Basically MMO gamers are a captive audience of suckers, and yes that makes me one too. Which is why I developed the following philosophy:
If I go to the movies I will spend roughly $20 for ~2-3 hours of entertainment, or roughly $6.67 per hour of entertainment.
If I spend $60 on a game and $15 for the monthly sub and get at least 40 hours of entertainment that month then I come out ahead in the Money/Entertainment ratio, or roughly $1.87 per hour of entertainment.
I certainly hear that. But for your $1.87 per hour of entertainment, are you actually getting a quality experience? Saying you get more hours per buck is a common excuse in MMOs, and the devs know it. That's why we spend so many hours killing rats, than tigers, than bears etc... You know what's cheaper? Watching TV. And just as mindnumbing.
And yeah while I agree there's a certain amount of doom and gloom if you go back and read Mythrans posts, which I agree with for the most part, it doesn't mean quality, finished, products won't happen and that we should just resign ourselves to buying crap games. I think it's just more apparent in the MMO market as we've been a bit of a goldrush since WoW came out.
Consoles ALWAYS have a steady stream of fantastic, innovative, completed products hitting the shelves. Why? Console gamers typically don't put up with crap games. Console games only recently were able to be patched, so they had to be completely finished before hitting the store shelves, this caused a culture of gamers used to holding their games to a much higher standard than a typical PC gamer (who are often left being their own troubleshooting department... and we've gotten used to it). Sure there has always been bad console games, but they meet a fairly swift trip into obscurity with little fanfare.
I have high hopes for SWToR. I don't even know if I'll play it or if it will be my thing, but I hope it's complete and polished. If it is I hope it's successful beyond their wildest dreams even if I never play it.
In my view a lot of the issues the dev team appear to be grappling with now are symptoms of a game that was released too early, in a bad state.
There are so many examples of this not working; it amazes me that it still seems to happen so often. What follows then are usually revamps, revisions, changes to the business model etc.. It seems to take a small miracle to turn around a bad launch.
More of the same BS we've seen from Craptic since closed beta. "It's coming soon, just wait and see". Then when it shows up it's way way too little, done way way too poorly. They're nothing but a bunch of liars and scam artists in my opinion, and they should offer refunds to lifetimers that bought before release and pre-order customers.
STO was, is, and will be a major disappointment as long as Cryptic is running it. I was so hyped, as were multitudes of other Trekkies, that we were finally going to get a Star Trek MMO. I even had figured out how many boxes I would have to buy to get most of the pre-order bonuses etc. Then I played the beta. It took me all of three hours before I uninstalled it and scrapped my plans to buy all of those pre-order bonuses and a lifetime sub because this was in no way Star Trek. It was a poorly designed space shooter in a semi-quasi ST skin... PURE JUNK. No matter what they 'promise' at this point, STO will never be a true Star Trek game. Our only hope for that - a true Star Trek MMO - is if this 'thing' finally fails completely and Cryptic pulls the plug to end its (and our) misery so that another developer can pick up the IP and make an MMO based on and encompassing the Star Trek universe the way it was built for the numerous series and movies.
We talked and talked about how important it was to include something ... anything ... than just combat missions. The market they were looking to break into didn't materialize because it wasn't "Star Trek-y" or "Iconic".
They're backpedalling now, desperately, looking for that left turn at Albuqurque.
Hate it break it to you, but it isn't going to happen. Customers have decided the game isn't Star Trek, regardless of the title.
It's another clear example of a company looking at numbers and assuming people will come instead of looking at people and trying to get the best numbers from them. It's not a SWG catastrophe, but it definately needs to go in the books as what NOT to do.
Clearly Cryptic were very greedy with the way St was implemented. They made us pay for things we take for granted in other mmo's such as character slots, classes and races, they also charged a sub, so basically it was microtransactions and subscriptions. They thought that us gamers were gullable fools who would happily pay up as this is Star Trek! And while a few foolish people did get sucked into this game the vast majority saw through the tinsel and realised Cryptic were just out to fleece them for every penny.
I will NEVER buy another Cryptic game and this one is only going one direction....DOWN.
Cryptic slammed their dicks in the door when they released this game that was maybe 25% complete. I played it in beta and was completely appalled by how terrible it was. I played at launch for the first month; but, it seemed to be getting worse every week, rather than improve. I gave the game several months and recently resubbed and noticed that they have improved a lot of the problems that plagued the hell out of it in the beginning, that and added some things. The Klingon faction still is dead; due to the lack luster content available for that side. Now that they admited what they did with that faction was the biggest mistake ever they seem to be attempting to resolve the screw up. They should have never put the Federation and Klingons in an all out war as an excuse to only focus on making content for on side and just have the Klingons for PvP; which is absolutely awful in this game. If they really intend to clean up their shit stain they need to start by resolving that huge issue right there and giving the Klinks some badly needed PvE content and overhauling the enourmous amount of boring combat missions. How many times can you kill 5 groups of the enemy before you get sick of it?
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
STO was, is, and will be a major disappointment as long as Cryptic is running it. I was so hyped, as were multitudes of other Trekkies, that we were finally going to get a Star Trek MMO. I even had figured out how many boxes I would have to buy to get most of the pre-order bonuses etc. Then I played the beta. It took me all of three hours before I uninstalled it and scrapped my plans to buy all of those pre-order bonuses and a lifetime sub because this was in no way Star Trek. It was a poorly designed space shooter in a semi-quasi ST skin... PURE JUNK. No matter what they 'promise' at this point, STO will never be a true Star Trek game. Our only hope for that - a true Star Trek MMO - is if this 'thing' finally fails completely and Cryptic pulls the plug to end its (and our) misery so that another developer can pick up the IP and make an MMO based on and encompassing the Star Trek universe the way it was built for the numerous series and movies.
It does not matter what they do with this game. It is not a Star Trek game and no amount of patching and expansions can "fix" that.
Been playing Season 2 up to about a week ago from this posting. The one thing I was waiting for most in Season 2 was a complete disappointment. Season 2, while it has a few plusses has a lot of disappointments.
1) As a low level character (Lt 4 at this writing), I cannot flag my away team. No matter how many /bug reports I send in on this, it never gets addressed.
2) When you make Vice Admiral, obtaining very rare items requiring Mark of Honors to purchase them has been taken away from the VA's. It's automatic. Once you hit VA, say good by to Marks of Honor. There is absolutely NO incentive in this area to want to rank, and the horror is you Have No Choice in the matter.
3) Many of the problems and bugs from Season 1 are carried over to Season 2.
4) Diplomatic missions are not the easy-as-they-seem missions we've been reading about in all these interviews. Getting to the point where you can receive Diplomatic missions from a common NPC takes a modicum of work, but after that the assigned missions have a very long cool-down time. You can log out for two days after doing a Dip, and when you log back in, you still don't have a diplomatic mission available. This cool-down time is online-time. You have to remain online the entire time in order to do progressive diplomatic missions, which in the beginning are nothing more than non-combat cluster missions. Staying in a cluster running Explore system contacts is tedious when you only want to engage in non-combat missions and is very time-consuming.
It makes me sick to even look at the icon on my desktop that opens the Star Trek Online game. I've been waiting about two to three days before going back in the game just to see if the Mark of Honor missions have been reinstated, to my disappointment.
All-in-all STO is one of the most disappointing MMO's I have ever played.
Loving-kindness, Compassion, Altruism ... Think About It !!!
Comments
I certainly hear that. But for your $1.87 per hour of entertainment, are you actually getting a quality experience? Saying you get more hours per buck is a common excuse in MMOs, and the devs know it. That's why we spend so many hours killing rats, than tigers, than bears etc... You know what's cheaper? Watching TV. And just as mindnumbing.
And yeah while I agree there's a certain amount of doom and gloom if you go back and read Mythrans posts, which I agree with for the most part, it doesn't mean quality, finished, products won't happen and that we should just resign ourselves to buying crap games. I think it's just more apparent in the MMO market as we've been a bit of a goldrush since WoW came out.
Consoles ALWAYS have a steady stream of fantastic, innovative, completed products hitting the shelves. Why? Console gamers typically don't put up with crap games. Console games only recently were able to be patched, so they had to be completely finished before hitting the store shelves, this caused a culture of gamers used to holding their games to a much higher standard than a typical PC gamer (who are often left being their own troubleshooting department... and we've gotten used to it). Sure there has always been bad console games, but they meet a fairly swift trip into obscurity with little fanfare.
I have high hopes for SWToR. I don't even know if I'll play it or if it will be my thing, but I hope it's complete and polished. If it is I hope it's successful beyond their wildest dreams even if I never play it.
When it comes to new MMO's gamer lemmings rush in, if they did not the industry would not be able to release every thing one to two years early.
In my view a lot of the issues the dev team appear to be grappling with now are symptoms of a game that was released too early, in a bad state.
There are so many examples of this not working; it amazes me that it still seems to happen so often. What follows then are usually revamps, revisions, changes to the business model etc.. It seems to take a small miracle to turn around a bad launch.
More of the same BS we've seen from Craptic since closed beta. "It's coming soon, just wait and see". Then when it shows up it's way way too little, done way way too poorly. They're nothing but a bunch of liars and scam artists in my opinion, and they should offer refunds to lifetimers that bought before release and pre-order customers.
STO was, is, and will be a major disappointment as long as Cryptic is running it. I was so hyped, as were multitudes of other Trekkies, that we were finally going to get a Star Trek MMO. I even had figured out how many boxes I would have to buy to get most of the pre-order bonuses etc. Then I played the beta. It took me all of three hours before I uninstalled it and scrapped my plans to buy all of those pre-order bonuses and a lifetime sub because this was in no way Star Trek. It was a poorly designed space shooter in a semi-quasi ST skin... PURE JUNK. No matter what they 'promise' at this point, STO will never be a true Star Trek game. Our only hope for that - a true Star Trek MMO - is if this 'thing' finally fails completely and Cryptic pulls the plug to end its (and our) misery so that another developer can pick up the IP and make an MMO based on and encompassing the Star Trek universe the way it was built for the numerous series and movies.
~ Adder ~
Quick, Silent, Deadly
We talked and talked about how important it was to include something ... anything ... than just combat missions. The market they were looking to break into didn't materialize because it wasn't "Star Trek-y" or "Iconic".
They're backpedalling now, desperately, looking for that left turn at Albuqurque.
Hate it break it to you, but it isn't going to happen. Customers have decided the game isn't Star Trek, regardless of the title.
It's another clear example of a company looking at numbers and assuming people will come instead of looking at people and trying to get the best numbers from them. It's not a SWG catastrophe, but it definately needs to go in the books as what NOT to do.
Clearly Cryptic were very greedy with the way St was implemented. They made us pay for things we take for granted in other mmo's such as character slots, classes and races, they also charged a sub, so basically it was microtransactions and subscriptions. They thought that us gamers were gullable fools who would happily pay up as this is Star Trek! And while a few foolish people did get sucked into this game the vast majority saw through the tinsel and realised Cryptic were just out to fleece them for every penny.
I will NEVER buy another Cryptic game and this one is only going one direction....DOWN.
Cryptic slammed their dicks in the door when they released this game that was maybe 25% complete. I played it in beta and was completely appalled by how terrible it was. I played at launch for the first month; but, it seemed to be getting worse every week, rather than improve. I gave the game several months and recently resubbed and noticed that they have improved a lot of the problems that plagued the hell out of it in the beginning, that and added some things. The Klingon faction still is dead; due to the lack luster content available for that side. Now that they admited what they did with that faction was the biggest mistake ever they seem to be attempting to resolve the screw up. They should have never put the Federation and Klingons in an all out war as an excuse to only focus on making content for on side and just have the Klingons for PvP; which is absolutely awful in this game. If they really intend to clean up their shit stain they need to start by resolving that huge issue right there and giving the Klinks some badly needed PvE content and overhauling the enourmous amount of boring combat missions. How many times can you kill 5 groups of the enemy before you get sick of it?
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
Expand on the ground content with fully explorable planets and il come back
It does not matter what they do with this game. It is not a Star Trek game and no amount of patching and expansions can "fix" that.
My gaming blog
Been playing Season 2 up to about a week ago from this posting. The one thing I was waiting for most in Season 2 was a complete disappointment. Season 2, while it has a few plusses has a lot of disappointments.
1) As a low level character (Lt 4 at this writing), I cannot flag my away team. No matter how many /bug reports I send in on this, it never gets addressed.
2) When you make Vice Admiral, obtaining very rare items requiring Mark of Honors to purchase them has been taken away from the VA's. It's automatic. Once you hit VA, say good by to Marks of Honor. There is absolutely NO incentive in this area to want to rank, and the horror is you Have No Choice in the matter.
3) Many of the problems and bugs from Season 1 are carried over to Season 2.
4) Diplomatic missions are not the easy-as-they-seem missions we've been reading about in all these interviews. Getting to the point where you can receive Diplomatic missions from a common NPC takes a modicum of work, but after that the assigned missions have a very long cool-down time. You can log out for two days after doing a Dip, and when you log back in, you still don't have a diplomatic mission available. This cool-down time is online-time. You have to remain online the entire time in order to do progressive diplomatic missions, which in the beginning are nothing more than non-combat cluster missions. Staying in a cluster running Explore system contacts is tedious when you only want to engage in non-combat missions and is very time-consuming.
It makes me sick to even look at the icon on my desktop that opens the Star Trek Online game. I've been waiting about two to three days before going back in the game just to see if the Mark of Honor missions have been reinstated, to my disappointment.
All-in-all STO is one of the most disappointing MMO's I have ever played.
Loving-kindness, Compassion, Altruism ... Think About It !!!