Incline Official codex Star Trek Online topic :salute:

[Matticus]

What do you know, it's this old game

 

[Drakron]

Some of that may just be perception, rather than actuality, but the effect is the same.

Perception is all that matters in the end.

STO major faults kinda ends up being on the "endless march of progress" as things get released, playerbase does it until they got what they wanted and Cryptic then somehow manages to break then, few people report the issue and they are ignored, either deliberately or by negligence so we get piles of older content that is somewhat bugged, the severity depends ... at one point one of the story missions could not be completed as the trigger to progress somehow failed and took months to fix that but to me the shinny example of the negligence and uncaring was the Duty Officer system.

At one point, dont recall exactly when,several assignments ceased to appear and despite being reported for months we had the Systems Lead saying he heard about rumors ... RUMORS ... about then not appearing and asked for people to tell him what assignments seem to have problems, it was not like there was WHOLE THREAD on the forums were people reported then, a few weeks later they got fixed.

This I will never forget.

Also we have the Tzenkethi Battlezone, it was bugged on launch and its still bugged now, ithat was content they released and abandoned on the same breath, like it was a checkbox that had to be ticked.

To new players I assume the experience of many missions having some noticeable non-breaking visual bugs kinda takes the wind of their sails, negligence also extends to smaller things like the B'rel that is still pretty much the launch model and for years we had a crappy Miranda model until it got remade apparently on one the developers spare time, they didnt even updated it for the console launch, also one the things that is sticking up like a sore thumb is that when you look at Klingions they either look exaggerated renditions or they look like the actor, this is kinda grating to me as a example of something that despite being ninor kinda makes me not wanting to play KDF based on the fact their mission contact looks so terrible.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

At one point, dont recall exactly when,several assignments ceased to appear and despite being reported for months we had the Systems Lead saying he heard about rumors ... RUMORS ... about then not appearing and asked for people to tell him what assignments seem to have problems, it was not like there was WHOLE THREAD on the forums were people reported then, a few weeks later they got fixed.

When I first started I was working my way through the KDF missions and got stuck on The House Always Wins, since the thing I was supposed to destroy never appeared. Some searching revealed this was a bug from at least 6 years ago, and you must do things in some specific order or it frequently fails to spawn the last transport, or the transport is there but you can't target it. Top quality work.

 

[eklektyk]

best irony in sto is that its heavily slanted on fed side with content but to get anything going you need kdf aligned pylons ...

oh i miss old doffing before nerfs ... admirality is waaaaaay more complicated mechanicly than it needed to be

 

[Blaine]

That (doff nerfs) relates directly to another problem that we experienced quite nakedly in Warframe. The developers noticed (and by "they noticed" I mean "they'd been stewing glumly about it for years") that ancient dragon bittervets had piles and piles and piles of every type of crafting resource lying around, and also that even fairly recent recruits were able to grind resources far more quickly than they had apparently anticipated when originally designing the game's F2P model. It's quite clear they'd always wanted to monetize the (massive ripoff) resource packs from the cash shop, or at least more so than they were able to do.

Therefore, they pursued various harebrained tactics. Firstly, they tried a number of times to nerf Vacuum, which is a mod for sentinels (companion creature) that slurps up drops from the ground in a radius. Without this, you have to walk pixel-fucking-perfectly over each and every drop, so you can see how drastically a Vacuum nerf would have reduced overall resource gain (and increased player tedium). They've had to back off from nerfing Vacuum every time because the player base simply will not put up with it, in part because Warframe evolved to be a much faster and more airborne game than the developers originally intended, so slugging around on the fucking ground for each and every drop like a God damned marmot is a load of bullshit.

They couldn't nerf Vacuum directly, so instead they introduced an entirely new currency alongside a new expansion, replacing an old system in the process, which requires players to walk directly over drops to collect. This didn't do much to force players to not have fun, but I suppose Digital Extremes exacted their emotional revenge on the mean ol' players who don't want to sluggishly collect every fucking drop off the ground.

Then they dropped a real nuke and remade the entire game map, "coincidentally" removing all of the good old XP and resource farming spots in the transition. They pitched the new map (which included genuinely fancy new graphics) as a massive boon and upgrade for players, but any bittervet who wasn't retarded could see that nothing was given, mechanically speaking. Except for the graphics, the new starmap was a loss.

Then DE turned their beady Jewish-Canadian rat peepers to the huge hoards of dragon treasure bittervets had collected over the years. The next time there was a new content update, they gated a featured weapon behind a clan project that required an absolutely absurd amount of resources for any decent-sized clan to complete, based on the size of aforementioned dragon hoards. Just to give you an idea, Lazing Dirk and I had been playing for two years, accumulating piles of this resource and using almost none of it, then suddenly our clan needed 20x more of it than he and I could have contributed if we contributed our entire stash.

That's when we left the game. See, if you try too hard to force your bittervets to buy that shiny new weapon from the cash shop, they might leave. Stick to making vanity items, dumbfucks. I personally spent hundreds of dollars on that shit in addition to grinding/buying and selling like a fiend and then buying yet more of it. I'll buy cool vanity scarves and armor and shit, but don't get too cute with the actual gameplay-affecting shit. The real news, though, is that making shit so obnoxious to grind that even bittervets can't do it easily makes it functionally impossible for new players to grind, so you're at threat of losing both bittervets and new players if you get too greedy.

As for all the technical issues Cryptic never fixes, yeah, I'm not surprised. If it can't be monetized, they aren't going to bother. DE was the same way with Warframe, and Warframe is one of the most successful F2P games on Steam/in existence, barring dotas and shit of course.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

It's okay man, just let it go; everything will be alright. The nightmare is over now.

 

[SerratedBiz]

near the end of second episode i remembered why i stopped playing sto awhile ago - as The only piece of software that i run on this pc sto client sometimes decides to terminate my sound card - not its drivers - whole shabang hardwired into system ... and only reset helps - trying to nudge it into consiousnes in any way doesnot work ... kinda shitty one

Have you tried loading up services.msc and restarting the Windows Audio service? It's happened to me before that all my sounds goes kaput and this always does the trick.

 

[eklektyk]

yeah - tried that one - it simply kills all sound related thingies and bans them from resurecting - weird thing and all that

first time ever in my pc time i had to spend time googling for ways to reenable sound processes and to no avail in the end - i guess in linux it might work but somehow on win7 something gets tangled in weird and/or unexpected way - i simply gave up on it

i guess its a craptic engine related fuckup so maybe they fix it in 3 years or smth - almost always happens in battle when multiple fx play on eachother/near exact same time

 

[Blaine]

Speaking of odd performance quirks, STO takes the prize for most lag-inducing game UI I've ever encountered.

Character creation is just laggy as fuck for me period, no matter what, but the more preview frames of faces and hairstyles are showing, the worse it is. In-game, the inventory pane drops frame rate by ~20 FPS and the status window likewise by ~20 FPS if it's displaying any models at all; I learned by Googling about this that even the quest tracker drops frames by ~20 FPS, and that disabling the UI entirely can provide yet more of a performance boost. This is all particularly noticeable for me because I use a 144Hz G-Sync monitor, and STO is one of the very few games that actually tax my beefcake rig enough to drop that many frames.

It seems tolerable enough, and at this late date I'm quite sure it'll never be fixed regardless, but quite obnoxious.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

A lot of lag problems I've noticed is when using the new shadows and lighting graphics option, it seems to be pretty poorly optimized. Turning it off should help a lot too.

 

[Matticus]

best irony in sto is that its heavily slanted on fed side with content but to get anything going you need kdf aligned pylons ...

oh i miss old doffing before nerfs ... admirality is waaaaaay more complicated mechanicly than it needed to be

I implemented the original doff system. Internally it was known as the Item Assignment System for the lack of a better name -- 'crafting' was already taken . That was 7 years ago.

 

[Blaine]

Codex threads best threads, we even have Professor Skinner right here for consultancy.

 

[Matticus]

Speaking of odd performance quirks, STO takes the prize for most lag-inducing game UI I've ever encountered.

The UI programmer assured us that he did everything he could think of to optimize the UIGen system.

 

[Norfleet]

So are you allowed to talk about why you were sacked yet? Or maybe about the mystery of the now-gutted 12-hour assignment slot?

 

[Matticus]

I wasn't sacked. Four years is a long time when the job entails working with memory leaks and corruption in oldschool C code with no smart pointers and loose static type checking. While I enjoy masochism, I can only endure it so long.

The original designer of the doff system left Cryptic after we finished the original implementation. And I'm not sure who worked on it since then. But I do know that the general design philosophy was that shorter assignments were supposed to be more rewarding per hour of mission time because it required more micromanagement, while longer assignments were less rewarding. I do know that early on there were some perceived issues with granularity and assignment length and reward balance that made it too efficient/convenient to do certain assignments over others. That might have been the 12 hour missions but I wouldn't be positive as it's been seven years and memory fades. I also had my mind on tons of other systems.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Great, now I can't stop picturing in my head that everyone on Cryptic's upper management tight wears latex masks and insists their underlings address them as "The Dom."

 

[Lazing Dirk]

A fiendish puzzle

 

[Blaine]

Matticus Yeah, well, the way it works now is that very short-duration doff assignments yield pitiful rewards and dominate the available missions (granted, I haven't been/looked even close to everywhere yet); the good ones, when you find them, tend to require higher-quality/highly specialized officers in order to avoid a 25-50% chance of failure, which comes as quite a sting after waiting an entire day only to find you've failed.

The ASS is much worse though, clogging up the possible assignments (limit of 3, with 2 visible and enqueued) with very short-duration missions that offer relatively mediocre rewards. Completing these just to move the queue along causes the ship(s) you assigned to require the same length of maintenance that they'd need after a long, rewarding mission. It's slimy and underhanded, but hey, this is a F2P game, so that's to be expected. Personally, I'm considering employing a strategy of intentionally failing these missions with single shuttles, just to access more of the highly desirable Tour of Duty assignments more often while I'm still new to the game.

 

[Matticus]

Great, now I can't stop picturing in my head that everyone on Cryptic's upper management tight wears latex masks and insists their underlings address them as "The Dom."

Tangentially related: There were two large props floating around the building that 'the shadow council' used to shame programmers that made significant mistakes: The dreaded Dunce Cap and Brown Cat. I received the Brown Cat on one occasion and I will never live it down.

It's slimy and underhanded, but hey, this is a F2P game, so that's to be expected.

And this is why I work on singleplayer games now :D

 

[Norfleet]

Personally, I'm considering employing a strategy of intentionally failing these missions with single shuttles, just to access more of the highly desirable Tour of Duty assignments more often while I'm still new to the game.

This is a real strategy people actually use, yes. Occasionally it bugs out and the mission succeeds anyway.

 

[Norfleet]

The UI programmer assured us that he did everything he could think of to optimize the UIGen system.

The clunkiest part of the UIGen system and why it's such a performance dog is that it recalculates everything every frame, instead of being driven more by events, so that the more UIcrap you have on you, the more calculations are performed...every frame. This pretty much prevents it from ever achieving high FPS because the more FPS you have, the more it thrashes. Especially when it's being recalculated faster than the game can possibly be generating new information to render.

 

[Blaine]

The clunkiest part of the UIGen system and why it's such a performance dog is that it recalculates everything every frame, instead of being driven more by events, so that the more UIcrap you have on you, the more calculations are performed...every frame. This pretty much prevents it from ever achieving high FPS because the more FPS you have, the more it thrashes. Especially when it's being recalculated faster than the game can possibly be generating new information to render.

I initially assumed the in-pane models must be responsible, but quickly realized that couldn't be the case, since plenty of other games display in-pane models and/or tons of UI elements with little to no slowdown.

In any case, clearly the overactive UI updates are all being done client-side. You'd think that Cryptic or someone would have found a way to throttle it by now, by brute force if necessary, but apparently not.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Starfleet must've purchased chairs for ogres by mistake

 

[Drakron]

The ASS is much worse though, clogging up the possible assignments (limit of 3, with 2 visible and enqueued) with very short-duration missions that offer relatively mediocre rewards. Completing these just to move the queue along causes the ship(s) you assigned to require the same length of maintenance that they'd need after a long, rewarding mission. It's slimy and underhanded, but hey, this is a F2P game, so that's to be expected. Personally, I'm considering employing a strategy of intentionally failing these missions with single shuttles, just to access more of the highly desirable Tour of Duty assignments more often while I'm still new to the game.

Thats why shuttle assignment is a thing, people use shuttle that have shorter maintenance duration to burn assignments with low wield instead of using pass tokens they might not have, I only started using pass token just because of the 50 limit so burning 10 of then isnt a issue as I will get more and can always go back to the shuttle burning. But it also highlights a problem with Cryptic that develops thing in relation to what the current playerbase have and not new players, when ASS come most players where from Pre-DR and had a larger number of ships so the system was reactive to those players and not newer ones that lacked event ships and ones they got from giveways.

 

[Blaine]

But it also highlights a problem with Cryptic that develops thing in relation to what the current playerbase have and not new players....

That describes virtually every F2P game that sells gameplay-affecting items in its cash shop.

It's inevitable, really. All online games ultimately have a finite life cycle, and I think it's safe to say that STO is past its peak. Player numbers are naturally declining as-is; at the same time, since it's a F2P game, veterans become less and less willing to spend money, while new players become less and less willing to start playing at all, because it means grinding for ages or forking over tons of cash to catch up in a system balanced around veterans. Meanwhile, the developers become more and more focused on getting fresh monetizable content out the door, and ignore longstanding bugs and issues with the game as a whole.