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Post by Lantesh on Mar 17, 2015 16:08:12 GMT -5
So by now you've probably heard about the layoffs in PWE and Cryptic. It's been described as a "slaughter" by one of the former PWE employees. Cryptic alone looks to have lost 18 people to the corporate axe. Neverwinter lost the most, followed by STO. We lost one of our content devs and our community manager STO side. I'm putting this up in CO General since the fate of CO is mentioned directly in the article. massivelyop.net/2015/03/17/cryptic-layoffs-alone-totaled-18-people/So there it is. Champs is basically just going to be left alone in maintenance mode. I'm pretty sure we've all known that fact, but this round of layoffs is pretty much confirming it. At least it isn't being shut down. Best of luck to those who lost their jobs, this truly sucks.
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Post by not1stepbackwards on Mar 17, 2015 23:03:00 GMT -5
Thanks for sharing this. Great find, very relevant. I hadn't heard about it 'til now. A few quick remarks:
1. A Silver Lining, CO unaffected because "it doesn't take much to keep it afloat." Hooray for maintenance mode!
2. Layoffs happen. If anything, it's really been popularised by U.S. business practices, often as short-term fixes.
3. Layoffs don't reflect bad performance by the laid-off. NW's Xbone migration and STO's 7 of 9 expansion were impressive.
4. Layoffs do reflect short-term planning by the management. Finding good people is costly, directly and indirectly, in the long-term.
5. This may relate to the costume set price hike. The Cryptic North team of CO had to show their mgmt they were business-minded.
(Disclaimer - My previous point does not mean I endorse the price hikes, only that I acknowledge it happened, and it probably caused a sales spike right before the layoffs were made. This gave Cryptic North AND CO some political cover. I still feel it's a short-term fix that may hurt business in the future, but they needed to play this card -before- not after the layoff plans.)
Well wishes to those who left. The downside is, in all likelihood they did their jobs professionally and well, but PW Corp just demanded sacrifices to be made from everyone; it's not fair. The upside is, I think other companies that may hire them in the future recognise this, that it's not their fault, that they are achievers and only lost their jobs to meddling; they leave on a high-note and can find better developers to work for with their successes under their belt.
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Post by Lantesh on Mar 18, 2015 8:18:02 GMT -5
Yeah, CO being left up and running is definitely the silver lining here. I'm bummed out that we lost our CM for STO. He wasn't very good at what he did, but at least we had a CM. Anyway, for a bit more insight on the situation as a whole, one of the better posters STO side left a few gems, as he normally does. He made this post almost a year ago: sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18290541&postcount=1And then this post yesterday when the news broke: sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=22857521&postcount=83Dude was right. He usually is though. He's one of the very few posters on the STO forums that I give weight to his words. I'm posting them up here since it's an interesting glimpse at a bigger picture.
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Post by XStorm on Mar 22, 2015 14:37:24 GMT -5
Is it as bad population-wise over there on STO? In CO there's hardly ANYONE, anywhere; the whole game is like a ghost town most of the time.
XS
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Post by Lantesh on Mar 22, 2015 15:38:18 GMT -5
Nah, STO population is solid. We did have a fair number leave because the latest expansion changed a bunch of things that many did not like, but for the most part it seems fine. They have been going hard at trying to get people to log in lately and they have some event coming up to try to get people to make alts, so maybe at the least log in numbers are down. I don't feel that STO has a major population crisis like CO does though.
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Post by XStorm on Mar 22, 2015 19:56:29 GMT -5
What types of things did they change? Was it just stuff they threw in there, despite people saying they hated it?
XS
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Post by Lantesh on Mar 22, 2015 21:57:20 GMT -5
There was a whole lot, so I'll just give a quick rundown of the major points that made people the angriest.
First was exp gain changes. Normally, you could level from 1-50 just by doing story missions. When they raised the level cap to 60, they decided that wasn't happening anymore. So now you have to grind between story missions to level up going from 50-60. They left 1-50 the same though.
The second was Specialization Points. Basically, after you hit the level cap you can keep gaining exp that turns into spec points. 1 spec point needs a full levels worth of exp. You can put these points into a sort of specialized skill tree. There's a whole lot of them and they keep adding in new spec trees. Sounds good, but since replaying story missions give you junk exp you need to hardcore grind if you want them. After hearing complaints about the exp gain, instead of reducing it they actually increased it lol. These points being character bound leads to...
Alt unfriendliness. Because you have to grind out those spec points individually for each character, many players decided to abandon their alts. I myself went from 7 alts to having to focus on my 1 main just to keep up. And I'm still very much behind. I ended up leaving those alts as just bank characters. One individual that I know of deleted 40 alts simply because it's completely unfeasible to manage that many now. Another main source of alt unfriendliness is because of...
Crafting changes. The previous level cap of 50 had MK. XII gear as the highest you could get. It used to be fairly simple as I had all 7 of my alts in MK. XII gear. At 60 they added in MK XIV. You can upgrade your existing gear to that level, but it's expensive. In fact, I still don't have a single one of my ships in all MK. XIV gear. I just don't have the will or the funds to do it. The funds being dilithium (STO questionite). This too has to be done on a per character basis since much of the high end sets are bound to character. So specs and upgrades basically killed alting for a large amount of people, myself included.
Next, they added a new tier of ships. The old max tier was T5. We now have T6 ships with super OP stuff. People were sore because they spent literally years building up these T5 ships only to have them suddenly not be the top anymore. They let us sort of half upgrade our ships to T5U (Tier 5 Upgrade). These new ships also come with the ability to use new bridge officer specialization abilities that can only be used on these T6 ships. On top of that, these new ships aren't cheap. 3,000 Zen for one ship and 5,000 for the packs. The playerbase has more or less come to terms with this one, but it's worth a mention since it's a part of the whole picture.
This next one wasn't so much a change, but rather a a bit of a scandal. Short version: Because of the hardcore grind needed now, people were getting into groups and hardcore grinding certain patrol missions that gave out tons of exp. The Executive Producer came out of nowhere, called everyone exploiters, and took away our spec points. Problem was that they took away the spec points from people who weren't hardcore grinding. Oops. Much rage later, the Executive Producer gave a half-hearted apology and gave people back their spec points but still maintained that people were exploiting. Damage was done by then.
And finally, the "Delta Rising is the BEST expansion EVER and the players LOVE it!" mess. Basically everyone was still pissed at the Delta Rising expansion. This was like a week or so after all this came down. The lead designer, Al Rivera, went on a podcast and repeated that line like 10 times. Obviously, we players didn't take that too well. It started a truly massive and coordinated campaign from the forum posters taking that line and making forum sigs using that line sarcastically. Threads got deleted. People got banned. It got so bad that one dev asked for us to take them down because it hurt their feelings lol.
All of this put together and you can see where people just walked away from the game. STO went from a nice, casual Trek themed game to a hardcore, expensive grinder. I myself walked away for around 2 months. I came back once I heard that the Executive Producer that called everyone exploiters had left and that a new guy had come in. So I have some small hope he can turn things around. We'll see though.
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Post by XStorm on Mar 22, 2015 22:26:33 GMT -5
Sounds like CO, the justice stuff is one HELL of a grind, just to get one character equipped.(it's almost becoming impossible now, because there aren't enough people left that know what they're doing to complete Fire and Ice.) Price increases on stuff really drove a lot of newbs off. And they've taken away almost all ways to earn Q IG(they want you to open boxes for q crates to earn your q). Almost removed most of the ways to get resources without one hell of a build, and grind.(they want you to buy rerolls from the z shop at 5x inflated/worth pricing.)
XS
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Post by Lantesh on Mar 23, 2015 7:02:48 GMT -5
That sucks. I still think about playing CO from time to time, but I'm not sure it's worth it at this point. Especially since I don't have a freeform.
Oh yeah, I forgot one of the other major points. Difficulty changes.
The STO devs decided that things were too easy. So they made things harder. But not by making enemy AI better or giving them interesting abilities. Nope, they just beefed up the HP and damage that enemies do. Then they added failure conditions to all the PVE queues. They outright told us that they expected a certain percentage of failures and didn't want everyone winning all the time. That one hasn't gone over very well at all lol.
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Post by not1stepbackwards on Mar 23, 2015 8:33:15 GMT -5
Thanks for sharing the behind-closed-doors look. I had no idea, even though I was just next door in CO. My experiences were exactly as you described, to a T. People were talking about the expansion, that it had 7 of 9, so I played it in earnest this time, just did missions to around level 50, then lost interest. I think I'm literally at level 51 as at that point I thought it got really boring because things became grindy. The Executive Producer came out of nowhere, called everyone exploiters, and took away our spec points. Problem was that they took away the spec points from people who weren't hardcore grinding. Oops. Much rage later, the Executive Producer gave a half-hearted apology and gave people back their spec points but still maintained that people were exploiting. Damage was done by then. Was this the other guy that left from STO? If so, then it wasn't really a layoff, it was a good opportunity to get rid of him, making use of the situation. All of this put together and you can see where people just walked away from the game. STO went from a nice, casual Trek themed game to a hardcore, expensive grinder. I myself walked away for around 2 months. I came back once I heard that the Executive Producer that called everyone exploiters had left and that a new guy had come in. So I have some small hope he can turn things around. We'll see though. Great summary. I was about to drop like $10 on the game, like I did on CO initially, by a ship or something. However, I got the impression of what you described, all the Tiers and stuff was in flux, what's good today might be obsolete tomorrow, so I was just going to wait. It turns out there was a reason for that impression. The fact that STO is a licensee probably affected some of what they did, why they were so desperate to get the word out that "fans love it", etc. Based on what you described, it sounds like they were under duress to say that, like someone told them, "Go out there, make a webcast or something, and tell people how much players love it!" --- On the broader issue, of game company layoffs at this time, that's not too surprising. You cited the posts mentioning layoffs at other companies, the lack of fancy dinners in the Valley (I used to work in San Jose, as I recall the best food was cheap Mexican stuff tbh), all great points that I agree with. The telltale signs came earlier and you, as a gamer, would have noticed them. Here's 1 I'd cite. It was a little over a year ago, when Irrational Games suddenly shut down. This was the studio being Freedom Force (which you probably played) and Bioshock Infinite, which was awarded many Game of the Year awards and looked like there were more DLC, etc. Ken Levine, who is probably a bit overrated but a great producer, said he's more interested in mobile games or something. Considering this guy was at the height of his popularity, the top of his game, saying that was a real shock to the system. To be clear, not saying Ken Levine changed things, but that even he sensed the shift and was responding to it. Whatever was happening has clearly reached Cryptic and STO, etc. CO didn't get layoffs, but they're probably tightening their belts in other ways. It's not just Irrational Games or Ken Levine, or even the lack of excitement over this generation of consoles (2 years later, I still don't notice the same excitement with the previous gens). We can all cite our own examples, but it does seem there's a greater shake-up, doesn't it?
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Post by Lantesh on Mar 23, 2015 10:43:48 GMT -5
Nah, the EP that called us exploiters left before the layoffs happened. Can't say for absolute sure why he left, but we mostly suspect it's because he just didn't care about the game. He wasn't even the full time EP. He's also Cryptic's Chief Technical Officer. We think he spent more time doing that than anything on STO. He only spoke to the community a grand total of 3 times. First time was to introduce himself. Second time was to accuse us of all being exploiters. Third and final time was to kind-of-but-not-really apologize. And then he left. Dude was terrible. He's still at Cryptic back to being their full time CTO though. He just isn't involved with STO anymore. On the "players love it" thing, I can see where it might come across as being under duress for those who aren't familiar with Al Rivera. You see, Al has a long history of doing things like this. He's pretty much a metrics man. He insulates himself from any and all player feedback and works only on the metrics. Because of this, he's completely and totally disconnected from the playerbase. He's shown contempt for the players on more than one occasion too. He's straight up said that he thinks all pvpers are 14 year old elitist crybabies. He also has a habit of ramming things that he likes into the game without any regard as to how it affects the game as a whole. Two main examples come to mind. First is the Excelsior class ship. It's an old ship and has no business being a top end ship (or it used to be before T6 came out), much less more powerful than a Galaxy class cruiser. But Al likes the Excelsior and hates the Galaxy so that's exactly what happened. He also decided he likes dinosaurs with lasers on their heads and so we got a whole season dedicated to that. Basically, Al does what Al wants and then sticks his fingers in his ears while he insults you. So it isn't duress, just Al being Al. STO players are used to his crap by now. When the news of the layoffs came down, one of the first responses that some players has was "OMG please tell me Al got the axe!" So you can see just how much love the players have for this guy. He didn't get laid off by the way, we still have him. I can totally see where it would look like duress from the top though. So your thought on that wasn't unreasonable. I actually wish it was duress from the top instead of us just being stuck with a terrible and temperamental lead designer. --- Back to the general game layoffs, I just stumbled upon this one. www.gamasutra.com/view/news/239298/Report_Kojima_on_the_outs_with_Konami_amid_corporate_reshuffle.phpThat one in particular strikes me since it's Kojima. And Kojima isn't small time in any possible way. He's Mr. Metal Gear himself. So if a big shot like that is having to deal with stuff like this...yeah it has to be an industry wide issue. And it's not something tiny either.
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Post by XStorm on Mar 23, 2015 12:30:22 GMT -5
Yeah, definitely don't bother with CO if you don't have an FF, you did just miss a half off sale though. If you can manage 1 ff, and get the resource unlock; it might be worth it, but ATs are almost unplayable garbage, so if you're stuck with them, don't bother.
XS
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Post by Lantesh on Mar 23, 2015 15:36:35 GMT -5
In all honesty, I don't think that CO is worth spending money on now for me. I saw the sale up but passed on it. Maybe if I had a LTS or something from like 4 years ago I might have still fooled around with it from time to time. But taking the fact that it's basically in permanent maintenance mode now? Eh, I just can't justify it.
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Post by plinske on Mar 25, 2015 7:29:43 GMT -5
So there it is. Champs is basically just going to be left alone in maintenance mode. I'm pretty sure we've all known that fact, but this round of layoffs is pretty much confirming it. At least it isn't being shut down. I had mixed feelings about it, maybe miss the time when my SG had so many events occurring at the same time that I had to choose which one to pick, but at the same time relief to not to be hit hard and confirmed what everyone else know: CO is in maintenance mode. and it probably caused a sales spike right before the layoffs were made. This gave Cryptic North AND CO some political cover. I still feel it's a short-term fix that may hurt business in the future That is exactly my thinking. Which leads us to: Price increases on stuff really drove a lot of newbs off. Not only newbs, I for one not realized a trade for more than two months. I gave up placing items in the Action House because very fews things sells nowadays, my last batch that included 4 Gravitar Costumes pieces for a handful of N and 12 purple secondaries for 1-2 G (price lower than the value) returned with out a single sale. It is easier vendor it or delete.
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Post by XStorm on Mar 26, 2015 2:58:22 GMT -5
Unless it's legacy devices/lockbox stuff, it's not gonna sell; the exception to this would be the rare core mods(depleted, and hi pan eyes). Just about everything else is completely worthless at this point. Just NPC everything else.
XS
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