Interest and Incentive

After the Cloaked Intentions Featured Episodes finished most of my interest in playing STO faded. I did manage to log in enough to finish the FE on both alts, but felt like more of a chore to do than a joy. At least to login and get started, I always have fun once I’m actually playing. It just seems to take a lot to overcome the gravitational force that the Rift icon exerts on my mouse pointer.

Saturday though, I had no problems playing for a couple of hours. I logged in to do the shuttle daily as I work towards crafting my very own Delta Flier (daily has to be done ten times and each time requires twelve anomalies scanned). But after I’d finished, I ended up running quite a few other missions and taking a tour of Longasc’s TOS ship interior.

A quick side note: Cryptic did an amazing job with the TOS interior. I’m not much of a TOS fan really, I used to watch the occasional rerun growing up but it wasn’t until TNG that I became a fan.

So where did this resurgent interest in playing STO come from? I bought the Enterprise Owners Manual on Friday from a Borders that’s going out of business. Reading it peaked my Trek interest and motivated me to play. The same thing happens after watching one of the movies or TV episodes or reading the novels. I guess that’s one of the benefits of using an existing IP. Just imagine if there was a new TV series. Even if it wasn’t tied directly to the game, I can imagine a lot of fans logging in to play after watching episodes just because they want to stay in the Trek universe longer.

It’s old news now, but in the latest Engineering Report, Dan Stahl stated the teams intent to change their schedule and possibly staff up more in order to do nine or ten Featured Episodes a year instead of five like they previously planned. I’d say that’s ah excellent indicator of how popular the FE’s are and how much interest in the game they generate. Hopefully the STO team is given the resources to make it so.

Foundry!!!!!!!!!

Today’s is supposed to be the big day! Foundry day! According to Dan Stahl, the Foundry has been on Holodeck (the live server) in internal testing for a few days. I’ve been keeping an eye in the Dev Tracker over the weekend and this morning but no mention of when it’s supposed to be activated. Of course Cryptic is a few timezones behind me, so their Monday hasn’t really started yet.

I haven’t said much about the Foundry, but I am looking forward to making some missions. I played with the Foundry a bit on Tribble a few months ago, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time there only to have to recreate missions on Holodeck. I’m also excited to see some of the great content that people have been producing on Tribble get remade on Holodeck and played by a wider audience.

Update: I heard on Twitter from @StarbaseUGC that the Foundry goes live at 10 AM PDT (which is GMT-7).

Update 2: As of 1:18 EDT (GMT-4) Foundry is live! Hopefully it’s a smooth and easy day for the STO servers. Dan Stahl has posted an FAQ.

DAW: Notch and Mojang

I wanted to wrap up my Developer Appreciation Week posts by sending a heart felt thanks to Markus “Notch” Persson and the rest of the team at Mojang: Daniel Frisk, Daniel Kaplan, Jakob Porser, Jens Bergensten, Junkboy, Carl Manneh, and Tobias Mollstam.

Notch started out developing Minecraft as a one-man shop. Like most developers he was not too concerned about the business aspects of things and very open about his sales and what he was working on. When Minecraft’s popularity exploded, he didn’t change that. He started a company and hired a small staff to help. This is the point where Notch could easily have pulled back from the community but hasn’t.

The entire Mojang team is on Twitter, check out Daniel Kaplan’s Mojang list to see the public company discussions. Notch still keeps up on his blog, although he did have to turn off comments (no loss there given some of the commenters that I read), and the stats page is still ticking off registered users and sales. He’s shown up on Reddit a few times, and is active with the Minecraft player community on Twitter. Just last week, I highlighted some posts from Jens about wolves, and several recent features like beds and cake have come about from interactions with the player community.

As much as I enjoy playing Minecraft, seeing how Markus has handled his success has been nearly as interesting. Go watch the twenty minute short documentary if you want to see what I mean.

Thanks Notch!

DAW: The Star Trek Online Team

Today’s appreciation goes out to the entire Star Trek Online team at Cryptic Studios.

Of all of the MMOs I’ve played, past and present, I can’t think of any that hold a candle to Daniel Stahl’s team when it comes to communication and engagement with the community and transparency into the development process. The amount of engagement by the designers and developers has truly been impressive, and has been a major part of the growing success of the game.

Every month there’s an Ask Cryptic post answering community questions. There’s the Executive Producer’s Engineering Report where we get a detailed look at what issues are in testing, what’s being investigated, what’s in development, and what’s in the design stages. There’s a deployment calendar showing launch windows for new content and features.

Beyond the regular structured feedback, there are a dozen posts nearly every weekday from the team. Some of that is from the Community Management team, but there’s a lot more activity from the designers and developers than I’ve seen for any other game I’ve played. There are usually daily posts from Stahl, Gozer, Heretic, Zeronius Rex, Mapolis, and Captain Logan, not to mention the community wranglers Wishstone and Stormshade.

Even outside of the company’s own communication channels, the STO team has been very generous with their time doing interviews with many of the podcasts dedicated to the game.

So, I huge thank you’s to the entire team for all of the work they’ve into the game and for all of the time and energy they’ve invested with the player community. I for one am very very grateful.

DAW: Trion

Thanks Trion!

I want to kick of Developer Appreciation Week by thanking all of the programmers, artists, and designers at Trion that worked their butts off for the last few years to bring us Rift. Thanks to all of you for showing gamers what happens when a developer get’s enough time and money to do things right. I hope you’re all enjoying some time off, kicking back with a beer or three, and recharging those mental batteries.

 

Author’s Note: So…. communication… um yeah.  I should, may, probably will get back to my theme tomorrow, but it ain’t happening tonight. See I thought I had an idea that I wanted to use regarding Trion and Rift, but as I sat down tonight and started working I realized that what I actually wanted to say wasn’t what I thought I was going to say yesterday. I got a little frustrated and thought about skipping it altogether, but that’s stupid and goes a bit against the spirit of what this week’s about. Instead, I decided to just go with it.

DAW Theme is Communication

Before I start with my Developer Appreciation Week posts tomorrow, I wanted to mention this year’s theme: communication.

In my opinion, it’s one of the things that makes a good game great, and it’s not something that a lot of developers excel at. So I think it’s important to highlight some developers (I have three in mind) that have impressed me with their ability to communicate and respond to players.

For more on DAW check out Scary’s site.

Rift Weekend

It was a productive weekend for me, at least in Rift. Kae reached level 40 and splurged on a new mount, the Nimble Silver Eldritch Steed, which gives a nice 90% increase to movement. It looks like a very uncomfortable to ride though and sounds a little clanky too.

I also finally got around to trying out some alternate roles. My main build so far has been a Stormcaller/Dominator/Elementalist with nearly all of the points in Stormcaller. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’ve been feeling like I’m missing out on a part of the game by not trying out some other roles.

Since I’ve mostly been soloing lately, I decided to start easy and try out an alternate soloing build, so I focused most of my points on Elementalist. I added Dominator to that with just a few points to buff up Transmogrify (I love being able to turn mobs into squirrels) and Pyromancer with zero points. Once I had my action bars set, I headed out and proceeded to get killed multiple times.

At first I was thinking that maybe Elementalist was just gimped, then I noticed that the Greater Earth Elemental I summoned was lower level than the Lesser Earth Elemental that I normally use in my Stormcaller build. Doh! So… I went back to Meridian and trained up the new skills I’d acquired.

The second attempt to try out my Elementalist build worked much better, go figure, and I used it for a couple hours of leveling before I switched back to my original build. Even though it worked well and was a little more survivable than my usual build, I don’t think I’ll keep it. It just wasn’t as much fun for me to play that way.

Fortunately, I just have to spend a little gold and I can reset that role and try something else. I’m generally not a fan of the Necromancer class, but I was thinking of looking into the Warlock soul. I’ve heard it combines well with Chrolomancer for a healing build, which is something I really need to look into for running dungeons and Warfronts.

Interested After All

It isn’t as if I’ve been ignoring LotRO-related news, I still read the same blogs and listen to the same podcasts, but somehow I had very little interest in the coming Update, Echoes of the Dead, until I read the patch notes. I think it’s because I kept hearing about talk of the new instances and raid cluster which I didn’t care about and nothing about the Book 3 update. Guess I missed that Dev diary.

I wonder if Brynulf is locked out of his house in Bree…

Wolves

One of the things coming some time soon™ to Minecraft is pets, specifically (or at least) wolves. One of the Mojang programmers, Jens, is working on them now and had a few things to say on Twitter:

I’m pretty happy about the wolf now, both looks and AI =) But I think I need a separate texture for aggro-wolves, link

Wolf progress (yes it knows “SIT!”), link

And possibly the coolest Tweet of the group:

A pack of wolves battled a creeper. The resulting explosion killed four of them… Will PETA be a problem here? link