CAPTAIN'S BLOG

Hmmmm. Where to start on the whole forum fiasco.

I'm with you on this Attilio, The fact that it was done without warning is the BIGGEST issue for me. It scares me a little that an IT project that will have such an impact is just done carte blanche. That speaks volumes as to how they consider the userbase and how things may progress in future.

I can live with the forums as is but why take a backwards step by losing functionality? I understand that its an inevitable consequence of PWE now owning Cryptic, just as C-Points will soon become Zen, it streamlines things for PWE. However to implement it in this way just beggars belief.

Its not very often that I posted on the STO forums, and never negatively, but this cock up made me post.

What price customer service now?

This whole thing actually stopped me going lifetime. I was seriously considering it but I think I'll just stay "gold" for now and watch what happens over the coming months.

*Spleen vent mode completed* :)

Well.... Ok. Here is how I see this. 1st The forum thing. The thing is its done... and no matter what we say, or how much we wish they would have done this or that... nothing is gonna change the fact they stream linned there site to fit there model. They didnt ask us, because they didnt have to... wether we like it or not they dont need our permission. Yeah it sucks we lost this or that.So all the harping in the world changes nothing. I am not saying I agree with it mind you. Just what good does your blog about it do?

Now what I would have love to have seen was more on the tribble test server's star bases.. I know I can go there and find out myself, but I really dont feel like leveling a new toon, when none of my friends play to experience that content. So I come here to hear about your experience's on Tribble.

We at StarFleetElieForce have a hard time swallowing this change to forums and accounts. First off, all the communication never included," We are changing the Forums and accounts prior to S6". Furthermore, no warning on having to buy "Zen" once the accounts are linked. We know that this was inevitable but to call it "Website Maintenance" and be down for 12 hours is a shister way of doing things. Where is the "Honest" communication form Cryptic.

So trial SB's are here. We went at it hard for 3 days now, noting the bugs and oveersights. No where to post them because they have not created an "Oficial" Feed Back Thread. Having to click data traces singularly 115 times to contribute them is a major oversight. The decor unlocks mentioned in the Dev Post Tribble Update are lame at best too. No where is our Fleet Logo available, either in a banner or a floor panel. No personalization just plain poor.
And where the PR Rep Bran Flakes in all this? MIA .... another silence treatment coming? just our two cents :)

I was quite surprised by the forum change. While I prefer the old forums, I can live with the new.
I don't like that they would make a change of such scale without letting us know.
What else are they going to do without letting use know?

Don't they care that we would be inconvenienced? Why wouldn't they think what opinions about their company this would create?

In a similar vein, they responded to a ticket I submitted, and posted about how C-points wouldn't be going away, and then the next day posted that C-points would be converted into Zen.
It troubles me how much the right hand doesn't seem to know what the left hand is doing. And the 'head' doesn't seem to care.

I've always worked to have a positive look at things, and while I'm not going anywhere and am looking forward to season 6, I'm certainly troubled by the recent changes.

Personally I like the new forums because it eliminated a huge mess of spam signatures, vulgar avatars, and other offensive tripe that players were using to clog up an honest discussion table with junk and idiocy. Maybe half the threads I read now will have some level of attraction and decency.

As for the account linking, I fail to see what the problem is. Way back when Cryptic made it possible for Perfect World accounts to access the game they said they were going to eventually combine everything into one account. It should only have come as a surprise to those who weren't paying attention. It wasn't done without warning, it wasn't a sudden change without our permission. It's been a long time coming.

The problem with account linking is not that it is happening, it's that the process ahs been so poorly planned and executed. As soon as PWE bought Cryptic, it was obvious that sooner or later they would link the Cryptic games to their own, just as Cryptic linked their own games to each other. Converting C-Points to Zen is a logical extension of that concept. Nothing I've seen so far indicates that that we will lose anything in the exchange. Nominal prices at the game store will go up, but the real money cost of buylin things will stay the same.

That said, too many people have had way too many problems with the actual peocess of linking. I can't speak to what the scope of those problems are because when, against my better judgment, I decided to go ahead and link before it becomes mandatory, I ended up wasting two and a half hours accomplishing nothing. The instructions for how to link are very incomplete, confusing, contradictory and useless. Tech support was nonexistent. My Gold Cryptic character couldn't link to PWE's support site because he wasn't a PWE character. My PWE Silver character couldn't link th PWE's support site because he was Silver. When I went to Cryptic's support site. I got some attempted assistance, but when I wrote back to say that I was still having problems, I got a message saying, "Your comments have been forwarded to the appropriate personnel." When I pulled up my GM ticket, I found that it had been closed with a comment that the problem was "resolved." I don't blame Cryptic's Tech Support team. They didn't create the problem and, since it was occurring on PWE's site, Cryptic probably had no ability to do anything to fix it, other than to give sympathy and advice, which they did.

Now, I'm having another problem with PWE. I've been trying to transfer a PWE character to Tribble to help with the STOA Starbase project. At first, I got a message that the transfer failed and telling me to come back later. I did go back and was told the transfer had gone through but might take up to two hours to go into effect. This morning, over fourteen hours after I requester the transfer, the character had still not transferred. When I tried to do the transfer again, I got the original message that the transfer could not be completed at this time and to try again later.

Bottom line, I think it is a cultural problem. The Chinese model is "Line up, do what you're told and don't ask questions or we'll bring out the tanks again." The Western model is to tell people, "This is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it and if you have problems, we're here to help you solve them." Not everything PWE has done has been bad, but they seem to have absolutely no understanding of the kind of people who have chosen to play STO. As a result, they treat us like cattle to be herded wherever they want us to go. Let's just hope that they're leading us to the dairy farm, not the slaughterhouse.

I am concerned with the life of STO. Being a lifetime member, I'm worried that my "investment" may be lost forever. I hope I'm wrong and everything works out. But until then ...