Considering spending money again (but)
Thurthorad
✭✭✭✭✭
in The Bridge
Hi all,
It's been a little while but I am considering buying next months campaign as it is the first thing in a while that looks like it will improve my crew (I don't have Pah Wraith Keiko).
I haven't being paying any attention lately so I am wondering if there has been any news or announcements about future developments that gives the community hope that the game isn't on it's way out? I don't want to spend the money and for the game to close it's doors in a couple of months.
Thanks,
It's been a little while but I am considering buying next months campaign as it is the first thing in a while that looks like it will improve my crew (I don't have Pah Wraith Keiko).
I haven't being paying any attention lately so I am wondering if there has been any news or announcements about future developments that gives the community hope that the game isn't on it's way out? I don't want to spend the money and for the game to close it's doors in a couple of months.
Thanks,
0
Comments
That being said, TP did spend money to acquire the game, so presumably they have long term plans for it. There has just been no indication of what those plans are or any sign of investment into the game yet.
The game won t close it’s doors in a couple of months, licence „just“ got renewed
and a new ownerships as well. And a new game feature will be released very soon, as well. All is fine imho.
Do you have sources for the new game feature? I've been waiting for something substantial for a long time.
I do, but i can t talk about it in public. Sorry.
Maybe todays Q&A with WRG Ben will reveal something about it. 🙂
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/16110/timelines-talks-next-show-sept-2nd-interview-with-wrg-qa-manager-ben-youtube-streaming#latest
I said: „In public“(meaning: in this forum).
There‘s also the option to PM a member and ask nicely for more details
(I know, shocking that anyone would ever do so). 😉
I don't consider that proof at all. TP was already a large creditor of DBs, we don't know how much of the acquisition of STT was just taking something that might make a return versus closing out the debt for pennies on the dollar. DB burned through plenty of cash with little to show for it. We paid for much of that experimentation but so did their creditors. It's actually kinda weird that TP took STT and didn't attempt to have the asset sold to established mobile game publishers. I suspect that no one was that interested in taking a mature game with a notoriously dodgy codebase and few whales.
I looked at a summary of the announcements from the stream and whilst I have hope now that they are serious about adding more features, the time to delivery from when the game was purchased is quite alarming. It will be over a year after taking control of the game that they deliver on this new feature. That's kind of insane, I feel that if they were super serious about investing in their new asset that we would see results earlier than that. I do worry that this is vapourware and is merely intended to keep hopes alive and wallets open.
I guess only time will tell. I really hope that they do their best to keep us informed on development progress and try to actually build some hype for this feature. Sometimes I think the only people who have less faith in their product than I do are WRG themselves.
I'm in a similar boat. Saying this campaign legendary is better than the previous 4 (? 5?) is certainly darning with faint praise, but it was a really bad streak we had there. I don't have 1/5 Keiko either, or this would be tempting for me. But somehow I've stopped spending entirely on this game, and I'm fairly sure that it's because I've caught the general apathy the devs project.
We're just winding up the third miserable mega in a row - badly-skilled legendaries introduced with poorly-thought timing in a ridiculously non-mega event schedule. Three times. How difficult is it to introduce crew with the event bonus earlier in the event and hold back a faction (or at least faction half) until at least week three, if not four? And my heart goes out to those who'd been wishing for an Enterprise mega for several years only to be served this.
And there's so much other stuff that could be easily fixed. Every day that goes by that it isn't, is yet another fail.
But $10 isn't a lot, and I'd like to reward their effort... so let's see some effort, TP! Let's see some easy problems fixed.
For newer players, let's remove the straight-drop purple from the standard 650 packs. It was a huge undertaking to work through my Purple Farm in 2018, and I can't even imagine how newer players could cope with such a diluted portal. It's barely going to affect us long-time or spending players, but it'll make such a difference to have a behold in those packs, just to help out and hopefully stop alienating newcomers so much.
Achievements, Jiminy Cricket, take 30 minutes and extend the Gauntlet achievements and Immortalization achievements - even if it means switching the latter over to unique immortalizations, I'm sure no-one would really mind. Easy, obvious, and ridiculous it hasn't already been done.
A few trait fixes wouldn't go amiss. RAF O'Brien still resigns from Starfleet and leaves the Federation to grab a few hours in the holodeck. It was pointed out in the event thread that Emperor Georgiou's traits leave something to be desired, like "Veteran" and "Crafty", and this week would be good timing to finally get that done.
Ship selection improvements were finally added... for Arena and Skirmish, where they help some players a couple of times a month, instead of Voyages, where they would help most players once or twice every day. What's going on there, then?
I've been installing some, errr... cheaper (in the "nastier" sense") games recently, and the thing that they have in common is those darn pop-ups that come up when the game finally loads. Close one - there's another! Close that, go to clic- no, there's another! And another. Every time. And now Timelines has that, too - the new, nesting offers, especially on top of a DYC pop-up and event pop-up, cheapen the game, making it look desperate for cash. Is it too much to ask that those pop-ups only... errr... pop up, say, three times? The icon's still right there on the screen if we want to buy it later. Especially this week, where the options are Bad Reed or Worse Reed, it's a flaming annoyance.
(Incidentally, I haven't bought a DYC in the four years I've been playing, I'll never spend $25 on one star of one legendary - could I disable DYCs in Options, perhaps? That'd help, too!)
And I think we'll just catch the next mega schedule before the Keiko campaign ends, so how about breaking the bad mega streak and setting up something decent? Too much to ask?
That's just off the top of my head - there are so many simple little things they could do to improve the game. Want my $10? Get one or two of these things done at last, please!
The chat with Ben doesn't give me too much hope, though. They're updating the Skirmish rewards table.... in 2021, because apparently it's a six-month coding job? We're getting one mini-event... in November?
The forums have many posts from people saying they've stopped spending, the Steam stats show player numbers have been dropping for months, and TP wants to fix it with a second little mini-event two months away and new Skirmish rewards and a new gameplay feature six months away. There is stuff that could be done today. Sigh.
On a more constructive note : the campaigns value is not in the crew it gives but in all the other goodies , bunch of dil, citations and portal pulls among more . The campaign is the most bang for the buck you can get followed by the monthly IMHO.
I say it pretty often. The Premium Track is not just about the Legendary. I know some people do look at that as the deciding factor. And do have an issue with paying for the Premium Track, if the Legendary is less than spectacular. So, I see both sides. Neither one is necessarily the wrong side......
🖖🖖🏻🖖🏼🖖🏽🖖🏾🖖🏿
If you think, „rude asking“ is more successful, please help urself.
Gladly, not everyone has issues with being nice to other people. 🤗
I totally agree *if* you are going to do the campaign anyway. However in months where the legendary is crap I don't log in as much and barely reach lvl 30 in the campaign. It's remembering to log in twice in a day to send out those pesky shuttles and do those scans, probably don't even average 1 visit a day unless I make a concerted effort to do so.
Nope, none of that was done.
No collections were extended. Wasn't there a positive reaction to the Vulcan and Diplomat extensions? Doesn't that get people interested in and buying packs? I can't understand why that stopped.
Another slew of relatively poor legendaries. Mirror Georgiou didn't get her traits updated. Nona has Med and Com, which should excite me! I tried two event packs for Fajo and got two Nonas, but even at 3/5 she's just not worth finishing. Just another 100 Voyage points would have made her decent. Emory has some notable plus points - while his skill combo isn't quite rare, it's a decent skill order and a decent Voyage score. Stick another ~50 points on his Eng base and I'd give him his last two stars (got him at 3/5 from the event). But he's just not... quite... there. But imagine if the Innovator Collection had been extended along with his event announcement, making him a desirable collection piece - however, instead it's just another missed opportunity, another phoned-in performance by TP.
I've had four support tickets within a week of each other this month. Four. I think that's a personal record. I again had the problem of a Timelines customer service representative not even bothering to read my ticket, and it's now likely that I've lost a legendary crew from an 18-month-old bug in the game.
Oh! But that reminded me of the temporary achievements, which I do keep forgetting. The rewards were bland, which is a shame, but I like the idea and I liked the achievements. As it stands, it would work best as a regular post-mega thing, as it really didn't have anything unique or memorable about it - apart from the technical issues (which ended with the players being asked to open a ticket!) and the mismatch of days and required arena battles! Which is a shame. I had a similar problem with Homesteader Janeway - the idea was sound, but my strongest memory of it is how we got four stars for Bones but only three for Janeway (and no monkey).
We have also had the announcement of Science Officer Spock for this month's campaign - and as I have him at 1/5, this looked like an easy way to get $10 out of me (better late than never!). I almost bought him on the first day, although it's worth noting he's got the second-most-common skill-set in the game. And despite a solid Voyage score, there are plenty of stronger Voyage crew with the same skills, some of which were even mega crew or given away. That said, I do need him for the Vulcan collection, so as long as he'll help out in Spocktober (how could he not?), I may as well plonk down $10.
...hmmm. No Faction event in Spocktober. What the heck? Megas used to be exciting because of the trait/bonus pool - a wonderful way to accrue some new toys, and then play with all our bonus toys (new and old) in an exciting shuttle palooza towards the end of the event! The bonus really mattered, because it allowed for unprecedented fleets of shuttles to be sent out with decent %s. It was so much fun, balancing what crew to thaw versus what crew we'd get in the month, managing our crew slots, saving up our boosters. Since TP took over, the theme bonus has been little more than a preview of one bonus trait/pool for the week 1/2 Faction event. And now it's not even that.
So, let's tally up all the September successes:
- Temporary achievements
The neutrals:
- First Officer Spock Campaign announcement
And the failures:
- No straight-drop purple fix (or any portal fix, or any indication of any potential portal fix)
- No achievement extensions
- No trait fixes
- No voyage ship selection improvement
- Pop-ups! THE POP-UPS! EGAD!
- Another poor mega-schedule (the worst so far, I think)
- No collection extensions
- Poor month for new legendaries
- Temporary achievement technical issues
- Event technical issues
- Customer Service still not always reading tickets
- Yet another month with no free crew slots
As ridiculous as this now feels (as they basically had my money a few days ago for SO Spock), I guess we're going to reset the clock and see how they do this month. Ten free crew slots would be a positive, for example, given the long wait despite relentless numbers of new crew. And the list above is far from exhaustive - there is so much they could do to show that they're interested in working on the game.
Would that work? He is trying to get game information, not permission to win a Faction event.