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Should new content stop and more focus be put on fixing and optimizing STO for a better experience?
salvation4
Member Posts: 1,167 Arc User
To be clear, by saying stop new content I dont mean indefinetly stop..But to focus more on fixing and optimising STO for a much better experience..That way with the content launches you can have major improvement patches keeping the player base happy with fewer complaints..
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Should new content stop and more focus be put on fixing and optimizing STO for a better experience? 57 votes
Yes (Fix and optimize with no new content for the time being till fixed)
40%
23 votes
No (Dont fix and optimize, but have new content with the current state of STO)
50%
29 votes
Maybe/Cant say
8%
5 votes
0
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New content + unstable unoptimised game = unhappy player base with lots of complaints..
New content + stable optimised game = happy player base with much fewer complaints..
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I say no, because the bug smashers are not the same people as the content developers. By your limited choices, you'd basically be telling a whole department (or more) to sit on their hands while bugs get sorted out.
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From a business perspective, it doesn't make sense to focus exclusively on one of these asects. Bug fixes and optimization provide value for customers, content provides value for the customers. How much value they present, and how much they'll cost to implement, will determine prioritization.
Aside from that, they have a team of game designers, artists and programmers - they need to actually fully utilize that team, and some will be better suited for bugfixing, while others are better for content creation.
Wasting a dev cycle to quash [as many bugs as possible] means nothing for STO long-term. Once development resumes more bugs will inevitably be added (that's what humans do) except the game will have suffered a months-long dry spell (at least) to reach that point. It may be squeaky clean (as opposed to serviceably clean from more balanced bug-bashing) but it'll have lost relevance and players in a highly competitive market. That's not a good exchange.
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And even though that should suffice, all the other stuff: people leaving due to lack of new content, different people working on such issues altogether.
Also, it seems to me we'd talked this through about a dozen times.
I do strongly feel that Cryptic need a far more proactive lead in bug fixing. There's to many in game that have been around for years that have not been addressed, They haven't cleaned up all the bugs released with AOY like the warp in/out during combat, account bank disable when calling in freighter, NPC's not always despawning after being defeated ect.
The last few patches we have had have been extremely Spartan.
Sure trying to locate and isolate bugs and fix them is tricky business but it would be nice to know that Cryptic are looking into things as quite frankly and I apologize to the Dev's in that department, I don't know how they are managed and how their time is divided up during the day, but a lot of the patches we get with the odd bug fix in does often feel more like a token effort than a real effort to fix the issues with the game.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
The devs cycle through periods of content focus and bug bashing focus. Basically, they work on stuff and once that's done there's a short gap period in which they'll do as much house cleaning as they can (within the limits of time, personnel, and economics.) That's necessary because to fix bugs dev attention is often required. A general purpose QA tester can't do much, for example, with costume clipping. You need a character artist for that.
Anyway, the patch notes through any short timescale (ex. "last few") are not indicative of how well the overall QA process is working. It just notes that what Cryptic's work (1) varies and (2) requires time to complete. Not every patch note contains new systems or content. Not every patch note contains a bug fix. We don't have a slow, unwavering trickle of any one thing. It tends to spike as Cryptic works through their tasks. We get a lot of everything with a new season, meaty patches after that, and once the pool of completing tasks runs dry we find ourselves in times like this where not a whole lot is going on. But that eventually gives way to the next full or half season, and the cycle (from our point of view) begins again.
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They have a bug fix department?
Money is a fluid thing. You can reapportion it smoothly. You could for example hire another coder with debugging experience rather than a new digital artist. Existing staff is NOT a fluid thing. You use them for what they're good at or you don't use them at all.
Now and then you HAVE to take the horse out of the stall and clean things otherwise you have a terrible mess.
Exactly. I like to suggest that the janitors fly the airplanes now and then to bring more excitement to air travel, but no one seems to agree with me. Or let the receptionists do heart surgery, what could go wrong?
You also don't seem to understand that the 5 Servers are all different beasts too! What works fine on Red-Shirt and Tribble (the test servers) may not work fine on the game servers because the total content of the programming and interactions are different than on the game servers!
Holodeck has over 140k files. Now just imagine the amount of lines of coding being in their millions!
Then there's actually fixing the bugs which requires replicating it in the first instance, then sifting through the code (and what it's interactingwith) to find where the issues lie. All this and whether the report is accurate, substantive and detailed, on top of whether the issue actual resides in the code and not in the reportee's system!
Then there's the issue with people saying, that in a game that has way more content than the extreme cast majority of AAA 'paid for games' (That's over 100 hours of Episodic Content, plus all the other in-game activities), that there is a lack of content!!!
Cryptic can't satisfy everyone. I, for one, am very satifisied with the game for the most part, including this current Balance Pass. My critisms of the game lie in the Farmville-like and entitled attitude of some players and how ship-combat is currently 'fantastical' in nature. Whilst most of the game is following on from 'canon' the current ship-based action isn't.
But just before a known big balance patch that's gonna improve pets, nerf the OP abilities and give engineers a bit more love space-wise, that's a bad timing.
Besides, bug-fixing and content are handled by different departments even if if they have to interact with the others.
2. Biased poll options.
Seriously, this topic has been covered to death, get over it.
As the man once said: "For Every Complex Problem, There Is an Answer That Is Clear, Simple, and Wrong."
That includes questions on complex problems.
I don't mean to be offensive about this, but the question gets asked about four times a year, and the answer will always be the same. It would also be nice if pigs could fly and brown cows gave chocolate milk, but those things won't happen, and the question of stopping development to fix bugs is just about as realistic. Okay, it might not be nice if pigs could fly.
So much this. MMOs can never stop producing content or they will shut down their servers. Most MMOs fluctuate between a lot of people during an Event or couple of weeks after a major content update and a few people the rest of the time. Which is why grinding like the Duty Officer system, Admiralty system, and Reputation system exists. Also, new content means new lockboxes and new C-Store ships.
If STO focuses on fixing bugs for a year, then STO players will leave in droves and Cryptic will lose out on money to run the game. The most that bug fixing advocates can get is a change in priorities. So if it is currently set at 75% content and 25% bug fixes, then Cryptic might be able to set it to 50% content and 50% bug fixes. Have no idea about the actual results, but I expect the focus on bug fixes is between 25% to 50%.
And the answer would be "yes."
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Pigs can fly. It is just in the same way that most humans fly. Although, it would be interesting to put pigs in a hang glider or rocket and see how they do.
So if they focused on bug fixing, then we wouldn't even get that.
There are different types of bugs. Bugs that are just an inconvenience, bugs that affect only a limited number of people, bugs that make certain parts of the game unplayable, and bugs that make the game unplayable.
Bugs are constantly fixed in the game and each bug is given a priority based on its difficulty and urgency. Cryptic like most other games doesn't make a choice between new content and fixing bugs. New content just means there are new bugs to fix as well. STO has been around for 7 years and while certain bugs have irritated a lot of players, it has never stopped working properly for more than a few hours or became buggy beyond belief.
If a bug makes the game unplayable for a good portion of the players to all the players, then it will be fixed right away or the bugged patch will be removed and the game restored to its previous condition. That can also happen with game-breaking exploits like the Economy is swamped with Dilithium similar to what happened in Neverwinter's Caturday. If a bug makes the game unplayable to 20 people, then it might take a few weeks or months to fix. A bug that has a hole in the map for a single mission that is extremely easy to miss might never get fixed.
I have rarely found any bugs at all (I'm playing since beta), and if I did find a bug it has never been game breaking.
So I am strongly against only fixing "bugs", I want new content frequently.