> @pomonagrange#3097 said: > I guess it depends on what type of computing system is most popular in Asia right now. Which might not be desktop PCs or laptops anymore. It might just be tablets, cell phones, and consoles. After all, what works in Asia should work in the rest of the world, right? We're all humans. Why *shouldn't* we do everything the same way? Because ... um ... being an individual is better than being part of a collective? Didn't anyone at PWE learn *anything* from the fictional Borg? I guess not. > > In any case, I guess that there's enough hole-filling material to keep the STO colander from sinking this year. (Provided they don't keep punching more holes in it.) > > *sighs and walks away*
There is a real Borg Collective right here on Earth, it’s called the European Union.
I'm just astonished at how many systems experts we have in this thread.
And how many of you, exactly, have ever applied to work at Cryptic? They've been seeking systems programmers for years for this game, it's been on their website right along. I'd think all of you who know exactly how to solve the Foundry issues with just one or two dedicated software engineers would have been actually doing it, for pay, rather than just sniping from behind your keyboards.
Or was my first assessment correct, and all this ignorance is in fact spilling from people who never coded a line in their lives, and wouldn't know a NAND gate from a Nancy strip?
I find this funny in a outlandish way. A person need not know how to fix something to know what is needed to fix it. If i have a flat tire and need it fixed i either call a tow truck send the car to a shop and know that a grease monkey is needed to fix said tire issue. That or knowing how to fix the flat my self i can see that i need a jack and a tire iron to remove the busted tire and replace it with a new one.
So knowing that a code monkey is needed to fix the issues the game has is in the same light as the flat tire. And as to us working for cryptic to fix the games bugs and other problems, Last i checked a customer is handing money to the company thus providing the funds to work on the game. One could even go so far as to say by its very nature this transfer of capital is for such silly notions as updating the product, correcting errors and bugs, And providing a benefit to the customers as a worth wile product.
At some point the scales will tip regarding the value of the product in this case a game as a service. If any company fails to keep up with the reasonable demands of a customer base then it will end no longer having the funds to operate. And in this case there is plenty of feedback as to consider the ramifications of this action and what it might end up costing them.
In the end it is there choice, and it has been to close the foundry. So if the results are detrimental it can't be said that people did not advise taking a different course.
Except PWE has allowed them to hire people. You know the UI artist Joanna, the one responsible for the Character Creator revamp? She's there on the team at least 6 months now. There are people on the team also that recent. So don't say that PWE isn't willing to authorize hiring people that are needed. They just aren't authorizing people that the customers think should be utilized like programmers.
The devs have stated that sunsetting the Foundry was a hard choice that they all collectively made. There were some devs that did try and fight for the Foundry like CaptainGeko. I think they feel that with the Foundry closed, they can actually focus on the core of the game since they won't have to devote programmers time to fixing the Foundry every time they force it to go down with and update. It probably won't be updates that we want to see most.
I want to say that I've been here through every major decision since 2012 when it comes to the game. Not once did any of these decisions make me say, "this is the last straw, I'm quitting!" every time that something that we had in game was removed. I soldiered on. I may not be a paying player, but what keeps me logging into the game is that I have unfinished characters and story arcs. When I play, I usually hop on my main character which is my Tactical Delta Recruit (from the first run) and play through the story that is current, then figure out where I want to go from there. If there's an easy to do endeavor, the I'll do whatever is needed for that day, because I'm about playing through content, even if it's repeated. I support the game as a fan.
Well the question here is what happened to the previous UI designer? It's not like they never had one before. Hiring new people to replace others who quit doesn't actually increase the size of the team, so it's not as simple as going based off of new hires and job listings.
It also sounds like Cryptic has quite a bit of churn, considering no one apparently understands the code of the Foundry anymore. Keep in mind this was a feature that only dates back about 6 or 7 years. It's not something from 1995, or even 2005.
I don't know... to me it's been pretty obvious from the very start of STO that Cryptic only had limited resources to work with, and that didn't really seem to improve much after the PWE acquisition. I frankly have doubts whether dropping support for the Foundry is going to result in any meaningful improvements for the rest of the game. The systems programmers are not content designers, so it's not going to help there, and I don't really see any major need to revamp all of the systems again (just like the character creator UI overhaul, it's better, but wasn't really needed).
So knowing that a code monkey is needed to fix the issues the game has is in the same light as the flat tire. And as to us working for cryptic to fix the games bugs and other problems, Last i checked a customer is handing money to the company thus providing the funds to work on the game. One could even go so far as to say by its very nature this transfer of capital is for such silly notions as updating the product, correcting errors and bugs, And providing a benefit to the customers as a worth wile product.
This comparison only works under the assumption that there is a code monkey that knows how to fix the Foudnry's code, the whole reason they are shutting it down is because there isn't.
Yeah, but how excusable is that really? Maybe it's not the fault of those working at Cryptic now, but there was some seriously poor leadership/management in the past that led to this.
So knowing that a code monkey is needed to fix the issues the game has is in the same light as the flat tire. And as to us working for cryptic to fix the games bugs and other problems, Last i checked a customer is handing money to the company thus providing the funds to work on the game. One could even go so far as to say by its very nature this transfer of capital is for such silly notions as updating the product, correcting errors and bugs, And providing a benefit to the customers as a worth wile product.
This comparison only works under the assumption that there is a code monkey that knows how to fix the Foudnry's code, the whole reason they are shutting it down is because there isn't.
I don't seam to remember at any point indicating that they had this person on staff. I may be wrong the game may take off and get thousands of players chomping at the bit to buy keys, ships, and bank space, doff space, inventory space, and be all the better for cutting the foundry off. Then again people may look and say hm... i ran all the games content played every mission and ask them self what do i need more things for? Will a new ship drive a person to play everything again and think its a different game with a new ship?
In short i don't expect to know how players will react. But i like everyone else still playing will find out one way or the other.
There is an explanation that makes sense for this. If the foundry was originally coded as a personal side projects one of the developers took on rather than an officially assigned project, the core of the code could have been thrown together without documentation. We have to remember that Foundry was introduced during the Great Content Drought. I know because when they told us about it there was this whole, "So nw WE have to do your job for you and make our own content!?" argument. Foundry may well have been a stop gap measure, originally intended as a temporary solution to the problem Cryptic AND the community were facing due to Atari having laid off employees and was not hiring anyone else. Something HAD to be done. Foundry made a great deal of sense, and it did turn out to be a great feature going forward after that.
The Foundry was an officially sanctioned project that took over a year to develop and was introduced in April 2011, before the content drought. The content drought began in March, 2012, when the last featured episode, the Reman-focused Cloaked Intentions missions, were released.
For the record, it wasn't Cloaked Intentions that was released then, but the Lost Dominion/the 2800 Featured Series episodes, first released a week after the 2nd anniversary and completed after the 10th of March. Keep in mind though that the content drought was that of story only, as we had other content in that period.
It is funny. They finally admit that the current set of developers are worse than the past set of developers. So bad actually, that they can't maintain an existing feature. Not developing it or upgrading it, but simply keep it existing.
The old employees who worked on its core creation should feel proud. They had a vision and the skill to created something that stood the test of time. Cryptic no longer has that vision or skill of the past.
You know what, I can't be bothered any more. I spent my fortnightly £80 yesterday that was earmarked for Zen on a year's subscription to ESO. I was on STO for a couple of hours last night we had some fun with the handful who logged in and then we were done and I went back to ESO to check out the 400 quests I have yet to do.
ESO sounds like a viable solution to me as well. Perhaps we will meet there, Matt !
Maybe one of the programmers at Cryptic could give some input in this thread and explain how difficult the transition would be.
They already have. The original post wants you to believe:
It turned out that it would take months of work for each individual mission
Is the estimate of "months" direct from one of the programmers, or from a Cryptic spokesperson forced to say whatever PWE tells them to say? I'd rather hear from one of the programmers, to be honest. And it doesn't have to be a long, in depth answer from them. Just up front and honest. "This is the current time estimate from the programmers. This is their cost estimate. This is how much Foundry code they think would have to be changed to work with the current STO code. Simplified, this is the kind of STO code that keeps breaking the Foundry every time there's a new expansion." Maybe that's what they've been discussing for a year (probably less). If so, it would've been nice if they could've given us updates, to let us know what was going on. Maybe then some of us could've offered them our help (those of us who know how to program, I mean). It wouldn't be paid work for the playerbase to help out, of course. But then again, creating Foundry missions wasn't paid work either. It was a labor of love. Love that made all the blood, sweat, and tears worthwhile.
It turned out that it would take months of work for each individual mission
I would call BS on that. A big, major, massive pile of it actually. It took me a couple of weeks to develop an importer for the Foundry. With that, I could recreate any exported custom landscape in 10-20 mins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz5F1zNr7Z8
Recreating the text and the switches took some 1-4 hours, depending on the complexity. In any case, you give me a foundry export and you could get your mission recreated by the next day.
Cryptic used to tell us that their dev tools are more capable and complex. Which means, what you can do with the Foundry, you can do with the dev tools (and much more). This means that such importer could be created with ease. The buttons may be at different positions or tabs or whatever, but they are there somewhere. Train the importer to that different interface and there, you can import missions 50x faster as of now. With better tailored tools, you can do it even faster than that.
Now, if you have only 1 hour a week to work on that (because you have other tasks), one mission migration would take 2 months.
How do you play STO in a way that requires grinding in any significant manner? the game so over-showers you with rewards, be they marks, or dil, that you can get enough to buy almost anything in a matter of a few days.
LOL. Try reaching T6 reputation with every faction on a new character, or generating 3000 Zen for even a single T6 ship in "a matter of a few days".
Both take months of playing an average of an hour or two (at least) every day.
The most recent fleet holding requires over 67 MILLION dilithium to get the ultimate rewards.
'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.'
Maybe one of the programmers at Cryptic could give some input in this thread and explain how difficult the transition would be.
They already have. The original post wants you to believe:
It turned out that it would take months of work for each individual mission
Is the estimate of "months" direct from one of the programmers, or from a Cryptic spokesperson forced to say whatever PWE tells them to say? I'd rather hear from one of the programmers, to be honest. And it doesn't have to be a long, in depth answer from them. Just up front and honest. "This is the current time estimate from the programmers. This is their cost estimate. This is how much Foundry code they think would have to be changed to work with the current STO code. Simplified, this is the kind of STO code that keeps breaking the Foundry every time there's a new expansion." Maybe that's what they've been discussing for a year (probably less). If so, it would've been nice if they could've given us updates, to let us know what was going on. Maybe then some of us could've offered them our help (those of us who know how to program, I mean). It wouldn't be paid work for the playerbase to help out, of course. But then again, creating Foundry missions wasn't paid work either. It was a labor of love. Love that made all the blood, sweat, and tears worthwhile.
Ambassador Kael (supported by Neverwinter's CM, I forget her name) laid out as much information as he could during that livestream. Among that information blast was the statement about taking "months per mission" due to needing to change the missions over from how the Foundry processes things to how the live server does (best summarization I can do without rewatching it and quoting it).
I think he stated the devs tried it and came up with that estimation, but don't quote me on that. I may have implied that between him saying they tried it and his statement about "months per mission" to adjust for differences in the Foundry versus Holodeck, the live server.
If you want more detail, I'd suggest you watch the livestream on Twitch or Youtube. The whole stream was about 30 minutes, give or take.
But if you don't trust Kael because you feel he's, "...forced to say whatever PWE tells them to say," then find a door and leave because no argument that uses information from Cryptic employees, including information from the devs with whom he works, will mean anything to you because they're paid by Cryptic (and maybe PWE, I don't know) and therefore have a vested interest in painting information in as positive a light as possible.
Comments
> I guess it depends on what type of computing system is most popular in Asia right now. Which might not be desktop PCs or laptops anymore. It might just be tablets, cell phones, and consoles. After all, what works in Asia should work in the rest of the world, right? We're all humans. Why *shouldn't* we do everything the same way? Because ... um ... being an individual is better than being part of a collective? Didn't anyone at PWE learn *anything* from the fictional Borg? I guess not.
>
> In any case, I guess that there's enough hole-filling material to keep the STO colander from sinking this year. (Provided they don't keep punching more holes in it.)
>
> *sighs and walks away*
There is a real Borg Collective right here on Earth, it’s called the European Union.
I find this funny in a outlandish way. A person need not know how to fix something to know what is needed to fix it. If i have a flat tire and need it fixed i either call a tow truck send the car to a shop and know that a grease monkey is needed to fix said tire issue. That or knowing how to fix the flat my self i can see that i need a jack and a tire iron to remove the busted tire and replace it with a new one.
So knowing that a code monkey is needed to fix the issues the game has is in the same light as the flat tire. And as to us working for cryptic to fix the games bugs and other problems, Last i checked a customer is handing money to the company thus providing the funds to work on the game. One could even go so far as to say by its very nature this transfer of capital is for such silly notions as updating the product, correcting errors and bugs, And providing a benefit to the customers as a worth wile product.
At some point the scales will tip regarding the value of the product in this case a game as a service. If any company fails to keep up with the reasonable demands of a customer base then it will end no longer having the funds to operate. And in this case there is plenty of feedback as to consider the ramifications of this action and what it might end up costing them.
In the end it is there choice, and it has been to close the foundry. So if the results are detrimental it can't be said that people did not advise taking a different course.
Well the question here is what happened to the previous UI designer? It's not like they never had one before. Hiring new people to replace others who quit doesn't actually increase the size of the team, so it's not as simple as going based off of new hires and job listings.
It also sounds like Cryptic has quite a bit of churn, considering no one apparently understands the code of the Foundry anymore. Keep in mind this was a feature that only dates back about 6 or 7 years. It's not something from 1995, or even 2005.
I don't know... to me it's been pretty obvious from the very start of STO that Cryptic only had limited resources to work with, and that didn't really seem to improve much after the PWE acquisition. I frankly have doubts whether dropping support for the Foundry is going to result in any meaningful improvements for the rest of the game. The systems programmers are not content designers, so it's not going to help there, and I don't really see any major need to revamp all of the systems again (just like the character creator UI overhaul, it's better, but wasn't really needed).
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
Yeah, but how excusable is that really? Maybe it's not the fault of those working at Cryptic now, but there was some seriously poor leadership/management in the past that led to this.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
I don't seam to remember at any point indicating that they had this person on staff. I may be wrong the game may take off and get thousands of players chomping at the bit to buy keys, ships, and bank space, doff space, inventory space, and be all the better for cutting the foundry off. Then again people may look and say hm... i ran all the games content played every mission and ask them self what do i need more things for? Will a new ship drive a person to play everything again and think its a different game with a new ship?
In short i don't expect to know how players will react. But i like everyone else still playing will find out one way or the other.
For the record, it wasn't Cloaked Intentions that was released then, but the Lost Dominion/the 2800 Featured Series episodes, first released a week after the 2nd anniversary and completed after the 10th of March. Keep in mind though that the content drought was that of story only, as we had other content in that period.
They already have. The original post wants you to believe:
Not days, not weeks, but MONTHS. And not months of work for all the missions, mind you, but months of work for EACH INDIVIDUAL MISSION.
Ludicrous.
The old employees who worked on its core creation should feel proud. They had a vision and the skill to created something that stood the test of time. Cryptic no longer has that vision or skill of the past.
ESO sounds like a viable solution to me as well. Perhaps we will meet there, Matt !
Is the estimate of "months" direct from one of the programmers, or from a Cryptic spokesperson forced to say whatever PWE tells them to say? I'd rather hear from one of the programmers, to be honest. And it doesn't have to be a long, in depth answer from them. Just up front and honest. "This is the current time estimate from the programmers. This is their cost estimate. This is how much Foundry code they think would have to be changed to work with the current STO code. Simplified, this is the kind of STO code that keeps breaking the Foundry every time there's a new expansion." Maybe that's what they've been discussing for a year (probably less). If so, it would've been nice if they could've given us updates, to let us know what was going on. Maybe then some of us could've offered them our help (those of us who know how to program, I mean). It wouldn't be paid work for the playerbase to help out, of course. But then again, creating Foundry missions wasn't paid work either. It was a labor of love. Love that made all the blood, sweat, and tears worthwhile.
I would call BS on that. A big, major, massive pile of it actually. It took me a couple of weeks to develop an importer for the Foundry. With that, I could recreate any exported custom landscape in 10-20 mins.
Recreating the text and the switches took some 1-4 hours, depending on the complexity. In any case, you give me a foundry export and you could get your mission recreated by the next day.
Cryptic used to tell us that their dev tools are more capable and complex. Which means, what you can do with the Foundry, you can do with the dev tools (and much more). This means that such importer could be created with ease. The buttons may be at different positions or tabs or whatever, but they are there somewhere. Train the importer to that different interface and there, you can import missions 50x faster as of now. With better tailored tools, you can do it even faster than that.
Now, if you have only 1 hour a week to work on that (because you have other tasks), one mission migration would take 2 months.
LOL. Try reaching T6 reputation with every faction on a new character, or generating 3000 Zen for even a single T6 ship in "a matter of a few days".
Both take months of playing an average of an hour or two (at least) every day.
The most recent fleet holding requires over 67 MILLION dilithium to get the ultimate rewards.
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.'
Ambassador Kael (supported by Neverwinter's CM, I forget her name) laid out as much information as he could during that livestream. Among that information blast was the statement about taking "months per mission" due to needing to change the missions over from how the Foundry processes things to how the live server does (best summarization I can do without rewatching it and quoting it).
I think he stated the devs tried it and came up with that estimation, but don't quote me on that. I may have implied that between him saying they tried it and his statement about "months per mission" to adjust for differences in the Foundry versus Holodeck, the live server.
If you want more detail, I'd suggest you watch the livestream on Twitch or Youtube. The whole stream was about 30 minutes, give or take.
But if you don't trust Kael because you feel he's, "...forced to say whatever PWE tells them to say," then find a door and leave because no argument that uses information from Cryptic employees, including information from the devs with whom he works, will mean anything to you because they're paid by Cryptic (and maybe PWE, I don't know) and therefore have a vested interest in painting information in as positive a light as possible.