“I don’t get no respec”… well at least not yet anyway. It is a subject recently heard in many a barb in Star Trek Online (STO) fleet chat these days.  Of course those of you who have been following the news out of Cryptic lately know that the patch with a respec, federation versus federation pvp and more is just around the corner.  As a side note, once federation vs. federation pvp is firmly in place I wonder how much demand there will continue to be (or not) for Federation versus Klingon pvp.

Yet no matter how much a developer does to answer their critics and give their customers what they want there will always be those for whom the glass is not merely half empty, but the other half is full of toxic waste. One developer who was a guest on our show once told us “if you lose a customer, you don’t just lose a customer – you gain a detractor.”  Would that it were more people had the attitude espoused by Mr. Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve:

“One thing that you hear [Valve] talk a lot about is entertainment as a service, it’s an attitude that says ‘what have I done for my customers today?’” – Gabe Newell, co-founder Valve

Still, even if it were the case – Even if the development industry was full of nothing but Gabe Newell clones the task would still be a monumental one.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people some of the time but someone will always be ticked off all of the time. Even when you discount the customers, spoken of by Glen Swan (one of the community managers from Funcom featured on show 55) who want a spaceship in games like Age of Conan, finding a median in the often conflicting customer demands is problematic at best. It is an exercise in multiple regression that might have even befuddled Einstein.  It is something that many a developer, I am sure, has only considered possible by changing the name of the developer’s studio to “Free Lunch.”

Even that would likely not work for long for as we all should know (and don’t seem to) there is no such thing as a free lunch. Some see the “free to play” business model as the savior of the industry (or at least their little corner of it) hoping to repeat the success of Turbine.  But free to play doesn’t mean free for everyone, and if it does, doesn’t mean the entire game is free – someone, somewhere, has to pay to keep the servers open.  When Cryptic Studios first announced the subscription plus cash shop model for Champions Online, and now STO, many players seem to forget that companies like the 800 pound Blizzard Gorilla have been doing it all along; it is just recently that they have opened an actual shop instead of calling things a “fee.”  Unlike games like Allods, which is designed to be unplayable if you do not support the cash shop, STO is designed (at least so far) so that you can ignore the cash shop and never be disadvantaged. Even so, it seems that what is good for the Blizzard goose is not good for the Cryptic gander these days. It’s a bit odd, however, that those players who complain the loudest, the “un-silent minority”, are those players who no longer seem to be playing the game. It doesn’t help matters when the impression some players have of cash shops are those created by Gpotato, which seem one step short of two big guys named bubba, waiting for the players in a dark ally, demanding their wallet.

In the end, no matter what developers try there will always be those players who are not happy deciding that the game is not for them, but are determined to bring the game down and the company that makes it along with it.  There was an old expression that was prevalent when I was growing up, and is just as applicable now as it was then.  It especially applies to those whom are determined that if they don’t like a product no one else should either:

Don’t get mad and go away – just go away.