Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Cryptic needs to hire this guy to fix their games

What an awesome post. Right there on the Star Trek Online boards

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=59477

a poster outlines, describes and tells you how to break the gameplay of STO. This is a rather fascinating post and it still baffles me to this day how developers can let MMO's release with blatant issues like this:
Saw this in the closed beta, really seeing it in the open one and wanted to comment on it. STO currently rewards Antisocial play more than it rewards social play. How do I mean? Allow me to explain with examples I personally witnessed and then did to duplicate.

1. Fleet Actions - Re-gear your ship with all front power weapons and put your ship in attack mode. NEVER be first, the person first dies, always. Follow the pack around and the moment someone shoots at something open up. I did this and got 6 drops in a row, with more than 20 people shooting at things. I picked an entire group apart without ever being shot, while others were blown to pieces and got nothing for it. It's hilarious to watch people figure this out, they zoom towards a pack of enemies, then screech to a halt at 15, and mill about until someone's impatient or accidentally gets too close, then it's like blood in the water.

How to fix it? Give credit for dmg received as well as dmg done. Being grouped is moot, I was taking loot from groups of 5 people simply because I was free to focus fire by playing like a jerk.

2. "Secure" missions - In addition to the above, you can also level for free while alt-tabbed playing other games. Fly into a Deep Space contact, fly deep into a corner, far from the action, alt tab and surf your pr0n. Every 5 min, tab in and press space so you don't afk out. Every 15 min, tab in and call Sulu to turn in mission and get another. Congratulations, you're afk leveling in STO, just like people did in SWG, and faster than most because a mission completion every 15-20 minutes is a lot faster than many people can do. This is a big point, btw. Opening day is going to be a tidal wave of free exps.

Sit in Sirius deep space until regulus is available, lots of folks will go there, follow. There'll be roving packs of afk'rs just riding the wave, moving from sector to sector Secure missions because it's the easiest way to advance. You'll fly into Pi Canis Deep Space encounters, there'll be 50 folks there, and you're the only one actually shooting anything.

This is America, reward without work is our national pasttime. Give us a game that supports it and we'll play it from our easy chairs, watching TV and alt-tabbed going through pr0n.

How to fix it?
* If you aren't in combat, you don't get credit for the Secure.
* The mission doesn't complete until you leave the instance.
* You can only do the Secure missions 1/day.

3. General missions - You fly into a mission and are auto-grouped with people.

The mission objective is to hit glowies, but there are bad guys near them, and because you're grouped there are a LOT of them. Easily handled, let the other schmoes in the group agro, run up and snag the glowy, move on. Let them be pounded and die, I'll be moving on to the next mission. I did this last night with one of the patrols, hitting the strange objects. Some poor guy lit up 8 cruisers and was torn to pieces while I quietly zipped in, snagged the objective, and left.

The mission objective is to defeat packs of enemies. I wonder what's on TV? I'll sit at the door until it's done, then warp out when it's done. I bet I can get a few games of Gemz in!

8 comments:

  1. "it still baffles me to this day how developers can let MMO’s release with blatant issues like this"

    It's a beta. It hasn't been released yet.

    Exposing problems like this is the reason for having alpha/beta tests. It's still an interesting post, hopefully these issues make it on their list of things to fix before release.

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  2. Oh I knew someone was going to nitpick that. But honestly do you think that after two years of in house work and people testing it they should not have caught this before this close to release? This is a basic gameplay mechanic involving their grouping system. It's what one month until release? Lets hope for a huge patch release day like most MMO's do.

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  3. Ah, give the guy a break...the whole Open Beta thing is the best excuse in the world.

    You know it will get fixed, just like Age of Conan did...or how about Warhammer Online...that works great...better yet, look at Tabula Rasa or Hellgate as great games that follow the "It's still Open Beta" excuse quite well...


    /snicker

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  4. [...] – Angry Gamer put this post up about how easy it is to exploit others in STO right now.  [...]

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  5. I can actually believe that they did not catch it themselves when testing internally - sometimes developers (not just Cryptic) seem to be really surprised at fairly obvious player behaviour.

    But yes, they would have seen it when people played in closed beta, no excuse for not noticing.

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  6. I love the "This is Beta!" answers.
    But this is no Beta its like a Demo, its not used for testing its used for hyping the game.
    Nothing will change until release, i dont know any game that really changed anything from OB to release.

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  7. Well Cryptic did release a massive NERF patch on the day of release of Champions (because everyone was apparently leveling too fast). Lets just say , hasty patching does not go down well, and the first day patch of Champions upset ALOT of people, especially since it only increased the grind without adding any content..

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  8. I've seen it myself in the Secure missions. On a bad one, only about a third of you are actually fighting. the rest are just sitting at the spawn point.

    I can't understand why people would bother to do this for a beta. They're going to get wiped in a few weeks anyway.

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