For those of you who dislike longer posts, see the following as my sometimes viewpoint on the STO community, and just remember the game isn't going anywhere, we can be patient while they work on all the multitudes of new and improved stuff we and they want. See below for the less abrasive version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufHZy80dmXM
I swear, sometimes I wonder how we haven't driven some of the Devs to sociopathy with all our incessant demands and complaints.
Maybe its because I've been playing MMOs a lot longer than many of the Star Trek fans here, especially given how many of you would never have played an MMO at all had it not been Star Trek, maybe its because I've simply grown more realistic and pragmatic in my expectations over the years, but I honestly think we as a community are being grossly unfair to Cryptic.
Now, before you all start flaming me keep in mind, I am
not saying that there haven't been missteps, problems, and outright mistakes made by the dev team, the problems with the Q fountain among the more recent ones. STO is not perfect. The Devs are not perfect. (neither are we) STO was much worse at launch, maybe even a bit worse than some of the other MMOs I've played when they first came out.
That said, they want this game to succeed.
Overall it is. They want us to be happy. That's one they can't deliver to everyone, but they are making a darn good showing of it.
They also want to do it right. With the way things look now STO will be around for a good long while to come, come Titan or SW:TOR or whatever. They have time to implement all those crazy and wonderful ideas they wanted to originally and couldn't because of the hard deadline for release that frankly was unrealistic but understandable given the ****-poor job Perpetual made of actually making a playable anything. They also have time to implement a lot of those off the wall and brilliant ideas we come up with.
How many MMOs really put that much effort into changing things directly based on forum feedback? I never knew GW or EVE or anyone else to do it, aside from balance issues and bug fixes. Heck, Galaxies actively ignored the player base with some of their changes, despite desperate, unified pleading to undo some of them, a unification we almost always lack.
The point is - ALL of these changes and improvements take time. They aren't a very large team and they have to prioritize. It isn't a race to get everything worked on all at once. If they even try they'll just end up doing poorly at them all.
Frankly endgame and KDF content is sorely lacking right now, and ground combat is functional but nowhere near as fun and engaging as space. Exploration is another area I find fun, but unfulfilling. Its popcorn basically, and we want meat and potatoes.
We can afford to be patient.
It will come. We already know they are working on ground combat, the duty system is another exciting improvement in the pipeline, and the KDF seems to be a continual element of their work, albeit a bit more low key than some of the flashier elements, like the Featured Series.
Also everyone should keep in mind that each of us has a different list of priorities for the game. We can't all have what we want immediately. I'm sure, however, that Cryptic is trying to be as fair as possible while balancing the relative difficulties of wanted features. Frankly something that will take a hundred man hours to implement compared to something requiring ten, with both equally demanded, shouldn't have priority.
And lastly, we have to understand that some things are just not possible or desirable in an MMO setting, or they are wanted by too small a portion of the players to warrant the necessary time to implement.
A simple example. I saw a thread recently saying we shouldn't have any loading screens at all in sector space. Besides being next to impossible with the realities of MMO servers and engines such a move would have other problems, like having the same player limit for the entire map instead of one sector block. I don't know about you, but I like seeing other players flitting about in their ships as I travel. Space would feel a lot lonelier if we were spread out over the whole shebang.
Actually, there is one more thing I want to say. I've seen way too many threads that basically boil down to attacks or threats against Stahl personally or Cryptic in general. That does
no one any good at all. Dstahl and his team are our friends and givers of gifts, not our enemies. They are just as big Star Trek fans as the rest of us and care about making STO great, even greater than it is now. These threads literally make me sick. By all means, keep posting what you want to see and what you want improved, but that can be done with some class.
We are fans of Star Trek, the greatest egalitarian and idealistic vision in Sci-Fi ever. Lets act like it.
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