v1.9 Beta Results & Your v2.0 Update Questions Answered!

Posted: 26 April 2017 12:46 PM Hello Captains! For all of you who participated in the recent v1.9 Android beta test, we thank you! Over 2,000 players completed the beta test survey, giving us valuable feedback regarding some of the changes introduced with v1.9. Following up on the beta and prior to releasing what we are now calling v2.0, we wanted to provide you with some insight into the survey feedback and also to answer some of unanswered questions around v1.9 / v2.0. First, we’re now calling v1.9, Version 2.0. Though the name changed, the contents include all the changes our players saw in the v1.9 Beta. Second, we’d like to share some of our survey results. Many players completing the beta survey had opinions about the Crew Quarters changes. Some changes, like adding filtering and sorting, were wildly successful: 96% agreed and 74% strongly agreed that adding those features to Star Trek Timelines was a good change. The changes to training were similarly well received, with 82% of players agreeing that they were good changes (2.5% disagreeing). Overall, 90% of our players agreed that the Crew Quarters changes were good changes overall for Star Trek Timelines (3.3% disagreeing). Our changes to Honor and Citations, being new systems, predictably caused some confusion; 27% of our players said they were unclear how to purchase and use Honorable Citations. As some feedback on the forums showed, some players were also unclear about the value of Honor; 23% of players were neutral on obtaining Honor rather than Training Programs. Despite some confusion around the changes, 81% of players agreed that adding Honor was a good change (3% disagreeing), and 85% agreed that Honorable Citations were good changes for Star Trek Timelines (2% disagreeing). Third, after reviewing the survey results and reading all your feedback, we are moving forward with releasing the new v2.0 client to all players very soon. In addition to all of the content you saw in the v1.9 beta, v2.0 will also include fixes to several of the reported bugs in the beta, like some items being unable to be crafted and the Replicator pulldown menu preventing some items from being filtered. Lastly, we wanted to close the loop on a previous forum thread in which we asked for player questions around the v1.9 release. In lieu of a video, as originally planned, below are some responses from the team to help answer your questions: ———————————— “Are the item icons switching back to the colors they had before? What about the Galaxy Map?” In v2.0, if a crew member has the ability to equip or build an item, it’s now much more clearly called out with an orange border. Some players have asked for a return of the green border for buildable items; we may add that in a future build. The Galaxy Map has been greatly improved in v2.0, with most players agreeing that it is much better and usable than in 1.8.0. Like the Fleet UI, the Galaxy Map changes give us a foundation that lets lets us do more with the Galaxy Map in the future. More on that in a future build! “Can we get some filtering and sorting into the game?” One of our goals with v2.0 was allowing you to better manage your crew. To that end, we introduced the ability to sort and filter on a number of new criteria, like alphabetical or by rarity. We also introduced the ability to search for crew based on their name or trait. One thing to keep in mind: when you search for a crew, you’ll want to search for their actual name, not the base crew. In other words, searching for Picard won’t bring up Detective Dixon Hill. We may introduce a way to easily find all variants of the base crew in a future update, but for now, you’ll need to use their literal name. “What are Honorable Citations, and what about the Honor costs?” As several forum posts have discussed, Honor is the new currency you get when dismissing crew. One of the thing you may purchase are Citations. Citations allow you to add another star to a crew without needing another copy of that crew. Citations may be purchased in the Honor Hall for Honor. We’ve read the feedback about Honor costs, and we’re watching closely to see how much Honor players are earning. We’ll be introducing new ways to earn Honor, like through new Fleet Activities, in a future build. Prior to the Beta we did testing on our end, factoring in how many crew players get from events, plus how many crew players get from packs, and how long we think it would take for players to get Citations. We then factored in the future sources of Honor, as well as future systems we’re building. Many players had thousands of Honor within the first week, but we understand the concerns about the exchange rate being high. The team wants to see more people acquiring and using Honor before we make any changes to the cost of items in the Honor Hall, but if we see the high-value items being too difficult to acquire, it’s pretty likely that we’ll adjust the cost accordingly. “Can we lock our crew from being dismissed?” With v2.0, favoriting a crew now prevents the crew from being accidentally dismissed. We also introduced the Reenlistment feature that will allow players to buy back crew they have accidentally dismissed. As a note, our Support team would receive dozens and dozens of tickets per week for accidentally dismissed crew; our hope is that players may now recover accidentally dismissed crew without needing to contact our support team. We also added a message that lets you know why a crew member cannot be dismissed if they are busy doing another action. Signature Nod

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Posted: 26 April 2017 12:47 PM “Can we get more info about things in-game?” One of the changes in v2.0 is an info button for our shop packs. We’ll be adding info text to packs going forward. The info button should clearly define what crew are included in packs, though we won’t be disclosing drop rates for crew. We’re also continuing to improve the UI by clearly laying out crew information, and we’re adding more info buttons to other parts of the UI in future builds. Stay tuned for more improvements in upcoming client builds! “What’s going on with the Fleet UI?” One of the parts of the update that confused some players was revamping the Fleet UI. Some asked why we moved the Fleets button to the main HUD. The short answer is that we plan for our next build to include a number of improvements and additional actions for Fleets to do. As we continue to improve Star Trek Timelines, Fleets will play a larger role. v2.0 sets the stage for those improvements with a new UI and new location for the Fleet button. “What about new content, like new ships or episodes or crew?” We have something very special coming in May that introduces new content and crew. More details on that will be coming very, very soon. And we have new ships coming as well, from a popular Star Trek movie and from Star Trek Voyager. We can’t wait to show you the new stuff coming in May! ———————————— That’s it for now - if you have any other specific v2.0 questions, let us know in the forums. We’re not able to reply back to every question, but if we can, we will! Thanks again for reading,

Nod and the entire Star Trek Timelines team Signature Nod

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Posted: 26 April 2017 12:49 PM I liked all the changes in the beta except one - the obnoxious side-scrolling in faction centers. The blown-up (in terms of size) of the item icons is…less useful. Profile

Posted: 26 April 2017 12:50 PM Thanks Nod. I realize actual metrics aren’t that granular beyond the questions asked for scoring. Were there any trends in long form feedback that surprised the team? What are the teams thoughts on the dislike of the tile view vs being able to view several crew members stats at once? Signature This week Frank and Roonis talk about extra long shuttles, the concept of F2P pain to convert to spending customers, discuss how Odo is not a Dax, and discuss the worst Starfleet Department to work in, HR.

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Posted: 26 April 2017 12:56 PM With costs for citations set so high, especially since people cannot use old airlocks (i.e., massive excess of trainers) to pay for them, I think the odds that you will receive useful information beyond “obviously too high” on the citations are low. Would you consider making a one-time exchange available for people to convert excess trainers to honor? That would give people value for previous airlocks without creating a potential saddle point vis a vis the honor-to-trainers exchange ratio. Profile

Posted: 26 April 2017 12:56 PM Roonis - 26 April 2017 12:50 PM Thanks Nod. I realize actual metrics aren’t that granular beyond the questions asked for scoring. Were there any trends in long form feedback that surprised the team? What are the teams thoughts on the dislike of the tile view vs being able to view several crew members stats at once? Like some players here mentioned, the Tile view was something that some players disliked intensely. Most feedback focused on a de-emphasis of the art, and diminishing some information. We’re investigating internally whether we want to create a new view for crew, something like a cinematic or art-only view for a crew; and we’re discussing about making changes to the tile view itself. Ultimately we decided to go with the current version and continue to iterate on the changes for a future client build. UI changes, by definition, need a new client build, which would delay a lot of the other great changes coming in 2.0. It’s safe to say that the feedback was heard and the team will continue iterating on the crew view in the future. Most of the other feedback was in-line with what we expected. Signature Nod

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Posted: 26 April 2017 01:00 PM Given that next week is May, will these new missions/ships be released with 2.0, or separately? Profile

Posted: 26 April 2017 01:01 PM Nod - 26 April 2017 12:56 PM We’re investigating internally whether we want to create a new view for crew, something like a cinematic or art-only view for a crew; and we’re discussing about making changes to the tile view itself. Perhaps a double-tap to bring up a full-sized card? Profile

Posted: 26 April 2017 01:01 PM [DoBetter] [NDQ] Joker41NAM - 26 April 2017 01:00 PM Given that next week is May, will these new missions/ships be released with 2.0, or separately? Most of our content is agnostic to client build. Note that I didn’t say Missions in particular; I said new content, which may mean anything from new events, new missions, new types of existing content, or changes to existing content. When we make content changes, they should be in parallel to the client changes. Signature Nod

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Posted: 26 April 2017 01:03 PM Confused Klingon - 26 April 2017 12:49 PM I liked all the changes in the beta except one - the obnoxious side-scrolling in faction centers. The blown-up (in terms of size) of the item icons is…less useful. This is something we have heard, and may change in a future client build. It won’t be changed in v2.0. Signature Nod

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Posted: 26 April 2017 01:03 PM Nod - 26 April 2017 12:46 PM Many players had thousands of Honor within the first week, but we understand the concerns about the exchange rate being high. The team wants to see more people acquiring and using Honor before we make any changes to the cost of items in the Honor Hall, but if we see the high-value items being too difficult to acquire, it’s pretty likely that we’ll adjust the cost accordingly. When you were looking at the amount of Honor that testers accumulated, did you factor in how many people had been sitting on hundreds of portal pulls because there was no benefit to using them before? Or, in other words, do you have a way to track “free” vs “paid” portal pulls that were converted to Honor? Profile

Posted: 26 April 2017 01:05 PM [DoBetter] [NDQ] Joker41NAM - 26 April 2017 01:03 PM Nod - 26 April 2017 12:46 PM Many players had thousands of Honor within the first week, but we understand the concerns about the exchange rate being high. The team wants to see more people acquiring and using Honor before we make any changes to the cost of items in the Honor Hall, but if we see the high-value items being too difficult to acquire, it’s pretty likely that we’ll adjust the cost accordingly. When you were looking at the amount of Honor that testers accumulated, did you factor in how many people had been sitting on hundreds of portal pulls because there was no benefit to using them before? Or, in other words, do you have a way to track “free” vs “paid” portal pulls that were converted to Honor? Yep - we did track that, and did check the “historical” dismissal rate vs. the current. We can spit the data up by level, by VIP, etc. and see how Honor accrues over time by various stats. We’ll continue to watch as we roll out v2.0 to everyone. Signature Nod

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Posted: 26 April 2017 01:08 PM Nod - 26 April 2017 12:56 PM Roonis - 26 April 2017 12:50 PM Thanks Nod. I realize actual metrics aren’t that granular beyond the questions asked for scoring. Were there any trends in long form feedback that surprised the team? What are the teams thoughts on the dislike of the tile view vs being able to view several crew members stats at once? Like some players here mentioned, the Tile view was something that some players disliked intensely. Most feedback focused on a de-emphasis of the art, and diminishing some information. We’re investigating internally whether we want to create a new view for crew, something like a cinematic or art-only view for a crew; and we’re discussing about making changes to the tile view itself. Ultimately we decided to go with the current version and continue to iterate on the changes for a future client build. UI changes, by definition, need a new client build, which would delay a lot of the other great changes coming in 2.0. It’s safe to say that the feedback was heard and the team will continue iterating on the crew view in the future. Most of the other feedback was in-line with what we expected. Yeah, the dislike of tile seemed a common theme in commentary I saw. The art does look framed better on the left, but the size difference is noticeable, and hiding info that was there before is always going to illicit a reaction. (even though it’s not hidden, just requires individual loads) The new views is an awesome idea. and 1.90 was WAY better than 1.8 even if 1.9 wasn’t perfect for that video. Signature This week Frank and Roonis talk about extra long shuttles, the concept of F2P pain to convert to spending customers, discuss how Odo is not a Dax, and discuss the worst Starfleet Department to work in, HR.

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Posted: 26 April 2017 01:15 PM From the screenshots I saw..that tile view no longer has the character short names. I really wish they would put those back, perhaps at the top of the tile? Signature = EXODUS = Profile

Posted: 26 April 2017 01:22 PM As it seems that many ‘concerns’ were put into a ‘maybe someday’ pile. I have to reconsider any further investment into the game. As ‘maybe someday’ has a tendency to be months and years in your development and in some cases just into the bitbucket of ‘sorry’ , this makes me feel like the ‘you’ve been heard’ statement is just a repeat of 2016. I dare you to prove me wrong. And just when you got me excited with an Expedition. Thanks for the ugly tile covered pig with feature laden lip-stick. Incidentally, putting the Fleet on the HUD isn’t the issue. What you get when you get there is very informative but worse than Medusa after a car wreck. Profile