Disclaimers: I do not own an Excelsior. Neither do I own a Nebula. I'm not a huge fan of those ships either. This thread is not about the Tier 5 Excelsiors, or the new consoles. I also think the Tier 5 Excelsior having a LtC Tactical station and being offensively stronger than the Sovereign class is monumentally stupid. Making it a +1 counterpart to the Sovereign is even more so.
Now to the subject matter.
When the Excelsior and the Nebula were introduced to the Federation players' ship lineup, they offered a different hull to use, an additional choice for people that were not fond of the four-nacelled heavy cruisers (which I personally like) or the sphere-hulled Olympic and variants. I believe it was a very good move to make those choices... and I have absolutely no qualms at how the Tier 5 retrofits were treated then (aside from my discontentment in the way Excelsior retrofit vs. Sovereign were balanced).
In the Free-to-Play transition, you have decided to make both ships at Tier 3 "+1 ships", removing them from normal gameplay in favor of purchasing them.
As outlined above, I'm not invested in those ships... but I think that is an error. Out of principle, I have to point out that what you are doing to your players
is wrong.
Do not remove something we already have access to like that. Your arguments that you've made them better as justification hold no water, since we don't really care about the improvements you've made to them: we care about them no longer being available because of something that looks very much like clawing after a cashgrab.
You do not go and give something to someone, then withhold it from them, add a few improvements and return it to them at a price. I'm sure the practice of handing someone a gift, then snatching it back and giving it back
only at a price despite it having been slightly improved would be a practice that's reprehensible to any person of good morals. That's how I equate this. Surely you can see this too.
If you want to provide '+1 ships' for the Federation Commander tier, I pray that you take the honest approach, let us retain the ships we can obtain for energy credits on Holodeck, and instead create new assets to sell to us. In example:
- Making a +1 Heavy Cruiser variant based on the Ambassador-class would be all kinds of cool for your playerbase, and its +1 status would justify it as stronger than the Excelsior and weaker than the Galaxy-class. Perhaps you could even allow the skin to be used for the Excelsior retrofit as well (just like the Venture skin could apply to the Galaxy retrofit); it'd probably would make a lot of people happy.
- For the Nebula, people have loved what has been done to the Venture Exploration Cruiser refit and have practically been begging you to give a similar skin to the Nebula-class as well. You could go and answer to that plea, create a +1 Ship, get a neat skin out for the Nebula retrofit, and make some other people really happy as well.
Please. What you're doing with the Tier 3 Excelsior and Nebula is unacceptable. I hope you can re-examine the decision, and do the better thing.
Comments
My protest stands. Tier 3 ships should remain available as they are for us on Holodeck, If Cryptic absolutely wished the +1 ships to be the Excelsior and the Nebula, than I have no qualms about seeing some come as +1 Boff power/+1 console (with nifty console) upgrades as long as the normal ones we have right now remain available for E-Credit (or the proper dillithium conversion like all the other normal ships). However, I still believe the creation of new assets to put in the Tier 3's +1 ships would be a much superior way of doing this.
The Tier 3 Excelsior "plain getting better" does not excuse this.
OP's point is the T3 Excelsior and Nebula should have never been made +1 ships since players don't care about being +1. Instead, they want to use it with "normal" stats and have it available as an alternative to the "ugly" Constellation/Olympic choices.
Having the normal version still available along with the souped up +1 ship version would've been redundant, but tolerable.
But... if they'd had gone and created new assets like the Ambassador and a Venture-skinned Nebula as the +1 ships with skins accessible on the Tier 5 retrofits... they probably would've gotten a lot of very happy buyers.
How many people do we, Cryptic, and everyone else honestly think will buy a very temporary ship? Especially when their console is obtainable with the T5 version as well?
Sure the Nova, Oberth, and Connie Refits matter (as the console is concerned), but the Excelsior and Nebula? I was Commander for all of three days tops. So I would put up with the "ugly" ship, and just pay once for the ship model. Thank you.
Quite a few to be honest, especially if it comes with a special console that you can use elsewhere. Look at it this way, how many people do you see flying around in the special starter ships? I still see NX class ships flying around almost every other time I log in.