Whoops. I may have added to the misconception. But not the reality.*
Borticus has just responded about the reasons why this error – which got past rounds of QA and several MONTHS of game deployment – needed to be fixed.
When you see a string of numbers laid out as:
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 40, 3, 2, 1
… you don’t presume it’s correct. And once you’ve determined that the series has an inconsistency, you find yourself with what we in Design sometimes call “a bump in the floor.”
As in, if you have a big flat floor with one obvious bump in it, you don’t raise the entire floor to the level of the bump. You take a hammer to that thing, and you fix it.
This fix was not made with the conscious intention of decreasing anyone’s enjoyment of the game, or ability to earn XP/CXP, or anything else we’re currently being accused of. The fix was made because it is a fix — a problem existed, and had to be corrected.
So, yes: Doff Assignments with durations between 12 and 15.9 hours were awarding roughly 10x the amount of numerics they were designed to reward. I’m sorry if you assumed that was an intended part of the system, but it was, in fact, an egregious misplacement of a decimal place, and needed to be corrected.
We will take another look at Doff Assignment XP gain as a whole in the near future, and see if it’s reasonable to consider any sort of systemic increases. But we aren’t going to add back in a bug, or revert a fix to such an obvious error.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic – Staff Systems Designer
OK. Borticus explained this well, so I can’t take exception with the change. It is a bug, one that arguably could cause issues later on. But it still doesn’t change my impression that Star Trek Online is only for the dedicated player. Or that the player base continues to shrink.
At least the lag has been reduced slightly, one good side effect of fewer players online.
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