For what's it's worth I was part of the beta, love the game and am not going anywhere. Despite all the grief about what individuals are not happy with ( whom will probably never be happy ) I think that You guys at cryptic are doing awesome and feel what your doing is for the best. Otherwise you wouldnt be doing it

What tough decisions?

Selling power in the cash shop is the cardinal sin of MMOs. How long before there is an auction before each pvp match, with the highest bidder guaranteed to win? Like that other guy said, we all knew it was coming as soon as you introduced the cash item shop.

edit- I think this was maybe a bit too strongly worded.

Please check the dev tracker, he's responded twice in a thread about that particular topic.

On the topic at hand, STO is a business like any other, which means that however they can make money they will. It's the way ANY business succeeds. The stuff that has been put to the C-Store has essentially been fluff pieces or add ons. There's nothing on there - including this new ship that everyone is ranting about - that you absolutely need to play the game.

Furthermore, as has been said many many times before, the art team doesn't develop content, so them working on a new uniform doesn't effect anything, except allows them to keep doing their jobs and getting paid.

Dstahl, if I had a nickel for every time I heard you say that... :p

But seriously, that's your default position on everything: "STO's future looks brighter than ever!" What kind of timescale are we looking at here? I'm sure you said that STO's future looked bright when the content drought started, what... more than six months ago now? How about Klingons? How about PvPers? Their 'future' wan't bright half a year ago, a year ago, or even at launch. This time, is their future 'bright' also? Or just the rest of player base?

That's another thing I hear repeated quite often, "Subs are up! Subs are up again!" But absent of proof, these claims aren't particularly powerful. Subjectively it often seems like the population is decreasing. What if the subs are going up and down each month but we only hear about it when they go up? What is the actual *long term* trend. Give us a timescale here.

And here's the rub: If the picture that you are painting is accurate and subs are consistently increasing, then why the glacial pace of development? If your sub numbers are going up, then you should be getting more resources, and development should accelerate! If anything, it seems like development is slowing down for a rather long time now.

Perhaps a lot of the blame falls on Atari or Cryptic management above you, but isn't it your job to deal with the higher ups and grow the development team to support the apparently growing subscription base?

Look, I'm one of those guys that thinks that a degree trust needs to be given, and that will be strengthened or weakened over time. I had confidence in you when you took over as EP. Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe it was Atari holding you and the team back, and you'll do a lot better under PW. That would be excellent! I'd love to be proven wrong! My trust and confidence may yet be restored. Until that time, I'm going to remain skeptical and I think that's fair.

A good place to start would be hiring someone who understands game balance better than even a mediocre PvPer does. You could basically take any member from the PvP community and they would school your design team in terms of understanding what is overpowered, underpowered, and how to play the game.

Some more nitpicking ...

That suggests that the perfect world deal was something being worked on for longer than 2011 ... but ...

See, there's a contradiction there. Unless what you're saying is, that long ago, when this Perfect World deal got going (longer than we all realize) ... part of the idea was to not have more featured episodes out and stay focused on other things that are far more critical and important for the long term health of the game.

See, going by the track record established in this game, the content that gets pumped out fast, and on time, is C-Store content.

Is that what was taking the focus away from featured episodes?

That's how your commentary reads if we're to take it that long before we realized, Perfect World was grooming this game for success, and one of the sacrifices that had to be made was mission content.

There's no direct evidence to back that up. And none has ever been offered.

This game's not old enough to have a long term. People's grievances stem from launch to season 4. Is that short term? Yeah, ok. But it's also the entire life cycle of the game.

Ooooh. This is bad. You're suggesting that interacting with the forums is not a valuable source of feedback. But I don't see this game reaching out to the rest of the playerbase. No polls in-game. No big or official presence at big comic cons and trek cons and gaming cons. The forums are where you get the most interaction with your customers. Or at least used to be.

....deleted in advanced to prevent any undue misunderstandings and or moderation..

Dan... I like your decision making style, overall. I do have issues here and there and I've posted on most of them at some point today.

On a certain level, though, I think FEs take how long FEs take, as much as you and I and everybody wants weeklies. In addition to the FEs, though, I frankly think you need one person tasked with making sure that one mission, apart from the FEs, ships for each faction, every month. It may be a sparse mission some months, particularly if that person is also working elsewhere.

My own experience is that a meaty little mission can be done in a weekend. That's how long Currents Turned Awry on Holodeck and No Piece More Action took me on Tribble. My experience with both is that they needed about eight hours on fixes as bugs emerged. I have a much grander mission in the works that will have taken around 5-7 days, disregarding Foundry downtime.

There are TONS of things that need done, FEs among them. But I think what would speak a lot to Cryptic's commitment to the game and players is, acknowledging that FEs have lots of ambitious elements, that 1-2 less ambitious missions ship every month. I could write at least ONE functional, serviceable mission in the time it takes you to write an Engineering Report or Cryptic Speaks Q&A. My concern is that there's been no move towards THAT kind of assurance at Cryptic.

It seems to me like you could set aside a week for a content designer. You could say, "You have to have a functional mission by the end of the week. It can be as long or short as it has to be. If you finish the core stuff early, feel free to dream up special item rewards, recruit people who have a spare minute to do voicework, add cinematics, or lengthen bits of it. But we want SOMETHING complete and playable that takes at least five minutes by the end of the week."

It seems so easy from my perspective and I think it would show more commitment than Ask Cryptic orn Engineering Report. If it's a labor hours issue, that perhaps reinforces for me the need to have a freelance merc or two off the team who get paid by the job. Outsourcing the C-Store has meant that the C-Store gets steady updates.

Outsourcing a mission a month, understanding that it's a different beast from EITHER the Foundry or the high quality Featured Episodes, would guarantee SOMETHING, and would show commitment to there being something new in-game every month. Comics do it. The Trek TV shows did it more than virtually any other non-anthology show in the history of television and it helped define their character and tone.

And I think that would turn a lot of the sentiments and dialogue around. But the room right now is tense and stuffy and that will affect everyone's opinions about everything. You can say, "It will be colder withis winter." You can say, "Hey! Here are some Foundry-branded water bottles to keep you cool. Just fill them up at your own Fountain." But at a certain point, you should look at having a ceiling fan as a backup for when the AC breaks.

Thanks for the ongoing feedback and open communication. I for one support your recent decisions and am looking forward to the upcoming content..

Just because you don't approve of his answer, doesn't mean he didn't answer it, nor is it reason enough to derail every thread that he comments in trying to get him to provide a different answer.

anyhow...I'm upbeat about the future of the game personally, and I know that there's been some hard times lately at the office, and they were short handed for a while. That doesn't mean I'm happy that things have been delayed time and again, but at least it's been stated why things have been delayed.