My opinion on the ER's -- yeah they showed what COULD happen down the road or in discussion but it gave people the sense that it's GOING to happen its a 100% guaranteed thing, and that caused a lot of issues in my mind I'm happy with the dev blogs in that regard

Now the Ask Cryptic's I wouldn't mind seeing again as it's a simple ask questions and poof get some answers. Pretty much it's like an interview done by any of the communities just directly based from the STO website :p

I always took the Dev Blogs as 'Oh no!' That's not the reaction they sought, but it's what they got from many people.

Almost every time a Dev Blog come out, some absolutely wretched things were introduced into this game that ruined the experience.

There are *some* good things in those blogs, but they are few and far between.

Ask Cryptic is good, don't get me wrong, but I found myself occasionally irked when you saw certain months where it was nothing but answers to softball questions.

Be bold! Hit a hardball question out of the park and wow us to our delight!

Yeah, Dev Blogs seemed a way to soften terrible news.

No more dev blogs.

Problem is that they don't actually tell us about anything except what is already happening. They aren't informative, they're just the spin that's released concurrently with bad news in an attempt to soften the blow. They're an effort to give us as little inflammatory information as slowly and incrementally as possible in order to boil the frog.

We don't need an EP to do that, they could have a marketing plebe or StormShade type up the standard announcements we've always gotten when something new releases. We never needed Dan Stahl to write a personalized note to us every time an item was added to the store, now did we? Of course not, and he'd have been wasting his time to do such a thing.

As anything other than spin the dev blogs have been complete and abject failures, and even the spin was poor.

They've never given us any idea of the game's path. They've never set goals. They've left us in the dark, with a game that feels all but entirely directionless because we aren't given any indication of what, if anything, we can expect.

The only actual relevant news that we've gotten from the damn things, that wouldn't have been discovered within a day of playing the game ourselves, was the slash to the number of FEs Cryptic plans to release and that wasn't even in the dev blog, no that came from Dangelo posting in the related thread clarifying a point that sounded weak to some people (and only through that clarification was it discovered to be worse than we originally thought). And this was information that people had been screaming for over the past months, especially during the F2P changeover. This was stuff he should have told us previously, and a question he would have been bombarded with earlier had the "Ask Cryptics" not been suspended.

The dev blogs have been a pointless and pathetic waste of energy. Nothing more. Have they been frequent? Sure. Have they been worth anything? Nope. If someone gives you crap several times a month that doesn't help anything, it just gives you a pile of crap. The "Ask Cryptics" and "Engineering Reports" may not have always been accurate, plans and projections are rarely pinpoint accurate and foolproof, and they may not have always answered the pressing questions, but at least they answered something; they served a purpose, and that's something dev blogs have consistently failed to do.

The engineering reports were neat ideas, that you're not getting the majority of because "plans change".

There's really no reason to bring them back. I quit reading them many months before they ended. Because there was no reason to waste time reading about things they said were in development but wasn't going to happen.

That's what the engineering reports really were, unrealistic fantasies most of which never to came.

please please please!

I like the way you think.

Yes the Dev blogs are nice maybe they could just bring back ask cryptic, I would like to know about my Tholians.