Galactic_Hobo wrote:
they studio had to lay off employees because the game wasn't as much of a success as they hoped for..... maybe due to the fact that gamers made stupid unintelligent demands they wanted to see in the game.
You misunderstood, I'm not talking abou the lay-offs, I'm talking about Sony giving the ENTIRE team at Lightbox the boot, and taking the game and handing it over to Sony Santa Monica. Sony invested in them, and got a joke of a single player campaign in return, and broken multi-player.
Trying to blame the customers, who spent money on this unfinished mess, is absurd. It's not my fault that the geniuses at LBI couldn't' fix the audio, couldn't fix the XMB kick issues, couldn't figure out how to balance teams in time, couldn't build maps that ran well on the PS3. Its not my fault that the in-game stats are ufinished. It's not my fault that the game wouldn't give you a brief explanation about the server loadouts, forcing new players to make servers blindly & experimenting with loadouts through trial and error, for months on end. In fact I had to keep **bleep** about that specific issue, every few weeks, until they finally added it in. How was a new player supposed to know the difference between 'Classic blitz' or 'Heavweight'??? 
LBI was too slow to fix the numerous problems they released with the game, and the game suffered for it. The crappiness that is the single player and co-op is the perfect example of what Lightbox is capable of. I wasn't making the design decisions there. Instead, I was the gullible moron buying into their BS before release and spent money for a single player that was promised, but never delivered.
The numerous balance issues with weapons that were never addressed since release are not my fault either. Why don't clusters damage the hawk firing them? Even the SWARMS can damage you at point blank. Why are clusters the ONLY exception in the entire game? Why were the clusters released in their absurdly broken state at release? LBI sat for months testing with those clusters, and didn't notice they were broken and absurdly overpowered ? really? Is that my fault as a customer? I noticed the clusters were broken on the day of release in the very first match I joined. but LBI didn't notice through months of QA testing? Hah
It then took over 3 weeks to make adjustments to the tanks and clusters ? Is it the customers fault for that ? It took them how many more months to finally fix the broken team balancing, and party system that allowed players to stack teams and cheat ? Those fixes came about because of customer complaints. All the changes that helped fix this game and brought it to its current more playable version, are due to customer complaints, the exact OPPOSITE of what you claim. If LBI was messing up their game based off of our complaints, why didn't we get capturable bases ?
As for this particular thread, most of my old complaints are bang-on regarding flight. The arbitrary changes to CAF flight, making CAF flight it's own control mode, is what breaks it. Why does the reticule move ? Why is the control scheme simply not AF's controls pasted over, with a locked horizon for the players who complain about "motion sickeness" with everything else being the EXACT same? The loop-de-loop you pull off with the right stick is NOT the same as an actual loop-de-loop you perform in AF. It's quicker. It's automated, and it's broken. The right analogue stick in CAF should perform an equivalent loop-de-loop as when an AF pilot manually does one, but with the camera locked. Instead, it is a totally different hawk, in fact a different vehicle. Maneuvering in ways that an AF hawk can't reproduce. and the entire dodge mechanic overall is broken and easy to exploit. AF or CAF. These flight issues were never addressed because LBI had no clue how to play their own game.
But if you don't want to read paragraphs of me blabbering on in detail, the reason for Starhawk's failure can be summed up perfectly with an old quote from Dylan Jobe:
"XMB Kicked?"
Emphasis on the question mark.
Just to set the record straight, Sony laid off every single development team on Sony's payroll, literally hundreds of people who wasn't currently working on a pending release. It had nothing to do with how successful the particular game was that a given studio had worked on. Sony had millions of dollars of loss in 2011/2012 and made it quite clear that they would be "cleaning house" in an effort to scale back to prepare for their strategy to get out of the hole they had dug for themselves. It was just business, nobody got fired. Sony even said something to the effect of looking forward to opportunities to work with Lightbox in the future.
Also, I think most people are really over the flight debate, "can't we all just get along?"
Galactic_Hobo wrote:
I am sorry, I have been reading through this topic today, and I know this might be kind of a late post, but i feel like I should say something. I work in the industry as a designer myself, and I am feel pretty dtrongly about what I am about to say. reading the above comment makes me sad, and here is why. As a gamer/player you have every right to PLAY the game, but you should have never tried to lobby for a specific event or certain thing in a game itself. You are not a designer, you have no formal training of any kind, and most importantly you have no idea about how your "ideas" can impact the overall build of a certain game. Feel free to reply angrilly to this everyone, but the very reason why so many games become broken is because players have no idea about what they are talking about and they twist the arms of the devs and their visions, and then later blame them when a game turns out not as good as thye anticipated. Imagine this, you are a succesful writer, and have been for some time, you have two best selling titles and are working on a third one. Now a highschool freshman tells you that you need to do so and so with your new book or else it will be bad... How would you feel? Maybe you do what he says and your novel turns out like garbage or has some plot holes here and there, perhaps if you stuck with YOUR original concept/design it probably would have been a success....
I get your point. Lay people need to recognize that they are not programmers and that there is a whole world behind the image on the screen, of which they have no understanding. I deal with this on a daily basis. Someone does a google search and suddenly they are my intellectual equal in an occupation that took 7 years of formal training for me to be competent. That being said, the lay person is entitled to form an opinion and even scream it from the mountaintop... or post it on a forum. Their opinion can also be very wrong.
it is the job of the individual or group (LBI) with a greater knowledge base to assess the merits of those opinions. Some may be good, some may be garbage.
As maangus already pointed out there were glaring faults to the game that had nothing to do with this community. No one suggested that LBI create a team balancing algorhythm that created teams with 10 players on one side and 4 on the other. Where in the history of fair competition has it been wise to start the competition with such dramatic imbalances? With all due respect to LBI, that was down right stupid and lead to this game's demise faster than any other factor.
So who's fault is it in your example? The freshman for having an opinion or the writer for following the freshman's suggestions? Also, recognize that it is quite feasible that the freshman's suggestions/ideas are good ones.
The team balancing was fixed up pretty nicely, in my opinion, with the last couple of updates... but I digress from the topic.
I don't think the "Flight mode dodging is unbalanced." I just don't, never did. With the right moves, you can dodge just about anything but flak. Dodging isn't the imbalanced part of flight...
