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C-Store disabled, no specialization giveaway
devencombs
Member Posts: 225 Arc User
I tried to claim the specialization point giveaway last night but the C-Store was disabled. In fact, from my end anyway, it was disabled the whole time. Now it looks as though the deadline has passed. Has anyone else had this problem?
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Forgive my ignorance if this was announced some time ago. Because of college classes I haven't had much time to play STO. But why is it going away. That just isn't fair.
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
Was announced in February - see here and here.
Basically, the official client is not being supported any more, but STO will still work on Macs via WINE.
WINE actually stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator"...
I've have tried Wine in the past, but it's really choppy. And working with Bootcamp is a hassle. WTF is the problem with keeping the Mac client? This is BS!!
Essentially the official client was buggy as hell and they eventually decided that they didn't have the time or staff to support it properly.
And there are a KLUDGELOAD of ways to get STO to run on a mac without using the official client (which was really just a wrapper placed around the PC version anyway!!) - take a look through the threads I linked above.
(Is bootcamp a hassle nowadays? It seemed really simple back when I used it with WinXP in 2009-2011. Unless you're just talking about having to boot into Windows when you want to run a PC program. /shrug)
All Crew got fired in s11.5
(Hull Repair is constant now...)
Seriously though, the MAC userbase in STO is tiny compared to the PC userbase. It was an economic decision (although obviously not a popular or welcome one!) to axe the buggy official MAC client - they simply don't have the spare money or manpower to dedicate a large amount of Support Staff to something that isn't central to the game. To "Hire more crew", they'd need more ongoing income than they would reclaim from happier MAC users.
Sorry but that is the cold hard truth.
What's not rocket science is they would do that IF there was enough exclusively Mac users to make the expense worthwhile.
You're in a group that's too small to command that kind of overhead.
Pure coincidence as the MAC Client would have no bearing on the performance of the Windows Client unless of course you had a shed load of MAC users logged into the game, adding additional numbers using the server everyone from here to Neverwinter uses.
"You might have felt a great disturbance in the Server, as if hundreds if not thousands of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. By the discontinuation of the MAC Client"
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
I don't know if you understand that the more people they hire, the more that they have to pay those people, which might mean more money that will be required to pay for the game to continue producing content.
Since Cryptic owns the game and whatever clients its using, they have the right to shut something down if it's not meeting their standards of quality. I remember that for a while the Mac client had a lot of problems with people not being able to play the game for periods of time. Since you play occasionally, you might have played when there were no problems with the client or maybe weren't affected by the problems. Not everyone was as lucky who were playing on a mac.
Why would they assign more help when even you won't spend money on it?
As for the "That's not fair!" cries.....grow up, please. It's certainly not unfair.
It makes all kinds of sense for them to axe the Mac client.
It does and it doesn't, but mostly does for a F2P.
First off, let's face the facts here--the Mac client was subpar and that was me being nice about it. It was literally the Windows client wrapped up in a Cider/WINE layer and called an "official Mac client."
It was really an elegant solution for the time...in March 2014. Macs were on 10.9 Mavericks (10.10 didn't come out until October 2014, after the Mac client's release) and Windows were on Win 8 but everyone hated it and stayed on Win 7 or even XP. Since then, we've had two major MacOS releases that had the potential of making STO a living nightmare and the client is sometimes only held together by duct tape and super glue to begin with!
Could they have made a native Mac client instead of a WINE wrapper? Maybe. Again, duct tape and super glue are sometimes the only things holding together the Windows client! At the very least, you know what you're working with on the Mac platform because Apple keeps hardware tightly locked. However, you have to deal with the holy terror of OpenGL and LET ME TELL YOU THAT OPENGL FOR MAC SUCKS! There is a tremendous overhead cost when coding for OpenGL on the Mac.
Now with 10.11 there is the Metal framework and that can bring a lot of game developers over. It brings a huge performance boost if your Mac was made since 2012 (or a 2008+ Mac Pro with the right graphics card). For Windows only users, think of Metal as the Mac's version of DirectX. It's made to strip down the quite taxing overhead of OpenGL. However, you still have to hire someone, and probably several someones, pay them money, and give them enough duct tape to take the Windows version and 100% recode it for the Mac.
There is always WINE layers like CrossOver and PlayOnMac, which I and a few other posters outlined here: http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1211833/how-to-continue-playing-star-trek-online-on-your-mac
If there are posts here that do not appeal to you, or opinions you disagree with, the best way to deal with that is to resist the urge to add comments. Instead, engage with the content you like! Don't feed the trolls!