Going to consoles is a leap of faith in the hope of more profits.
Given the track record for bugs and other issues being even considered for fixing, let alone trying to fix, it's going to go horribly wrong.
No-one has said this is a Klingon only game, however they made KDF a playable faction, they need to at least pretend to do something for them, not just abandon it and the same goes doubly for the Romulans.
Especially as they did an entire expansion to create the Romulans as a playable faction, so why ignore potential profits by abandoning it?
Because someone with clout has gone to a lot of time and effort to not only block any attempt to keep faction balance and uniqueness but utterly remove and destroy said faction uniqueness and balance, you wait and they will find some way of giving the Feds battle-cloaks and singularity powers or something so similar it'll be an obvious copy.
So what if everyone is one big happy family in the 31st century, this game is set in the 25th, so the constant push to merge everything is about 600 years too early, not to mention it is getting really tiresome.
You want a big happy family Star Trek game, go make it and set in the 31st century, I for one won't touch it.
sqwished is piling on 5 years of history to support the claim. Look at 5 years of any MMO and you'll find a similar number of bugs, flaws and missteps. The questions to me are a) do they learn anything from them? b) do they fix any of them? c) do they get other things right and most important of all, by far: b) is the game fun to play?
I think management and the devs do learn and do fix things.
The new R&D is better than the old R&D and it has been improved a bit since launch.
They fixed the Delta scaling issues, and added a couple of different new ways to add spec points (featured episodes, Admiralty).
The boff skills revamp was a great quality of life improvement, from being able to train any boff to being able to switch skills on the fly with no need to re-train.
and more.
Thanks for your candid response, so please let me be as equally as candid in return.
I don't think they do learn from their mistakes unless it costs Cryptic money, other wise we'd see a reduction in the number of bugs that get ported to Holodeck, which we aren't. All they've managed to do is minimize the number of times of server blows a gasket and crashes. As for fixing things, well all I can say if you saw the bug lists that I've have and just how many simple issue's such as spelling mistakes have gone uncorrected as of yet, and some of them have been logged by the OST since it's inception and are still outstanding. This being one of the reasons @tarastheslayer was walked away from the game for a while. I can't say any more without breaching the NDA we have.
The Delta scaling issue's should never have even made it to Holodeck in the first place. It was Cryptic's inability or unwillingness to act with any reasonable speed to solve this issue, and I believe they had several weeks to do so. The R&D system as it is now is unfinished, we still can't upgrade our ground gear. But in a recent pod cast, Geko I believe it was did state that they would be looking to revisit the crafting system in the near future, but I'll agree with you that current system as it is, is way better than that PoS we used to have. Add to the fact that they're porting certain items from the Lobi store over into the R&D system shortly is another step in the right direction. As for adding the additional ways to gain XP, how do we know this was their intention all along, or was it merely done to calm the masses? Also why have they not fix the duplicated epic quality admiralty cards by know?
One thing they did really well was the bridge officer skill revamp, I'll give them that one. That particular improvement meant I personally went from requiring 30 some odd boff's to crew my various ships and build layouts, so being able to use about a dozen at most. But throw into the mix the horrible job they did of the duty officer UI and I quote "It looks like something fisher price would make for toddlers". And they created that monstrosity under the pretense that the original UI was difficult to understand!
But one thing I understand all to well, is with any complex system there will inevitably be bugs and glitches with the system, Hopefully if the rumor I heard was correct, Cryptic are almost done replacing the original coding they inherited from Atari. So I can only hope that if correct and once it's completed, bug fixes will start rolling out at a much faster rate. But the Dev's, and Geko in particular should be walking a neutral line through all of this, not going on public record stating that he hates the Klingons and as such hates making content for them. More so I've yet to hear him admit that he's ever made a mistake and that they're trying to correct it. I could just imagine what would happen if the Dev's of Eternal Crusade turned around and said oh yeah we don't like the orcs, so you know what we're not going to bother working them into the game. Or turning around as saying ok we put the Eldar in game, but we're not going to make content for them.
Sure, if this was Klingon Academy Online. But it's not. And it's making enough of a profit to justify moving to X1 and PS4 so from a business standpoint Gecko is apparently good for the game.
Going to consoles isn't a measure of success otherwise world of warcraft would be on them. WoW managed to keep both factions semi healthy and kept its subscription model.
How much of what WoW releases is faction-specific still, though?
It seems most games do eventually wander in a focus on faction-agnostic stuff. And a lot of stuff it doesn't really matter - if TOR releases a new armor, it can be used by pretty much any character. But ships in STO? If it's not from outside the playable factions in the first place, it must be "typed" to that faction. It must match is visuals design ethics, its special mechanics.
The TOS pack basically is the first to include faction-agnostic C-Store ships. But I don't think that this is what people really want, at last not all the time.
And when the game was designed and released as a subscription game, there wasn't yet a concept of buying or purchasing ships being a major part of the income model for this game. It was supposed to be financed by the subscription, and some Cryptic Official even claimed micro-transactions were a bad idea. (He might be correct on that still - I don't find 20-30 $ for a space ship a "micro" transaction.)
I think if Cryptic were to tasked making a new Star Trek game they would try to go for multi-faction at all. At best in the form of alternate starting areas (probably in form of expansions, RR and TOS style). Probably with a shared ship pool, so that people that only ever make one character might still be tempted to buy a Bird of Prey (maybe that would require a lockbox win).
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I don't think they do learn from their mistakes unless it costs Cryptic money, other wise we'd see a reduction in the number of bugs that get ported to Holodeck, which we aren't.
I work as a software developer, so I guess I'm just used to some bugs staying in the bugbase for years on end. We only have so much time to get the next release ready for QA. Once it goes to QA we only have so much time to fix whatever they find. Things get pushed off to the next release, things get pushed down in the priority by things that matter more.
So yes, Cryptic management no doubt tells the developers to fix things that cost them money first and fix them fast. Then work on things that will make money and things that have been publicly announced. Then things that will make the most players happy. Way down on the list is the KDF and Romulans since fixing a bug for them has less impact than fixing a bug for feds.
Edit: case in point, for the three tickets I worked on today: one was created this week, one was 14 months old, one was 19 months old.
Answers
Given the track record for bugs and other issues being even considered for fixing, let alone trying to fix, it's going to go horribly wrong.
No-one has said this is a Klingon only game, however they made KDF a playable faction, they need to at least pretend to do something for them, not just abandon it and the same goes doubly for the Romulans.
Especially as they did an entire expansion to create the Romulans as a playable faction, so why ignore potential profits by abandoning it?
Because someone with clout has gone to a lot of time and effort to not only block any attempt to keep faction balance and uniqueness but utterly remove and destroy said faction uniqueness and balance, you wait and they will find some way of giving the Feds battle-cloaks and singularity powers or something so similar it'll be an obvious copy.
So what if everyone is one big happy family in the 31st century, this game is set in the 25th, so the constant push to merge everything is about 600 years too early, not to mention it is getting really tiresome.
You want a big happy family Star Trek game, go make it and set in the 31st century, I for one won't touch it.
Neither is it Starfleet Academy Online.
Thanks for your candid response, so please let me be as equally as candid in return.
I don't think they do learn from their mistakes unless it costs Cryptic money, other wise we'd see a reduction in the number of bugs that get ported to Holodeck, which we aren't. All they've managed to do is minimize the number of times of server blows a gasket and crashes. As for fixing things, well all I can say if you saw the bug lists that I've have and just how many simple issue's such as spelling mistakes have gone uncorrected as of yet, and some of them have been logged by the OST since it's inception and are still outstanding. This being one of the reasons @tarastheslayer was walked away from the game for a while. I can't say any more without breaching the NDA we have.
The Delta scaling issue's should never have even made it to Holodeck in the first place. It was Cryptic's inability or unwillingness to act with any reasonable speed to solve this issue, and I believe they had several weeks to do so. The R&D system as it is now is unfinished, we still can't upgrade our ground gear. But in a recent pod cast, Geko I believe it was did state that they would be looking to revisit the crafting system in the near future, but I'll agree with you that current system as it is, is way better than that PoS we used to have. Add to the fact that they're porting certain items from the Lobi store over into the R&D system shortly is another step in the right direction. As for adding the additional ways to gain XP, how do we know this was their intention all along, or was it merely done to calm the masses? Also why have they not fix the duplicated epic quality admiralty cards by know?
One thing they did really well was the bridge officer skill revamp, I'll give them that one. That particular improvement meant I personally went from requiring 30 some odd boff's to crew my various ships and build layouts, so being able to use about a dozen at most. But throw into the mix the horrible job they did of the duty officer UI and I quote "It looks like something fisher price would make for toddlers". And they created that monstrosity under the pretense that the original UI was difficult to understand!
But one thing I understand all to well, is with any complex system there will inevitably be bugs and glitches with the system, Hopefully if the rumor I heard was correct, Cryptic are almost done replacing the original coding they inherited from Atari. So I can only hope that if correct and once it's completed, bug fixes will start rolling out at a much faster rate. But the Dev's, and Geko in particular should be walking a neutral line through all of this, not going on public record stating that he hates the Klingons and as such hates making content for them. More so I've yet to hear him admit that he's ever made a mistake and that they're trying to correct it. I could just imagine what would happen if the Dev's of Eternal Crusade turned around and said oh yeah we don't like the orcs, so you know what we're not going to bother working them into the game. Or turning around as saying ok we put the Eldar in game, but we're not going to make content for them.
How much of what WoW releases is faction-specific still, though?
It seems most games do eventually wander in a focus on faction-agnostic stuff. And a lot of stuff it doesn't really matter - if TOR releases a new armor, it can be used by pretty much any character. But ships in STO? If it's not from outside the playable factions in the first place, it must be "typed" to that faction. It must match is visuals design ethics, its special mechanics.
The TOS pack basically is the first to include faction-agnostic C-Store ships. But I don't think that this is what people really want, at last not all the time.
And when the game was designed and released as a subscription game, there wasn't yet a concept of buying or purchasing ships being a major part of the income model for this game. It was supposed to be financed by the subscription, and some Cryptic Official even claimed micro-transactions were a bad idea. (He might be correct on that still - I don't find 20-30 $ for a space ship a "micro" transaction.)
I think if Cryptic were to tasked making a new Star Trek game they would try to go for multi-faction at all. At best in the form of alternate starting areas (probably in form of expansions, RR and TOS style). Probably with a shared ship pool, so that people that only ever make one character might still be tempted to buy a Bird of Prey (maybe that would require a lockbox win).
I work as a software developer, so I guess I'm just used to some bugs staying in the bugbase for years on end. We only have so much time to get the next release ready for QA. Once it goes to QA we only have so much time to fix whatever they find. Things get pushed off to the next release, things get pushed down in the priority by things that matter more.
So yes, Cryptic management no doubt tells the developers to fix things that cost them money first and fix them fast. Then work on things that will make money and things that have been publicly announced. Then things that will make the most players happy. Way down on the list is the KDF and Romulans since fixing a bug for them has less impact than fixing a bug for feds.
Edit: case in point, for the three tickets I worked on today: one was created this week, one was 14 months old, one was 19 months old.