I agree with most others on here the story arc was pretty good. Admittedly, it never answered how on earth the Vaadwaur in 30 years go from a few guys released in cyro to dominating the quadrant with fleets of OP ships using technology that was 700-900 years old.
Having said that, the devs definetly took a different direction to this expansion then to LoR before it. In LoR I could progress through the missions at my own pace and appreciate the story arc with only minor if any interruptions. The missions themselves had enough XP that I could leisurely work my way through them. There was also a lot more to it than the DR one.
This ties into the other problem with leveling. When it first came out, the leveling allowed me to stay up in pace with the story arc fairly well by setting it to elite and throwing a few random missions/patrols. Now, however, since Thursday that is not the case. My toon was at 58 pre-patch and took most of next two days grinding through elite and advanced missions/patrols to reach the level 59 requirements to do the last mission. That burned me out. I'm more or less just doffing/R&D cycling/collecting lobi this weekend. The toon still isn't even 60 yet. 6x more HP
but 5x more rewards was a good trade off. 6x HP for 2x rewards is not. This is a dramatic turn from how this entire MMO has worked in the two years that I have been playing it. I definitely do not like this new attitude from the devs.
And I almost forgot I couldn't train my Roms on the KDF side for, oh wait I still cannot train them properly. That was my main. I used an alt to get through the story line waiting for the boff training to be fixed for my main. So with the idiot nerfs to XP it'll take him months to reach 60. :rolleyes: Also, the workarounds do not allow me to train etps3 or ET3 . . .
Story Arc: B+ (This assumes I could play through it without days of stupid grind)
Bugs: F (Fix the Rom/KDF aligned boff training already, this should have been a priority, that it isn't explains why so few play KDF. Had this been for Feds, it would have had an emergency patch in hours the day DR was released)
PvP: F (dead already but just got worse, the stacking of all those specializations will turn off all new comers who cannot possible grind to the real level cap of 115)
PvE Queues: D (Rewards are not inline with the time investment AND the optionals requirements are killing pugs. I'm all for challenge but more HP was a dumb idea to begin with. Seriously fire the guy who came up with the bandaid to fix hemorrhaging artery. Challenge means something new not more of the same. Borg Disconnected is a good concept but really hard for Pugs given the HP out there in the mobs.)
R&D: F (ok I'm adding this because I was going to ignore it but the upgrades to MK XIV are so expensive on the exchange that I had to change my mind. This adds next to nothing to the game IMO except more grind. At MK XIV my disruptors are the same as they were at Mk XII. Only now they cost a lot of dil and tons of EC from the exchange to do a bit more damage)
Overall: D I already regret getting the DR pack. I only got it because I had a gut feeling the tier 6 ships would be 3000 zen and it looked like a way to keep up with the pace of the power creep in the game for toons across all three factions. Thanks to the XP grind, I will probably only play one or two of them going forward and even then I won't be able to keep pace. Nor does it matter anymore since PvP will be awful with all of these specializations stacking to their full potential. PvE queue rewards are so bad, that I will be doing Argala runs 60x a day to be doing anything meaningful in game. Seriously, if we fail an optional on borg disconnected on advanced we get 10 delta marks?!? That is not puggable, period. This expansion really only serves to introduce massive amounts of grind it seems.
Story is a B-. Good overall, but lots of little immersion breakers here and there. (why am I going along with murdering thousands on dozens of ships over some contraband?)
Mechanics, especially the overlong slugfest everything is, combined with the cut rewards is utter fail. F-.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
copy/pasted rewards
bugs out the wazoo
helping the kobali, which after talking to many who actually remember them from the show, the majority of people dislike them cause how they keep people from leaving their society, etc.
The story is nice, some cool features, cool new ships (your mileage may very), new abilities. But I dislike the levelling gap, and the whole Tier 5 Upgrade / Tier 6 ship stuff annoys me.
They would have been better off if they had released the missions on weekly basis or so if they want to ensure people do it spaced out, this way is just annoying, and Tier 5 Upgrade ships should simply be fully fledged Tier 6 ships. Maybe minus the special ship trait (because creating so many new traits out of thin air sounds genuinely impossible and). It would have allowed people to keep using their favourite ship (from canon or otherwise) without feeling gimped. Intel abilities could still have remained limited to the new ships and should have provided plenty of incentive for buying the new Tier 6 ships or the Ops pack. Maybe they would have had to increase the cost of the upgrades, but I still would have preferred. Especially since I half-way expect that we'll see eventually Tier 6 ship versions of the lower tier canon ships. Cryptic already had to do that for Tier 5 to satisfy us Star Trek nerds that needed their Tier 5 Defiants and Galaxies and what not.
Oh, and I am afraid they have made PvP even worse with specializations - there is now such a huge gap between a starting point Tier 6 character and a Tier 6 character Level 60 Specialization with a Tier 6 ship ship and all reputations maxed out and what not that PvP can never really be satisfactory - too many people will realize what mountain they have to climb to become competitive and just not bother. Especially since the only thing of meaning in STO PvP is the invididual match - no territory control, no leaderboards.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Story missions (the few proper story missions there are anyway) : B
Everything else : D-
Overall disappointing, I feel like they forgot to unlock the other 50+ story missions I would need to get to level 60, without mindlessly regrinding the whole game 10 times over.
STO Devs handling of the various bugs and issues (including the EXP gain rollback debacle): F(I'd go lower too, if it were possible on a grading scale.)
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Story content: B (story is good, we just need more of it, more exp and and less boring patrols)
Everything else: (including STO devs nerfing and [mis]handling of issues): F
D+
Just too many poorly thought out things. The parts of the story that I have seen (I am NOT grinding XP, it will come as it comes) are good but using the patrol missions as half or more of the content feels lame to me. The bad parts, well, have been discussed enough already.
Story was alright for the most part, there were a lot of things that seemed off to me and playing as a Starfleet Officer I didn't really feel like one. Also the ending to the episodes was not much of a cliffhanger and I wasn't really shocked about it.
Content: D-
Patrol Missions are NOT content... and while I do like some of the new visuals introduced I feel like they put way too much emphasis on the Vaadwaur. They were a one off race Voyager ran into while on their journey and to focus an entire episode block on them was a mistake. Seeing all the blogs about all the Delta Quadrant races we'd be running into I though we would be fighting diverse groups of enemies, but in reality we were constantly fighting the Vaadwaur in ground and space. The few times we weren't fighting them we'd get to fight a random DQ race in space, never did we get to fight Kazon on ground or APUs, or any of the others. The Kobali Zone while it looks great really has very little playback value and I feel it's gonna go to waste once everyone finishes it.
Systems: F
The Upgrade System and the recently introduced nerfs to queue rewards and SXP are awful. I'm also not a big fan of the T-5U / T-6 ship introduction, it just screams of a cash grab. There were many prior issues with the doff system and R&D that weren't fixed before DR and the bugs introduced since then just reek of poor Q/A.
Communication: F-
There are a lot of 'why's that haven't been answered and the players don't really know what the Devs are thinking (I think they've lost their minds). While the blogs leading up to the expansion looked very nice and I'm sure a lot of effort went into them, the overall content in them was hollow. Many issues were found on tribble by testers like me and a lot of the issues were ignored. While some of the Devs have been very communicative others have been noticeably silent, and with the recent 'exploits' which were clearly issues that had been brought to the attention of the Devs long before launch, for the Devs to punish players for their mistakes that they were guilty of letting slide into the game is absurd.
Overall: F
They really missed the mark on this expansion, it honestly doesn't even feel like an expansion... feels more like a glorified season. And the way the Devs have treated some of the community members recently has be appalling. Unless they do some extreme changes to the systems and content they introduced I only see things getting worse from here on, 60 pieces of lobi isn't want we want, we don't want this game to be a DPS race... nor do we want these silly patrol missions instead of actual content.
Delta Rising... more like 'Alpha Release' Rising :rolleyes:
I was impressed with the story and the voice acting. The game part however was a big let down. I fundamentally disagree with the direction of the game in taking the ultra grind route. My issue is that the lengths at which one has to grind now to make progress seems so distant in relation to the past that the carrot no longer seems worth it, which is a shame because I liked the game itself and would like to keep playing it. But Cryptic has made sticking with it more difficult.
I would have preferred to have had the option of having paid for the xpack and got new content under the pacing of the old. Then at least would still make for a game still worthwhile. But with the current state of "free" xpacks, it seems I've been pushed out of the demographic for the game regardless. But, who knows. Perhaps Cryptics direction will ultimately squeeze a minority of the fans for so much money that the potential loss of myself and others will still work itself out to being a fiscal net gain for the company. Kind of sucks for some of us, the fans, however.
My rating is a D. Not quite failing, because I can really tell they put some effort into it. The story is great, the voice acting is great, the modeling of the Guardian makes it look like a ship that would actually be in Starfleet. But the grind sadly makes me not want to bother. I might go so far as to upgrade my mark to a B with the flipping of numbers around, but I'm not holding my breath.
Not enough story content to allow the story to flow.
The need to grind and replay missions to complete the story.
The ridiculous HP and shields on the new foes making every battle into a boring slog.
The way the Fed's get 5 Tier 6 ships to the other factions 2 a piece, allowing Fed to have a choice from 5 ship traits while KDF & ROM get 2 traits and no choice.
The total fubar of the Tau Dewa missions, because who doesn't like being called a cheat?
So overall an F.
Oh I forgot Robert Picardo's VO was excellent, which earns the grade a free upgrade.
It's not possible to grade them without considering the typical 5th Grade report card. At this stage in the MMO's development, we should be using 3 grades: Satisfactory S, Needs Improvement N, and Unsatisfactory U
Reading S
Language Arts U
Mathematics U
Science S
Social Studies U
My time playing has dropped dramatically. I went from playing lots of STFs, and re-playing episode content, to this: Log on. Wait for assignments to complete. Begin twenty hour R&D projects. Run a patrol for duty officer assignments. Check exchange for anything interesting. Log out.
Too many bugs. Too much broken gear. "Encouraging" upgrades by altering difficulty levels that didn't need it. Nerfing rewards to increase sales. Less time monetizing, and more time fixing bugs is what's needed, but I have no expectation of that happening.
The voice actors were the only bright spot. Tim Russ was excellent. Its a shame the developers are tarnishing that fine work with their greed and incompetence.
I think I would give a E.
It's plain bad, and shallow of content, especially for an expansion. The story is not bad, and it's the only redeeming part, unfortunately, it's extremely short, filled with level gap and patrol cheap filler.
Up until the EP got worried food might not be on his table, solid B+, borderline A-.
Even knowing what all the content would be from "testing" it on tribble, it was still fun to play through everything with voice acting again.
Breakdown:
Story: B+ better than anything they've written so far
Missions: C way too much wrapper patrol but it was known before live
Added features and content: A+ a lot of work was put into new stuff, so good on you cryptic
The fact that my friends list wasn't a ghost town from 10/14-10/22: again A+ I like seeng my friends returning
However, obvious stuff here
Dev communication after the fact: F
D'angelo again proving himself to not be able to communicate without insulting his customers: F
Dev teams ability to take the fall for their mistake: F
Dev teams ability to listen to feedback on tribble which would have avoided all of this: F
My now ghost town of a friends list: F
Rolling back in a situation that doesn't allow either a) massive server instability or b) massive effect on the games economy, either real or virtual (basically one of the 10 dev commandments you do not ever break): Scale needs to go lower than F
Using blanket tactics such as "300 accounts" and "17x faster" when in reality no metrics could support this statement: Again, this only goes to F
Cryptic, you made your own bed. Balls in your court to make "the best expansion ever" not the "best twisting of words ever". If you asked me on the 22nd, solid B+. Now, I login, queue r&d and doff and log out to play solo player civ. I got hit as hard as some of the dps guys (110>60) and thats really too bad. Because I was totally set to level my next of 27 chars to 110 this weekend and was taking a grind recoup break after finishing my first. Upgrades (ie dilithium) cryptic will now never see. Box/lobi ships I will never buy when the majority of those chars would have recieved them. All because your EP wanted to add a lil epeen to the tone of his post.
Tell me cryptic whats more profitable? People giving you two dollars for a skill booster that does nothing and never buying one again? Or people with massive amounts of alts ready to be upgraded/leveled because they actually enjoyed your new content, the pace at which progression was possible, and were having fun with friends all day? Apparently, y'all like the $2 route.
New Missions: C+
There are some fantastic new missions, such as Mindscape and the Dragon's Deciet that are A+ efforts; there are also some fun little surprises like the Shuttle Race mission... but the fact that it's all drowned out by long and painful grinds pulls the grade down to a C+. Some of the best work in this release is in a few of the new missions. Unfortunately, so is some of the worst.
New Ships: C-
Far more wore was put into non-canon-inspired and alien designs, than was put into the handful of ships that are actually canon-inspired. The new ships in the game are one of the biggest letdowns in DR, especially considering the FANTASTIC work that these ship artists have proven themselves capable of. I have very high expectations from this team on this front, and they were not met.
New Environments: A
The Kobali Battlezone is, IMO, the most beautiful ground map in the game. The environment designers went above and beyond, and have continued to impress me. The environments in this expansion are new, interesting, refreshing, and generally top-notch. Give these guys a raise, because they're consistently putting out the best work in Star Trek Online.
Level Cap Raise: F
This was handled very poorly. I think we all see the pain it's causing. The XP apportionment was insufficient, and the work required to earn it is too great. We're being asked to do more work for less payout, and it's making it excruciatingly difficult to run multiple toons. This upgrade was poorly conceived, poorly executed, and unfair to the players.
PvE revamp: D+
Space gets an F. Ground gets a C+. There are plenty of bugs, and you still have yet to fix IGA's boss room. The biggest problem in space is the lack of a proper level for the ~10k DPSer. A huge portion of your playerbase is casual-elite, and we run between 7k and 13k DPS, and we had a very hard time doing Advanced queues at launch. It's a little better now, but you've still cut down our rewards and again, are requiring us to do more work for less payoff. Also, we were promised Normal, Advanced and Elite content for all queues. That hasn't happened. I'm very anxious to try Elite Ground STFs.
Tailor revamp: B-
A lot of good changes here. Right now it gets a B-, but I can see this grade going much, much higher if and when it gets a little touchup. I'm glad to see more sliders for body and face options, and I like the fact that the new BOFFs are all fully customizable (even if it was a mistake, leave it, it was a good one). There's still some work to do though... female swimsuits look bad... there are a whole new set of clipping issues... and the off-duty gating needs to go. Neelix wore a comm badge with his Talaxian outfit... I should be able to as well.
Intangibles: B-
Voice overs were great to hear. Really happy to see Neelix around, and I love having the Doctor as a DOFF who beams in during combat. The new Queuable missions are ok... not great... still far off the mark of the original Borg eSTFs. The upgrade system is painfully expensive, and could use a balance. The Delta Quadrant music is sort of cheesy, and doesn't feel 'Trek' to me at all.
Overall Grade averages out around a C.
But with some of the events that have transpired since release, that feels pretty generous.
Comments
Dont you know? those dancing ninjas are epic
they ninja you and then dance while you fail
Having said that, the devs definetly took a different direction to this expansion then to LoR before it. In LoR I could progress through the missions at my own pace and appreciate the story arc with only minor if any interruptions. The missions themselves had enough XP that I could leisurely work my way through them. There was also a lot more to it than the DR one.
This ties into the other problem with leveling. When it first came out, the leveling allowed me to stay up in pace with the story arc fairly well by setting it to elite and throwing a few random missions/patrols. Now, however, since Thursday that is not the case. My toon was at 58 pre-patch and took most of next two days grinding through elite and advanced missions/patrols to reach the level 59 requirements to do the last mission. That burned me out. I'm more or less just doffing/R&D cycling/collecting lobi this weekend. The toon still isn't even 60 yet. 6x more HP
but 5x more rewards was a good trade off. 6x HP for 2x rewards is not. This is a dramatic turn from how this entire MMO has worked in the two years that I have been playing it. I definitely do not like this new attitude from the devs.
And I almost forgot I couldn't train my Roms on the KDF side for, oh wait I still cannot train them properly. That was my main. I used an alt to get through the story line waiting for the boff training to be fixed for my main. So with the idiot nerfs to XP it'll take him months to reach 60. :rolleyes: Also, the workarounds do not allow me to train etps3 or ET3 . . .
Story Arc: B+ (This assumes I could play through it without days of stupid grind)
Bugs: F (Fix the Rom/KDF aligned boff training already, this should have been a priority, that it isn't explains why so few play KDF. Had this been for Feds, it would have had an emergency patch in hours the day DR was released)
PvP: F (dead already but just got worse, the stacking of all those specializations will turn off all new comers who cannot possible grind to the real level cap of 115)
PvE Queues: D (Rewards are not inline with the time investment AND the optionals requirements are killing pugs. I'm all for challenge but more HP was a dumb idea to begin with. Seriously fire the guy who came up with the bandaid to fix hemorrhaging artery. Challenge means something new not more of the same. Borg Disconnected is a good concept but really hard for Pugs given the HP out there in the mobs.)
R&D: F (ok I'm adding this because I was going to ignore it but the upgrades to MK XIV are so expensive on the exchange that I had to change my mind. This adds next to nothing to the game IMO except more grind. At MK XIV my disruptors are the same as they were at Mk XII. Only now they cost a lot of dil and tons of EC from the exchange to do a bit more damage)
Overall: D I already regret getting the DR pack. I only got it because I had a gut feeling the tier 6 ships would be 3000 zen and it looked like a way to keep up with the pace of the power creep in the game for toons across all three factions. Thanks to the XP grind, I will probably only play one or two of them going forward and even then I won't be able to keep pace. Nor does it matter anymore since PvP will be awful with all of these specializations stacking to their full potential. PvE queue rewards are so bad, that I will be doing Argala runs 60x a day to be doing anything meaningful in game. Seriously, if we fail an optional on borg disconnected on advanced we get 10 delta marks?!? That is not puggable, period. This expansion really only serves to introduce massive amounts of grind it seems.
Mechanics, especially the overlong slugfest everything is, combined with the cut rewards is utter fail. F-.
This is the correct answer ducy
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
copy/pasted rewards
bugs out the wazoo
helping the kobali, which after talking to many who actually remember them from the show, the majority of people dislike them cause how they keep people from leaving their society, etc.
The story is nice, some cool features, cool new ships (your mileage may very), new abilities. But I dislike the levelling gap, and the whole Tier 5 Upgrade / Tier 6 ship stuff annoys me.
They would have been better off if they had released the missions on weekly basis or so if they want to ensure people do it spaced out, this way is just annoying, and Tier 5 Upgrade ships should simply be fully fledged Tier 6 ships. Maybe minus the special ship trait (because creating so many new traits out of thin air sounds genuinely impossible and). It would have allowed people to keep using their favourite ship (from canon or otherwise) without feeling gimped. Intel abilities could still have remained limited to the new ships and should have provided plenty of incentive for buying the new Tier 6 ships or the Ops pack. Maybe they would have had to increase the cost of the upgrades, but I still would have preferred. Especially since I half-way expect that we'll see eventually Tier 6 ship versions of the lower tier canon ships. Cryptic already had to do that for Tier 5 to satisfy us Star Trek nerds that needed their Tier 5 Defiants and Galaxies and what not.
Oh, and I am afraid they have made PvP even worse with specializations - there is now such a huge gap between a starting point Tier 6 character and a Tier 6 character Level 60 Specialization with a Tier 6 ship ship and all reputations maxed out and what not that PvP can never really be satisfactory - too many people will realize what mountain they have to climb to become competitive and just not bother. Especially since the only thing of meaning in STO PvP is the invididual match - no territory control, no leaderboards.
Everything else : D-
Overall disappointing, I feel like they forgot to unlock the other 50+ story missions I would need to get to level 60, without mindlessly regrinding the whole game 10 times over.
STO Devs handling of the various bugs and issues (including the EXP gain rollback debacle): F(I'd go lower too, if it were possible on a grading scale.)
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Everything else: (including STO devs nerfing and [mis]handling of issues): F
D- for everything else.
Just too many poorly thought out things. The parts of the story that I have seen (I am NOT grinding XP, it will come as it comes) are good but using the patrol missions as half or more of the content feels lame to me. The bad parts, well, have been discussed enough already.
Story was alright for the most part, there were a lot of things that seemed off to me and playing as a Starfleet Officer I didn't really feel like one. Also the ending to the episodes was not much of a cliffhanger and I wasn't really shocked about it.
Content: D-
Patrol Missions are NOT content... and while I do like some of the new visuals introduced I feel like they put way too much emphasis on the Vaadwaur. They were a one off race Voyager ran into while on their journey and to focus an entire episode block on them was a mistake. Seeing all the blogs about all the Delta Quadrant races we'd be running into I though we would be fighting diverse groups of enemies, but in reality we were constantly fighting the Vaadwaur in ground and space. The few times we weren't fighting them we'd get to fight a random DQ race in space, never did we get to fight Kazon on ground or APUs, or any of the others. The Kobali Zone while it looks great really has very little playback value and I feel it's gonna go to waste once everyone finishes it.
Systems: F
The Upgrade System and the recently introduced nerfs to queue rewards and SXP are awful. I'm also not a big fan of the T-5U / T-6 ship introduction, it just screams of a cash grab. There were many prior issues with the doff system and R&D that weren't fixed before DR and the bugs introduced since then just reek of poor Q/A.
Communication: F-
There are a lot of 'why's that haven't been answered and the players don't really know what the Devs are thinking (I think they've lost their minds). While the blogs leading up to the expansion looked very nice and I'm sure a lot of effort went into them, the overall content in them was hollow. Many issues were found on tribble by testers like me and a lot of the issues were ignored. While some of the Devs have been very communicative others have been noticeably silent, and with the recent 'exploits' which were clearly issues that had been brought to the attention of the Devs long before launch, for the Devs to punish players for their mistakes that they were guilty of letting slide into the game is absurd.
Overall: F
They really missed the mark on this expansion, it honestly doesn't even feel like an expansion... feels more like a glorified season. And the way the Devs have treated some of the community members recently has be appalling. Unless they do some extreme changes to the systems and content they introduced I only see things getting worse from here on, 60 pieces of lobi isn't want we want, we don't want this game to be a DPS race... nor do we want these silly patrol missions instead of actual content.
Delta Rising... more like 'Alpha Release' Rising :rolleyes:
I would have preferred to have had the option of having paid for the xpack and got new content under the pacing of the old. Then at least would still make for a game still worthwhile. But with the current state of "free" xpacks, it seems I've been pushed out of the demographic for the game regardless. But, who knows. Perhaps Cryptics direction will ultimately squeeze a minority of the fans for so much money that the potential loss of myself and others will still work itself out to being a fiscal net gain for the company. Kind of sucks for some of us, the fans, however.
My rating is a D. Not quite failing, because I can really tell they put some effort into it. The story is great, the voice acting is great, the modeling of the Guardian makes it look like a ship that would actually be in Starfleet. But the grind sadly makes me not want to bother. I might go so far as to upgrade my mark to a B with the flipping of numbers around, but I'm not holding my breath.
Everything Else : Z
DR has turned STO into one huge, time-gated greed-fest.
The need to grind and replay missions to complete the story.
The ridiculous HP and shields on the new foes making every battle into a boring slog.
The way the Fed's get 5 Tier 6 ships to the other factions 2 a piece, allowing Fed to have a choice from 5 ship traits while KDF & ROM get 2 traits and no choice.
The total fubar of the Tau Dewa missions, because who doesn't like being called a cheat?
So overall an F.
Oh I forgot Robert Picardo's VO was excellent, which earns the grade a free upgrade.
So final grade FU.
Reading S
Language Arts U
Mathematics U
Science S
Social Studies U
Music S
Art S
P.E.N
Health N
"Little Johnny needs the school that the short bus goes to"
My time playing has dropped dramatically. I went from playing lots of STFs, and re-playing episode content, to this: Log on. Wait for assignments to complete. Begin twenty hour R&D projects. Run a patrol for duty officer assignments. Check exchange for anything interesting. Log out.
Too many bugs. Too much broken gear. "Encouraging" upgrades by altering difficulty levels that didn't need it. Nerfing rewards to increase sales. Less time monetizing, and more time fixing bugs is what's needed, but I have no expectation of that happening.
The voice actors were the only bright spot. Tim Russ was excellent. Its a shame the developers are tarnishing that fine work with their greed and incompetence.
It's plain bad, and shallow of content, especially for an expansion. The story is not bad, and it's the only redeeming part, unfortunately, it's extremely short, filled with level gap and patrol cheap filler.
Even knowing what all the content would be from "testing" it on tribble, it was still fun to play through everything with voice acting again.
Breakdown:
Story: B+ better than anything they've written so far
Missions: C way too much wrapper patrol but it was known before live
Added features and content: A+ a lot of work was put into new stuff, so good on you cryptic
The fact that my friends list wasn't a ghost town from 10/14-10/22: again A+ I like seeng my friends returning
However, obvious stuff here
Dev communication after the fact: F
D'angelo again proving himself to not be able to communicate without insulting his customers: F
Dev teams ability to take the fall for their mistake: F
Dev teams ability to listen to feedback on tribble which would have avoided all of this: F
My now ghost town of a friends list: F
Rolling back in a situation that doesn't allow either a) massive server instability or b) massive effect on the games economy, either real or virtual (basically one of the 10 dev commandments you do not ever break): Scale needs to go lower than F
Using blanket tactics such as "300 accounts" and "17x faster" when in reality no metrics could support this statement: Again, this only goes to F
Cryptic, you made your own bed. Balls in your court to make "the best expansion ever" not the "best twisting of words ever". If you asked me on the 22nd, solid B+. Now, I login, queue r&d and doff and log out to play solo player civ. I got hit as hard as some of the dps guys (110>60) and thats really too bad. Because I was totally set to level my next of 27 chars to 110 this weekend and was taking a grind recoup break after finishing my first. Upgrades (ie dilithium) cryptic will now never see. Box/lobi ships I will never buy when the majority of those chars would have recieved them. All because your EP wanted to add a lil epeen to the tone of his post.
Tell me cryptic whats more profitable? People giving you two dollars for a skill booster that does nothing and never buying one again? Or people with massive amounts of alts ready to be upgraded/leveled because they actually enjoyed your new content, the pace at which progression was possible, and were having fun with friends all day? Apparently, y'all like the $2 route.
Story: B
Everything else: F
Cryptic: There isnt even a grade to express how much you guys fail right now.
Visuals: A
Bugs: F
PvP: F
PvE Queues: F (Zero)
R&D: F
Communication: F
Support: F
Quality Control: F
Overall: D
Would you recommend STO to a friend?
There are some fantastic new missions, such as Mindscape and the Dragon's Deciet that are A+ efforts; there are also some fun little surprises like the Shuttle Race mission... but the fact that it's all drowned out by long and painful grinds pulls the grade down to a C+. Some of the best work in this release is in a few of the new missions. Unfortunately, so is some of the worst.
New Ships: C-
Far more wore was put into non-canon-inspired and alien designs, than was put into the handful of ships that are actually canon-inspired. The new ships in the game are one of the biggest letdowns in DR, especially considering the FANTASTIC work that these ship artists have proven themselves capable of. I have very high expectations from this team on this front, and they were not met.
New Environments: A
The Kobali Battlezone is, IMO, the most beautiful ground map in the game. The environment designers went above and beyond, and have continued to impress me. The environments in this expansion are new, interesting, refreshing, and generally top-notch. Give these guys a raise, because they're consistently putting out the best work in Star Trek Online.
Level Cap Raise: F
This was handled very poorly. I think we all see the pain it's causing. The XP apportionment was insufficient, and the work required to earn it is too great. We're being asked to do more work for less payout, and it's making it excruciatingly difficult to run multiple toons. This upgrade was poorly conceived, poorly executed, and unfair to the players.
PvE revamp: D+
Space gets an F. Ground gets a C+. There are plenty of bugs, and you still have yet to fix IGA's boss room. The biggest problem in space is the lack of a proper level for the ~10k DPSer. A huge portion of your playerbase is casual-elite, and we run between 7k and 13k DPS, and we had a very hard time doing Advanced queues at launch. It's a little better now, but you've still cut down our rewards and again, are requiring us to do more work for less payoff. Also, we were promised Normal, Advanced and Elite content for all queues. That hasn't happened. I'm very anxious to try Elite Ground STFs.
Tailor revamp: B-
A lot of good changes here. Right now it gets a B-, but I can see this grade going much, much higher if and when it gets a little touchup. I'm glad to see more sliders for body and face options, and I like the fact that the new BOFFs are all fully customizable (even if it was a mistake, leave it, it was a good one). There's still some work to do though... female swimsuits look bad... there are a whole new set of clipping issues... and the off-duty gating needs to go. Neelix wore a comm badge with his Talaxian outfit... I should be able to as well.
Intangibles: B-
Voice overs were great to hear. Really happy to see Neelix around, and I love having the Doctor as a DOFF who beams in during combat. The new Queuable missions are ok... not great... still far off the mark of the original Borg eSTFs. The upgrade system is painfully expensive, and could use a balance. The Delta Quadrant music is sort of cheesy, and doesn't feel 'Trek' to me at all.
Overall Grade averages out around a C.
But with some of the events that have transpired since release, that feels pretty generous.
New Difficulties: D-
Disconnected: D
Bug Hunt: B
Communication: F
Bug Testing: F
Overall: D
So Overall a C- or a D+