Hey guys / ladies. It's no secret that 6 major Klingon fleets (that I know of) have shut down and spread members throughout several fed fleets. I wanted to post here for a couple reasons. Primarily to hopefully keep as many Klingon fleets from shutting down as possible and also to make my own fleet available to lost players who may feel pressure to go Fed simply because of the entirely overboard negative press Cryptic is getting on the Klingon race.

There are lots of conspiracy theorists out there in the MMO Media and individual players who claim "doom & gloom" and are crying wolf over the recent Klingon information releases. Don't get me wrong, some of the media is getting it right but it's really easy to tell who is writing reviews and opinions based on experience and who are writing them based on a standard "the world is ending read my article" system. Be selective about what you read, consider the source always. Some websites will let anyone write a review!

I feel the need to point a few things out.

First, what in the world qualifies me to make some of the comments I'm going to make? I've been running Total Aggression Gaming for 11 years. We are a multi-game online community, arguably the first of our kind. We have been supporting multiple games new and old for many years and have a roster of members who have been in TAG / MoK since 1998. We as an organization have played almost every single game which had multi-player support on PC since our formation. If you poll TAG/MoK you will find a significant percentage of our player base has been together for more than 5 years and hundreds of them for more than 8-10.

Read more - Click below

If you look at our website, you will not see a SINGLE advertisement. We are entirely community supported and internally funded on donations. I have no stake in saying anything positive or negative for Cryptic, nor can I get any benefit from it. We are players first and foremost and because of that you can expect us to have a player opinion.

In our years we have been invited to many closed beta's, previews, community summits, unveilings and so forth. I've seen tons of games in post alpha state including AO, WoW, SWG, Vanguard SOH (when it was Sigil), EVE, Planetside, Matrix and MANY many more. The point is not to brag, it's to say "I'm not talking out of my rear."

Currently STO is under two months from release - yes. Where should the Klingon faction be right now? That is a matter of perspective and arguably none of us in the general public or ANY media source is qualified to make an accurate judgement on that. Different DEV teams work in different ways, none are "wrong" so to speak. There are hundreds of ways to get from A to B, how they decide to get there is based on many things none of us have access to.

So ask yourself a simple question when you read this press about Klingon game-play in STO. "Would it benefit Cryptic in any way shape or form to minimize arguably the 2nd most popular race / faction in the Star Trek Franchise?" The answer to that question is NO, absolutely not. I'll add; anyone with an IQ above 100 can draw that conclusion. This isn't rocket science.

When we do anything in life unrelated to building video games we are bound to a budget. Rebuilding a car or motorcycle? Expanding your house? Building a new house? Expanding your business or starting a new one? Anything that requires any sort of design and is in any way shape or form "new territory" requires that you adhere to a strict budget. Going over budget means you cut employees and consume less resources. This balance can only be kept with compromise. You may not be able to put some expensive ceiling tiles up. You may be forced to go ahead with the amazingly powerful engine in your car but wait on the fancy wheels.

What you are seeing with the development of this game (in my humble opinion) is just that. Let's just cut to the chase. Compromise is a requirement in game development. Otherwise you get what has plagued this particular games development for 5 years. Failure after failure, after failure. Cryptic took over the STO project and delivered something. Give them at least THAT credit.

Now... Assuming your reading this and you have a logical brain capable of simple deduction;

At release say the Klingons are 65% done. In lay-mans terms, say the foundation is built, walls are up, roof is on but we need a little paint and some appliances to finish the job. SO WHAT!!

I've read every single DEV/Design post on this subject. One thing has remained consistent through all of them. Every single person at Cryptic wants to give the player base what they expect from Trek. Since Klingons are Trek and easily the most popular non-fed race we will see in the game, it stands to reason those folks want to finish the job.

So I say let them. Stop crying over milk not yet spilled or shooting at ghosts (this goes for all you media people too). At this point, until the first content patch you truly have NO CLUE what Cryptic's intentions are toward the Klingon player community and you wont until they release that content patch.

By definition an MMO is recurring income for a Franchise / MMO Developer. The idea is to "pay to play" and the "new" definition of MMO is "Expandable." Failure to meet that criteria means you fail to capture a chunk of the market. Since there are only two real Sci-Fi / Space MMO's out there right now (EVE/SWG both old.) you are talking about a massive chunk of people who are sick and tired of swords and mana and spells and dragons who want to blow things up in a modern setting! Long story short, Star Trek and Cryptic stand to make BUCKET loads of money here. Do you think they would arbitrarily blow years of subscriptions over failing to add content for a faction in an early patch? If you do think that, you are wrong!

When I look at making decisions on which games I'll allow new Divisions of TAG for, I talk to my admins and players and guild leaders, we discuss key elements. In today's MMO market a game MUST have the following to succeed:

1. Captivating content
2. Replayability (instances)
3. Expandability (more to tell/play)
4. A niche (this is like that 3 note hook in your favorite song.)
5. Enough captivating end game content to last till the next major content patch.
6. A decent GUI
7. Good graphical assets
8. Reliable servers
9. Good support staff
10. Epic LOOT!

If a game I look at to expand TAG with is missing one or more of those things, I'm a skeptic. STO in my estimation isn't missing ANY of them. One could argue on the content for Klingons... Sure, I'll give you that. However, if the amount of Fed content is any sort of indication towards what we can expect for Klingon content, I think this obstacle will be overcome.

That said, I'll close with this. For your and everyone else's sake. Stop being so negative. This game has been in flat spin 3 times already. These folks are actually going to release it and do something with it. So try to look at the bright side and stop screaming doom & gloom. All you "followers" jumping ship right now to be Feds or simply refusing to pre-order or trying in some small way to "scream at Cryptic" with some insanely stupid childish video insulting them for 5 minutes or some adolescent flame post which gets locked anyway... All you are doing is creating a faction imbalance for those who ARE going to play Klingon and creating regret for yourself later when the Klingon content is in the game.

One last thing - Bravo Ethec!

Argulace
President
Total Aggression Gaming
http://www.totalaggression.com