[kroonect]

Okay, who gives them this kind of idea??? LOL

[Heyallo]

Gorram morons.

YOU DON'T TAKE THE FREE STUFF AWAY TO PLUG YOUR PAID POOP!

How simple is that to not forget

[Jestersmith]

Fleet discount applies to these

[Phoenix]

They've not taken them away you can still earn them, this is ON TOP, all im seeing is a bit of crying and alot of negativity, i for one am thankful for this

[Sul-Matuul]

They were not technically free tokens anyway. They were part of the actually rewards for doing the in game content. Cryptic effectively nerfed the rewards for people actually playing that part of the game to force people into their paid system.

[Miles]

They've not taken them away you can still earn them, this is ON TOP, all im seeing is a bit of crying and alot of negativity, i for one am thankful for this

From today's patch notes:

"Admiralty Pass Tokens and Endeavor Reroll Tokens are no longer included in rewards from their respective systems, but may now be purchased for Dilithium. "

so they are taken away.

[Jestersmith]

They were not technically free tokens anyway. They were part of the actually rewards for doing the in game content. Cryptic effectively nerfed the rewards for people actually playing that part of the game to force people into their paid system.

That they was, though looking at last nights tweet they will be reversing this in some way the question that remains unanswered

[Jestersmith]

Tweet added to first post

[Jestersmith]

Looks like this one has caused a lot of turmoil all round

[Arno12]

Good lord the extremes people go to express their displeasure, I mean I'm not happy with the change either but you don't see me making threats.

[darthnovawave]

Looks like this one has caused a lot of turmoil all round

Kael similarly put out something because people's were hunting him down on non-work social media accounts to gripe too. Debating video game economic theory is one thing, but stalking people is downright criminal. Even on Reddit and Twitter some of the more "official-ish" account stuff was pretty toxic that was getting posted, so I can only imagine what these poor folks were getting hit with.

[Phoenix]

From today's patch notes:

"Admiralty Pass Tokens and Endeavor Reroll Tokens are no longer included in rewards from their respective systems, but may now be purchased for Dilithium. "

so they are taken away.

i missed that i appologise, still no need for the negatives to s**t on them lol

[Sul-Matuul]

Personally attacking the devs etc on personal accounts is a big no-no. Those doing that are idiots and should be rightly called out on their behaviour.

But Cryptic don't help their cause because their communication with the players has become pretty poor in its own right. Misinformation, lies, passing the blame, gaslighting, apathy, avoidance of issues, lack of communication, tarring us all with one brush.
It really is no wonder people are getting terribly hacked off with them; and that's to say nothing of the actual state of the game.
The devs and in particular the CM don't really seem to be interested in making a good effort to get on with the players; the people paying their wages. A lot of people have sunk a lot of cash and time into this game and I think they have a right to voice opinions on what happens with it; even if the devs don't like the way they say it. I mean if someone calls out the CM for being terrible at his job because of all the errors in blogs and lack of care...are they really wrong, are they really wrong for saying Cryptic are idiots for continuing to employ the guy?

These guys are the public face of a game, they ARE going to have to put up with people getting annoyed and angry at them and saying nasty things. Provided it's not personal account attacks, stalking etc., they just need to accept it as part of the community feedback. If people are so angry it's because they are passionate about your game. Listen to that and consider why people are acting this way.

[Petrarch]

As a customer, the players have every right to complain, criticise, disagree or otherwise voice their disapproval (or approval) of a given change to something. That's the same regardless of what business you're in or the product, be it cars, electrical goods or games. What you don't have a pass to do is make it personal and start harassing the workers, that just undermines the very point you're trying to make and the meaning gets lost. The devs/CMs etc have to take the criticism/praise as it's part of their job, they can be asked what they were thinking, asked to justify what they've done but what they don't have to take is some frothing at the mouth idiot insulting them, their dog and making colourful comments about their mothers or whatever line of attack is being used. Taking that sort of approach just makes matters worse.

Cryptic has consistently eroded whatever goodwill they had, particularly over the last 2 or 3 years. The seemingly endless number of mistakes in blogs, information not being handed out, the infamous bait and switch to the services starter pack, the list goes on. STO is now effectively a game I'd expect to see on my phone, not a desktop MMO with a big name attached to it.

It's clear they generally just don't listen to the players at all and it's very easy to get the impression that they simply don't care either. The original tweet from Broticus when he called the reaction a "knee-jerk" is at best dismissive of the players and at worst, combative. If you're representing your company and team, a certain degree of diplomacy is necessary as anything you say is going to be picked up on. And to touch on Kael, who may not write the blogs and mistakes do happen, but he's the most public face to the community - would it really be so difficult to take 2 minutes to read over what's handed to you and flag up something that doesn't look right with the powers that be?

It's getting harder and harder to look past the cracks nowadays and this recent incident has opened a big one. They've known the economy has been in trouble for some time now - they'd seen it before in Neverwinter so it's not like this is a first time deal either - yet instead of trying to make any effort or steps to fix it, they've instead let it break and now with the horse having bolted, they're carrying on as if this is a complete shock and they've no idea what to do about it. You want effective dil sinks then don't make ones that penalise players, make one that incentivises them to spend it willingly. Why not have cosmetic and older items available that people can earn for dil? Why not have the option to unlock a lobi ship you already own for a large dil payment on another character, or account wide? The answer to that one is probably greed, they want to squeeze every last penny out of a customer and they're not ashamed to be so blatant about it. How about selling the phoenix upgrade tokens separately, those would probably drain a lot of the excess currency in a matter of days. Cryptic/PWE just see dollar signs and so long as those are rolling in, nothing is going to change.

[darthnovawave]

I think one of the biggest problems Cryptic created for themselves over the years is that they've created a madly complex in game economic system with all these different currency types (energy credits, latinum, various marks, dilithium, etc.) and whenever they try to rebalance the system, they oversimplify things by just trying to come up with some sort of exchange rate on stuff and launch it without really thinking about the consumer behavior implications of the changes. With the vanity shield sink, they increased supply to something that had very high general demand to something that had been very low in supply overall, so the idea ended up being really popular overall. With this token sink, they tried to artificially replicate this dynamic by making something that was in relatively high supply already (e.g., it dropped about 25% of the time per Borticus's tweet) and mediocre demand and cut off the free supply. This forcible, drastic cut to supply is really what keeps setting off the player base. We saw the same thing with the cross-faction ship launch. People were happy or at least ambivalent about being able to fly whatever ship they wanted on whatever toon they wanted to use, but at the same time they angered a lot of people by removing the trait and console box drops for those factions that were previously restricted from buying the source ships and now those things are selling at 10x the rate or more that they used to as supply dwindles.

What would be nice to see Cryptic do is reach out to universities to see if they could get an actual economist to come in and give them advice around cleaning up their in-game economy. If they tried hard enough, they could probably find someone that might do it pro bono so long as they got to write things up and publish in an academic journal somewhere, though I'd imagine they could trade off hiring another Trek actor to do voiceover work in order to pay for some help if it came down to that. I just don't see guys like Borticus and Kael, whatever you may think of how they handle their primary job, being the kind of deep expert social scientists needed to really straighten out the in-game economy in a way that would create the longer term fix that players are asking for while not enraging the players at the same time.