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Star Trek Online News - Advisory Council Formed, Devs Respond to Uproar
Posted by Michael Bitton on Apr 05, 2010 | 75 comments in our forums
Late last week Cryptic Studios announced the formation of a Star Trek Online "Advisory Council" whose aim was to essentially widen the feedback net so that the team could hear from more voices in the Star Trek fan community that may not necessarily play Star Trek Online or even have an interest in it. Response to the announcement has been curiously, and overwhelmingly negative, however, stirring up a forum wildfire over the weekend.
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GM_Destra has responded to the community's feedback, assuring players that the Advisory Council is not meant to overshadow players' feedback but will simply exist as a supplement to all the current tools and procesures Cryptic makes use of to gather feedback. This point was further emphasized in the following exhaustive Q&A that Destra posted further down in the thread. A short excerpt is available below:
Quote:
Ivan (Cryptic Marcom Manager): Well, the basic idea is: "We're not hearing all of our current audience nor are we hearing all of our target audience. How do we hear more?"
So, in addition to the forums, polls, surveys, calendars, engineering reports, dev posts, etc., we implemented this, "Advisory Council". Maybe the over one hundred thousand active players who never post hear might be more inclined to share their thoughts somewhere else -- anywhere else? Maybe Star Trek fans attached to other sites and clubs might find some value discussing their wishes in a place that is comfortable for them? Pretty straightforward idea: "Do more stuff for fans."Quote:
Ivan: That's not really accurate. We have well over a hundred thousand players that never post on the forums. To be a responsible developer, we must approach these people and listen to their feedback, too. Polls, direct e-mails, newsletters, and the Advisory Council are some ways we can better tap this segment of our player base. Even if they ultimately don't work, we have to try.
The original announcement can be viewed here.
While Cryptic Studios has endured a number of blunders in the past, the reasoning behind this massive uproar escapes me, as it all appears to be quite benign. Was it all a misunderstanding or miscommunication?
Are you for or against this Advisory Council? Let us know in the comments below.
[Thanks Christopher8 for the tip!]
Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see why people are so upset about this. There are plenty of reasons to be angry with Cryptic, but I don't think this is one. The STO forums are crazy, those people are rabid, just waiting for a reason to pounce.
Could be that when they did this same thing in SWG it was pretty much what cryptic are saying that this advisory council isn't going to be.
Cryptic can go ahead and get all the feedback in the world but if they can't act on it because of engine limitations then what's the point?
maybe, but i dont see why people are so upset. I think the STO community is taking it out of proportion. They are upset overall at how the game has turned out, and i cant blame them. A phenom like Star Trek should have been alot more indepth and intricate then What it is right now at launch.
I think part of the furor is this announcement being sprung suddenly on a Friday afternoon, following so closely on the heels of Cryptic giving Lifetimers special privileges not afforded to the monthly subscribers. Also, Cryptic's response is more of their typical way to handle disgruntled customers: it's always the community's fault. All their great ideas are just underappreciated. A better way for them to encourage feedback would have been to clean up their own forums early. Instead, they chose to squelch reasonable dissatisfaction, while pandering to the forums' worst abusers. They sent a clear signal that the only feedback they were interested in was that which told them how awesome they were.
Personally, I think the official explanation is nothing more than damage control and frankly, doesn't make a lot of sense, like most of Cryptic's customer relations.
"Curiously" this so-called News article seems to be just an attempt at a bit of free good PR for Cryptic.
The reason people are upset is simple: in an MMO, every paying customer should have EQUAL influence with the Devs(be it alot, none at all, or anywhere in between). However, the 3 members of this council will have MORE influence than any other 3 random members of the playerbase who are not on said council. Furthermore, there is no way to insure that these 3 people will truly be representing the wishes of their respective communities and not simply their own. If Cryptic wants to find out what the players think about any issue, they can do so easily with an in game poll. We do not need some elite group speaking for us.
Hopefully this 'Advisory Council' will not be moderating out what people find wrong with the game and what changes need to be done...well i could see rants like "omfgzzzzzzzzzz dis gmae suxxxxxx" being shafted but genuine issues need to be kept for feedback.
If though it's just a sweep all the complaints under the rug and try and show 'all the amazing features! come play our game!' then well...welcome new advisory marketing council
The best thing would be to switch out the members of this council every 6 months or so..people in 'power' become disillusioned by it especially on the internet.
I am also frustrated by the uproar. People have thoroughly and irrefutably convinced themselves that Cryptic is incompetent and evil, so nothing Cryptic does can be seen as positive or good, that is my experience with trying to argue with these people.
If the article had been negative, would that have made it News? The general pattern I see is:
Positive about Cryptic: free PR, shill, fanboy, etc.
Negative about Cryptic: unbiased, telling it like it is, news, etc.
I dunno, I am not upset or in uproar. I am deeply disappointed and they need to stomp the game and make it anew. This time take 4-5 years development time. Thats all the advise I would have for them. *shrug*
Insightful my friend, very insightful.
I wonder as well...
Every part of STO was created from scratch in just two years, which means they are still 2-3 years away from having spent 4-5 years on the game in the first place. People should read the link in my sig about customer development, that is exactly what the advisory council is a part of, getting feedback from the players for the future development of the game.
FWIW, I had not heard of this advisory council until I read this very article. I think both of you are reading too much into this and suspect you fall into the crowd of "Cryptic can do nothing right".
The reason for the uproar is rather simple...Cryptic chose the voices they wanted to hear. In other games (Eve, SWG, etc), the devs let the community choose, in as small a group as possible (class, faciton, profession, etc). During the beta, Cryptic hand-chose testers they gave "special" treatment to, gave them titles and such, and openly states that THESE testers input was treated with more attention.
They're doing the same thing here. THESE players, hand picked by Cryptic, are saying the things Cryptic wants to hear. These guys are under no obligation to listen to anyone, you as a player don't have an avenue through them to get your inputs added to their list, this is the list of Cryptic's favorite players.
That's how Cryptic rolls, and that's why the community is upset.
I suspect that the way this council was announced, in addition to the recent uproar over the lifetime subscription issue, on top of the also fairly recent weekend sale charlie foxtrot last month is creating an avalanche of negative press both with subscribers and non-subscribers right now.
Also, it does give the appearance Grand_Nagus suggests: that these three random people who may or may not be part of the playerbase but who are part of the target audience (basing this on wording of the announcement) seem to have direct line access to the developers and perhaps more influence than paying customers while there seem to be no three randomly selected players who are known members of the playerbase also on this council. There is no known means of accountability to the playerbase for this council and therefore, no way to know whether these council members are representing players or their own interests.
At least with the Senate system in SWG, there is enough done publicly that players know who is representing the respective community they were appointed to represent and who is representing their own interests. The Senate seats may rotate among the same people most of the time (which is why I do not find the Senate program to be any more effective than the United States Congress in practice, to be perfectly honest), but there are some players appointed to the Senate who genuinely are interested in representing the playerbase and improving the game and there is at least some transparency (to a certain point) and accountability. (Except for what they did to TUX, which was seven different kinds of wrong, no matter how you look at it - and bear in mind that when I played, I disagreed with TUX more often than I agreed with him, but the man was representing what his particular community wanted - I just happened to disagree with a large segment of that community. :P )
The fact is that Cryptic has made a really bad habit of making announcements like this on Friday afternoon and then letting a disaster unfold over the weekend. Then, on Monday morning, they come in and start locking threads and slapping bans on anyone who disagrees with the way they choose to do things. It's not very good for business, in my opinion, and it really shows a disdain for the people who are paying customers.
I was on a ten-day trial when Cryptic did this with the sale back in February/March that they later tried to deny ever existed - then attempted to ban players who posted proof that it did, in fact, exist, then, when the backlash got big enough, were forced to honor the sale for those who had purchased the game before they pulled the sale. I recall seeing the multiple edits to the Community Manager's post: first, announcing the sale, then denying the sale ever existed in the form that it did and essentially telling all the players that we hadn't seen what we had seen, then stating that the sale had been pulled, then stating that the sale would be honored in its original form only for those who had purchased the game during a certain window.
If Cryptic enjoys the drama on their boards and enjoys handing out bans like the Easter Bunny hands out chocolate, more power to them. But in the end, it will likely end up losing them more customers - something I don't suspect they can really afford with this game, given the fact that they're already practically giving the game away at half price just a month or so after release.
I think this uproar is very understandable. The name for example is stolen from another MMO game where it stands a diffrent things and is selected diffrently.
Secondly... Cryptic can not read the websites and forums where ppl are posting ? Is there an MMORPG.COM staff in this concil for example ? PPL give their opinions here don't they? It sounds to me like that answer from Cryptic was created when they realised how badly they had failed in their orginal news release.
But to tell you what is wrong with STO - its pretty simple...
The bridge is not used as part of the gameplay. Thats just the biggest mistake of any startrek MMO that is built on the ship beeing the main focus of the game.
Ground missions are not up to acceptable standards. STO is not ONLY about combat. Its not champion online in STO suits. The content needs to be alot deeper. THe STORY needs to be alot deeper. THe game is just cheap in every single way.
I'm going to disagree with you on "what's wrong with STO". Bridges are nice, but IMHO the #1 mistake is how they implemented exploration. I could live without a bridge, but the very definition of star trek, trekking through the stars, is exploration. We don't "boldly go" anywhere. We fly into big patches of cotton candy with a dozen other ships and race for "anomalies" which are all the same. At no point do we feel we're on the "final frontier".
There are a lot of other areas they fell short on (bridge officer interaction, bridges, crafting, space, etc) but for me, the amazingly lack-luster implemention of exploration, combined with the "essence of trek is huge fleet battles!!!" nonsense is where it died for me.
If Cryptic REALLY wanted player feedback, they could have login polls. The "we want to hear from the players that don't post on the forums" is BS. Does anyone honestly think the same 90% of the people that don't bother with the official forums are going to go to STOked or some other fansite to provide feedback? All this is is Cryptic wanting feedback from fanbots.
Most of the rage, from what I've gathered, is who was selected and how, and not so much the idea of the Advisory Council. Some girl with unusual personal hygiene issues and some dude that hates Klingons are interesting choices to say the least. Talk about the gang that couldn't shoot straight...
sto forum are were the babys and trolls go over 95% of the forum threads are whineying bitching and say why cant i do this
so the advisory council is a good idea but they should have representives from all the main huge clans there too comment for there clans aswell as sites like mmorpg and others
having read the article I was gob smacked by the stupidity of the people arguing. I havent read such bile for years.
Have you read the Eve forums?
Or the Warcraft forums?
Or the forums of any MMO ever designed?
Or forums in general?
Forums are where babies and trolls go. The amount of whining and gnashing of teeth on a forum is exponentially proportional to how much the game sucks. Games that don't suck at all will always have some. Games that suck a little will have a lot, and games that suck a lot will be 110% whining :)
Except that this isn't the same thing as SWG's Senate. This isn't a ruling body. This isn't a body of people that have any power at all over the forums. This isn't selection of people that have "more" say-so in anything than the current forums have. All it is is an extension of the current community.
Now, maybe they could've named it something more appropriate, but the majority of the ranters in the STO forums are angry because they percieve their "power" being stripped. And OMG if Cryptic doesn't listen to the demands and ultimatums of hysterical forum posters, you just know the skies are going to open up and swallow the Earth whole...
Try reading the article. The advisory counsel is NOT IN PLACE OF OTHER FORMS OF FEEDBACK, JUST ADDITIONAL FEEDBACK.
/agree
I think it's amusing that STOked has gold-selling ads on their site, yet their guys are eligible for council membership. Also the fact how Jeremy (one of STOked crew) posts in his own fleet forum them to go "show your support of our nomination in public, to quell the haters."
Basically saying everyone who disagrees with forming such a council in the first place is now a "hater". That's a good first impression to make surely!
http://jupiterforce.org/showthread.php?1813-congratulations-to-Chris-and-Jeremy
It is most certainly a miscommunication, and has been since the first day these guys decided to make this game.
Is it possible that the creation of this council caused so much fan outrage because Cyptic is pretty much admitting they have no idea what direction the game should take and honestly haven't since the games inception? Getting feedback from 100% of their fan base is something they should have been working on long before they launched this game. I could be remembering this incorrectly, but didn't Cryptic even say at one point they weren't targeting this game at Trekkies?
Oh well c'est le vie. Once again it seems Cryptic is blaming the poor state of the game on a third party and not on their own lack of either talent or vison. Considering they have taken two magnificiant intellectuall properties (The Hero System and Star Trek) and had stunningly lackluster results with both them, I'm leaning more twards lack of talent. You can have as many people giving you input as you like, but that won't fix the fact that the buzz is going straight into an ear that leads only to a yawning dark cavern of emptiness.
Considering how some of Cryptic's staff have voiced their feelings on the games critics in recent interviews, I suggest all they need is one advisor constantly whispering in their ear "Remember thou art mortal." It might help.
QFT
Plain and simple the move is one of marketing and not actual customer relations or game development. Cryptic has little interest in improving the game, heck most of its flaws are factually unfixable as the game engine is so limited in what it can do as far as masquerading as an MMO. So Cryptic does what it always does, they spend their effort trying to make people think better of their game rather than trying to make their game(s) better. And what proof is there of this? Simple, Cryptic got roundly panned for releasing CO with most all the same issues STO has - but rather than extend development and push back release to address the issues they pushed forward only devising new ways to hype an dmarket the game and increase initial box sales. The fact of the matter is that spending 2 years on a supposed AAA MMO tells you all you need to know about Cryptic's interest in putting out a good product, especially considered against the backdrop of the same game iwth a different skin falling just as flat just months earlier.
The only other thing to add is that it seems pretty obvious that the very last group of people any game needs to listen to is its fanboys who think the DEVs can do no wrong. Clearly, Cryptic picked voices they know offer little dissent or at least are reliant on Crytpic's cooperation in some way (try doing media about a game/DEVs without them supporting you with interviews and information) to survive. It is typical of how Crytpic does things, for appearences not for substance, and that is why it irked so many people who now see through their 80% marketting and 20% development company.
Yup. If this is anything but a publicy stunt then they should have let the gaming community select these "representatives". Instead Cryptic is going to hand-pick them and you can bet they will pick your run of the mill fanboys that sees nothing wrong with the game and who's job will be to agree with whatever Cryptic does.
The problem with a council is fairly simple: While the common player's voice and opinion has a slight chance of being heard (or drowned out in the forums), the council members' voices and opinions will always be heard -- not necessarily followed, but still heard and known.
What is also "egg" on Cryptic's face is the fact that they banned countless player accounts on their own forums, during late beta and early retail, for anyone who barely breathed any words of negativity towards the game. These actions set a precedence on the forums, where only good/positive feedback was welcomed by the company and all other opinions were subject to suspension/banning. So how is the public to expect the privately-held council will be any different? Similar to how a dictator surrounds themselves with those who dare not speak out against their actions and can do nothing but praise them...or face the inevitable consequences.
So, now, after all of the bannings and all of the beta testers trying to tell them what was "needed" or wanted in the game before release: they come to the public, with seemingly open arms, and state that they are going to create a council for "additional" feedback...However, they have already shown, through deed, what they do to those who have differing opinions of their game than they do. What, exactly, do they expect to achieve with this? Can they even salvage their reputation at this point?
-yawns-
wasn't this done and dusted a week ago, with the blog person.. cryptic screwing up the wording to the community and pretty much showing their idiotacy as an experianced MMO developer... (the forum madness of last week with overbearing moderators for the so called "customers")
proof that the niche game CoH was a fluke...
-munches popcorn- still amusing to watch, still wondering how Cryptic are going to pull people back for STO and CO, because at the moment.... both can't possibly be making them, if any, profit.
what we're at an estimated over 100,000+ but cryptic's PR says they have 1 million registered accounts... hmm.. not much of a maths whiz but i see a problem there.
CO is down to less than £4 (about $7ish) on play.com, and still isn't selling (you can't make this stuff up)
I dont know how they can survive while they keep shooting themself's in the foot.
Crash and burn I hope.
I know, and...so what? The point stands. Why do they think people who don't post on the forums with their input are going to go to a fansite to do so? Answer...they don't.
The point does not still stand, here are the current plans for getting feedback from non-forum players:
"Polls, direct e-mails, newsletters, and the Advisory Council..."
They are trying every angle possible, and fansites are just one such angle.
The root of the problem is trust. Many people distrust Cryptic for various reasons, and and all of these hypothetical problems with the advisory council are based on mistrusting Cryptic in the extreme.
Oh yea, and they are going to "listen" to this "silent majority", unlike the way they dont listen to the forum posters ?
One born every second for sure.Just another MMO failing, trying its best to explain away why its doing so, while being unwilling to admit their product is almost complete crap.
"Look, over there ! Its those people we wouldnt listen to IF they bothered to post on our forums !Our not being able to ignore them, as they havent said anything for us to ignore yet, is why we are making such bad decisions about our "sterling much loved" product !"
Too funny by far.
as far as im concerned they are well on their way to take first place in the epic MMORPG screwup of all time even passing SWG.
they took what was "supose" to be this decades hugest most epic platform and bastardized it into this...this....thing! a shallow, mega instanced, clumsy hack and blast
I would have bet REAL MONEY that STO was finally going to fill the gap that eve was unable to fill in its PVP only universe. right now I feel betrayed and bitter by this obvious fan fleecer
you want my input FINE! contact me id be glad to tell you where I think you messed up but I think an advisory council is just another PR suck up ploy that wont get anything done except special intrest.
as usually its the hardcore raiders and PVPers that make those councils not the lowly gamer that never gets heard.
The most shocking thing to me is he said they have over 100k subscribers that dont read the forums. Im amazed to hear they even have 100k subscribers. Im somewhat doubting it even though it came from someone who might know the real numbers.
Your dramatic reply aside...why? Why make another one if the ones you have are perfectly good?
Because they're not perfectly good. They don't want "user input", they want "distilled user input". There is no other reason for hand-picking people from the community and not putting a structure in place to support them.
SWG and Eve both have "senators" that are elected by the community. The structure is in place for the people who voted for the senator to communicate with the senator, and the senator is RESPONSIBLE for gathering that feedback and rolling it up.
That isn't what Cryptic is doing. Cryptic is saying "this handful of guys right here say what we want to hear, so we can 'promote' them to advisors and still say we're listening to the customers!"
If what you have works, there is no need to change it. They are changing it, ergo what they have doesn't work. The problem is what they're changing it into. To do it correctly, they should have 7 "Ambassadors": Fed Escort, Sci, Cruiser, Klingon BoP, Crui, Carrier, and PvP. These 7 people are selected from the community, voted on, made mods of the respective forums, made responsible for distilling down the community's posts and being VERY present in the forums, someone that community see's all the time and knows is out there working for them. Re-elect them every so often, give them perks like titles and such because they were chosen by *US*, not favorites of Cryptic.
For example, say I'm the Cruiser Ambassador. You guys yell at the top of your lungs all the things you want for cruisers. I gather it up, summarize it (in front of you, in the forums, let you comment), then submit it to Cryptic. They take all this feedback, come back and say "these 2 won't work, you can't have them at all, you can have 3 of the rest of your list for the next update". I take this back to the community, post a poll and say "these 2 won't work, I'm bin-iteming them. We can have 3 of the rest in the next update, so vote". The cruiser pilots pick the 3 they want, Cryptic puts them in.
That's how player councils work, and that's the only way to do it that doesn't completely alienate the community. When you\ve screwed up as bad as Cryptic has, the only option is to surrender to the community and give them as much respect as possible.
It was obvious that the game was rough/bad/terrible from a mile away without buying it, I have no sympathy for fans who willingly bought the game without waiting or listening to any reviews. Even when I was a child I did enough research on my game purchases, before the internet was availible, that I could have never gotten bitterly betrayed by STO: all the reviews rated it mediocre/poor! There was no deception!
I had a feeling STO wouldn't be very good but I never thought it would be because of stupid ideas like this council.
They didn't say that, but I guess your point is that we should automatically and necessarily know that that is their true opinion of the advisory council. Then how is it possible to discuss anything if the worst hypothetical scenario is assumed to be true?
If, like me, you trust that Cryptic is competent, then you trust that they will do a good job receiving player feedback. If you don't trust them, then nothing they say about communication will stop these paranoid conclusions. But, eventually the folks who play the game will see the communication working and then the trust will return. Almost no champs fans trusted Cryptic in January, but their actions since then have earned back a lot of trust, STO will be the same way in time.
The game is not bad. It's actually enjoyable, for the 2 days it takes to get to max lvl. The biggest problem with STO (apart from Cryptic's inability to create/manage a game well) is that it's about 20% of what it should be. The game looks like it was developed in 2 years and beta tested for 3 months...because it was.
What really makes it look bad is Bioware's TOR. They've been working on it for years, talking a 6 month beta minimum, showing off huge features, and have a history of fantastic games. Every update f rom TOR shows Bioware is taking their game serious, while every update from Cryptic shows they're floundering around, flinging poop at the walls, trying to see what sticks.
STO is not a bad game. Matrix Online was a bad game. Vanguard was a bad game. STO is an incomplete game. It needed 2 more years in the oven, and someone who actually knew something about ST at the helm. The fool who said "the essence of Trek is huge fleet battles" should be shot. Cryptic is like the Rick Berman of the ST IP, taking something awesome and turning into mediocrity as fast as they can.
I was a beta tester and like many others I was full of complaints, often in a pretty nasty way, calling the game terrible, boring in the first 10 minutes, one of the worst games I ever played, etc on the official forums (you can find me saying the same things on MMORPG.com forums during that time period). I never even so much as got a warning. The only posters I saw getting infractions and bans during beta were the ones who were really asking for it.
But you can find this smear about every forum and every company "OMG they are banning people for no reason." Even the brutes in the Chinese government don't "ban" you with no reason, there are always rules, and the people who get banned are the ones who break the rules.
Cryptic's biggest problem, as a company, is that they don't think before they release marketing info, they have absolutely zero vetting skills. How many times, over the course of all the MMO's they've made, have they opened their mouth and said something so Herculeanly stupid, then rescinded or clarified it? They just slap crap out there and backpedal when people are "surprisingly" upset, yet any one of us out here could have told them if they'd've just asked.
Here's what I do know, from what they've released...they are not relying upon us to choose the people, they are choosing them. That alone tells me quite a bit. The developer *NEVER* chooses the customers they listen to, that is *RAMPANT* favoritism. Even if it's not favoritism, even if they draw names from a hat, there's no way the customer can see it as anything else but favoritism, especially with Cryptic's background.
I do trust Cryptic. I have a lifetime STO sub, I wouldn't have that if I didn't. But I'm also a realist. Cryptic has started seasoning their feet as often as they put them in their own mouths, but the structure of this one is more than a verbal faux pas, this is actually stupid. I don't believe for a second they're trying to hurt us or their game. I trust them to want to do what's best for themselves and STO, because they have money involved, but this shows they honestly have no clue at all how to go about it.
The vendor can't choose the people it listens to, publicly. Oh, you can have some favorite posters and ignore all the others, but the moment people know you're doing it, you're doomed. Hand-picking from the community, especially guys from a fan site, is just so monumentally stupid as to be beyond comprehension.
The main reasion there fan base is posting on other sights is that they ban over the sillyest stuff. i understand crybabies are a pain in the butt , but there are paying to play and Crypt should expect sme bad feed back. i think if they give up there this is my game and i am going home idea and let the paying people expess there selves a little more freely ( in the realms of adulthood ) they would get more feedback from the playing fan base and the target base.
STO was in development for alot longer than three years,, no cryptic may have dumped all that good code but that was their choice.
They had no choice. Paramount moved the IP, but I don't think they got Perpetual's Code. They didn't buy Perpetual, so they didn't get the code, they had to start from scratch.
If a developer doesn't know what kind of game they want to make and have to ask their players because they don't know what kind of game their players want, and they've already published the game; then they're screwed.
My problem with STO's incomplete state is how Paramount/CBS reguards the franchise. How many bad Star Trek games have been made? I can't count them all. Most can be attribited to a lack of care from Paramount. They make a deal with a second party and trust that they will maintain canon and quality. Yeah, right. They are still shocked that Star Trek is an issue for entertainment. The real trouble with Paramount in the mix of this is they invested a set amount. Perpetual failed but created assets that could be used to continue the developement. Paramount finds an easy sell for this product in new re-forming Cryptic. Cryptic does the goverment method of out bidding anyone else in the shortest time. Paramount has held them to the schedule and thats what we got. If the game didn't come out when it did, it wouldn't have come out at all as there would be no money. Thats the main reason why games release incomplete. Paramount needs to create its own Star Trek devision that can police content and canon along with a marketing department designed to work with and explain to its Studio Heads about the MMO biz. This is where Lucas Film has it right with different divisions. Its also where Warner Brothers has it right with DC Entertainment now.
That all said, I think Cryptic lost a lot of talented people when they sold thier interest in CoH. I see the current Cryptic as the dead wieght that kept CoH a so-so game. Its doing much better IMHO.
I am curious how you determine they are trustworthy. Given that they did the same thing with STO that they did with CO - i.e. rush to live in 2 years with little content and basically just a fast port of the IP to their limited engine. Heck, even if you accept that they really though with Champion's that the game had enough content and was truly done when that went live and was roundly panned for being small, incomplete, and content starved there is no way a well intentioned developer with integrity could think that the same treatment for a Star trek MMO would result in anything but more problems. In short, if they legitimately where interested in making the game as good as it could be there is no way after CO they would have launched STO when they did. I respect that your preference may have you enjoying the game, but honestly - can you see anyway a responsible game developer could have really seen that STO was truly done and ready for a $15 a month sub? Anyways, I think trust is the issue in some ways, and for most objective views Crytpics actions wtih CO and now STO simply defy explination any way other than they are pushing out products they know darn well are not ready just for the box sales - and that they are more about making good hype than good games and I think this latest move is indicative of that, something designed to get good press and good will with little substance to it and less chance of actually making anything any better becuase what is really needed is too big to do (i.e. major game changes most of which their little psuedo MMO engine cannot handle).
Ahh, I see the confusion. I didn't qualify my statement. I trust Cryptic...to do what they think is in their best interest. Cryptic is not trying to lure people in and screw them. STO is not a scam. They genuinely want to make money with it, and I feel they are honestly surprised everytime they do something they feel is a great idea and their customers freak out. Like when a mentally challenged person turns on a stove and then they are burned.
They don't vet their activities through people that know the industry. They are the worst kind of MMO dev, IMHO...one that feels they know what the customers want/need better than their own customers. Sony tried that, we know it as SWG. SWG wasn't an instant failure, it was actually hugely successful when it came out, one of the biggest at the time. Sony felt they knew better than their customers and step by step, with the best of intentions, destroyed their own game.
It's a great parallel, because Sony had a great IP as well :)
So here's hoping Bioware steps in with a Star Trek game after they dominate the SW IP :)
Sorry no it was not. 2+ years thats it..
It has been stated several times that Perpetual failed to produce a working game engine for STO, despite being involved with the project for much longer then the entirety of time that it took Cryptic to bring the game to launch. There was no useful code to get.
The inside scoop is that Cryptic started work on STO quite a while before they had the IP rights signed. It was well known that Perpetual was going to go down ahead of time and that the IP would eventually be broken free.
It's fairly risky to start on a project before the IP is secured, but it is a common practice. It's easier to line up the publisher funding for an IP if you already have a jump on development of the game.
Wow all I can say is I feel for the folks with liftime subs. In the end they are the ones who are going to get hosed.
Actually the entire player base is going to get hosed.
All we can do is watch and see as the game dies quickly at this point.
I was going to wait 6 months and give it another try,after the sad afiar tha beta was. I am not so totaly not interested in having anything to do with cryptic or any project they have.
All I can say is we all used to hate soe for what they did to swg, I think cryptic just stepped into that spot now.
Unbelievable, six pages of conjecture over an advisory council. I think the "I hate Cryptic club" bandwagon has gotten way out of hand. I understand that people don't like the game, that's fine people are allowed to not like things, but to continually bash Cryptic and it's customers at every chance given is just ridiculous.
I don't know why I even bother to read these forums anymore.
Here are the latest xfire numbers
http://www.xfire.com/games/sto/Star_Trek_Online/
All I got to say is sad.
Dude...the PAYING CUSTOMERS on the official forums are the ones that started with the torches and pitchforks. How do you think this story made other MMO sites? To paraphrase the song...we didn't start this fire. We're just here LOLing at Cryptic's incompetence.
When it comes to STO XFire numbers have been buggy for a bit. This may be the case of the recent drop as well.
Yeah they were 70 a few days ago, which is still pretty sad for a MMO with such a huge IP just hitting 2 months live. As much of a fail I think this game is, even I don't believe they really dropped that far so fast.
But my contention, and I think the conclusion of an objective view of their history with CO and STO, is that they are trying to lure people in for the quick buck, the box sale, not for the long term. Sure, they are not selling cardboard DVDs in boxes and scamming people but in terms of really developing a full fledged MMO with enough depth and content to warrent not only the box price but a subscription, it is a scam. Fanboys and haters aside it is really inarguable that the 2 years to live approach that Cryptic is based on is not about long term success but rather maximizing box sales and I think few people could make the argument that CO/STO are really anywhere near up to par in terms of content and depth for teh genre which includes a $15 price tag every month.
I understand that some may think they mean well and are not intentionally rushing to cash in on box sales but the history shows differently. Seriously, is it at all possible that anyone with the intelligence to run a game company and produce a game could have though that CO or STO really had enough depth and content to warrent even short term subscriptions let alone mid or long term subscriptions? Come on, that is a stretch. But even if we buy that they where just naive once CO went live to near universal panning over its shallowness and utter lack of content they went forward with STO which suffers are the same issues. Seriously, trusting them as you describe above requires that they think they can do in two years what every other developer takes 4 to 5 years to do, is that really reasonable? Or is it much more likely that they know full well their model is to throw together a quick port to their simplistic engine and make money of the box sales then use C-store and lingering subscriptions to get whatever else they can post launch.
My point is that either Crytpic is a bunch of total morons thinking CO/STO are deep and content rich games worthy of monthly subs and long term play (hard to accept that even if it was true as once CO launched it should have been obvious to them their own vison was horribly wrong) or they know full well these games they are putting out are simplistic, shallow, and lacking content but they simply do not care because their port and release 2 year model works for them to turn a profit on box sales rather than subs. I think the facts and logic make the second of those two possibilities the obvious reality but either way Cryptic is not a company anyone should have much faith or trust in.
That is total BS. Cryptic even bragged about thier 2 years to live model and has cited the 2 year development many times.
From Cryptic's own press release on the aquisition of Cryptic by Atari:
"Atari will benefit from Cryptic’s powerful proprietary engine, scalable content development tools and online server architecture to deliver very high productivity-per-employee and industry-leading client/server performance and create unique, high quality MMO games on 18 to 24-month cycles"
Translation: Cryptic is the McDonald;s of MMOs cranking out cheap happy meals very quickly.
David Gardner, CEO of Infogrames, the parent company of Atari, said: “The acquisition of Cryptic Studios brings to Infogrames an outstanding creative organisation, with a proven track-record of success in the fast-growing MMO category. Cryptic’s success is founded on leading-edge technology and the vision of a seasoned executive management team. I am impressed with the tools and technology that Cryptic has developed to make MMOs less expensive to build. Creating vast worlds and interesting interactions can be very people intensive but with the use of Cryptic's toolset they have a proven way of cutting average production costs in half.
Translation: Half the production cost by being willing to forgoe half the time it takes to make a deep, content rich, and quality MMO.
In short - Crytpic is by design about cranking things out fast - it is their business model and something they openly make no bones about. 18 - 24 months while every other developer takes 4 to 5 years. Why? Simple, the press release says so - they have built and engine that automates content creation and, essentially, they just port IPs to their simplistic game engine. Of course, this means the games are shallow, repetitive, and still very content challenged but their goal as a business is not quality but fast and cheap.
I can see your point here. I like how CCP has handled this by allowing the players to vote for their representatives.
From what has been suggested on these forums about how Cryptic has deleted forum posts and banned users for writing negative feedback on their forums it's no wonder the community is in an uproar. It just seems to be one more way for the team to isolate itself from the communities criticism of the game by making somebody else have to deal with it.
Advisory Council = PR spin = 'we don't want to deal with you (the community) directly'
How can you be puzzled? This is very straightforward.
MMO development tends to be driven by a small but vocal minority of the player base, i.e. the forum bunnies who are in this case in an uproar about developers sidestepping them to sample the opinions of anyone other than their marvellous selves.
This is one of the few smart things Cryptic have done lately. Their next smart move would be to completely ignore this uproar.
It really is past time that MMO developers really started listening to their customers (and potential customers) like this rather than being led along blindly by the small but overly vocal few.
So wait, they picked 2 of the biggest STO fanboys to be on this council? I haven't really watched any of the STOked podcasts but have they ever had anything negative to say about either Cryptic or STO?
Cryptic: So what do you guys think about this feature?
Council: It's amazing!
Cryptic: What about this fea...
Council: Amazing!
Cryptic: What about....
Council: AMAZING!
Cryptic: Do you want us to change any...
Council: A.M.A.Z.I.N.G!
I'm sure that it will reflect positively on the game.
/s
Uh, what? They're going to give more weight to feedback from slavish fanbots. Now when this game tanks, they can blame the fans instead of their own incompetence.
FYI everyone posting on their forums IS a customer, since you have to be a paying subscriber to post in all but the tech help section. They can't say that about all the feedback they're going to get from outside sites.
Edit: typo
Why would people pay to help develop a game? Maybe a small one off fee against a finished product but ongoing fees? For other far more expensive software that sells into much smaller markets I have got lifetime licenses for early adoption, testing and feedback. What next get potential customers to pay before development starts?
The only advice for this game is to start over, the existing implementation is beyond redemption.
yeah.. lets take a look at that and go a little farther..
I noticed you took the time to highlight the passage of " not in place or other forms of feedback, just additional feedback "... Interesting.. I know some will view this as subjective, but what exactly is additional? The reason I ask this is because I'm looking at the main "STOked" section of Jup's forums and see little forum traffic that constitutes additional. I'm looking at page 1 (which happens to be the most current topic post) and see a total of 17 post that have been active in April, with only 1 topic (dealth penalty) that has more then 8 post. In addition it appears all the post are by writen by a dozen or so.. In fact as of 11 am this morning I'm the ONLY person viewing their forums.. ONE PERSON (guest)..
Is this additional feedback? STOked feedback is a JOKE in my opinion from what I see.. Hell, even MMORPG has 224 logged on, and STOked has 1 (which is me, so that doesnt' count..lol ).. I fail to see how a dozen or so active STOked forum fans justifies 2 members being on the Council..
If cryptic wants real feedback, use log in polls, and open up a PUBLIC section of the forums to non subscribers and actually hire someone to be the forum liason.. or do what SWG and other games have done, have volunteers that make up a player appointed senate..
Hey all. This is my first post on MMORPG, and I thought this topic would be fitting, given my opinion on this topic.
Anway, I feel this council is a complete waste of time.
Cryptic really can get all the feedback they need in the forums. If they want the opinion of potential customers, all they need to do is open up one section of the forums for those people. Also... and this will help attract potential customers also... they could....
1.Make quality games.
2. Clean up your horrible rep by making quality games
Yes... I know this probably wont happen... given their "dime a dozen" attitude on MMO production given their 18 to 24 month dev cycle. Its ironic that no Cryptic game is released onto consoles... as their games get no more dev time than a single player console game.
But I digress.
To activley seek the feedback of people that dont play the game nor have any apparent interest in the game... then funnel this feedback through a selected few... two of which run a fleet in game and have their own podcast, seems ... disturbing to me. Obviously these two guys have the "Thank you Cryptic may I have another" attitude, as they will happily gobble up and devour any crap that is handed to them by Cryptic... thus telling Cryptic its ok to hand out shoddy lame empty crap and call it content.
An ingame poll, or a poll on the game launcher itself would gather more unaltered and unbiased information, directly from the player at that, much quicker and more efficiently than the selective eye of any council fanboy.
Anyway... thats my opinion.
But that is the point - Cryptic doesn't want real feedback because they know thier non real MMO engine cannot do what people really want (persistent world, proper ship interiors and whatnot not just ship interior themed maps, etc). They are not stupid - they know full well that their silly little engine cannot handle a proper MMO, that is why they built their development house around an 18-24 month development cycle that amounts to porting IPs to their psuedo MMO engine. All they really do as far as striving to improve is finding new ways to market things and that is exactly what this council is - a way to look like they are doing something without doing something.
Oh sorry, you need to pass me those "special" glasses you're wearing.
I've read and re-read their announcement but I just can't see where they say they'll give more weight to this 'council' than their forums...
So, in addition to the forums, polls, surveys, calendars, engineering reports, dev posts, etc., we implemented this, "Advisory Council".
The 'council' part of this package is a glorified focus group with an ambassadorial PR element to it.
What they're doing is trying to listen to people whose views would typically be drowned out by shouting rabid forum bunnies and hear what potential customers have to say about their product. That's just plain good business sense.
You honestly struggle to see how a 'focus group' of nothing but dependent fanboys weights the voices they hear? You got one thing right, it is nothing but PR/marketing - just like everything they have done since launching another half baked psuedo MMO has been nothing but PR/marketting. If Cryptic spent half the time/resources in making their games good as they do trying to explain away the fair and widespread impression that they are bad they would have much less of a problem. Of course, the reality is you work on what is fixable and the obvious truth of the matter is that their games are not fixable due to getting a limited engine and barely half the development necessary for the genre, so they work on PR and marketting.
It has probably been 10 years since I anticipated a game like I did STO. I so wanted this game to be great.
But Cryptic is like a 10 year old growing into adolescence. They mean well, but then they trip over their own feet, knock over the table, with causes the candle to catch the curtains on fire, and then they grab grab gasoline by mistake and throw it on the fire.
The problems that STO has, can't be fixed by an advisory counsel, because Cryptic won't admit the problems they have.
A) The game is far too easy to play (mind-numbingly simple).
B) 'Shallow' doesn't even begin to describe the lack of depth hey have in their story line (and they had such a great IP to work with).
C) They have some of the worst writing I've seen since grammar school. High School students could have written better.
D) And the game is soo damned repetitive, after a couple of weeks you want to put a gun to your head and release yourself from the misery. I mean they couldn't even mix it up from a constant "kill 5 x" ... make 3, make it 8, make it whatever ... but OMG!
E) The constant instancing is just sooo 1995. Every time I had to look at a splash screen I would just get more aggravated, every time I had to do the exchange with friends trying to get everyone in the same instance, every time my friends wound up in one instance and I wound up in the other. One-Server-Instancing just blows chunks, and I and my friends would go from annoyed to aggravated, to out-right mad.
The final capper for me, was the the transaction store. I refuse to pay microtransactions for a game I'm paying a monthly subscription to. I'd rather be given the opportunity to decide that I'm going to pay $20 or $25 a month and not have micro-transactions. The problem is, STO doesn't even merit the $15 a month.
AND I'M ONE OF THOSE THAT SPENT ALMOST TWO YEARS IN THIER FORUMS AND WAS ROOTING FOR THE GAME TO BE A HUGE SUCCESS FROM THE BEGINNING.
Then you add to it, the worst public relations I've seen with a Game Developer in years ... they need to scrap the Advisory Counsel idea, and instead fire their PR people and get a real PR firm in there to research why the game is bleeding subscribers and then pound it into the heads of Zinc, and Emmert that they didn't deliver what they promised or what people were looking for ... so start working towards their promises first.
All this Advisory Counsel is going to do is introduce distractions from people who aren't even playing the game, and never will.
All I can say in the end is, thank God for Fallen Earth.