...bunch of projected pixels not worth building a life around it. You can quote me on that one.
I will, because it's TRIBBLE. Relationships, lives, and marriages have the foundry to thank for their existence today. It has shaped peoples lives not because of pixels but of the social connections its fostered and the people it's brought together.
If you want to minimize that, fine. But I will absolutely call that out.
Call out what you want and that's up to each of us. I totally disagree with your view point. Real life is not found in a pixelated world. This is human made (and perhaps badly made at times) with a bunch of 0s and 1s that will end eventually when the servers go down in a few years. What would you then? No matter how you feel about it this will end somehow.
IMO not worth even getting upset about it or building a life around it. If you want to rage about it go ahead and see if that makes you feel better. Goodluck with that.
"I don't like this decision, I don't want to play this game, I want to go play this other game" is a dangerous and potentially toxic attitude. Make your individual decisions but don't try and sway other people. If you're part of a community don't force their hand by making them feel neglected or peer pressured into playing what you want. You do what you want to do as an individual decision and leave everyone else out of it.
I can't imagine even the most vitriolic of people would be ok with that circumstance, if they are well the quality of their character is revealed.
...bunch of projected pixels not worth building a life around it. You can quote me on that one.
I will, because it's TRIBBLE. Relationships, lives, and marriages have the foundry to thank for their existence today. It has shaped peoples lives not because of pixels but of the social connections its fostered and the people it's brought together.
If you want to minimize that, fine. But I will absolutely call that out.
Call out what you want and that's up to each of us. I totally disagree with your view point. Real life is not found in a pixelated world. This is human made (and perhaps badly made at times) with a bunch of 0s and 1s that will end eventually when the servers go down in a few years. What would you then? No matter how you feel about it this will end somehow.
IMO not worth even getting upset about it or building a life around it. If you want to rage about it go ahead and see if that makes you feel better. Goodluck with that.
Okay, but ask yourself why should I consider your opinion a constructive position in a debate when your opinion is that mine has no value? To each their own doesn't work when you're explicitly denying what others have.
You may not see the Foundry as a vector for human interaction but that's a literal statement of how the system worked. I could build a narrative experience, couple that with gameplay mechanics and pacing, to communicate perspective and human experience to an audience with a minimal of interference (beyond the limitations of the editor) and yet do so a base level of mechanics, visuals, and setting provided by the main game (providing more fodder for hybrid visual-literary experience.) Audiences and creators connected deeply with each other and to the other creators in the Foundry community through reciprocal processing of creative problems, direct collaborations, and connection through shared experience. Add to this the act of introducing players to each other who might not have interacted (much) with analogous systems and the friendships that have resulted from that. The Foundry offered a unique set of creative experiences that are not easily replicated through other communication systems or even in other creative communities (as the Foundry built into the design of the feature its baseline for community interaction. It was a very impactful component of the creative community.)
You may not have been a part of those interactions but that's a very, very long way from saying that they did not exist (per "ones and zeroes") or cannot matter to those who are now looking at the community and asking how best to continue their unique experiences. That minimization, to be frank, is nonsense. All experience is virtual experience and this is a clinical definition of how perception works. Synapses carry modulated input to processing centers (formulating perceived interpretations) which assemble a perception of reality from what sensory organs can indirectly translate to your neural network. Nothing you experience is real because nothing you experience is directly taken from it's source or carried through without some kind of loss in breadth or precision to the original signal. Every point on the chain above removes you a step from "the real thing" and limits a full appreciation for what the universe is (hence the work required for science.) Light is reflected or emitted, sound is an arbitrary reinterpretation of rapid pressure differentials, and how you value these inputs is definitely not in line with the proportional make up of the cosmos. Experience is a statistically insignificant sliver of reality, but that doesn't make what you feel any less important to you (even if one could state that life is ultimately a series of chemical reactions for which we've attached a discrete classification system on per the evolution of language and human society, so it's not getting worked up about anything because it's ultimately disconnected from the conceptual framework we've projected onto reality.)
Moderating human communication (both verbal, non-verbal, and symbolic [all strong components of effective foundrying]) per ones and zeros neither detracts or elevates from what that communication means to the people involved (this is fairly basic to modern human interaction or human interaction since the invention of symbolic art.) What matters is what people put into these systems. The Foundry's loss is felt and is dramatic as we were told up until recently that the dev's priorities were in getting it back online (we weren't told that it might not be coming back in any form.) Ergo, sudden emotion. Regardless of how you feel, it's not okay (per constructive community dynamics and trying to contribute to a discussion without simply antagonizing people) to minimize loss when you don't have the perspective to appreciate that loss in its host context. Even if you don't understand it personally, you can still respect what others found was important (for whatever that meant in grand context, for which you definitely aren't in a position to judge accurately [no human is]) or at least give it sufficient distance in line with your stated disinterest.
Post edited by duncanidaho11 on
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
@sirsitsalot Try again, and try not to troll next time. Watch the video. Read the transcript. Get some knowledge. Kael has already stated that the programmers are working on several new things that will benefit all of Cryptic's games. Ignoring that fact and making such ignorant statements is willful trolling.
LoL… I see my sarcasm was completely missed. If they had a developer to work on the foundry, they would be working on the Foundry... And come ON people... Changing a user interface happens on the code level. It's not something that someone can just sit down and change on a whim.
I want to clarify my position here. I understand that the foundry has to go away due to the reasons explained in detail. I accept that. What I have a hard time accepting is that this is being done with what seems like no regard for the individuals who have relied on the Foundry to provide them with the content which the developers are unable to produce based on the direction of focus. Namely exploration-themed missions, and missions designed to facilitate faction-specific missions.
Unless the devs will be changing their focus and intend to begin developing continuing exploration-themed and faction-specific missions, then I believe that a smaller, but no less important segment of the player community will be neglected, and I see the loss of the Foundry as a lost opportunity for Cryptic to service that segment.
This is the second system being removed from this game which fell into an unmanageable state due to long-term neglect. Had the explorations system been improved and expanded upon rather than abandoned, it likely would have drawn a lot more people to it, but it wasn't so it didn't and new players got lost in a square room that had only one door, and that was the reason we were given for its removal.
The Foundry also would have had a far larger following, had it been improved and maintained from its beginning. Bugs had been reported for years that went unfixed. The Foundry listings in the game only showed a drop in the ocean of content. These alone made people not want to bother producing content because they never knew when it would be broken, or if people would even be able to find it. Not to mention, every time big changes were made to the core game, the Foundry went down for long periods of time. These are all issues that Cryptic caused and seemed to never attempt to resolve.
So while I accept the decision, I find it disappointing that it had to come to this. It was a part of the game, like Exploration was part of the game, they both should have been treated as such given as much of a priority as any other feature. That they were not is terribly sad.
The facts are:
- They couldn't find a way to successfully monetize the Foundry.
- Charge ZEN for foundry slots rather than RD. You could still trade RD for the ZEN thereby avoiding spending your own money.
- Charge Zen for creation assets introduced to the game in core game expansions.
- Put Lockboxes that no longer drop in the core game into the foundry's mission completion reward rather than any other reward that the Foundry could be used as an exploit for. That way even those push a single button to complete the mission coutl technically be valid for those wanting to farm old lockboxes. A lockbox is after all nothing without Zen spent to buy keys.
- They have limited full/actual programmer resources spread across 4 game (3 launched, 1 MtG still in development)
That's their and PWE's problem. PWE should be able to afford to allocate funds for Cryptic to FULLY STAFF all of their ganmes. And if PWE HAS Allocated those funds, then it is Cryptic's fault for not doing so. But since I cannot imagine any developer that doesn't want all of its games to be everything they can be, I lean more towards PWE being too cheap to allocate the funds.
- To Upper Management, the tangible ROI on having programming resources allocated to fix (or expand) the Foundry for each major update across the two game that have it, is too low compared to using those same programming resources to new features that both assist in better monetization of the games in general; and that they also feel will attract NEW players and get those new players to open their wallets.
^^^
IMO - It sucks for people who liked the opportunity the Foundry gave to those that used it; but it's business 101 in that if you have limited resources, you direct them to things that in your opinion give the best tangible return on investment (ROI).
I well understand that. I don't pretend to really know what goes on with the coding side of things, but it seems to me that the reason Foundry breaks every time there is an update is that the database changes for the core game, but the Foundry's references do not update with it. I've messed around with Unreal Engine 4 enough to know that if you populate your game with a whole lot of objects, you use instances that reference the objects, not objects themselves. That way if something gets updated on the object level, the update propagates to all instances, thus eliminating the need to update every single one if something changes. Cryptic's mistake was not addressing the cause of the breakage the first time it happened, but rather just fixed the breakage. Of course, the stitch likely would have taken more time than the band aid. They put off and put off the stitch solution until the wound had ripped itself so much wider that the only viable solution to the was to cut off the affected limb. Had they addressed the issue correctly to begin with, it would have been an ounce of prevention saving a pound of cure. But at this point they would need a kiloton of prevention to save a megaton of cure.
Again. the fault is with PWE/Cryptic due to lack of staff in the right place.
The above said, it MIGHT come back to bite them in the A$$ because of a number of intangibles that won't fully take effect until the Foundry is sunsetted. But in Business you prioritize on the tangible stuff you can quantify first and foremost if you want to survive.
Except for one thing. Rather than just leaving it alone and explaining why they have to leave it alone and let it stand as is, they are removing it. Removing it just sweeps the issue under the rug. It does not solve anything really. If left alone, then those who manage to work around the issues can still create missions and those who play them who understand that there will probably be persistent bugs and still be engaged with the game between official content releases. Sometimes tou just have to leave a wound alone and hope that it doesn''t get worse.
Personally, I do think they;re making a bigger mistake with sunsetting the Foundry then they realize, but I understand the decision from a Business perspective, and time will tell.
Too much emphasis on business and not enough emphasis on production. It's par for the course for the entire corporate game dev industry these days. Look at all the different publishers out there pushing their monetization agendas into the development access, resulting in the games themselves being less game and more store front. It's really making more and more consumers mad. The golden age of game development happened when the emphasis was on game design and ensuring that what was designed actually worked. If you did that, your game was gold and the money took care of itself. But now it's all about publishers finding ways to nickel and dime the consumers to death, and the lackluster quality of the games is making it harder and harder for the consumers to just blindly throw money at the game.
Like I said a little later on after the post you quoted, It is not what Cryptic does that upsets me. It's what they could do but don't because they do not have the manpower due to PWE being tight on the money that is flowing into their bank account like a raging river. We've seen two systems removed from the game with another likely on the way out before too long. And they will have all gone because of lack of manpower to maintain and improve them. That is not our fault. It's on the developer/publisher. But we are the ones punished for it. And it upsets enough people that they stop playing over it. They do not have to post "I Quit" threads when they leave. There is no real point to doing so in a free to play game. They just stop playing. And if they are not playing, they certainly are not buying anything...
Of course, STO has lots of new people coming to it from the new fans of Trek thanks to Discovery. Maybe there are enough to offset the inactivity of veteran players for whom removal of these systems was the proverbial straw to break the camel's back. I don't really know. That would require access to metrics that we simply are not privy to.
None of those suggestions successfully monetize the Foundry (IE just adding a ZEN cost DOESN'T automatically mean players will spend money for it to the point further development is justified for it. Without further incentivising it to make it ATTRACTIVE and something players WANT to spend money on because of said incentives, etc; the monetization fails.
As for your other main point: they have the manpower they can afford (nothing is unlimited) to still be in business and make a profit. They CAN'T just "leave it (the Foundry) standing" for either game because when they do a major update and add new things, their data structure changes; and that BREAKS the Foundry - meaning to get it working again, they have to allocate programmer resources to do that - and again, Upper Management doesn't see enough ROI for tat to continue as it has. A better ROI is to just remove the Foundry and keep the programmers working on supporting new features and content that provide a better ROI (in their eyes.)
Post edited by crypticarmsman on
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
'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.'
And furthermore, it is immature of us to make it a point to say that we're going to some other game because we don't like a decision that was made here, and then try to promote that game as if to rub salt in an open wound.
That wasn't my intention. There can't be many people who have not heard of ESO, not gamers at least, it hardly needs advertising, I bet their coffee budget is bigger than Cryptic's entire turnover. It was just to tell folks where some of us were going to spend our time when not grinding STO, as that's all it is now, a continual grind. It certainly won't worry Zenimax if they are not mentioned on these pages and it won't make any difference to STO either. ESO is not a natural competitor for STO, EVE could be seen that way, perhaps No Man's Sky or Elite Dangerous, but even so, if folks are deciding to go spend some time in one of those games, the only thing it damages by not being allowed to spread the word is the community. (Flaming/Trolling comments moderated out. - BMR)
To me Matt, I feel the issue is that while you're not advertising the game directly, you are advertising that you have a guild on there. That I feel can be taken as an advertisement, since you're suggesting to people where to take their money if they are upset with Cryptic's decision.
I can say that while I am sad about the situation the Foundry was left to, if I had any spare money to spend in this game, I would put it towards STO if I could. Even without the Foundry, the game is still here for anyone to play.
None of those suggestions successfully monetize the Foundry (IE just adding a ZEN cost DOESN'T automatically mean players will spend money for it to the point further development is justified for it. Without further incentivising it to make it ATTRACTIVE and something players WANT to spend money on because of said incentives, etc; the monetization fails.
As for your other main point: they have the manpower they can afford (nothing is unlimited) to still be in business and make a profit. They CAN'T just "leave it (the Foundry) standing" for either game because when they do a major update and add new things, their data structure changes; and that BREAKS the Foundry - meaning to get it working again,m they have to allocate programmer resources to do that - and again, Uper Management doesn't see enough ROI for tat to continue as it has. A better ROI is to just remove the Foundry and keep the programmers working on supporting new features and content that provide a better ROI (in their eyes.)
Coming in here with a senior Foundry author point (hopefully to bring a little resolution here so we can move on from suggesting that there's an easy fix per systems or monetization): the Foundry as it is now is not viable. The problem (all this is IMO, and gained from limited explanations of systems for which I haven't been trained to use) is pretty basic, it runs differently to the main game. Cryptic has had to invest in and develop their own content for growth and survival and the longer that has occurred the further the Foundry has drifted from both their technical capacity to manage and as well as the underpinning architecture. More can go wrong and the devs understand it less from their day-to-day work. What may have saved it is if the Foundry and the original STO were unified at the start, such that Cryptic could fully exploit the Foundry (ie. directly fold missions into arcs and port to other platforms) and the Foundry mission system wouldn't ultimately diverge from the game through allopatric speciation in system design.
If they could bring missions back there would still be a problem in how they work differently to the main game. It's a failure point in the system. It would be absolutely fantastic if Cryptic eventually solved the translation problem to bring missions back but big point for learning how to manage these big creative systems is to integrate them from the start and to consider long-term evolutionary dynamics in game design, as by the time big problems arise it may be too late (developmentally) to take corrective action. (too much constraint and too much developmental inertia to fight against.)
That's where we are with the Foundry, and where we go from here is hoping for creative solutions (to bring missions back in some form at some time in future) and second tries in future games (lessons learned.) Additional things Cryptic can do to help mitigate the disruption to community dynamics and maintain positive mechanisms in same: additional creative challenges and further development of remaining creative systems (eg. character/crew building, creative reflections taken from thought provoking/interesting episodes, cohesive world building.)
Post edited by duncanidaho11 on
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
'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.'
As I have stated before, the only way for UGC tools/content to get the attention they deserve is by being the main, and singular, focus of a game, not as being something attached to a non UGC focused game.
Counter example: Halo's Forge (it's one of the most prominent examples of UGC in modern gaming, actively supported by the studio over more than a decade now with live development all the way).
Stronger integration is the critical point, you don't need the hyperbolic extreme of a "UGC focused game" to see the medium implemented well in a live game/series. As elaborated on before, the Foundry's sunset is a function of the underlying Foundry platform diverging from the main game. If Cryptic had been in the position to build the Foundry on the same platform as the main game or vica versa (such that episodes and Foundry missions worked in the same way), the Foundry probably wouldn't have diverged to the point where the system is now experiencing exponential decay with each update. No one knew the code, more and more was going wrong, and from a systems point of view support it was no longer viable. That's intrinsic to the setup of this particular system, not the concept of UGC more broadly. However, considering how STO started this likely wasn't a realistic option. Hence our current situation.
Cryptic did the best job they could when developing the Foundry and that still resulted in some of the best years of community gaming (in my experience though it's not a difficult argument to make) in spite of all the limitations but those limitations ultimately set the platform on a negative developmental trajectory (playing out over the better part of a decade) for which a later technical solution was not found (or at least Found yet) and the studio wasn't ultimately able to overcome. Over time more and more effort was required just to keep the thing stable and even if more money had been thrown at the problem that exponential decay over time would have still posed a huge challenge (if not an insurmountable one), over the long term. Sunset delayed, but not prevented.
The lesson though isn't to make the entire game UGC focused (hyperbole and wide of the issues) but instead just to build games with big systems in mind from the get go (not feasible with STO's inherited start) so they can be integrated for greater long term stability (in for example: how missions work on the back end.) In a hypothetical next game with Foundry support, basically what we're talking about is UGC and main missions sharing the same technical underpinnings (with secondary benefits to being able to port content to main arcs and to other platforms [incidentally making it more important to business operations and to the population at large], but the key point is that maintenance of the Foundry wouldn't be a problem of fundamental separation increasing over time [on top of routine development problems], which is what hurt us most.)
Though it's worth repeating for the sake of avoiding an inapt comparison that the issue here applies to any big system Cryptic develops, not just those involving UGC.
Well well, Zen:Dil exchange now at 319/320, up by 10 points since this announcement. I guess there's just less Zen floating around, as I predicted many pages back. It remains to be seen how that translates to bottom line, just a blip, a strong downward trend, or barely registering? Also, steam charts, which I know are not any kind of reliable indicator, but are the only indicator we have, show a sharp drop off in activity over the last couple of weeks.
Just a caution on data trends: we're also occupying a between-episode lull and the tail end of the last PVE grind (with at least one more to look forward to before the next episode.) These can also result in population depreciation and the loss of the Foundry hasn't actually been felt yet because it's still in game. Foundry folks may not be expected to sign off from the game now, during their last opportunity to play what they loved so much.
Inevitably some will have but the more interesting stats (IMO) to look at are population trends over time, the rate of retention with respect to major content lulls (for which the Foundry was keenly able to satisfy), the rate of retention with respect to player burn-out (the Foundry provided an outlet and alternative, which may be of greater importance with the Endeavor system pushing for reductive grinding), the rate of retention with respect to new players (not finding Foundry content through the top 3 system as an alternative to the major episode grind and major USP for the game), and the positivity of community interactions (lacking a major nucleus for constructive interactions via an established game system.) Those will take some time to show and some time to show definitely as other factors (such as episodes, events, and the broader ecosystem of MMO gaming and Star Trek fandom) will push trends in various directions.
Ie. it'll be months or years after sunset before the loss of the Foundry can be fully quantified across all levels of player interactions. Simple stuff might be perceptible right away, but the interactions probably won't be (and would take something like Mixed Effect Linear Modeling on internal data to appreciate. Also Cryptic if your data people aren't doing this (ie. MELM) or something comparable to evaluate the effect of factors on player response variables via comparisons of parameter coefficients derived from AIC-evaluated models, they should be doing this. )
Post edited by duncanidaho11 on
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Well well, Zen:Dil exchange now at 319/320, up by 10 points since this announcement. I guess there's just less Zen floating around, as I predicted many pages back. It remains to be seen how that translates to bottom line, just a blip, a strong downward trend, or barely registering?
In my experience, there is dilithium inflation whenever there is an in-game event, new content roll-out, or a significant sale. Dilithium prices shot up to the 320 range over the winter holiday event and again when they had a recent "20% off everything" sale. Same during the recent Anniversary event. ZEN costs more because people are needing more to buy the latest shiny object. It's more likely that the current jump in DIL price has more to do with the regular economics of the game than the Foundry announcement.
Foundry need not go away forerver, but rather, eventually become a Cryptic title unto itself. It could have themed categories based Cryptic's titles, including Champions, Neverwinter and Star Trek, as well as a generic category which would be built araound assets not specific to any particular IP.
Call it Foundry Online.
And a point on the original proposal: while I would use the hell out of this the problem is a pretty basic one: each of those is a licensed IP and any integration of Champions, Neverwinter, and Star Trek would require agreement between license holders to produce a joint game principally supported by UGC (ie. an MMO launching in the classic twilight of a mod supported game.) That would both be costly (see lawyers) and unlikely (see executives.) Furthermore, economic models would need to be implemented separate from existing titles that could support the game per UGC. Ie. pricing of UGC which would ultimately detract from the creative nature of building stuff for people via content or asset monetization (non-starters for previous discussions to support the Foundry and problematic per precedent. See. Halo's Forge versus Microsoft's Project Spark.) Add to that: this UGC game would detract from the populations in the original titles rather than adding to them (fundamentally flipping the dynamic the Foundry as a promotional asset and posing a disincentive for Cryptic to pursue the project.)
Cryptic did evaluate separating the Foundry off as its own server as one of the possible solutions they could try to keep the missions out there (see. Kael's ten forward episode) but it doesn't make sense from a business or technical point of view (and I'll add: from a creative point of view. Art needs context for best effect.) The Foundry succeeded through what integration it had and the way to implement it better in future is to provide it with more technical integration with its host game (mitigating for, if not overcoming, the specific technical factors that lead to the Foundry sunset.)
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
So glad to see that so many people's "final" words were in fact not.
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
That's quite the paradox, how could you nerf nerf when the nerf is nerfed. But how would the nerf be nerfed when the nerf is nerfed? This allows the nerf not to be nerfed since the nerf is nerfed? But if the nerf isn't nerfed, it could still nerf nerfs. But as soon as the nerf is nerfed, the nerf power is lost. So paradoxally it the nerf nerf lost its nerf, while it's still nerfed, which cannot be because the nerf was unable to nerf.
I used to love this game, but it got dull and ever since I've sort of been on a "log in to grind events then don't log in until the next event" sort of "schedule." But there's one thing I always have found fun, the forge. Just not fun enough to ignore the fact that it wasn't rewarding. I always thought to myself "You know, if they ever made the forge experience better and more akin to story missions in their gear drops I'd probably play a ton more."
But.. they never did that. Finding things was clunky and unreliable and the rewards were pretty terrible. If they had just given forge creators the ability to assign set piece loot or the like to the rewards of their missions I have zero doubt that there'd have been a significant amount more interest. And with that increased interest there'd be increased reason to revamp the forge and put the effort into de-spaghettiing its code so it didn't break with every patch.
But this is essentially the same thing as running a tractor every single day for 13 hours a day since the day it was made with only the barest minimum of maintenance. Eventually it's just gonna get to the point where it's falling apart so much it's just better to get rid of the thing and get rid of whatever you were using it for, too.
Personally, I've always found the "official" stuff to be bland, shallow, and just arbitrarily wide. Now a game where all of its content is like that instead of just most of it? Pity this is the only Star Trek MMO on the market. We really need one that isn't owned by an asian-grind company.
I've gotta say, I definitely don't like the direction Cryptic has been going lately. No other company has ever had me almost instantly regret spending money on one of their products before. Oh, well. I don't know. Maybe it's just time to permanently move on from anything Cryptic. It's been a long while since I played any of their games as my "full-time" games because they only seem to want to make things that are fun for themselves and don't seem to quite realize that what they consider fun isn't what most others consider fun.
Guess we'll see what happens. Really kind of says something that I've grown so disillusioned with Cryptic I'm this far behind on such huge updates to its games, STO and CO used to genuinely be my absolute favorite games but now I'm nearly a month behind a major sweeping change. /smh
Comments
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Call out what you want and that's up to each of us. I totally disagree with your view point. Real life is not found in a pixelated world. This is human made (and perhaps badly made at times) with a bunch of 0s and 1s that will end eventually when the servers go down in a few years. What would you then? No matter how you feel about it this will end somehow.
IMO not worth even getting upset about it or building a life around it. If you want to rage about it go ahead and see if that makes you feel better. Goodluck with that.
Original STO beta tester.
I can't imagine even the most vitriolic of people would be ok with that circumstance, if they are well the quality of their character is revealed.
Okay, but ask yourself why should I consider your opinion a constructive position in a debate when your opinion is that mine has no value? To each their own doesn't work when you're explicitly denying what others have.
You may not see the Foundry as a vector for human interaction but that's a literal statement of how the system worked. I could build a narrative experience, couple that with gameplay mechanics and pacing, to communicate perspective and human experience to an audience with a minimal of interference (beyond the limitations of the editor) and yet do so a base level of mechanics, visuals, and setting provided by the main game (providing more fodder for hybrid visual-literary experience.) Audiences and creators connected deeply with each other and to the other creators in the Foundry community through reciprocal processing of creative problems, direct collaborations, and connection through shared experience. Add to this the act of introducing players to each other who might not have interacted (much) with analogous systems and the friendships that have resulted from that. The Foundry offered a unique set of creative experiences that are not easily replicated through other communication systems or even in other creative communities (as the Foundry built into the design of the feature its baseline for community interaction. It was a very impactful component of the creative community.)
You may not have been a part of those interactions but that's a very, very long way from saying that they did not exist (per "ones and zeroes") or cannot matter to those who are now looking at the community and asking how best to continue their unique experiences. That minimization, to be frank, is nonsense. All experience is virtual experience and this is a clinical definition of how perception works. Synapses carry modulated input to processing centers (formulating perceived interpretations) which assemble a perception of reality from what sensory organs can indirectly translate to your neural network. Nothing you experience is real because nothing you experience is directly taken from it's source or carried through without some kind of loss in breadth or precision to the original signal. Every point on the chain above removes you a step from "the real thing" and limits a full appreciation for what the universe is (hence the work required for science.) Light is reflected or emitted, sound is an arbitrary reinterpretation of rapid pressure differentials, and how you value these inputs is definitely not in line with the proportional make up of the cosmos. Experience is a statistically insignificant sliver of reality, but that doesn't make what you feel any less important to you (even if one could state that life is ultimately a series of chemical reactions for which we've attached a discrete classification system on per the evolution of language and human society, so it's not getting worked up about anything because it's ultimately disconnected from the conceptual framework we've projected onto reality.)
Moderating human communication (both verbal, non-verbal, and symbolic [all strong components of effective foundrying]) per ones and zeros neither detracts or elevates from what that communication means to the people involved (this is fairly basic to modern human interaction or human interaction since the invention of symbolic art.) What matters is what people put into these systems. The Foundry's loss is felt and is dramatic as we were told up until recently that the dev's priorities were in getting it back online (we weren't told that it might not be coming back in any form.) Ergo, sudden emotion. Regardless of how you feel, it's not okay (per constructive community dynamics and trying to contribute to a discussion without simply antagonizing people) to minimize loss when you don't have the perspective to appreciate that loss in its host context. Even if you don't understand it personally, you can still respect what others found was important (for whatever that meant in grand context, for which you definitely aren't in a position to judge accurately [no human is]) or at least give it sufficient distance in line with your stated disinterest.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
None of those suggestions successfully monetize the Foundry (IE just adding a ZEN cost DOESN'T automatically mean players will spend money for it to the point further development is justified for it. Without further incentivising it to make it ATTRACTIVE and something players WANT to spend money on because of said incentives, etc; the monetization fails.
As for your other main point: they have the manpower they can afford (nothing is unlimited) to still be in business and make a profit. They CAN'T just "leave it (the Foundry) standing" for either game because when they do a major update and add new things, their data structure changes; and that BREAKS the Foundry - meaning to get it working again, they have to allocate programmer resources to do that - and again, Upper Management doesn't see enough ROI for tat to continue as it has. A better ROI is to just remove the Foundry and keep the programmers working on supporting new features and content that provide a better ROI (in their eyes.)
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
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.'
To me Matt, I feel the issue is that while you're not advertising the game directly, you are advertising that you have a guild on there. That I feel can be taken as an advertisement, since you're suggesting to people where to take their money if they are upset with Cryptic's decision.
I can say that while I am sad about the situation the Foundry was left to, if I had any spare money to spend in this game, I would put it towards STO if I could. Even without the Foundry, the game is still here for anyone to play.
Coming in here with a senior Foundry author point (hopefully to bring a little resolution here so we can move on from suggesting that there's an easy fix per systems or monetization): the Foundry as it is now is not viable. The problem (all this is IMO, and gained from limited explanations of systems for which I haven't been trained to use) is pretty basic, it runs differently to the main game. Cryptic has had to invest in and develop their own content for growth and survival and the longer that has occurred the further the Foundry has drifted from both their technical capacity to manage and as well as the underpinning architecture. More can go wrong and the devs understand it less from their day-to-day work. What may have saved it is if the Foundry and the original STO were unified at the start, such that Cryptic could fully exploit the Foundry (ie. directly fold missions into arcs and port to other platforms) and the Foundry mission system wouldn't ultimately diverge from the game through allopatric speciation in system design.
If they could bring missions back there would still be a problem in how they work differently to the main game. It's a failure point in the system. It would be absolutely fantastic if Cryptic eventually solved the translation problem to bring missions back but big point for learning how to manage these big creative systems is to integrate them from the start and to consider long-term evolutionary dynamics in game design, as by the time big problems arise it may be too late (developmentally) to take corrective action. (too much constraint and too much developmental inertia to fight against.)
That's where we are with the Foundry, and where we go from here is hoping for creative solutions (to bring missions back in some form at some time in future) and second tries in future games (lessons learned.) Additional things Cryptic can do to help mitigate the disruption to community dynamics and maintain positive mechanisms in same: additional creative challenges and further development of remaining creative systems (eg. character/crew building, creative reflections taken from thought provoking/interesting episodes, cohesive world building.)
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
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.'
Whenever I think of procedurally generated content, No Man's Sky immediately comes to mind.
Counter example: Halo's Forge (it's one of the most prominent examples of UGC in modern gaming, actively supported by the studio over more than a decade now with live development all the way).
Stronger integration is the critical point, you don't need the hyperbolic extreme of a "UGC focused game" to see the medium implemented well in a live game/series. As elaborated on before, the Foundry's sunset is a function of the underlying Foundry platform diverging from the main game. If Cryptic had been in the position to build the Foundry on the same platform as the main game or vica versa (such that episodes and Foundry missions worked in the same way), the Foundry probably wouldn't have diverged to the point where the system is now experiencing exponential decay with each update. No one knew the code, more and more was going wrong, and from a systems point of view support it was no longer viable. That's intrinsic to the setup of this particular system, not the concept of UGC more broadly. However, considering how STO started this likely wasn't a realistic option. Hence our current situation.
Cryptic did the best job they could when developing the Foundry and that still resulted in some of the best years of community gaming (in my experience though it's not a difficult argument to make) in spite of all the limitations but those limitations ultimately set the platform on a negative developmental trajectory (playing out over the better part of a decade) for which a later technical solution was not found (or at least Found yet) and the studio wasn't ultimately able to overcome. Over time more and more effort was required just to keep the thing stable and even if more money had been thrown at the problem that exponential decay over time would have still posed a huge challenge (if not an insurmountable one), over the long term. Sunset delayed, but not prevented.
The lesson though isn't to make the entire game UGC focused (hyperbole and wide of the issues) but instead just to build games with big systems in mind from the get go (not feasible with STO's inherited start) so they can be integrated for greater long term stability (in for example: how missions work on the back end.) In a hypothetical next game with Foundry support, basically what we're talking about is UGC and main missions sharing the same technical underpinnings (with secondary benefits to being able to port content to main arcs and to other platforms [incidentally making it more important to business operations and to the population at large], but the key point is that maintenance of the Foundry wouldn't be a problem of fundamental separation increasing over time [on top of routine development problems], which is what hurt us most.)
Though it's worth repeating for the sake of avoiding an inapt comparison that the issue here applies to any big system Cryptic develops, not just those involving UGC.
Just a caution on data trends: we're also occupying a between-episode lull and the tail end of the last PVE grind (with at least one more to look forward to before the next episode.) These can also result in population depreciation and the loss of the Foundry hasn't actually been felt yet because it's still in game. Foundry folks may not be expected to sign off from the game now, during their last opportunity to play what they loved so much.
Inevitably some will have but the more interesting stats (IMO) to look at are population trends over time, the rate of retention with respect to major content lulls (for which the Foundry was keenly able to satisfy), the rate of retention with respect to player burn-out (the Foundry provided an outlet and alternative, which may be of greater importance with the Endeavor system pushing for reductive grinding), the rate of retention with respect to new players (not finding Foundry content through the top 3 system as an alternative to the major episode grind and major USP for the game), and the positivity of community interactions (lacking a major nucleus for constructive interactions via an established game system.) Those will take some time to show and some time to show definitely as other factors (such as episodes, events, and the broader ecosystem of MMO gaming and Star Trek fandom) will push trends in various directions.
Ie. it'll be months or years after sunset before the loss of the Foundry can be fully quantified across all levels of player interactions. Simple stuff might be perceptible right away, but the interactions probably won't be (and would take something like Mixed Effect Linear Modeling on internal data to appreciate. Also Cryptic if your data people aren't doing this (ie. MELM) or something comparable to evaluate the effect of factors on player response variables via comparisons of parameter coefficients derived from AIC-evaluated models, they should be doing this.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
In my experience, there is dilithium inflation whenever there is an in-game event, new content roll-out, or a significant sale. Dilithium prices shot up to the 320 range over the winter holiday event and again when they had a recent "20% off everything" sale. Same during the recent Anniversary event. ZEN costs more because people are needing more to buy the latest shiny object. It's more likely that the current jump in DIL price has more to do with the regular economics of the game than the Foundry announcement.
And a point on the original proposal: while I would use the hell out of this the problem is a pretty basic one: each of those is a licensed IP and any integration of Champions, Neverwinter, and Star Trek would require agreement between license holders to produce a joint game principally supported by UGC (ie. an MMO launching in the classic twilight of a mod supported game.) That would both be costly (see lawyers) and unlikely (see executives.) Furthermore, economic models would need to be implemented separate from existing titles that could support the game per UGC. Ie. pricing of UGC which would ultimately detract from the creative nature of building stuff for people via content or asset monetization (non-starters for previous discussions to support the Foundry and problematic per precedent. See. Halo's Forge versus Microsoft's Project Spark.) Add to that: this UGC game would detract from the populations in the original titles rather than adding to them (fundamentally flipping the dynamic the Foundry as a promotional asset and posing a disincentive for Cryptic to pursue the project.)
Cryptic did evaluate separating the Foundry off as its own server as one of the possible solutions they could try to keep the missions out there (see. Kael's ten forward episode) but it doesn't make sense from a business or technical point of view (and I'll add: from a creative point of view. Art needs context for best effect.) The Foundry succeeded through what integration it had and the way to implement it better in future is to provide it with more technical integration with its host game (mitigating for, if not overcoming, the specific technical factors that lead to the Foundry sunset.)
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
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I call it, the Stoutes paradox.
But.. they never did that. Finding things was clunky and unreliable and the rewards were pretty terrible. If they had just given forge creators the ability to assign set piece loot or the like to the rewards of their missions I have zero doubt that there'd have been a significant amount more interest. And with that increased interest there'd be increased reason to revamp the forge and put the effort into de-spaghettiing its code so it didn't break with every patch.
But this is essentially the same thing as running a tractor every single day for 13 hours a day since the day it was made with only the barest minimum of maintenance. Eventually it's just gonna get to the point where it's falling apart so much it's just better to get rid of the thing and get rid of whatever you were using it for, too.
Personally, I've always found the "official" stuff to be bland, shallow, and just arbitrarily wide. Now a game where all of its content is like that instead of just most of it? Pity this is the only Star Trek MMO on the market. We really need one that isn't owned by an asian-grind company.
I've gotta say, I definitely don't like the direction Cryptic has been going lately. No other company has ever had me almost instantly regret spending money on one of their products before. Oh, well. I don't know. Maybe it's just time to permanently move on from anything Cryptic. It's been a long while since I played any of their games as my "full-time" games because they only seem to want to make things that are fun for themselves and don't seem to quite realize that what they consider fun isn't what most others consider fun.
Guess we'll see what happens. Really kind of says something that I've grown so disillusioned with Cryptic I'm this far behind on such huge updates to its games, STO and CO used to genuinely be my absolute favorite games but now I'm nearly a month behind a major sweeping change. /smh