So I’ve made posts about SOPA in the past yes? Well putting aside the combination of SOPA and NDAA which, a two hit combo brought together in the light of OcuppyWallstreet that will in essence allow the Government to Lock social sites that aid in organizing protests and then indefinably contain those protestors without charge. There’s the interesting fact that the organizations pushing for this act are themselves viable to be punished by it, though we all know that if you’re rich, or in the government you’ll be exempt from these rules. But the case of my point, and this bit of rambling, is that if we can’t trust the organizations hoping to enforce these rules to follow them, how can we trust them to not abuse them? I mean when the RIAA itself has pirated $9 million dollars worth of just a single series, and done nothing against themselves why should we trust them to enforce rules that would keep us from doing things much less offensive like sending a friend a song to see if they’d like an album?

Cryptic Studios, developer of Star Trek Online, has recently made motions in making the game free to play. The free to play conversion happens on January 17th of 2012. However, in preparation to this conversion, “Season 5″ of Star Trek Online, the Free to Play build, was made live December 1st.

Prior to this build, a Developer at Cryptic Stuidos informed the players via their forums that Purchasing an item in the games Cash Ship (C-store) namely the Excelsior Advanced Heavy Cruiser Refit would also unlock the Excelsior Advanced Heavy Cruiser. A more baseline version used at early points in the game at no additional charge.

Following this announcement many people made purchases of the ship in the hopes of having both come December 1st. Following December 1st however it was revealed that the information the Developer had given was “in error”. However Cryptic Studios (and Parent Company Perfect World) waited until a week after the date of the drop off point to inform people that they would in fact, not get the ‘bundle’ regardless of when they purchased.

So, Cryptic Studios mislead their customer base into making purchases based on false information. Now any good business, or smart business, when this information came about, would have made  strides to compensate those effected. Cryptic studios however has made no steps forward. In fact since this revelation they have released a new item to the C-store, with an in-store description that misleads the buyer about the items that they can acquire via purchasing it. This doesn’t even begin to cover the legal ambiguity of it as it ‘may or may not’ fall within the line of online gambling. (Small Note: Harking back to a previous post by me, a discussion about the legality of the ‘winter packages’ on the forums was closed by a Moderator. Strangely this moderation does not appear in the Dev/Mod Tracker…)

I as a player of this game am really at a loss for words in regards to these decisions. I try to regain hope about the game, but every time Cryptic seems to do something that sets them back on the path of good game development, they make 2-3 decisions that back track them back into the realm of shady business. They seem to follow a business model of perpetuating false hope, and then using that false hope to pump the player base of their money, now even going to the point of blatant lying to get sales.

StormShade aka Shaun Brodie is the community manager for Crytpic Entertainment and Perfect World Entertainment over on the Star Trek Online forums. He’s also a prime example of bad moderation. In recent months Star Trek Online has degraded as a game, a content drought, coupled with a constant flow of cash store material, unfixed bugs, and broken promises has gotten the forums up in a roar. And its well justified.

The problem however arises here. Instead of being open with their player base, and addressing concerned Cryptic bottled up, and this got people even more concerned, and those concerns became vocal. Threads and comments cropped up voicing frustration and concern over decisions about the game cropped up, and StormShade moved in. At first it was canned responses, copied and pasted answers that answered nothing and raised more questions. This didn’t sit well and people became more vocal about their concerns.

And StormShade became more aggressive.

Harking back to the end of the age of Wish_Stone threads were closed with little or no explanation, many of which were more canned responses. As you might expect this caused anger among many members of community and they sought to address it, only to be banned. Any discussion of moderation, however vague, even if not addressed at a single instance but the rules in general, is subject to be banned. However, stormshade didn’t ban everybody, only the ones expressing negativity. Plenty of people being positive about cryptic would point out rules and regulations and past banning against people being negative with no repercussions.

It became clear that StormShade was picking and choosing topics based on the opinion of the person violating the rules. If you were doing it to the benefit of cryptic, you were fine, if you were negative about a decision they made or pointing out something wrong, you were banned. But it wasn’t just a simple banning, but a layer of infractions. On more than one occasion I’ve had StormShade pile on bogus infractions on my account that so many emails were sent to my account that the spam filter kicked in. In essence, StormShade set it up so that if you continued to voice your opinions against how things were going, a permaban was in your future.

However it goes beyond just the forums, to the community system itself. The system contains a ticket system, in which you can contest issues that happen in the game and community. If you feel an infraction was unjustified you can submit a ticket, and the ticket system lists “We usually answer tickets within 24 hours. Please check back often as we occasionally need additional information to resolve your issue.” In theory you could expect a response in a day, if you were lucky a few hours, but if StormShade banned you, you’d never hear a word. Tickets about bogus avatar violations, or flaming when no flames were had, or discussing private correspondences, where none were had still sit open, weeks and months after the fact. Mr. Brodie has no intention of addressing your concerns of removing any unnecessary violations.

And it is not just me who sees this, as many private discussions about StormShade’s heavy handed moderation against people who are not pro-cryptic or pro-perfect world have been had. But due to his own actions any discussions in the area where it matters, the forums itself are unattainable. Any thread pertaining to it is closed or deleted (i.e. Year of the C-Store) and any public discussions in game are met with silences from the in game chat system. There is an over used internet law, that eventually everything will be associated with Facism. I don’t think this is Facism, I think this is just a sad attempt at hiding bad publicity. Trying to keep up the image of a pristine vessel with the hulls rotten and the rats are abandoning ship. Of course the issue isn’t just StormShade, he’s the messenger of powers that be, but in this case, I do believe the Messenger should be just as accountable as the one sending him.

I do encourage people to call (408) 399-1969 if they have had an encounter with StormShade like this and complaining directly to Cryptic. With luck, lots of luck, someone may have some decency and forward things properly.

Addendum: It has actually been brought to my attention, well I should say I have been reminded, that Stormshade himself has violated the rules himself. He’s been seen threatning people with bans instead of addressing their concerns. Not only is this a direct threat, which violates the rules, but also its discussing moderation as he is in fact discussing recent bans, which is also a violation. This may seem like nit-picking here, but the fact remains nobody is above ‘the law’ and a Mod team cannot expect to enforce rules if they themselves do not follow the rules. And these two instances themselves are worth more than 20 infraction points, which means they are more than enough to, if StormShade were a regular use, constitute a Perma Ban.

We’re going to point out all the little things, and big things, and just things of any size that we’ve been promised, or assured, were going to happen. That have been pushed back, continuously, or broken, or not at all what we were lead to believe. On top of this we’re also going to point out what we have been given. I’m not going to twist it to be a single point of view, but I’m going to provide you exactly the truth of the matter. This list is being amassed by going down some of the old Engineering reports btw, in case someone wishes to point out me handpicking subjects.

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1. Duty Officers – In the works for months, and the only shining jewel on tribble. That said it’s still not finished, I’d put it at a 90% completion. It’s not very well worded on if and when you will lose a duty officer. Duty Officers who shouldn’t die, are, missions simply vanish, rewards aren’t given. It’s not ready to be pushed live, but we’re going to get it whither it is or not. Thankfully Heretic happens to have a head on his shoulders and gets on things when they’re posted unlike most of the Dev team.

2. Crafting Updates: Crafting has seen very little love in the game, and now it’s seeing a gun put to its head in the form of a Dilithium Tax, on top of materials, to get anything of use for endgame. Given the time gated nature of Dilithium, the refinement cap, and bloated prices, Crafting has gone from a viable method of getting gear for end game events to another grind among many grinds being added to the game.

3. Starfleet Academy: Cryptic has seen fit to provide us with Starfleet Academy, complete with the ability to do nothing there! Sure on tribble you can do one event, and one daily, but the event doesn’t work half the time, people have been able to steal your particles during it (reportedly fixed), and sometimes regardless of getting the question right on the daily you still fail!

4. Klingon Academy: Targwarts is the same thing as Starfleet Academy, short of its event not being available yet, and given that its KDF and Cryptics history with that it’s not likely to be ready any time soon. Unless of course they make it a carbon copy of the Fed one.

5. Sector Space Revamp: That one Sector Block to Rule Them All thing is apparently still coming “Soon”™.

6. Deep Space Encounter revamps: Revamped in so far as they no longer chase you in sector space. They are otherwise the same arbitrary “Kill X amount of Y” missions they’ve always been.

7. Lag and Performance Issues: Still afflicting a good portion of the active player base, especially in social zones when loading maps. Random disconnects still happen in spades, and now some KDF characters can’t even log in simply because they gave cryptic more money and bought a ship that should have rightly been free. Many of these things have gotten no response or indication they’re being worked on, many others have gotten a canned response implicating the person experiencing the issue’s at fault.

8. The Foundry: The foundry, which many consider a piece of content, is a great feature when its not spending months broken. It’s also servery lacking. It hasn’t received any sort of update since season 3, missions are still being afflicted by bugs, vanishing, or just randomly being taken down. Many also like to point out that its a way for us as players to make our own content, but you are incapable of doing any sort of leveling via that content, and the rewards given for the daily regarding them are not enough to survive on. Add on the fact that there has not been a single update on when the Foundry would be receiving any sort of new, needed, features, it’s not a viable content generator, and is its not possible to make, and level, a character on user generated content alone. It’s also worth pointing out that User Generated Content cannot actually be counted as Content in the context of Content that Cryptic has Provided as Cryptic has not provided it.

9. PvP Content and Balancing: I would honestly suggest looking into the PvP forum. So much disregard for this section of the game. It’s just as, if not more, behind on updates and balancing than the KDF Faction, likely more so now in that the KDF are now at least getting C-store items. Every Major update, as few and far between as they are now a days, adds something that further imbalances PvP, and attempts to fix this results generally in more imbalances, while suggestions and feedback from the PvP community is generally ignored.

10. Bank issues: in addition to making additional slots available per character in the C-store, something everybody wanted per-account, issues like stacks of anomalies locking down and being unable to move them. This has issues going beyond the bank in that it keeps people from crafting using materials they’ve acquired forcing them to grind more, with a chance for the mats to be locked down along with the others.

11. Fan Designed Enterprise- Despite it being clear the model is done, this has not been provided to us. In fact it’s reveal in game has been redacted, as it’s been removed from the Mirror Event that it was initially in. On top of that it was never in the KDF version.

12. New Tutorial: More like, New starting map with everything else being exactly the same, including all actions and dialog on the very first map. Nothing new has been added aside from that.

13. Ship Varients: And how. All the ships that Logan has made have been beautiful. From the Venture to the Vor’Kang all these ships have been expertly designed. I may not agree with them having pay to win abilities, or the fact that the only ship customization the KDF is ever going to see is going to require them to spend money on top of their sub should they continue to get one during free to play but I can say Logan has doing a very good job on their design. Now, that said, there have been issues. The fact that the ships have not been tested properly, being put on Tribble requiring people to spend money to test them. Or not put up for testing at all and then going to holodeck and producing a show-stopper bug where the person who bought it can’t log in anymore.

14. STF Updates: Splitting the space and ground portions into individual missions was a great idea. Amping the Elite difficulty up to the point where nothing but Heavy and Elite Tac’s spawn, adding in new currencies on very low drop rates that are required to get end game gear to actually do the Elite STFs which are in turn required to get end game gear to do the Elite STFs easier is not. The STFs have been turned into just another grind, not something you get together to do with your fleet. The fun’s been removed from them, especially seeing as you need to do 100+ runs just to get the lowest set of gear.

15. Trivia and Lore missions for social zones- Only available in the Academy zones on Tribble and sometimes they don’t work, in so far as their answers not being correct, even if it matches the information on Cryptic’s on site.

16. Adding consensual open PVP melee areas to social maps- No word on this since September’s Engineering report, and even then it was just, “in Development”

17. Feature Episode Series 4 (near DS9): “In Development” since February of this year, not to be completed till February of next year. This is in lite of the fact that we’ve been told, many times, that it’d be available in the middle of the year… then September… then October… then soon™.

18. Improvements to DS9 areas: Newer, more appealing textures in the promenade area. OPs is much more IP accurate and Sisko’s office is now open. Sadly Quark’s is still a separate instance, not open to just be walked in like it was in the show.

19. Adding ability to warp to a friend and/or improving travel between sectors: The ability to warp to referal buddies has been in game since last year, however this feature is still not open to everyone. Improved travel to sectors is also lacking. KDF’s still are unable to use any transwarps aside to Qo’noS, Feds now have access to every single sector in the game.

20. Removing the restriction that you can only craft on Memory Alpha or Qo’noS: No word on this since September.

21. Borg Ground Invasion Event: Defera is under attack! Despite having a similar basis to Otha, only being Co-Op this isn’t a bad addition really. It’s very grindy, but it’s a new map, with new objectives. First true content to be added to the game since February. It is of course currently only on Tribble, the rewards are green quality and require you to grind multiple types of ‘borg parts’ that are a new type of Emblem/Mark. That said the missions are fun, and it’s nice to be able to work with KDF as a Fed and vice versa. If the Borg instead dropped EDC’s like the STF Borg did, providing more opportunities to acquire end game gear, and the rewarded gear for doing the missions was improved, and if the EC rewarded was Dilithium this would honestly be a solid addition to the game.

22. Combining Marks and Badges into a single scaled Emblem currency system: In addition to this, they have introduced a gated currency necessary to purchase most items needed to properly function at endgame. These items have, still, prices that are out of scale. The Marks and Emblems do not convert over in an even conversion. Missions that used to give 1 Emblem now give 480 Dilithium. 1 Emblem does not convert into 480 Dilithium. Also you generally receive only Dilithium Ore not Refined Dilithium, and you can only refine up to 8000 Dilithium per day. 8000 Dilithium is not enough to purchase a single end game item, and the likely hood of gaining 8000 Dilithium in a day is very low.

23. More shuttle and fighter specific mission types: Still waiting.

24. Additional Fleet Action restructuring and implementing Feedback on Fleet Action queue: Queues still miss-fire or lock up, leaving a map after succeeding one puts you back in the map. Many maps have bugged spawns that haven’t been addressed since they were first introduced. Namely the poll in Big Dig.

25. New Daily “Neighborhood” Events that take place near Sol and Qo’noS: No news on this since September.

26. New PVP Map with Feature Episode Series 4 (King of the Hill): Not until February at best, likely the month after if then.

27. STF: Into the Hive: Gozer has been busy producing the STF Updates, no real news on In to The Hive, though while testing Starfleet Academy DStahl was seen attacking players as the Borg Queen.

28. Considering 5-man versions of existing Fleet Actions: No news on this since September.

29. Updating character stances: On tribble, some good, some bad, some very bad.

30. New crafting quests and/or new mini-game side-quests: No news on this in a while. Considering the new Dilithium tax on Crafting I doubt we’ll see any quests for it. And we’ve been waiting for new mini-games, like Poker, and a High-Stakes Dabo since last year.

31. Assigning bridge officers as duty officer department heads: Part of the DOFF system currently, but it currently doesn’t seem to have any effect other than putting a portrait of your BOFF on the DOFF window when you go to select DOFFs for a mission that is under that department’s lead.

32. KDF Episode conversions (converting FED episodes to a KDF playable version): No updates on this what so ever in recent months.

33. Sol System planetary system missions: We don’t even have the planets yet let alone new missions. It’s rather hard to give us content without maps to put it in isn’t it? It would seem Cryptic’s very lacking in the map design department perhaps they should hire more people to produce the maps quicker. It took them 8 months to make the Defera maps it seems so they are in severe need.

34. Adding melee weaponsmiths to the game that sell specific ground weapons: The consensual PvP zone has been in Andoria for a long time, just never turned on. A new tent was added many months back but maintains now use. Rura-Penthe is still just an ice planet with nothing to do, and the challenge floor on Qo’noS is only good for watching two NPC’s beat the snot out of each other.

35. Repurposing some Feature Episode maps as new PVP maps: As it stands PvP is the only part of the game to have actively lost content in the form of Maps. No new maps have been added, which is a shame, shuttle PvP in the Vault would be great, especially if each large room contained areas that could be taken over.

36. More ships such as the Ambassador class and an Andorian ship: We’ve been waiting for these ships longer than we have been waiting for the new featured episodes. The Andorian ship was even listed at one point to be released earlier in the year but it was removed and no new word on it has been heard in months.

The list honestly goes on but this is the most recent Engineering Report minus a few things that were easily pulled into other parts of the list. Like various issues with the foundry being pulled into one thing, or miner things like Fleet Actions occasionally not giving rewards. I know people are going to try and counter me with other things. Please, do, but do so in a way that supports your stance. Point out things that counter what I’ve said, do so in words that aren’t insulting. Try not to insight fighting, stay on topic. There’s a lot of disgruntled people on the forums, many both pro and anti-cryptic right now. But we all in the end, well most of us, want the game to succeed, and we do that better by pointing out problems, and how they can be fixed, and pointing out good things, and how they can be improved.

I’m sure most of you recall the two episodes of Voyager, involving the Krenim time ship, and the utter horrible year that Voyager had to endure up until Janeway rammed the ship and thus via technobabble reverted the timeline.

Well we’re all experiencing our own year of hell, the Year of Fail. In Februrary of 2011 we were given the Romulan featured series. We were also promised new featured series roughly every other month after that, on top of regular content updates, the C-store items, and general updates and fixes.

But we haven’t gotten them.

We’ve gotten Zero Content that wasn’t a re-appropriation and slight tweeking of preexisting in-game content. Such as the “Remastered Episodes” and the Borg Invasion.

It’s going on 10 months of no featured episode, and we’ve been informed to not expect it till February (one whole year).

We sometimes go a month without a single patch or bug fix. In fact just recently we went an entire month and the only patch we got fixed pets trying to occupy the same space.

But we have been getting constant C-store items, most of which are either pay to win (ships) or do nothing (pets).

We’ve gone 10 months, and going on a year, with no content. Some of us have been paying 15 dollars a month for nothing. Come December first I will have payed cryptic $149.90 since Februrary. That’s not the full extent of my sub, but the extent of it in which I have had nothing to do. None of us have. We’ve played all the story missions. There’s no use in PvPing they break it every time an items released.

We’ve been dedicated, and paying customers, for nearly 12 months, and gotten nothing that hasn’t required us to pay additional money. Yet whats worse is the fact that they’re sitting on new content. They’ve made as much clear that they’ve got the content ready to be released they’re just holding on to it. I just can’t fathom how anybody at Cryptic thinks this is a good idea, though I know people like Logan probably think its a horrible decision, but he has no power to do anything. It just boggles my mind that they expect this of us while giving us nothing in return.

Title got your attention? Its not too far from the truth. Today, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system.
This bill can pass. If it does the Internet and free speech will never be the same.

But we can stop this bill, we can keep the internet free to all people as it should be. A medium for the advancement and free sharing of knowledge for the betterment of mankind as a whole.

Click the link at the top of my page to go to Americancensorship.org. Go to demandprogress.org, send emails to your representatives, send emails to your friends and family. Do not go quietly into the dark.

Make a ruckus.

I’m honestly more than a little jaded with STO. Am I the only one? I mean, i’ve booted the game up once in the past week and a half, and it was just to do a 1 hour long event with my guild. When friends ask me now if i wanna run a mission, I make excuses, because I can’t stand the game right now. Well to be more exact, I’m jaded with Cryptic.

I mean, what am I paying for? I’ve been playing the same missions for the past 8 months. All thats changed are a few cutscenes and some voices. The ‘new content’ that isn’t just a C-store item, is taking per-existing game assets, slapping them into an Space map, and giving you 15 minutes to kill them.

And the excuses? First it was Atari was causing the game to slow to a crawl. Then it was the sale. Then it was the transition to perfect word. And now its the transition to free to play. What’s next “Not enough money from C-store purchases to fund new content”. I’m tired of excuses, and I’m not the only one, sure, I know someone will be an apologist will come along and justify it between “why don’t you QQ more?” posts.

But hell it even goes beyond the lack of content, its the lack of respect for any of us players and our feedback. We’re being shafted in the conversion, we’re being shafted in our vet rewards, we’re being shafted in our STF rewards, we’re being shafted in our skill tree. “Subscriptions lose nothing” was a bold faced lie, but perhaps worst of all is what you call us.

The Vocal Minority.

Are we the Vocal Minority? No. We’re not, but even if we weren’t, you’re insulting us and lying to yourself. We’re your only source of feedback, and ignoring that resource is only going to damn you. You don’t hold a yes or no election for 100 people. 20 vote Yes. 5 vote No. 75 do not vote. You do not then go “Well 75 people didn’t vote yes!” just to justify going with the No direction.

Everything that has happened with Cryptic in the past 2 months has done nothing to convince me this game is going to survive to next year. And the desperate attempts at hiding negativity are just sad. You’re making bad decisions, you’re lying to paying customers, you’re withholding content and trying to force away your player base, even some of your biggest supporters have gone.

Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?