The only solution I can think of is they could create a separate server which is just for the Foundry. It would be rolled back to whatever code was running when the Foundry was last fully functional, and it would be left in that state. No Zen store, no new missions, nothing. Maybe add a next button to allow us to see more than the top 50 missions. Other than that, no further investment in the Foundry, but all of the work remains preserved.
That is my best idea of how to meet Cryptic's need to stop investing in the Foundry, while still preserving it. However, I am doubtful this idea will be considered viable.
They maintained the Foundry as best they could until every possible option was explored, then made a final decision. That's my take, at least.
No they didn't. Let's at least be honest.
Instead of actually maintaining the Foundry as they should (i.e. with its own team dedicated to the task and keeping the code up to date) they decided the investment wasn't worth it and kicked the can down the road for years by doing stop-gap patches (far less than a best effort) until they decided to end even that.
It's not enough to look only at the decision before us today, we should consider the decisions made over the last few years that resulted in the current state. This stuff doesn't just happen over night, it took years for Cryptic to make this mistake.
I have to agree with this. The Foundry was on life support almost from the start. It never got the investment it needed. It was rushed out to get it ready for NWN and it never really was brought up to a fully functional state. It was always patched together, even when it worked.
Saying Cryptic did everything they could is ridiculous. Maybe there were business pressures, etc. I'm sure that no one had nefarious intentions toward the Foundry, but in the end it never really was developed to the extent it could have been.
Maybe there were business pressures, etc. I'm sure that no one had nefarious intentions toward the Foundry, but in the end it never really was developed to the extent it could have been.
I wouldn't say nefarious, there is no evidence of that. Incompetence, perhaps.
The business case for how we got here seems plain to me.
The Foundry was conceived as a method of adding low cost content to the game while increasing the sense of player ownership, interest and good will. Costs of code maintenance would originally be covered by the subscription model STO had at launch assuming that enough interest and good will was generated by this and the game as a whole to result in a large enough player base.
The concepts of interest, customer ownership and good will have actual value in the business world. You will see them even given a dollar amount on some balance sheets although they are very hard to measure and typically only come into play when a company is brought out. Most of the time they are undefined 'soft dollars'. But despite their vague valuation, these factors make up the baseline that marketing elements work from and hope to improve.
That original model changed when STO switched to F2P instead of subscription and elements of the game were monetized. Lacking a method of monetizing the Foundry meant that the Foundry itself no longer had a directly and easily measured funding source. It could only be justified on the merits of those hard to define soft dollar factors.
Cryptic decided that whatever the value of these factors were- it did not justify maintaining the Foundry code with the cost of its own team- and thus the team was let go. They were judged important enough to justify stop-gap patching for the next few years.
And now the stop-gap patching has become too expensive in their judgement to continue, and Cryptic is now willing to take a hit to their 'soft dollars' value. This means is they are willing to lose both current and future customers and sales. They are just betting that the loss will be less than the now very high cost of maintaining or updating the Foundry code.
And that is that. Very simple.
It is the people paying for new micro-transactions that will determine if the bet pays off or not. Cryptic is betting that most of their player base won't care and they can go forward with a major expensive removed from the ledger.
I think they're right, but I don't have to help them be right.
I think the failure that has led to this happening isn't likely to be caused by someone currently even on the payroll. This looks very clearly to me as a failure of leadership that occurred way back that sealed this fate by not ensuring there could be a smoother transition between old and new team members as well as updating the foundry code far earlier in the game to be more streamlined with updates. This probably could have been averted by far better leadership in the PAST. Don't shoot cannons at the newer dev ship that's currently in the harbor here, the ship you should be angry at already long set sail into the sunset most likely.
My hope, 11-04-19 is not the day that Star Trek Online begins to fall apart...
A "best quality" it's to make something better... not just blow up completely the effort of lot of people, and a very loved feature.
Not a peny anymore from me.
Personally, I truely believe they have done all they could to save the foundry the last over months. The recent decision does not seem to be taken lightly. But before that, years ago, things looked a lot different: The Foundry had an enourmous potential, most of which has never been fully realized. It never had the support it needed.
I fully understand why the Foundry has never been number 1 ony any priority list. PvE, new missions, expansions, bug fixes - all those things have taken precedence. However, only patching up a system for years and letting things run their course led us to the sad situation we are in today. I blame no one for the decision to sunset the Foundry. But I also can't help to think that never supporting the Foundry to the extent it needed and - given the possibilities of this system - deserved was a big lapse in judgement. The Foundry wasn't missing the one bright idea to save it, one big efford to get things going again. It's missing years of development. So pointing at anyone specifically regarding the latest decision seems to ma as a case of "Shooting the messanger".
I'm utterly amazed at how many people who have clearly never coded a line in their lives, much less in a production environment, are certain beyond a doubt that all the programming needed to accomplish their goal is simple and the only possible reason for Cryptic not implementing their ideas is sheer laziness. No matter how gifted you are, you can only code one line at a time, if only because there are limits to the number of keyboards a single human can utilize simultaneously. It's been stated that each time the Foundry broke, it took the entire software-engineering team to bring it back up in a matter of weeks. That's weeks during which nothing else happened. Does that really sound like a viable option to you? 'Cause it doesn't to me.
There also appears to be a severe overestimate of just how sophisticated AI currently is; you'd need something at least as advanced as a TOS-era duotronic computer system to parse all those Foundry missions and "automatically" convert them to mainline missions. It's not just code-swapping, it would also require quite a lot of actual choices to be made where something done in the Foundry is incompatible with the current edition of the game.
Don't shoot cannons at the newer dev ship that's currently in the harbor here, the ship you should be angry at already long set sail into the sunset most likely.
Oh don't let the current team off the hook completely. Perhaps they didn't cause the original problem, but they did nothing to solve it either.
Further they are betting they can lower expenses and thus increase profit by removing the Foundry instead of updating it. They are betting that the line of mistakes here won't in the end cost them good will and lost profits. We should prove them wrong so they don't make this kind of mistake yet again.
I think the failure that has led to this happening isn't likely to be caused by someone currently even on the payroll. This looks very clearly to me as a failure of leadership that occurred way back that sealed this fate by not ensuring there could be a smoother transition between old and new team members as well as updating the foundry code far earlier in the game to be more streamlined with updates. This probably could have been averted by far better leadership in the PAST. Don't shoot cannons at the newer dev ship that's currently in the harbor here, the ship you should be angry at already long set sail into the sunset most likely.
I agree. The explanation about the legacy code suggests to me a cluster of poor programming practices. (I'm not a programmer by trade, but I took some classes in middle school and partially paid for trade school scribing for a freelancer who had bad carpal tunnel. I know my way around basic logic and programming practices.)
Poor documentation. Not enough descriptive variable and function names, not enough in-line comments on the code files, and not enough notes left behind by the programmer(s) who designed the Foundry but left the company, so anybody who comes after them has to basically guess and test to figure out what stuff does.
Poor version control. Not enough code versions saved for backup that can be pulled to help deal with unexpected failures.
Poor segregation of systems (what people are referring to as "spaghetti code"). You've got things referring to each other that really shouldn't, so changing a seemingly innocuous function causes snafus in weird places.
Some of this may be due to the well-known development problems the game had, though: Cryptic got 13 months to make the game after getting the license when Perpetual went under, and apparently what Perpetual had done was so poor that even under that ridiculous time crunch, it was more cost-effective to weld a space game onto the Champions Online engine than to continue with Perpetual's codebase. And then Atari spent the first few years until the game was sold to PWE starving it of funding because they were in so much debt.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
There also appears to be a severe overestimate of just how sophisticated AI currently is; you'd need something at least as advanced as a TOS-era duotronic computer system to parse all those Foundry missions and "automatically" convert them to mainline missions. It's not just code-swapping, it would also require quite a lot of actual choices to be made where something done in the Foundry is incompatible with the current edition of the game.
Indeed, this makes me think of what I do in another game as a mapper, when I need to redo/port a map done by someone else to be compatible with just a MOD, and this is in the same game, I HAVE to decompile the whole darn thing, often have to rip elements out of the map entirely and redo them by hand because outright trying to directly port some things over, ESPECIALLY scripts, is harder than tearing down and building anew again! This is not easy stuff in the slightest and I'm doing this on an older and super simpler game!
This is both unbelievable and unsurprising. Ever since the change of ownership occurred, this game has been going downhill. The Foundry is the only thing that kept the game fresh, as they rarely produce new content. It is sad to say, but it feels like STO is dying. Maybe I need to go long back on to The Old Republic. The Devs have cut the content we have access down to a small fraction of what it is now, and I am not about to make a new character every time I want to experience something new. They need to rethink this decision immediately.
I'm utterly amazed at how many people who have clearly never coded a line in their lives, much less in a production environment, are certain beyond a doubt that all the programming needed to accomplish their goal is simple and the only possible reason for Cryptic not implementing their ideas is sheer laziness. No matter how gifted you are, you can only code one line at a time, if only because there are limits to the number of keyboards a single human can utilize simultaneously. It's been stated that each time the Foundry broke, it took the entire software-engineering team to bring it back up in a matter of weeks. That's weeks during which nothing else happened. Does that really sound like a viable option to you? 'Cause it doesn't to me.
There also appears to be a severe overestimate of just how sophisticated AI currently is; you'd need something at least as advanced as a TOS-era duotronic computer system to parse all those Foundry missions and "automatically" convert them to mainline missions. It's not just code-swapping, it would also require quite a lot of actual choices to be made where something done in the Foundry is incompatible with the current edition of the game.
And even then, look how well it worked out for M-5!
I get the business/support reasoning behind this. If the game/foundry publishing systems are too divergent, it makes sense that the numbers don't add up. I've had to make similar decisions in my professional life. It sucks disappointing customers in a service industry, because your customers' happiness is what keeps the money rolling in. When they are unhappy, the money stops coming in.
I don't think this is an issue of laziness, or incompetence on the part of the devs. I don't blame them. I blame the lack of support and/or resources not given to them to support and improve the Foundry. I don't think this is the thing that will spell the end of STO, but death can come with a thousand cuts. This is a pretty deep cut for me.
I'm utterly amazed at how many people who have clearly never coded a line in their lives, much less in a production environment, are certain beyond a doubt that all the programming needed to accomplish their goal is simple and the only possible reason for Cryptic not implementing their ideas is sheer laziness. No matter how gifted you are, you can only code one line at a time, if only because there are limits to the number of keyboards a single human can utilize simultaneously. It's been stated that each time the Foundry broke, it took the entire software-engineering team to bring it back up in a matter of weeks. That's weeks during which nothing else happened. Does that really sound like a viable option to you? 'Cause it doesn't to me.
There also appears to be a severe overestimate of just how sophisticated AI currently is; you'd need something at least as advanced as a TOS-era duotronic computer system to parse all those Foundry missions and "automatically" convert them to mainline missions. It's not just code-swapping, it would also require quite a lot of actual choices to be made where something done in the Foundry is incompatible with the current edition of the game.
I'll agree with the people who say that this isn't the fault (just) of the current people working at Cryptic. I don't know if they are totally off the hook or not, but this was years in the making.
With that being said, I think the fundamental design of the Foundry was flawed. The Foundry should always have been compiling missions into the structure of the current STO missions. It shouldn't be possible to break currently published missions because they should just adhere to the same general structure, so the only way to break the Foundry missions would be to break every mission in the game. I don't really believe it was impossible to compile the Foundry missions into a compatible format had that been the goal from the start. They should have focused on running as little parallel code as possible.
Now, at this date, you may have a point with every tacked together and patched with dental floss, it may not be easy to implement that, especially because it sounds like no one knows how the system even works. I just don't agree that the way things went with the Foundry was a foregone conclusion.
I think what really happened was this: they were in a rush to get the Foundry out for NWN and at that time everything at Cryptic was constantly being rushed first due to them not having enough resources to really get NWN done while also supporting STO and then the turmoil that occurred with the shift to F2P . As a result a lot of corners were cut in how the Foundry was designed, and it ended up being a TRIBBLE together mess. Over the years a lot of effort went into patching it back into a working state, but that never ultimately solved things because the actual problem was that the foundation wasn't solid.
I think this topic has run its course. I've run out of conspiracy theories and YouTube clips already.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
Again, I'm going to say, if you're upset about this change, fine. Be upset, disappointed, pi$$ed, whatever you're feeling. You want to vent those feelings, fine. But DO NOT break the Forum Rules, and that includes flaming, trolling, and making accusations against the developers.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
I find this wholly dissapointing and combined with a lack of real content for fans of the series, turns Star Trek Online into a glorified android game like Timelines, with repetitive poorly constructed missions which are released at a snails pace.
Oh, yeah. This is brilliant. If you want to definitely kill the game. Go back watch the livestream again. Kael said it would take months to convert a single mission over from the Foundry into the game system (they run on different systems). That's just ONE mission. Even if you limited it to just the spotlight missions, you're talking years to convert those missions. YEARS of no new content or development on anything else. The original Foundry took a team of developers a year to build, so Foundry 2.0 would take at least that long as well. The idea to put EVERY developer on these two things, MIGHT reduce this timeframe some, but not much, and again NOTHING new would be happening with the game. You think the pre-LOR content drought was something? Implement something like this, and there will be no playerbase left for Foundry 2.0 to return to, because there will have been nothing new in years to do, play, or buy to keep the game afloat and running. I hate to dump on your idea like that, but let's be realistic.
Forgive me but the Foundry being bugged should be revamped anyway and before removing something from the game at least have an alternative but what we are getting is not something that will improve the game we get a cosmetic item or a torpedo or a non combat pet. I spend little time in the game as it is as I really hate the discovery content and want to play episodes that relate to the star trek I like. Since your removing this it seems you are forcing us to play content that you want us to play.
In my eyes Foundry 2.0 should have been in the works already and should have been near release to replace a broken version this will in my eyes decrease the player base. This is in no ways a doom post as Cryptic still have time to make this game the MMO that many fans believe it can be. But after many years off seeing content being removed sub standard stories and other services being removed and finally game breaking bugs that have never been fixed. I do believe they have a lot of work to do. And a lot of players may not be around for Cryptic to be able to do this
NO TO ARC
Vice Admiral Volmack ISS Thundermole
Brigadier General Jokag IKS Gorkan
Centurion Kares RRW Tomalak
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I get the business/support reasoning behind this. If the game/foundry publishing systems are too divergent, it makes sense that the numbers don't add up. I've had to make similar decisions in my professional life. It sucks disappointing customers in a service industry, because your customers' happiness is what keeps the money rolling in. When they are unhappy, the money stops coming in.
I don't think this is an issue of laziness, or incompetence on the part of the devs. I don't blame them. I blame the lack of support and/or resources not given to them to support and improve the Foundry. I don't think this is the thing that will spell the end of STO, but death can come with a thousand cuts. This is a pretty deep cut for me.
This. It's pretty much a known fact that Cryptic inherited a mess and managed to make the best of it.
That's the key point: They managed to make the best of it. And despite some serious ball-drops over the years, and some really bad/stupid decisions along the way, Cryptic has managed to pull it off. Sometimes spectacularly
So, the question is "What changed?". Why is content being cut and thinned out (i.e. "streamlined")? The Foundry isn't the first example of this over the last year, just the biggest instance to date. Is the talk of a smaller team at Cryptic accurate? Is it a different business model or new direction? Have the code monkeys milked all that they could out of the legacy coding? These are just a few of the questions on my mind.
In any event, those questions are unlikely to be answered to the satisfaction of many. After a period of improved communication, the developers are gone back to silent running for the most part. But one thing is for certain, based on the laws of averages and common sense: Any decision supposedly made by the development team, that ticks off the base, isn't all or even part of Cryptic's doing/responsibility. I suspect that most of the fingers being pointed need to be aimed at Perfect World Entertainment, and not at Cryptic Studios. PWE are the ones who call the shots, control the purse strings, and make the business decisions. Cryptic just catches most of the flak from it.
BTW, for those who can't watch the video, I've posted highlights in the OP.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
I'm utterly amazed at how many people who have clearly never coded a line in their lives, much less in a production environment, are certain beyond a doubt that all the programming needed to accomplish their goal is simple and the only possible reason for Cryptic not implementing their ideas is sheer laziness. No matter how gifted you are, you can only code one line at a time, if only because there are limits to the number of keyboards a single human can utilize simultaneously. It's been stated that each time the Foundry broke, it took the entire software-engineering team to bring it back up in a matter of weeks. That's weeks during which nothing else happened. Does that really sound like a viable option to you? 'Cause it doesn't to me.
There also appears to be a severe overestimate of just how sophisticated AI currently is; you'd need something at least as advanced as a TOS-era duotronic computer system to parse all those Foundry missions and "automatically" convert them to mainline missions. It's not just code-swapping, it would also require quite a lot of actual choices to be made where something done in the Foundry is incompatible with the current edition of the game.
Oh I don't think it would be easy, far from it, but then nothing worthwhile is ever easy, the only easy day, is yesterday and all that. but the point still stands the foundry deserved better, it still deserves better and the creators who used it deserve better. I don't think anyone has accused Cryptic of laziness, and I certainly would not call it deliberate malfeasance but, the foundry has clearly suffered in the hierarchy of priority for resources over the years its its life-cycle if that's a local mismanagement issue or a corporate dictate from on high, who knows? but its clear the Foundry has been neglected and should have had its own dedicated team working on it from the start, keeping the code up to date, keeping it compatible, adding new features, documenting and noting the code-base, fixing problems as they come up so when something does break they have the time and personnel to quickly fix it rather than having to, as you put it have the entire software-engineering team to bring it back up. That would allow the Core team to continue to do what the core team does keeping the lights on, making all the buttons work and adding new content to the core game. that may have been the case once I dunno, I havn't been around as long as others, but its clear those people are now gone and were never replaced so the core team are under more pressure and have to split from what they are doing to fix it when it breaks instead and that is time they spend doing nothing else.
It's not laziness. its a lack of invested resources. its not the same thing. To fix the problems with the foundry now would clearly take even more resources precisely because it was neglected for so long, and time and bodies in addition to the core team currently working on the game if they wanted to keep content at current pace. its not insurmountable but clearly someone has weighed the options of the number of people disenfranchised by the loss of the foundry versus the versus the cost of fixing their mistakes and decided the former is more acceptable to their bottom line. I don't blame Cryptic for that. I genuinely believe they would do it if given the resources to do so without compromising the core experience. I blame PWE.
As for your assessment of AI and Machine Learning, You are absolutely right. its not a question of volume of Data, its like trying to convert C++ to Visual Basic. can you build a program that does the same thing in the other language? Sure.but it generally requires a fundamental rebuild of the program from the ground up because they are that different. At this point they would just be better off releasing a new stripped down variant of the current SDK more in line with the current code and tools and asking creators to run with it.
A pessimist focuses on why things can't be done, an optimist focuses on solutions.
Bring this message to your leaders. This may be Andre Emerson, and also people above him that actually make the decisions.
There are two possible solutions that come to my mind right now:
A) If you can't maintain the Foundry yourself in the long-term, ask for help. We're a bunch of Star Trek nerds, I'm pretty sure there are SOME people among the crowd that are able and willing to dive into the code - for free -
It is said they considered every possible way of keeping the Foundries open, but I haven't seen this one mentioned. Volunteers. I would imagine that of the thousands of people who used the Foundry, a handful are skilled programmers who could maintain the system. Various games use volunteer moderators for forums and volunteer guides for in-game help. It might be a risk from a business perspective, but turning the Foundry over to volunteers who have been vetted and selected for reliability... making it a totally fan-driven, sandboxed extension of the game would keep the Foundries alive.
You would have to speak with your legal department and work out terms under which this is possible, and of course swallow your pride to ask for help. However, this is a basically zero-cost option.
B ) Release a new ship outside of your current ship release schedule. This ship is "The Foundry Ship". Cryptic does not make any profit out of selling this ship in the Zen store. Instead, all money that is generated out of this is set aside to finance a special project. Say you make 200k to 500k out of this. This money is used to hire 2 to 3 new people to your team which create the new Foundry team. Their job all day long is to work on making sure the Foundry works with new updates coming out. And if they are not busy with that, they can work on creating and expanding on a Foundry 2.0 that doesn't break with every update, is more userfriendly and intuitive, and expands your game.
For ships, I thought of maybe the Ferengi T6 Nagus Marauder (which is already fully working ingame, though very few people ever got it), or turn some NPC ship model that already is in the game into a player ship - e.g. Acamar Escort, one of the Defera ships, Kazon Cruiser or Carrier etc. Be creative here.
People that buy "the Foundry Ship" know that all of their money goes into maintaining and expanding the Foundry. Cryptic has done somewhat similar things before with the Mirror Guardian cuiser or the Command Assault Cruiser. Some people will buy the ship exactly to support the Foundry, some "just so".
Benefits from this action:
- The community gets and keeps an improved Foundry, even if it takes some time to transfer to a Foundry 2.0.
- 2 to 3 new talented people get a job.
- I get the feeling that a lot of employees at Cryptic are saddened with the decision to close the Foundry. You want happy employees, as happy employees (which btw you see everyday during your office hours) make a better game, which in turn makes you more money.
- You get your game expanded for zero cost.
- You send a clear signal that you listen to the wishes of the community. You may say:"Oh, we use microtransactions and lootboxes to finance our game. The Foundry can't be monetized directly." No. But its existence or absence will have an indirect but very noticable effect on how invested people are in STO and how much money they spend on it.
Releasing a "Foundry ship" that is solely used to finance a team to work on and improve the Foundry has a lot of benefits.
This may require some humbleness from you to accept this solution. But it costs you nothing, improves your game and makes you more money.
Really think about it. This IS a solution.
A zero cost way for Cryptic to finance and expand the foundry
I've seen some posts defending this action, and while I usually support and defend developer's actions, this decision leaves me with more concerns than usual. Let's recap:
"The new code isn't compatable with old code".
The Foundry was, from the launch, to be part of this game. It's code should have been updated and kept in as new content was being developed. In any development, the two systems should have been updated and worked on in equal time. This means this decision was made a long time ago, essentially, when this did not happen, and was done so without disclosure. To say I feel defrauded would be not far from the truth
"We can't leave legacy systems/maps in the game, that's why Memory Alpha isn't there."
But yet they make us go, every year, to celebrate this game's anniversary to the single biggest embarrasment in the game: Andoria. Seriously, I've tried to bring people in the game during the event so they can have one T6 ship in the game, and Andoria Omega has gotten each and every one to leave. Andoria should have been closed years ago, and yet it lives on as yet another questionable decision by the dev teams. And in fact, Memory Alpha would have been a far more interesting location to do Omega, and appropriate too.
"We want to bring you new and exciting content."
Except the Discovery first mission is a retread of the new training mission, and both are presented as real events in STO, not simulations. So the exact same thing happens 200 years apart? This is niether new, nor exciting. In addition along these lines, the content has been slipping back to "Fight five groups of space enemies and then switch maps to fight eight groups of ground enemies" Official content has been some of the most repetitive content in the game, with few shining outliers that stand strikingly to the banality of the rest of the content.
The core of this is simple: The decimation of the Foundry was an intentional decision, but made long ago due to very questionable decisions long past. These dovetail with the current complete misunderstanding of their own code, and a regression to a simple mission generation technique within Cryptic that will lead to a poorer existence overall.
There are then two things I would like from Cryptic:
Better missions, with a return to focus on the exploration stories you've promised in the past.
A focus on the really poor parts of your game, such as the toxic nature of Zone chat.
Comments
That is my best idea of how to meet Cryptic's need to stop investing in the Foundry, while still preserving it. However, I am doubtful this idea will be considered viable.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
I have to agree with this. The Foundry was on life support almost from the start. It never got the investment it needed. It was rushed out to get it ready for NWN and it never really was brought up to a fully functional state. It was always patched together, even when it worked.
Saying Cryptic did everything they could is ridiculous. Maybe there were business pressures, etc. I'm sure that no one had nefarious intentions toward the Foundry, but in the end it never really was developed to the extent it could have been.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
I wouldn't say nefarious, there is no evidence of that. Incompetence, perhaps.
The business case for how we got here seems plain to me.
The Foundry was conceived as a method of adding low cost content to the game while increasing the sense of player ownership, interest and good will. Costs of code maintenance would originally be covered by the subscription model STO had at launch assuming that enough interest and good will was generated by this and the game as a whole to result in a large enough player base.
The concepts of interest, customer ownership and good will have actual value in the business world. You will see them even given a dollar amount on some balance sheets although they are very hard to measure and typically only come into play when a company is brought out. Most of the time they are undefined 'soft dollars'. But despite their vague valuation, these factors make up the baseline that marketing elements work from and hope to improve.
That original model changed when STO switched to F2P instead of subscription and elements of the game were monetized. Lacking a method of monetizing the Foundry meant that the Foundry itself no longer had a directly and easily measured funding source. It could only be justified on the merits of those hard to define soft dollar factors.
Cryptic decided that whatever the value of these factors were- it did not justify maintaining the Foundry code with the cost of its own team- and thus the team was let go. They were judged important enough to justify stop-gap patching for the next few years.
And now the stop-gap patching has become too expensive in their judgement to continue, and Cryptic is now willing to take a hit to their 'soft dollars' value. This means is they are willing to lose both current and future customers and sales. They are just betting that the loss will be less than the now very high cost of maintaining or updating the Foundry code.
And that is that. Very simple.
It is the people paying for new micro-transactions that will determine if the bet pays off or not. Cryptic is betting that most of their player base won't care and they can go forward with a major expensive removed from the ledger.
I think they're right, but I don't have to help them be right.
A "best quality" it's to make something better... not just blow up completely the effort of lot of people, and a very loved feature.
Not a peny anymore from me.
I fully understand why the Foundry has never been number 1 ony any priority list. PvE, new missions, expansions, bug fixes - all those things have taken precedence. However, only patching up a system for years and letting things run their course led us to the sad situation we are in today. I blame no one for the decision to sunset the Foundry. But I also can't help to think that never supporting the Foundry to the extent it needed and - given the possibilities of this system - deserved was a big lapse in judgement. The Foundry wasn't missing the one bright idea to save it, one big efford to get things going again. It's missing years of development. So pointing at anyone specifically regarding the latest decision seems to ma as a case of "Shooting the messanger".
There also appears to be a severe overestimate of just how sophisticated AI currently is; you'd need something at least as advanced as a TOS-era duotronic computer system to parse all those Foundry missions and "automatically" convert them to mainline missions. It's not just code-swapping, it would also require quite a lot of actual choices to be made where something done in the Foundry is incompatible with the current edition of the game.
Oh don't let the current team off the hook completely. Perhaps they didn't cause the original problem, but they did nothing to solve it either.
Further they are betting they can lower expenses and thus increase profit by removing the Foundry instead of updating it. They are betting that the line of mistakes here won't in the end cost them good will and lost profits. We should prove them wrong so they don't make this kind of mistake yet again.
I agree. The explanation about the legacy code suggests to me a cluster of poor programming practices. (I'm not a programmer by trade, but I took some classes in middle school and partially paid for trade school scribing for a freelancer who had bad carpal tunnel. I know my way around basic logic and programming practices.)
- Poor documentation. Not enough descriptive variable and function names, not enough in-line comments on the code files, and not enough notes left behind by the programmer(s) who designed the Foundry but left the company, so anybody who comes after them has to basically guess and test to figure out what stuff does.
- Poor version control. Not enough code versions saved for backup that can be pulled to help deal with unexpected failures.
- Poor segregation of systems (what people are referring to as "spaghetti code"). You've got things referring to each other that really shouldn't, so changing a seemingly innocuous function causes snafus in weird places.
Some of this may be due to the well-known development problems the game had, though: Cryptic got 13 months to make the game after getting the license when Perpetual went under, and apparently what Perpetual had done was so poor that even under that ridiculous time crunch, it was more cost-effective to weld a space game onto the Champions Online engine than to continue with Perpetual's codebase. And then Atari spent the first few years until the game was sold to PWE starving it of funding because they were in so much debt.— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Indeed, this makes me think of what I do in another game as a mapper, when I need to redo/port a map done by someone else to be compatible with just a MOD, and this is in the same game, I HAVE to decompile the whole darn thing, often have to rip elements out of the map entirely and redo them by hand because outright trying to directly port some things over, ESPECIALLY scripts, is harder than tearing down and building anew again! This is not easy stuff in the slightest and I'm doing this on an older and super simpler game!
And even then, look how well it worked out for M-5!
I don't think this is an issue of laziness, or incompetence on the part of the devs. I don't blame them. I blame the lack of support and/or resources not given to them to support and improve the Foundry. I don't think this is the thing that will spell the end of STO, but death can come with a thousand cuts. This is a pretty deep cut for me.
I'll agree with the people who say that this isn't the fault (just) of the current people working at Cryptic. I don't know if they are totally off the hook or not, but this was years in the making.
With that being said, I think the fundamental design of the Foundry was flawed. The Foundry should always have been compiling missions into the structure of the current STO missions. It shouldn't be possible to break currently published missions because they should just adhere to the same general structure, so the only way to break the Foundry missions would be to break every mission in the game. I don't really believe it was impossible to compile the Foundry missions into a compatible format had that been the goal from the start. They should have focused on running as little parallel code as possible.
Now, at this date, you may have a point with every tacked together and patched with dental floss, it may not be easy to implement that, especially because it sounds like no one knows how the system even works. I just don't agree that the way things went with the Foundry was a foregone conclusion.
I think what really happened was this: they were in a rush to get the Foundry out for NWN and at that time everything at Cryptic was constantly being rushed first due to them not having enough resources to really get NWN done while also supporting STO and then the turmoil that occurred with the shift to F2P . As a result a lot of corners were cut in how the Foundry was designed, and it ended up being a TRIBBLE together mess. Over the years a lot of effort went into patching it back into a working state, but that never ultimately solved things because the actual problem was that the foundation wasn't solid.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
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.'
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Forgive me but the Foundry being bugged should be revamped anyway and before removing something from the game at least have an alternative but what we are getting is not something that will improve the game we get a cosmetic item or a torpedo or a non combat pet. I spend little time in the game as it is as I really hate the discovery content and want to play episodes that relate to the star trek I like. Since your removing this it seems you are forcing us to play content that you want us to play.
In my eyes Foundry 2.0 should have been in the works already and should have been near release to replace a broken version this will in my eyes decrease the player base. This is in no ways a doom post as Cryptic still have time to make this game the MMO that many fans believe it can be. But after many years off seeing content being removed sub standard stories and other services being removed and finally game breaking bugs that have never been fixed. I do believe they have a lot of work to do. And a lot of players may not be around for Cryptic to be able to do this
Vice Admiral Volmack ISS Thundermole
Brigadier General Jokag IKS Gorkan
Centurion Kares RRW Tomalak
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
This. It's pretty much a known fact that Cryptic inherited a mess and managed to make the best of it.
That's the key point: They managed to make the best of it. And despite some serious ball-drops over the years, and some really bad/stupid decisions along the way, Cryptic has managed to pull it off. Sometimes spectacularly
So, the question is "What changed?". Why is content being cut and thinned out (i.e. "streamlined")? The Foundry isn't the first example of this over the last year, just the biggest instance to date. Is the talk of a smaller team at Cryptic accurate? Is it a different business model or new direction? Have the code monkeys milked all that they could out of the legacy coding? These are just a few of the questions on my mind.
In any event, those questions are unlikely to be answered to the satisfaction of many. After a period of improved communication, the developers are gone back to silent running for the most part. But one thing is for certain, based on the laws of averages and common sense: Any decision supposedly made by the development team, that ticks off the base, isn't all or even part of Cryptic's doing/responsibility. I suspect that most of the fingers being pointed need to be aimed at Perfect World Entertainment, and not at Cryptic Studios. PWE are the ones who call the shots, control the purse strings, and make the business decisions. Cryptic just catches most of the flak from it.
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Oh I don't think it would be easy, far from it, but then nothing worthwhile is ever easy, the only easy day, is yesterday and all that. but the point still stands the foundry deserved better, it still deserves better and the creators who used it deserve better. I don't think anyone has accused Cryptic of laziness, and I certainly would not call it deliberate malfeasance but, the foundry has clearly suffered in the hierarchy of priority for resources over the years its its life-cycle if that's a local mismanagement issue or a corporate dictate from on high, who knows? but its clear the Foundry has been neglected and should have had its own dedicated team working on it from the start, keeping the code up to date, keeping it compatible, adding new features, documenting and noting the code-base, fixing problems as they come up so when something does break they have the time and personnel to quickly fix it rather than having to, as you put it have the entire software-engineering team to bring it back up. That would allow the Core team to continue to do what the core team does keeping the lights on, making all the buttons work and adding new content to the core game. that may have been the case once I dunno, I havn't been around as long as others, but its clear those people are now gone and were never replaced so the core team are under more pressure and have to split from what they are doing to fix it when it breaks instead and that is time they spend doing nothing else.
It's not laziness. its a lack of invested resources. its not the same thing. To fix the problems with the foundry now would clearly take even more resources precisely because it was neglected for so long, and time and bodies in addition to the core team currently working on the game if they wanted to keep content at current pace. its not insurmountable but clearly someone has weighed the options of the number of people disenfranchised by the loss of the foundry versus the versus the cost of fixing their mistakes and decided the former is more acceptable to their bottom line. I don't blame Cryptic for that. I genuinely believe they would do it if given the resources to do so without compromising the core experience. I blame PWE.
As for your assessment of AI and Machine Learning, You are absolutely right. its not a question of volume of Data, its like trying to convert C++ to Visual Basic. can you build a program that does the same thing in the other language? Sure.but it generally requires a fundamental rebuild of the program from the ground up because they are that different. At this point they would just be better off releasing a new stripped down variant of the current SDK more in line with the current code and tools and asking creators to run with it.
baddmoonrizin
A pessimist focuses on why things can't be done, an optimist focuses on solutions.
Bring this message to your leaders. This may be Andre Emerson, and also people above him that actually make the decisions.
There are two possible solutions that come to my mind right now:
A) If you can't maintain the Foundry yourself in the long-term, ask for help. We're a bunch of Star Trek nerds, I'm pretty sure there are SOME people among the crowd that are able and willing to dive into the code - for free -
You would have to speak with your legal department and work out terms under which this is possible, and of course swallow your pride to ask for help. However, this is a basically zero-cost option.
B ) Release a new ship outside of your current ship release schedule. This ship is "The Foundry Ship". Cryptic does not make any profit out of selling this ship in the Zen store. Instead, all money that is generated out of this is set aside to finance a special project. Say you make 200k to 500k out of this. This money is used to hire 2 to 3 new people to your team which create the new Foundry team. Their job all day long is to work on making sure the Foundry works with new updates coming out. And if they are not busy with that, they can work on creating and expanding on a Foundry 2.0 that doesn't break with every update, is more userfriendly and intuitive, and expands your game.
For ships, I thought of maybe the Ferengi T6 Nagus Marauder (which is already fully working ingame, though very few people ever got it), or turn some NPC ship model that already is in the game into a player ship - e.g. Acamar Escort, one of the Defera ships, Kazon Cruiser or Carrier etc. Be creative here.
People that buy "the Foundry Ship" know that all of their money goes into maintaining and expanding the Foundry. Cryptic has done somewhat similar things before with the Mirror Guardian cuiser or the Command Assault Cruiser. Some people will buy the ship exactly to support the Foundry, some "just so".
Benefits from this action:
- The community gets and keeps an improved Foundry, even if it takes some time to transfer to a Foundry 2.0.
- 2 to 3 new talented people get a job.
- I get the feeling that a lot of employees at Cryptic are saddened with the decision to close the Foundry. You want happy employees, as happy employees (which btw you see everyday during your office hours) make a better game, which in turn makes you more money.
- You get your game expanded for zero cost.
- You send a clear signal that you listen to the wishes of the community. You may say:"Oh, we use microtransactions and lootboxes to finance our game. The Foundry can't be monetized directly." No. But its existence or absence will have an indirect but very noticable effect on how invested people are in STO and how much money they spend on it.
Releasing a "Foundry ship" that is solely used to finance a team to work on and improve the Foundry has a lot of benefits.
This may require some humbleness from you to accept this solution. But it costs you nothing, improves your game and makes you more money.
Really think about it. This IS a solution.
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1247522/foundry-sunset-april-11th-2019/p15
Look at my post about a Foundry Ship
BRING BACK THE FOUNDRY!
"The new code isn't compatable with old code".
The Foundry was, from the launch, to be part of this game. It's code should have been updated and kept in as new content was being developed. In any development, the two systems should have been updated and worked on in equal time. This means this decision was made a long time ago, essentially, when this did not happen, and was done so without disclosure. To say I feel defrauded would be not far from the truth
"We can't leave legacy systems/maps in the game, that's why Memory Alpha isn't there."
But yet they make us go, every year, to celebrate this game's anniversary to the single biggest embarrasment in the game: Andoria. Seriously, I've tried to bring people in the game during the event so they can have one T6 ship in the game, and Andoria Omega has gotten each and every one to leave. Andoria should have been closed years ago, and yet it lives on as yet another questionable decision by the dev teams. And in fact, Memory Alpha would have been a far more interesting location to do Omega, and appropriate too.
"We want to bring you new and exciting content."
Except the Discovery first mission is a retread of the new training mission, and both are presented as real events in STO, not simulations. So the exact same thing happens 200 years apart? This is niether new, nor exciting. In addition along these lines, the content has been slipping back to "Fight five groups of space enemies and then switch maps to fight eight groups of ground enemies" Official content has been some of the most repetitive content in the game, with few shining outliers that stand strikingly to the banality of the rest of the content.
The core of this is simple: The decimation of the Foundry was an intentional decision, but made long ago due to very questionable decisions long past. These dovetail with the current complete misunderstanding of their own code, and a regression to a simple mission generation technique within Cryptic that will lead to a poorer existence overall.
There are then two things I would like from Cryptic:
Better missions, with a return to focus on the exploration stories you've promised in the past.
A focus on the really poor parts of your game, such as the toxic nature of Zone chat.
I expect neither.