I love STO. I bought it before release on a preorder and played for a long time until I had enough.
Now I am back and love the game even more.
Unlike the vast majority of the community I personally like the Lock Box Lottery.
Knowing in advance the odds are against me winning a Galor ship it does not matter to me in the least.
The communities reaction in the forum has me completely surprised as I am sure it has all of you surprised as I have read the forum post by Borticus over at the Jupitor Forum and am aware you guys are in total and complete stasis shock over what seems to have turned into a fiasco.
The reason I am posting this thread is to make the one suggestion that I have been able to come across that would satisfy the community based on my many hours of reading threads not just in this forum, but elsewhere.
There seems to be only one answer that has come up that stands out as a way to make everyone happy including those in charge of the revenue aspects of the business.
You really need to consider making these lock box ships available in the CP store.
You can jack up the price to 10,000 CP for them and it would satisfy the vast majority of fans.
10,000 CP is $125 which sounds like an insane amount, but consider the farmers who leach off the game who are selling the ships for $400 to 600 million credits in the Exchange which if you want to buy credits and have them delivered in game would cost nearly $600.
As a side suggestion you could make it so any person would be guaranteed to get the ship in their 125th box opened with a paid for key. That way people would know up front the maximum amount they might have to pay for the ship and still have fun gambling to try and get it for less.
Its like those penny auctions online. You keep bidding and paying for your bids and even if you lose the auction you can apply 100 percent of what you spent on your bids towards the purchase of what you were bidding on to just outright buy it.
I have to assume you guys keep transaction records from the C-Store which makes it very simple to know how many keys have been bought by each account. You have already stated that the keys will stay in the store indefinately and will be used for other things in the future. It would be very easy to impliment a system whereby the purchase of keys accumalates with a running tally for each account and once 125 keys are bought the account gets a guaranteed unlock for one of those ships, or better yet any item they choose in the C-Store.
It provides an incentive for people to be willing to buy a few keys at a time over a long period of time. Knowing that one day in the future they will have saved up enough key credits to get something nice and they won't feel ripped off if after spending $50 bucks trying to get the Galor now if they know they can still apply that $50 to getting it, or something else down the road.
Furthermore this should only be allowed for Gold Account and Lifetime Account holders. For gold accounts only the keys they buy during periods of time where the account is active as a subscriber count in the running key tally.
I was a subscriber in the beginning for a good number of months until I took a very long vacation away from the game. I have been back now for a number of weeks since F2P started and I have to tell you guys that what you have done to the Subscribers and Lifetime members is terrible in terms of the way they are being treated.
0