97.6
Mar 14: 1,744.7 | Mar 15: 2,060.6 | +315.9
If you mousover the weekly numbers in the chart (which are peak), the dropoff is very pronounced. March looks like a dead-cat bounce.
Cherry pick all you want, the trend is hostile
Moneygrab > Gameplay everyday
This has been the problem for a long time with STO, narrow sighted revenue stream. Double down on store ships then lock box ships, then pack ships making them more and more ridiculously expensive every time until you hit the wall and start sliding down.
There is a crater in the wall now, and nobody has had the foresight to see it coming, unless "crafting" was supposed to be that saviour but it is so blatant in its money-grabbiness that only the most loyal will pump cash into that.
By now I'm sure a lot of the starbase money has dried up, they should have had a new system in the works well over a year ago to supplement it; ship interiors or some type of player housing seems like the most obvious missing thing in the game.
Completed Starbase, Embassy, Mine, Spire and No Win Scenario
Nothing to do anymore.
http://dtfleet.com/
Visit our Youtube channel
IMO TOO PREMATURE...to call it "coming around"...the new EP has not done much except for following what D'angelo outlined. The game still suffers from lots of GRINDING going nowhere but a blackhole with a slim chance that some day you will finally get to END game.
Also the SPEC system leveling is crappy and keeps being tweaked for adjustments. Its good they keep tweaking it but ultimately perhaps better to revert back to pre DR scale of leveling.
Worst...PvP..continues deader than pre DR and still is the ugly red-head step child of Cryptic. I know most dont play PvP but its indication of something that continues broken and a measurement of how really broken and forgotten this part of the game continues to be.
My fleets continues to diminish in membership which means not many interested in playing the massive grind fest online. I really hope there are some real changes to SPEC leveling, tone down the grinding orgy and work in some ways to revamp the forgotten PvPs. You can always put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig
Small design upgrades like the new space system might help...IMO Delta recruitment seems like another gimmick to keep players "in tune" and show the bigger bosses that "metrics are high for player participation". Im not naive to say all is "rosy and cheeky" but just cautiously will see where this goes...The real probs of the game remain to be fixed and to be continued.
I am super-duper excited for it, just wish it was coming out at the same time as delta recruits so I could go through like a total fresh start to the game.
I just dont get the complaining about it.. Sounds like people just want all the new shinies with no paying, and no time Investment.. Also called insta-gratification.
In PvE, there is no real mandatory requirements.. You dont need full spectrees or mk 14 epic stuff on new T6 ships with broken traits..
Regular T5 ships equipped with mk 8-10 common to rare gear can do 99% of all content ingame. The remaining 1% PvE content is for advanced or elite players.. Hence the name
Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci
Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac
Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
Yeah, its the Upgrading, not the crafting that is absolutely broken....
the real truth is that the time it takes ideas to get from the drawing board to the game is around 6 months, thats including previous work on their time tables, why dont you do some research first before you "claim" this and that.
edited after next post.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Dude, quit reading my mind.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/1020370-season-7-changes-_-now-live_
"By PWE_BranFlakes Tue 20 Nov 2012 07:00:45 PM PST"
and then
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/1014130-legacy-of-romulus-dev-blog-_2
"By PWE_BranFlakes Thu 04 Apr 2013 12:00:11 PM PDT"
Then try this as well for season 8, note: i couldnt find anything earlier then this, no mention before hand but the chances are they started after the summer event that year otherwise there are several months unaccounted for. also there is no way an expansion would take just a month especially in cryptics case:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/1003440-season-8-dev-blog-_1
"By PWE_BranFlakes Thu 03 Oct 2013 12:00:31 PM PDT"
and then
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/1001900-season-8-dev-blog-_17
"By PWE_BranFlakes Tue 05 Nov 2013 12:00:23 PM PST"
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I read the other reply and I'll respond on this one here for the sake of less quoting. :P
First of all - I didn't make any claims, you did. All I said was that unless either of us is an insider in Cryptic or PWE, neither of us can really claim anything.
Secondly - in your other reply you're quoting things from before and around the launch of LoR, which was the game's first and biggest expansion by far. Not even DR which is suposed to be an expansion came anywhere close in content quantity and quality as LoR. Which, as you said, makes sense to have taken at least that much.
The thing is - various projects require various times of pre-preparation, or making it from the drawing board to live server, in different companies, at different points of development and under different circumistances. That something has to be on the drawing board 6 months before release, without exclusions is not by any chance a fact. For some it's 6 months. For others 2. For something else, a year. Etc, etc.
Could it be possible that all of this we're seeing was planned and set into motion under D'Angelo? Yes, it's very possible and I'm not denying that.
Is it also possible that they swapped D'Angelo with Ricossa in order to try and save the game from the trainwreck he made for the entire timespan of his reign as EP? That's a distinct possibility as well.
So theoretically, under some circumistances, it's possible that Ricossa saw D'Angelo's plans for the following period, said "My God!" and threw them in the garbage setting a new direction that is suposed to start fixing the epic mess D'Angelo and DR left behind. Especially if you observe how 90% of stuff under D'Angelo was badly received by the playerbase and generally hurt the playing experience, while 90% of the stuff that has come under Ricossa has been well received by the playerbase and helped improve the game experience.
Those events are too diametrically oposite for me to believe them to be the product of the same mind, especially since I know D'Angelo from his first attempt as EP back in 2012. And still, I'm not claiming to know either way, just a gut feeling I have.
In conclusion, what I'm saying is that unless they work at Cryptic or PWE, noone on this forum knows if what we're seeing today are D'Angelo's leftovers or a forced new dircetion by the current EP. To claim either way without any direct evidence is just pure speculation at best.
We also don't know for how long the EP transfer has been prepared before it was announced and for how long the new EP's ideas and directions have been implemented in the game. If you remember from when D'Angelo became the EP for the second time - Stahl was nowhere to be found in STO some 4-5 moths before that. It is very possible that D'Angelo was slowly taking over the reigns before they decided it was a good time to officially announce it.