They always had a skeleton crew, even in pre-launch development. The whole reason why Atari bought Cryptic is they were a small studio with low staffing costs that touted high productivity via the Cryptic Game Engine.

I believe Atari recognized it looked good on paper but in reality the studio does not have the capacity to keep up with customer demand. And the profits just weren't there so they decided to sell Cryptic.

I don't think PWE plans to expand Cryptic to be a large development studio. PWE payed a lot for Cryptic. Maybe if they can get PWE out of the red and into the black they will consider expanding them. I think we got what we got right now and that's a small studio that will remain small until they prove their profitability.

I identified the bottlenecks clearly but thanks anyway for your drive-by troll which added so much to the topic of conversation.

True, throwing a bunch of money at STO is an extremely risky proposition for PWE or anybody else. They can't prove their profitability (in the long-term anyway) without ramping up development. They can't ramp up development without people. Their people problems appear to be three-fold: one being skills, two being location, and three being money being competitive with other places in the area.

On top of that, they're burning the existing team out getting even these releases out the door so naturally there's just nothing left for Featured Episodes or any of the other stuff that just needs fixing.

Actually the profits were there but Atari was so far in debt and being sued by so many companies that STO's profits weren't enough to offset all the corporate liabilities.

When PWE purchased Cryptic they had 20 employees on the STO team - that's what Atari had dwindled the team to. They now have close to 40. And PW is not in the red. They made over $150 million dollars last year - though 90% of that money was paid to shareholders via dividends. IIRC I think I made a little over $3.00 per share - not bad for an $8.75 per share investment.

I remember reading about Atari's Official Divestment statement. Cryptic showed a loss of $7 million for 2010 & 2011. And a loss of $18 million the previous year. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...ic_Studios.php

And I hear 40 employees is getting them back to where they were at launch. Meaning they are still a skeleton crew compared to other studios. This is better but they are still not being expanded into a large studio with a much greater capacity to meet customer demand.

Was responding to op, but thanks for thinking everything is about you and your name calling which added even more to said topic.

Putting a freeze on anything is like telling the frelling developers to go to Club Med for a long need vacation. They need to be chained to their PCs 24 hours a day with a large hooded man holding a whip standing behind them.

I always get a kick out of the premise that just because the larger group does not speak they MUST be happy. This is just plain wrong. In fact the second half of your sentence speaks to the larger truth regarding why they don't come to a forum. HEH! I think if a poll were done of all those who do not come to these forums you would find that the most common answers are:

1) What? That game still exists?

2) What Forums?

3) I only play a few hours a week so I really don't care that much.

Forums such as these are more likley to be attended by those whom regularly spend money (or significant time) on the game, and thus you could say have some measure of investment in it (please don't play with the semantics of the word ). It is only natural that such people will want to voice thier concerns.

To to be dismissive of them as "a minority" is not only rude (in general, not you specificly ), it's bad for business long term. In fact some of the most sucessfull games I can think of had or have active forums where the devs regulary interact with, and listen to it's forum members.

Some rumor control...

Cryptic was sold because it was a profitable business and worth at least $50 million to Perfect World.

The STO leadership team is triaging bugs weekly to prioritize bug fixes to go out as soon as possible. After the Season 6 launch, it has been all hands on deck for the Foundry, which should be turned on for editing this week if all goes well.

We will be making some tweaks to the amount of Fleet Marks several missions reward so that the various PVE Queue Missions reward similarly. (this means bumping up some of the missions that reward on the lower side of the scale)

We are meeting regularly to review Fleet Progression and have and will continue to make adjustments to projects. In the near future we expect to drop the Fleet Mark requirements on higher tiers (T4 and T5)

STO is not dying by any means and continues to grow stronger. Just last month we took over as the top performing game for Perfect World in North America.

The STO development team continues to grow month over month and we still have several positions open.

As the team grows larger our Seasonal plans are getting larger. We expect Season 7 to be bigger than Season 6, and Season 8 to be bigger than Season 7. More content, more fixes, more updates across the board.

Our development efforts to improve PvP continue and while we aren't discussing it and did suffer a setback with Gozer leaving, we are working towards a goal of having more efforts put into addressing this part of the game.

Season 6 brought with it several new video features from the Core Video Card team, some of which have been awesome, and some of which have caused some issues. We are working with that team (who in turn work with the Video Card makers) to get some fixes for odd glitches that crop up.

The Starbase Fleet Action map (20 man) does have performance issues. We have several people assigned to this specifically to address this and expect improvements over the upcoming month.

We haven't forgetten about KDF, or PVP, or Crafting, or Exploration, or any other feature we've all talked about addressing. We are simply being more pragmatic about how fast we can get to specific features - but our intention is to absolutely get to all of them as fast as we can.

We do listen to feedback, and while we don't always address every post, we certainly take note. As a F2P game, our business model is different, but the same hard working team will continue to develop STO into a bigger and better MMO year after year.

We are glad that players are enjoying Season 6. We realize there are some issues, but we also realize it has been great for Fleets and group game play. We expect that the second half of this year is going to be even better for STO than the first half was.

Thank you for continuing to support this game and for continuing to voice opinions. We hear them and are working behind the curtain to improve the game in every way.

and yet, when asked direct questions, especially regarding an apparent development oversight, all we get is silence.

http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/sh...d.php?t=303871

People (myself included) have been asking about the lack of a T5 Fleet Cruiser, given that the same tier Nova and Sabre are getting T5 variants.

We all understand the "no T5 Connie" policy, yet the Excalibur, Vesper and Exeter are 25th century vessels, and their only tie to the Connie is a similar shape in profile view.

But, anytime the question is asked, all we get is silence as we are ignored.

That doesn't exactly suggest that our feedback, nor our questions, are being listened to. Instead, it suggests "selective hearing" as my mother used to call it.

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!