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For Fans, By Fans is no more
glebben
Member Posts: 1 Arc User
Remember back in 2019, there was a contest to design merchandise?
https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11180093-for-fans-by-fans-contest-winners!
ForFansByFans has now moved ops to GoodSmileUS :
"As of October 17th, 2021, we will be moving a select amount of Artist Works to the Good Smile US website, under the For Fans By Fans partner branding. This is a selection of designs that have been historically top-selling and have been selected by management."
Looks like they retired the entire Star Trek Fandom. In 2 years I sold a magnificent 3 items (the bag flap) at $0.90 each (item retailed for $18.00) so guess it didn't count as a top seller...
https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11180093-for-fans-by-fans-contest-winners!
ForFansByFans has now moved ops to GoodSmileUS :
"As of October 17th, 2021, we will be moving a select amount of Artist Works to the Good Smile US website, under the For Fans By Fans partner branding. This is a selection of designs that have been historically top-selling and have been selected by management."
Looks like they retired the entire Star Trek Fandom. In 2 years I sold a magnificent 3 items (the bag flap) at $0.90 each (item retailed for $18.00) so guess it didn't count as a top seller...
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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In fact, the Foundry was shut down because every single time there was an update to the game, and y'all clamor for updates to the game on the regular, it broke the Foundry. Every. Single. Time. This would be followed by immediate demands to both fix the Foundry as the top priority, and to fix all the new bugs as the top priority. Now, I don't know houw big y'all think Cryptic Studios is, but I can assure you, it's no Blizzard - in either size or working environment. It came down to a simple business decision - do we devote developers to maintaining the Foundry code at all costs, or to working on the game itself? Well, kids, the Foundry didn't bring in a dime of revenue. New players weren't coming to STO hoping to play somebody else's fanfic. And frankly, the Foundry was a clear example of Sturgeon's Law, as 90% of it was cr@p.
As for this "For Fans, By Fans", it sounds like an invite to lawsuits to me - from either ViacomCBS or OnlyFans.
P.S. I can zap others and get explosions everywhere but a good story especially set in Star Trek I can be one of the characters in, that's unique and time well spent.
Your post is an extremely disgusting example of victim-blaming. There is 1 reason, and 1 reason alone the foundry was shut down:
Cryptic abandoned the project.
Not just in STO, but in NW too. And unlike STO, NW was actually launched and marketed as a foundry focused game. So the foundry was a much larger part of NW than it ever was in STO. Even so, Cryptic decided to abandon the project. And because they decided to abandon the project, the people who worked on it and knew how to keep it working left the company, so no one knew how to keep it working.
Just in case any of that is not clear, here is a play by play:
1: Cryptic developed the foundry.
2: Cryptic abandoned the foundry.
3: People left who knew how to work on the foundry.
4: Cryptic removed the foundry from their games.
Absolutely none of this is the players fault. And because none of this is the players' fault, your condescending victim-blaming post is very disgusting to read.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
If anything the whole Foundry debacle shows that they just don't bother to really document their codebase. With a well documented codebase. When the person who designed the Foundry left - yes, the programmers they had COULD eventually figure out how to 'fix it' after an update; but Management didn't feel it was a good ROI, plus the lead Dev never liked what it turned into because he felt it undermined the Dev content and people used it primarily to quickly level ships or gain badges by using player made 'missions' designed specifically for those purposes.
But had the codebase for the Foundry been well documented; OR Cryptic felt it was a feature they really wanted to support long term (Cryptic management didn't once Dev made content reached a certain availability threshold); they would have had the designer document it more fully, or had him show other Cryptic programmers more of the 'ins and outs' of the codebase.
They didn't because as their F2P model grew; they never found a way to monetize it to the level they wanted/needed for it to be considered a good ROI.
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..."
Side point: this problem is by no means exclusive to Cryptic. Lots of games have it.
But here is the major difference: because the foundry was player created content, it had extremely high emotional investment from the people that used it. So unlike some random system that gets taken out of any given game on any given week because they can't support it anymore, this specific system had extreme emotional attachment and therefore resulted in a much worse reaction than would normally be the case, IMO.
That is another reason I am so disgusted by the people that talk down to those who are still upset about the foundry, like the last post I replied to. The players did nothing wrong here. They were given a system, they invested thousands of hours into creating stories and missions, then had all of that time and work erased. They have every right to be upset about that, and anyone who tries to blame the victims is in this situation is being disgusting.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
I find the idea that it was shut down because the missions were "better" then the ones put out by Cryptic to be an odd one. If they were so much better, why were so few people using the Foundry even when it did work? If they were so good why was the playerbase of it so small that they couldn't justify continued support of the foundry? Why were the most popular missions I recall hearing about ones that there story-less loot/dil/kill farming missions that were forcing Cryptic to nerf how much of anything the Foundry put out to stop people from exploiting?
Now this sounds amazing, when I was PC I did try out Foundry occasionally, it was the only thing that PC version had that console version lacked, it was so good that I was hoping that foundry would show up on console version one day.
I'm guessing you haven't read the entirety of this thread so far...
What was also stated was that the reason much of the Foundry content not being used was this...
Essentially what killed the Foundry was a multitude of factors...
1. They couldn't "monetize" it. Why put money into a program that doesn't bring money back in return? "Greed, is good!" - Guess the movie?
2. Not enough "advertising" of the Foundry. Difficult "search feature" or lack thereof.
3. Constant crashes from updates. "I just fixed that damn thing!"- Montgomery Scott, ST 5
4. Foundry was being used for Dil Farming. Still happens with regular content... Admiralty, DOffing, Dyson Bz, Events, etc..
5. Foundry was being used for accolade farming. Still happens, just slower pace.
6. Foundry was being used for loot farming. Not an issue, you can make more EC in other areas of the game.
7. Some foundry content was legitimateley and markedly "better" than content created by the Dev team. Yeah, jealousy is alive and well.
8. Essentially, less work maintaining the game with its "Mission Builder" component removed.
Having the Foundry up and running was a benefit for the development team. It allowed the player base to develop stories (content) and took some of the pressure off the development team to continually bring forth new "content. It allowed them more time to do the behind the scenes work which keeps the game running. Sure, there are probably several other reasons (i.e. excuses) we might be given as to why they removed the Foundy, but, it is gone... and not coming back.
Join Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
1. Story missions, TFOs, patrols, and other such content aren't monetized, yet Cryptic keeps putting them out. They do so because new content helps drive the sales of ships, as it gives players new things to use their ships in. The Foundry works on the same principle. It doesn't need to be monetized for the same reason all the stuff mentioned isn't. New content would help drive metrics/ship sales by itself.
2. Most modding for games has zero official support/advertising, and is hosted entirely on third party websites which tend to be very clunky to navigate to this day. Yet other games still have large and vibrant modding scenes because the content they put out is good, and desired.
3. Mod tools crashing every major update is known an expected due to script/exe changes in all other games I am aware of. Still the modding scenes are large and vibrant despite it.
4. 5. 6. That farming still happens in other parts of the game doesn't excuse that the farming in the Foundry was really bad, and if its used primarily for that, it needs to be looked at and reevaluated.
7. I've seen the "they were jealous because it was better" argument for decades and yet many of these companies still allow, and even promote, modding for their games. If they were actually jealous why would they do that? Better yet, if Cryptic was actually jealous of Foundry content why would they let the Foundry exist for the what? 10 years? It did exist?
8. You can use the argument of "less work" to remove/not support the Foundry for pretty much every other thing in the game, and yet those things keep getting supported.
I'm sorry but none of the arguments you bring up here really make sense. As you comment at the very end, the Foundry was free content for STO that took pressure off the devs. And as I pointed out at the top of this post, It also would help with daily log in metrics, and the monetization of the game by giving people things to use Zen bought ships on.
So maybe the reason the Foundry was shut down wasn't because it couldn't be monetized, or because they were "jealous", but rather because most people just didn't care for it as an idea.
So you guys can stop beating a dead horse already. Please move on or a mod might close this for off topic or FCT since you guys are diving into FCT territory.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
If the Foundry used the same engine as STO that would probably have worked, but they were on different engines which complicated things massively. Porting it over to the STO engine would have been a prohibitive amount of work even back in its heyday, and as improvements were made in the STO engine that increased the gap between them and made it harder to support both at the same time. They don't even support multiple graphics APIs anymore, that they supported two different engines for so long after dropping Mac/Linux support is a sign of how much they actually did try to keep the Foundry going.
It is sad that it is gone, but it is understandable that they had to do it (it had gotten to the point where it would be down six months then when they finally got it fixed again it would last for a few months and be down for a few more) and it got to the point where some people would wonder if it was ever going to run again even before they announced it was being dropped.
Anyway, I don't plan on saying anything more about it beyond this either.
IIRC, the issue was the way user made Foundry content was coded compared to Cryptic made content was different to the point they couldn't just port it into the normal game content and have it work. It would need to be recoded entirely.
Like if Bethesda were to change how a script functions to where a NPC action takes 5 seconds instead of 10, they can go in an fix any content they made to make sure its timed correctly, but they can't do so for mod content. So the patch comes out, and any mod content built using the old 10 second timing would now be off, and that could break something. Modders would have to go in an update their mods to work on the new script timing themselves.
There's nothing a dev can really do about that sort of thing, the burden is only on the mod author to fix their stuff. Which always means, as time goes on, more and more mods get broken, and never fixed, as people move on, or just don't feel like updating stuff.
I agree with this. the devs wanted you to play TRIBBLE tfo to do TRIBBLE endeavor (Kill 30 Borg ships) someone wrote the battle royal missions that were specced for endeavors. or to max out the daily item drops (adm bobo, I miss you)
Endeavors were designed to get players into replaying content. the Foundry circumvented that so it had to go. That's my opinion, YMMV
Yeah, the uber-farming missions led to rewards (drops, XP, etc) being repeatedly nerfed, not to the shutdown.
(I remember one farming mission I saw. You warped in 15km away from the edge of a nebula. Inside the nebula was a tight grouping of a dozen battleships with no AI, so they just sat there. With no shields due to the nebula. Blow up two of them, the warp breaches kill the rest. Map complete, warp to... another exact copy. The full mission was 10 repeats. If that had been dropping full battleship rewards, rather than the super-nerfed level at the time... yeah.)
...and that's why "build your own mission!" content has been nerfed into the ground in every online/mmo game that's had it.
It's been years, but I think there were a bunch of complain threads when all the rewards were nerfed because of the few exploit missions. People complaining that foundry missions were "no longer worth playing" because of the nerfs.
That meant fewer people playing foundry missions, damaging the "metrics" for it and adding one more reason not to support it.
In Neverwinter, getting the equivalent of all the T6 ships from a single-player module didn't hurt anyone because no one was selling equipment for real money, and no one needed to pay for salaries, voice actors, and royalties to the IP holder.
In STO, they not only must pay those bills but they also must earn enough profit to keep PWE happy.
It's the same with mods for Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. There are some great mods for free, because it's all volunteer work.
In fairness to Cryptic and PWE, Cryptic has delivered a lot more professional quality story content than I've seen for Fallout 3-NV-4 (mods are mostly graphics & gameplay tweaks and equipment with a few standout story exceptions), and there weren't that many good long single-player modules for NWN that I can recall.
What you're talking about is more like online tabletop gaming where the story is partly emergent from the player actions, which is different from an MMO with fixed stories and no DMs
I highly doubt this really has anything to do with cash or staff. You look at other MMOs and they put things out new content on a 3-4 month basis, despite having a lot more people/cash, as well. ESO, GW2, DCUO, etc. all use the same 3-4 month release cadence STO uses.