After all of the craziness over the past few years with STO, Perpetual, lawsuits, Cryptic obtaining the rights etc.. as a fan of the IP I was originally relieved when Cryptic stood up to the plate and jumped into the development role.

I have a bit of experience with the Cryptic products, CoH/V wich I found could captivate my time as a side game for a bit.

With Champions however, I have witnessed a trend with development , patching and, poor quality management that really has me worried on how they will handle STO. It seems that the team lacks focus, they seem to jump one direction and then randomly to another, working on issues that should not be a priority.. such as npc textures that were fine to begin with, and changing and "breaking" animations and stats to powers that really did not need to be addressed at this time.

I'm not saying that there aren't things that need to be changed or addressed, but it seems to me that their priorities are way off, and at times they seem to be taking steps backwards instead of forwards.

Now, this isn't intended as a Champions discussion, so I apologise beforehand if it seems that way. It is intended as an example of what I really hope does not happen with STO. Many people, including myself have been waiting YEARS, literally, for STO to provide a sci fi oasis, in a desert of dark age mmos.

I can not imagine the more mature Trek community, putting up with some of the actions that I have seen taken by Cryptic in there current release. I truley do not want to witness what would happen.

It is to the point where my wife has asked if I thought Cryptic was hacked and they just don't want to admit it.

To Cryptic:

•     If it comes down to releasing a buggy STO vs pushing it back a year or so to release a polished version, please, for the sake of your own reputation, push it back.
•     Look into bringing in some veteran gamers that love the IP and have them consult on your game. I'm talking, gamers who have actively played online for 10+ years, who know the IP well and can give you an honest input on where your screwing up. Not the ones who just jump at the oportunity to kiss your egos.
•      This game isn't about just you, ST games have suffered many years of poor development and releases. The genre has a sad, sad history in the game market.
•      When scanning through your forums, learn the difference between those who really give a damn and have experience with the up and downside of the gaming industry, and the fanbois and trolls who just want to make a name for themselves.

To the community:

•     Alot of you old timers, just sit back and scan the forums from time to time. You know who you are, the ones who have 4-5 years on the boards and have posted 15 or so times. Its time for you to speak your mind and let these devs know what your views are. 
•     For those who are newer to the community, voice your views... but think them out before you post them. Try not to get into huge debates over silly crap. All of that just makes it harder for any dev to weed through and find constructive critiques on ideas and proposed gameplay.

   To close this post up, I'm sorry if this seems to be a long rant. I am just really tired of what gaming developers have tossed at us over the last few years. Crap, crap and more crap. I am just tired of it, and I believe that STO is in danger of being flung on top of that crap pile.

~DH 

Well if your looking to push back the release of STO a year or more I'd have to say it isn't going to happen. This game is being funded by investors that expect a return on their investments in a set amount of time. Pushing the game back a month or two may be feasible but there is no way they would convince their money men to push it back a year or more. In reality it just isn't possible.

As for Cryptic's handling of CO they say that the STO team is watching their progress very closely so they don't make the same mistakes. Lets just all hope this is true. Only the release of STO will tell us for sure at this point however. We will just have to wait and see as with the game so close to Beta the development cycle is pretty much set in stone at this time and nothing said on a forum is going to change that. Only time will tell.

Bren

I fully understand that investors will push for release and a return on their investment. Just look over at FC's release of AoC and many others who got rushed out the door.

But this isn't just "any" title that Cryptic is pushing out the door. This IP can really make Cryptic look "great" or on the other end of the scale, can literally ruin Cryptic's name in the gaming industry, such as what happened with SOE and SWG.

As far as the team watching the CO launch and learning from the mistakes. Like you, this is what I am really hoping for. And as far as stuff being said on this forum changing that, you really never know. I've seen a game go back into development at the urge of a player or two here on this very website.. with a lead developer responding to the the post.

One of the great things about MMORPG.com is that it is outside of the developers control, and they do  read over these forums. Wouldn't you, if your product was being discussed and you could sit in on it?

Regardless, thanks for your response and thoughts on the issue. I just hope that people like yourself can jump on here and give some support and express their true concerns with this title. Without all the bs that usually goes along with it.

Idealistic? Yeah... but one can always hope. =)

~DH

Actually i am starting to really believe that Roper is the problem at CO.

He talks a good game but that is all he does i guess. But someone has to be keeping him there. So whoever that is is also a problem:)

As to STO, release date is set i think. Just have to take a look at it and see what it looks like when beta starts to see for ourselves how it is.

Till then we can not do anything but guess how it will turn out.

I'm over STO already.  Why?  Its the  same ol' same ol', specifically with this ship class BS.  The ship class you choose determis weather you are a healer, tank or DPS

quote from http://www.startrekonline.com/ship_overview :

__________________________________________________________________

Ship Categories
Escort Ships

These heavily-armed warships are built with the firepower to defend the Federation. Escort vessels are armed to the teeth, fast and maneuverable, which makes them a hard target to hit when they’re moving evasively.

They are ill equipped to deal with advanced science or engineering tasks. Their lack of adequate medical facilities will hinder their ability to maintain their crew's health. Fortunately, they are so well armed and armored that their crew's health is seldom threatened.

Primary Role: Heavy damage ship, boasting incredible firepower for its size.
Special: Bonus to damage, speed and maneuverability; can load cannons; bonus to weapon power; extra forward weapon slot.

Science Ships

Although Science ships lack the massive firepower of other classes, their technology grants them distinct advantages in combat. Their advanced deflector and sensors can easily identify and exploit weaknesses in enemy ships and target their subsystems, or even detect cloaked ships. Their deflectors can also be used to aid and repair ally ships, as well as control the pace of battle.

These abilities allow them to provide superior fleet support, yet they are more than capable to complete missions on their own.

Primary Role: Fleet support, ally aid, battle control. Specializes in buffs, debuffs and control.
Special: Advanced shields, innate subsystem targeting, innate cloak detection; bonus to Auxiliary power.

Cruiser Ships

Cruisers are generally the largest ships in Starfleet. Their size grants them access to advanced warp cores, which allows them to distribute a large amount of power across their subsystems; a large crew complement, which improves a ship’s repair rate, engineering bay, boarding party effectiveness, and so on; and a large inventory, which makes them great for long distance missions.

Cruisers have a large warp core and crew complement. Their abundant resources allow them to adapt well to most situations and get damaged systems back online quickly. Cruisers can also support other ships with their massive power supply and crew.

Out of combat, these ships' massive cargo holds and crew make them invaluable when it comes to transporting cargo or colonists, and re-supplying planets, space stations or other ships.

Primary Role: Lots of power; large crew complement provides quick repairs and boarding party tactics.
Special: Large Warp Core (power bonus); large cargo space (inventory); bonus to power in all systems; more weapon slots than Science vessels or Escorts.

________________________________________________________

Don't be confused loyal fans.  This is a MMO that looks like Star Trek - NOT a Star Trek MMO.

I'll probably end up buying it anyway, but quit three months later.  Maybe that's the new goal for developers?  "Get them to buy the box, or better yet the special edition box.  Forget the subscription, the money is in the retail purchase!"

Im really looking forward to STO regardles of the problems that it will likely have. Im not saying Im willing to give Cryptic a free out Im just saying that I want to have fun and I like Star Trek and I plan to have fun with the game and not focus and things that I may not like. I have Champions and play with my wife and we realy do enjoy it so I know they at least have some idea of what they are doing, as I have played a mountain of games that were in fact just junk.

Anyway, I am fully ready for and almsot looking forward to the Nerd Rage that will hit the internets on a scale never before seen by man kind on the week of STO's release.

Im looking forward to STO and cant wait to captain my own ship and picking my crew. Too many ppl are criticsing the game b4 it even releases. Sad.

(AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.... hits communicator on chest...AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH)

Originally posted by Craggur

I'll probably end up buying it anyway, but quit three months later.  Maybe that's the new goal for developers?  "Get them to buy the box, or better yet the special edition box.  Forget the subscription, the money is in the retail purchase!"

Yeah, that seems to be the strategy these days. Its either that or cash shop. Cryptic can't seem to decide which of those options they want to go with.

Its so strange. For the last several months there has been quite a few people (myself included) saying many of these same things about our fears for the future of STO under the care of Cryptic and Atari. Yet when we did it there was a dedicated team of fanboys lead by a specific person who shall remain nameless that would nitpick us to death in an attempt to drive us out of the forum. So far the leader of this group hasn't mounted an assault on this thread or on the recently revived "Faith in Cryptic..." thread. I wonder if he died?

Or maybe the recent announcement of how the ship classes will work showed him the light. Like you said, its clearly just a Tank, DPS, healer/buffer set up. I can even see how the old classes from City of Heroes could easily be broken down as the new ships in STO.

Constructive advise or help sure wouldn't hurt in the least, and I hope they indeed do listen to our concerns.  As you have stated Star trek releases have to date dissappointed, hopefully cryptic will deliver fun where the others have failed.  One problem i see though is we all have different ideas on what a good Star trek adventure includes , so i hope we don't inject negativity because this game isn't going where some of hoped it would go.  Lets base our inputs on how to make this game a better game with the basic designers view in mind and not toward something they already said they aren't going to incorporate.  That said i hope they do develope the none ship world/duties well so we can enjoy the total Star Trek experience. It would be a shame if the whole world only included away missions and space travel in my opinion.  I'm looking for some exciting experiences in places like Deep space 9 's bar!

I would have much more faith in STO if Cryptic wasn't making it. I didn't really enjoy COH/V and I also did not enjoy the CO beta. I feel like Cryptic tries to make too many things like quest content automated and randomly generated and I have always felt that doing that really takes away from the immersion.

Cryptic has already stated that almost everything in the game is going to be procedurally generated, so we can pretty much give up any hope that a lot of thought is going into the content... Maybe I am jumping to conclusions (I HOPE that is the case).

I was also extremely disappointed to hear that we will not be able to walk around in our own ships. That is a real turn-off in my opinion and immediately detracts a lot from my interest in the game. Flying around AS the ship in space just does not feel like Star Trek to me. If they had done it like in Bridge Commander, where you sit in the Captain's chair, but still have control over everything on the ship, I would be much more excited about it. From what I can tell, the controls are going to be exactly like WOW in space... That just seems very off.

And my final problem with STO: The friggin' Klingon empire are supposed to be allies with the federation.  So much of the series revolved around that alliance and keeping it together. Why they chose to just cut it off and make the two factions enemies makes no sense to me and seems like butchery of the timeline. Its not like there aren't enough other enemies for the federation to fight!

Anubisan i didn't play those games you mentioned, but random generated missions is something I was really looking forward to as Canned missions get old in my opinion and i really don't like doing the same mission everyone else in the world is doing.  I heard they would have missions that built on to ones you already completed as in a chain of events, not sure if that is totally true though.  I'm hopeful they can produce random mission that could do that and maybe issue you a award such as a title like "Hero of Ka'Path' or something.

The walk around your ships interior won't be in the game from the start, but they are promising to do that in the future.  I agree that would be cool, if not expected.

My only disagreement with you is that I'm glad the Klingons have split from the Federation as to me as a fan of the early Star Trek series, it was meant to be that way!

It's really easy to say "They should put another year of development in".

It's a lot harder to pay for. Salaries for a large dev team, equipment and IT support, licensing for software, and the electricity to keep the lights on all costs money. Lots of money. Millions. That cash don't grow on trees.

There has to be a balance of how much it costs to develop a game with how much income it will bring in. Sure, a well-polished game has the potential to bring in more revenue, but there is a point of diminishing returns. The market will only bear a limited amount of purchases and subscriptions.  Often the forcasters are wrong, causing the demise of a game. It's a huge gamble to place the funds into development of a MMO, so investors will expect a big return on their investment if it's successful. The investors will get a large chunk of the money made on sales and subscriptions after the game launches, leaving a small slice left for further development.

Game development is not a charitible endeavor. :D

Originally posted by dodsfall

It's really easy to say "They should put another year of development in".

It's a lot harder to pay for. Salaries for a large dev team, equipment and IT support, licensing for software, and the electricity to keep the lights on all costs money. Lots of money. Millions. That cash don't grow on trees.

There has to be a balance of how much it costs to develop a game with how much income it will bring in. Sure, a well-polished game has the potential to bring in more revenue, but there is a point of diminishing returns. The market will only bear a limited amount of purchases and subscriptions.

How many games recently have flopped badly due to lack of development and polish? Too damned many. It's time to change the business model.

I'd rather see two or three quality releases a year than a dozen steaming loads. The bottom is going to drop out of the market if the quality of releases doesn't go up fast. A lot of players are getting fed up. I'm not currently subbed to an MMO. I'm killing a few hours a night in Fiesta Online - not because I find it enjoyable, but because it's free and basically, no more boring than WoW.

Don't say it can't happen - it happened to the home video gaming industry in the early '80s.

Originally posted by MMO_Doubter

Originally posted by dodsfall

It's really easy to say "They should put another year of development in".

It's a lot harder to pay for. Salaries for a large dev team, equipment and IT support, licensing for software, and the electricity to keep the lights on all costs money. Lots of money. Millions. That cash don't grow on trees.

There has to be a balance of how much it costs to develop a game with how much income it will bring in. Sure, a well-polished game has the potential to bring in more revenue, but there is a point of diminishing returns. The market will only bear a limited amount of purchases and subscriptions.

How many games recently have flopped badly due to lack of development and polish? Too damned many. It's time to change the business model.

I'd rather see two or three quality releases a year than a dozen steaming loads. The bottom is going to drop out of the market if the quality of releases doesn't go up fast. A lot of players are getting fed up.

Don't say it can't happen - it happened to the home video gaming industry in the early '80s.

 

How much cash have you invested personally in the development of a game? :D I'm sure most developers would jump all over spending more time and polish for an extra 10-20 million in investment.

The other alternative would be to increase the cost of purchase and subscriptions to the end user, which I highly doubt the market will bear at this time.

It's easy to complain about it, but much harder to actually do something about it, unfortunately. :D

Originally posted by dodsfall

Game development is not a charitible endeavor. :D

Neither is subscribing to MMOs.

Originally posted by dodsfall

How much cash have you invested personally in the development of a game? :D I'm sure most developers would jump all over spending more time and polish for an extra 10-20 million in investment.

The other alternative would be to increase the cost of purchase and subscriptions to the end user, which I highly doubt the market will bear at this time.

It's easy to complain about it, but much harder to actually do something about it, unfortunately. :D

Blizzard didn't take the cheap and easy approach. Look at the result.

Originally posted by buegur

Anubisan i didn't play those games you mentioned, but random generated missions is something I was really looking forward to as Canned missions get old in my opinion and i really don't like doing the same mission everyone else in the world is doing.  I heard they would have missions that built on to ones you already completed as in a chain of events, not sure if that is totally true though.  I'm hopeful they can produce random mission that could do that and maybe issue you a award such as a title like "Hero of Ka'Path' or something.

The walk around your ships interior won't be in the game from the start, but they are promising to do that in the future.  I agree that would be cool, if not expected.

My only disagreement with you is that I'm glad the Klingons have split from the Federation as to me as a fan of the early Star Trek series, it was meant to be that way!

I would perhaps be more excited about the procedurally generated content if I had not already played COH/COV as well as SWG. All three of those games used randomized content generation. While it might sound cool in concept, it gets old very fast. You mentioned that it gets old doing Canned missions, but how many times will it take doing procedurally generated missions before you have seen all of the different random elements they are made from? I remember in COH, I used to get very annoyed because eventually I would start recognizing the buildings, NPCs, and objectives used for their generated missions. They might mix and match things here and there, but everything was always pretty much the same regardless.

Plus, for me it really takes away from the immersion of the game if entire star systems only exist while you are on the mission they are generated for. It means the galaxy is not actually real and is being created on the fly as the game spits out randomly generated content. That just doesn't sound very cool to me to be honest.

Believe me though, I hope I am wrong about this...

Why are they doing a tank-healer-dps trinity with Starships? That isn't Start Trek!! Which idiot decided to do that?

Don't worry, now that mmorpg genre's bar has set lower then ever with Aion and its amazing contentlkess gameplay recieving great scores, you can better beleive STO will be aone button shootem up ! Have fun.

Unless Cryptic gets Deep Blue to generate their random content, I doubt there will much of an upgrade from the unconvincing and boring random dungeons seen in many console RPGs.

Originally posted by solareus

Don't worry, now that mmorpg genre's bar has set lower then ever with Aion and its amazing contentlkess gameplay recieving great scores, you can better beleive STO will be aone button shootem up ! Have fun.

I believe a few ET-sized landfills are being opened up in anticipation of the collapse.

Originally posted by MMO_Doubter

Unless Cryptic gets Deep Blue to generate their random content, I doubt there will much of an upgrade from the unconvincing and boring random dungeons seen in many console RPGs.

I think the upside to this is the unlimitted content... The quality may need improvement, but the idea of having an unlimited number of worlds to explore is phenominal.

Originally posted by madeux

I think the upside to this is the unlimitted content... The quality may need improvement, but the idea of having an unlimited number of worlds to explore is phenominal.

Chocobo's Dungeon had effectively infinite content.

Originally posted by MMO_Doubter

Originally posted by dodsfall

It's really easy to say "They should put another year of development in".

It's a lot harder to pay for. Salaries for a large dev team, equipment and IT support, licensing for software, and the electricity to keep the lights on all costs money. Lots of money. Millions. That cash don't grow on trees.

There has to be a balance of how much it costs to develop a game with how much income it will bring in. Sure, a well-polished game has the potential to bring in more revenue, but there is a point of diminishing returns. The market will only bear a limited amount of purchases and subscriptions.

How many games recently have flopped badly due to lack of development and polish? Too damned many. It's time to change the business model.

I'd rather see two or three quality releases a year than a dozen steaming loads. The bottom is going to drop out of the market if the quality of releases doesn't go up fast. A lot of players are getting fed up. I'm not currently subbed to an MMO. I'm killing a few hours a night in Fiesta Online - not because I find it enjoyable, but because it's free and basically, no more boring than WoW.

Don't say it can't happen - it happened to the home video gaming industry in the early '80s.

Actually this is the reason WOW retains so many subs:) Just a little research to check out other games and you get the , mostly justified, impression that you will be paying to play a beta, not a finished game. They know what they have there and there is no reason what so ever to move to a new sub par game.

People get tired of WOW, but there are not many, well polished and large games, out there to choose from. Yes even WOW got a lot better over time, but it started out as a huge game and got even bigger and better.

We need the bottom to drop out actually, maybe that will wake up the money people to stop being so short sighted and rushing things out.

And yes STO will be another of the many that releases way too early. Because that is the industry standard as of right now.  Just have to hope that the basic game we will get will be enough to keep people happy till the real game gets done:)

Originally posted by DarLorkar 

Actually this is the reason WOW retains so many subs:) Just a little research to check out other games and you get the , mostly justified, impression that you will be paying to play a beta, not a finished game. They know what they have there and there is no reason what so ever to move to a new sub par game.

People get tired of WOW, but there are not many, well polished and large games, out there to choose from. Yes even WOW got a lot better over time, but it started out as a huge game and got even bigger and better.

We need the bottom to drop out actually, maybe that will wake up the money people to stop being so short sighted and rushing things out.

And yes STO will be another of the many that releases way too early. Because that is the industry standard as of right now.  Just have to hope that the basic game we will get will be enough to keep people happy till the real game gets done:)

 

Well, personally, I hope the customers stay away from these games in droves (so that they lose a ton of money), because I suspect that the current business model is exactly what we are seeing happen lately - big box sales and pre-orders by tons of suckers - followed by the game rapidly declining and going on caretaker status after a year or so.