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It's Too Hard to Fix
devencombs
Member Posts: 222 Arc User
I am usually not the type to complain about Cryptic. I have been playing STO from the beginning and I am one of the more faithful players who greatly appreciates this fantastic game that they have developed, and I have no interest in ever seeing it end. I love playing Star Trek Online and I am grateful to Cryptic for giving us that opportunity.
But . . .
"It's too hard to fix" is a lousy excuse for pulling any feature. This is not limited to the recent Calendar deletion. Here is a list of features I remember that Cryptic pulled because they were "too hard to fix or maintain." If I have forgotten any, please post them in your replies.
Macintosh support
Exploration
Foundry
Calendar
Support for Macintosh was widely announced, but then quietly pulled about a year later with little explanation. During that year, Macintosh support always lagged behind and was often neglected. This move alienated a large group of players.
The exploration maps were part of STO from the very start and were used by nearly all players to farm crafting materials and skill points. Pulling this feature practically eliminated a large part of the game.
The Foundry was a major update that brought in a large number of new players. It was the closest way for players to "mod" the game. Many of the player created Foundry missions were very imaginative and challenging. Deleting all that expended effort angered just about everyone.
The Calendar let us know what was happening from one week to the next, allowing us to schedule our gameplay more efficiently so that it wouldn't conflict with our real lives. Pulling the calendar leaves everyone in confusion. And since when is a %&TRIBBLE^%! calendar too hard to fix?! If it really is too difficult to maintain in game, then why not just migrate it to the website? At least then we would all know what's going on!
All these features were deleted from the game with little or no explanation. If they did give an explanation, they were not satisfying in the least. I believe this level of neglect to be inexcusable. Is Cryptic going through downsizing? Are they having to lay off employees? Or is it that the current set of employees working on STO just don't care as much as the original crew did in the first years of the game?
Cryptic, you guys seriously need to start listening your players, or you will lose them.
But . . .
"It's too hard to fix" is a lousy excuse for pulling any feature. This is not limited to the recent Calendar deletion. Here is a list of features I remember that Cryptic pulled because they were "too hard to fix or maintain." If I have forgotten any, please post them in your replies.
Macintosh support
Exploration
Foundry
Calendar
Support for Macintosh was widely announced, but then quietly pulled about a year later with little explanation. During that year, Macintosh support always lagged behind and was often neglected. This move alienated a large group of players.
The exploration maps were part of STO from the very start and were used by nearly all players to farm crafting materials and skill points. Pulling this feature practically eliminated a large part of the game.
The Foundry was a major update that brought in a large number of new players. It was the closest way for players to "mod" the game. Many of the player created Foundry missions were very imaginative and challenging. Deleting all that expended effort angered just about everyone.
The Calendar let us know what was happening from one week to the next, allowing us to schedule our gameplay more efficiently so that it wouldn't conflict with our real lives. Pulling the calendar leaves everyone in confusion. And since when is a %&TRIBBLE^%! calendar too hard to fix?! If it really is too difficult to maintain in game, then why not just migrate it to the website? At least then we would all know what's going on!
All these features were deleted from the game with little or no explanation. If they did give an explanation, they were not satisfying in the least. I believe this level of neglect to be inexcusable. Is Cryptic going through downsizing? Are they having to lay off employees? Or is it that the current set of employees working on STO just don't care as much as the original crew did in the first years of the game?
Cryptic, you guys seriously need to start listening your players, or you will lose them.
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(The game now runs on the PS4, which I think is a lot closer to FreeBSD/Linux. I'm curious if that would be a way to go for Mac support.)
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Likewise with the Foundry and Mac support.
The Foundry required supporting an entirely different engine in parallel with the Champions based engine the game currently uses (Foundry was from a kludged up version of the old disk based Neverwinter engine that even the online Neverwinter does not use from what I heard) and that is always a headache.
Mac support is complex because of Microsoft and their notorious habit of changing things just to break compatibility with third party DX emulation software. Double-blind development of that software to keep law suits off their backs takes quite a lot of time and effort so the community projects that attempt it are always way behind or often disband from frustration, so the tools and libraries are just not available for the most part for STO to use without massive effort.
And switching to Vulkan natively to avoid the DirectX shenanigans would mean building an entirely new engine which is not practical for an already developed and running game like STO.
Quoted for truth.
One of the dev comments referred to the fact that it kept spoilering things which would only be possible if it was looking at something in their planning and development chain, which sounds very likely since tools like that exist for projects but many companies just use the other parts of the packages and ignore the autogenerated scheduling parts in favor of face-to-face discussions and whiteboards. Using an API to extract it and put it in the game would not be too difficult with many of those packages.
One of the companies I worked for did just that same kind of bypass the autogenerated documentation in fact, which was annoying to the off-main-shift people like me who had to guess what the scribbling really meant without the talking part because the autogenerated stuff was often wrong. And of course the handwriting usually looked like someone gave an orangutan a dry erase pen.
I didn't have any hard information on the Foundry, (though most of the stuff on the web about it seemed to be of the opinion that it was from the old disk game engine hammered to fit the online niche) which is why I said that it was what I heard. Even if it is for an older version of the same engine with a different database it would be a royal pain to keep synchronized, especially since according to the comments some of the devs made the foundry tools were completely different from the ones they used on the main game.
I know firsthand how much effort goes into keeping dissimilar systems working together, and how much more work and expense there is in refactoring stuff to all work on the same system. Though none of the companies I worked for were game companies that is pretty much a universal thing which is why a lot of companies run outdated systems along with the newer ones rather than porting everything over.
I kinda feel like when it comes to the Calendar, it was exactly like what Kael said, it was an automated system that they pre-loaded with stuff that they had picked to go out for a particular period of time. When they needed to make a change to it like for example, if they didn't want to actually have a dilithium weekend run, they had to go in with a patch to change it. Or another example is when the game decides to randomly say "I don't want to work for a few hours" and they have to extend a big event by a day in order to compensate for downtime, they also have to reflect this for the calendar. Something else I saw tossed around was that they didn't like how people relied on the calendar to get themselves ready for a particular weekend, such as an upgrade weekend.
For the Foundry, it was pretty clear that the Foundry was built upon a different database from the main game. So, when the main game updated for a new season/expansion release, most of the time the foundry went down because it was a new code branch, and the Foundry system would have to be updated in order to accomodate changes to the game. This was especially apparent during two major updates to the main game, the arrival of the modern sector space maps and whey added lighting 2.0 to the game. The foundry's days were numbered once they broke the costume selections in STO's Foundry.
You may have seen in other threads I've mentioned in Dyson Battlezone it was horrendous yesterday worse than normal. I'm about to see if a fresh reinstall of the game helps and reinstall of latest driver settings
Did what I expected jack and TRIBBLE at least I know it's not my drivers or any corrupt game files
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Right along with powers not activating instantly or reliably, like every other game in existence.
Please don't take my moans and groans as anything but someone who loves this game and just wants to log in and enjoy his playing experience. The more I moan about something the more I care about it.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
-Mac support: This was dropped due to how few people actually played on Macs and also due to differences in the operating systems being a pain to maintain for the small return on investment. It simply wasn't as profitable as they had hoped, otherwise it would still be around.
-Exploration: The exploration clusters, while they could be fun, were simply filler that generated a random encounter when you would enter. So there were limits to how much variation you would see anyways. This was a holdover from the earlier days of the game and was not meant to be a permanent solution. Also as was said, some folks would get lost in the clusters which was definitely not something they wanted. The auto generated encounters also offered nothing of real value in terms of rewards or similar. The real value of the clusters was their doff assignments, which thankfully were kept. Down the road we might see another type of system return and we might not. Time will tell.
-Foundry: Ah yes the foundry, something I spent a fair bit of time tinkering with myself. The foundry was basically an addition to the game and the way it was added to the game was akin to a mod that was done after the fact. I do a bit of modding for older games and anytime an update was ever done, I would have to update my mods to be in line with the new stuff. This same notion is what happened with the foundry. Every time something new was added or changed majorly, the mod had to be updated to reflect the new stuff. As time went on, more and more people who originally created the foundry left the company. This meant that anyone coming in after the fact would basically need to learn an entire system that amounted to essentially 2 games in one. It could be done, but after awhile the company is essentially paying someone to update what amounts to a mod instead of the actual game itself. Eventually once everyone had left the company who originally created the Foundry, it would go down for longer and longer each time, until finally it became nigh impossible to maintain it. Keep in mind, while the game itself updated regularly and was able to deal with the upgrades to the engine easily enough, the foundry was still largely based on code from the 2010-2012 timeframe. Also they kept all of the data and all of the missions from the old foundry so they're not gone. This makes me think they will do something with it down the road. Removing the old foundry gives them the chance to do a new foundry based on more modern code that's easier to maintain and potentially convert the old stuff over. Whether they do or not time will tell. Overall it got too expensive and cumbersome to maintain for what little return it garnered for them.
-Calendar: Now for the big one that sparked this thread. The Calendar itself while useful to check dates in game, ended up being a headache. Just like Cryptic said, the information was often wrong and it would also leak events early on Tribble and on occasion even holodeck before they were ready to announce it. This would lead to confusion among the players if for example the website said it was an upgrade weekend, but the calendar said it was a dilithium weekend. Then you would have folks complaining they wanted a dilithium weekend, and another bunch complaining they wanted the upgrade weekend, and it would just cause issues. When the Calendar was introduced initially, it was introduced to track the hourly events that used to be a thing in the earlier days of the game. As such the calendar was a largely automated system. When hourly events were retired they tried to adapt the calendar to the new stuff, which was somewhat successful. However in the case of the calendar it was overall changed to do something it was never intended to do. Again this became more trouble to maintain than it was worth. They always had the ability to fix it, however to fix it properly would require a complete redo of the calendar's design which simply was not worth it for what it brought to them.
At the end of the day folks need to understand Cryptic is a business that exists to make money. Sometimes at the end of the day it becomes impractical to maintain certain features from a business perspective. As such those features are discontinued if they become obsolete, become too cumbersome to maintain, or cause a loss in cash. I wish the resources of business were infinite and they could give us everything we want, for that matter so do they. I know this isn't what folks want to hear, but sometimes the reality is that it's no longer practical for them to support certain items for whatever reason or the other, be it technical, business, or both.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
Non-english blogs have just been dropped, and even if you're able to use the englisch blog, trying to just take a look how long an event is running / wenn it starts is a mess, you have to dig through patchlogs, sales, ship-stats and even stories (i still don't know why this FanFics are in the NEWS-Blog o_O).
If you rely on the forums, well there is information, but there is also a lot of information missing (i.e. the 'broken K'Tinga model' and 'the Zen is charged for Bridge Officers that should be free', both of these where only adressed on Twitter, and some USERS copied the info over to the forum).
It pretty much has become a 'News Hunt' for a lot of people.
I think a lot of people would be happy to just have a calendar on the site itself (which would be way easier to maintain, and it would not have the spoiler problem, because it wouldn't need a patch to add/delete information. And maybe throw in a special 'Known Bugs'-List in the site...or even a small textbox on top of the site, containing text with important informaion like the above mentioned bugs. Sort of "Attention: This function is currently broken. We are on it.'
Again i think the calender is a symptom of the problem that users having to go to extra lenght (i.e. 3rd party sites like twitter and reddit, which are both sites that are consciously avoided by some users) to stay informed, and most of the outrage would be gone if there was some solution like the above mentioned. Just throw us a bone.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Even if you speak English, the blogs are still garbage and full of incorrect information. That's the crux of the issue, the player base is just overall tired of getting bad/false information.
I guarantee you that if we got regular announcements that were correct and actually proof read, people would be making a lot less of an issue over the in game calendar.