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Is this game 100% P2W
lastdivinity
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Like if i throw enough Money at it can i buy all the best stuff riht out of the Exchange. Or are there still items stuff that have to be grind that are bind on pickup or somthing similar?
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Technically you can grind for anything, since you can turn dil into Zen.
There are a lot of crafted gear that you can buy, but crafted gear gets randomly generated modifiers. What you are looking for may not exist because it may not have been crafted yet. Or has already been purchased and you need to wait until more appear on the Exchange. Additionally, the Exchange only allows people to list items up to 500 million EC. If you want to buy an item that a player is willing to sell for more than 500 million EC, then you will need join a trade channel (something I have no idea about) and find someone with that item who is willing to do a direct trade with you. A possible example is the T6 Elachi Sheshar Dreadnought. That is a promo ship back in January I think. Players had a chance to win it when they purchased R&D boxes from the C-Store during the time the promo event was running and open them (either during or after the promo event). It is basically the same concept for the T6 Jem'hadar Strike ship. Buy R&D boxes now during the current promo event to win a T6 Jem'hadar Strike ship.
The game has Reputation Gear which can only be obtained from the specific reputation systems you are working on. Gear purchased from the rep systems are bound to your character. They are Mk XII gear and you personally need to upgrade them to Mk XIV.
Edit:
I forgot about fleet gear and ships... since I am not in a Fleet. First you need to join a fleet that has been developed far enough to purchase the best stuff they have to offer. These items are bound to your toon. The best ships are arguably Fleet ships. There are currently no T6 fleet ships. But back when T5 ships were the best, you had to be in a fleet with a Tier 5 shipyard to have the opportunity to purchase a T5 Fleet ship. Should T6 Fleet ships become available, the fleet would most likely need members to contribute resources to build a Tier 6 Shipyard. Once that project has been completed then players will be able to purchase T6 Fleet ships (if any are released).
No. Everything in game, with only a few exceptions (99% of which are cosmetic) can be had for free if you are willing to spend the TIME to EARN it. There are many tricks to earning things efficiently --- a sackful of alts is a great way to do it because you can only earn so much "bought currency (zen)" per day per character.
I have spend a bit but I have also earned on the average one big ticket item every 2 months. Talking $30 ships here, not "gear".
Gear is earned in game at a fairly decent pace. I have created two new characters since the last expansion hit and both are already geared -- one 100% and then some, the second has the critical items and is rounding out the nice to have stuff.
There are plenty of bind on acquire. There are 4 types: bound on acquire, bound on equip, account bound on acquire, account bound on equip. You CANNOT buy the bulk of your endgame gear in the exchange. You can buy starter equipment for every slot there, but not the good stuff. The good stuff comes from 3 places... crafting, which can be traded, reputation, which binds on acquire to character, and fleet stores, which bind on acquire to character.
A very few items that are endgame worthy are found in the lockboxs or from the currency found in them, and those items can be bough off the exchange. The bulk of this stuff is not that awesome, only a few items are.
HOWEVER, if you want your stuff NOW without working for it, you CAN CHOOSE to pay which can get you SOME of the items faster. Specifically it will get you anything off the exchange (you can buy things with real money to sell for in-game cash and then use that to buy the items that can be sold, again, there are not many of those worth havnig) and you can use it to pay the dil part of the costs for fleet and rep gear (you can convert dil and zen in both directions, this is the opposite of earning it, you buy it and sell it to someone who is earning it..) .
However, you would be unable to get the best Defector/Engine/Shield sets because the best of those are from the Reputation system, which you cannot pay to accelerate. You would be unable to get Fleet items because you need Fleet Credits, which means you wouldn't have Fleet Tactical or Science consoles, nor all but one Elite hanger.
Even if you could buy all the above with real money, if you don't know how to make a proper build you'd still suck rocks. Gear is secondary to proper builds and piloting.
So no, it's not 100% P2W.
quite simply, if players stopped putting zen on the exchange, stopped putting keys in, stopped buying anything from the store that can be resold or traded...
f2p players would be stopped cold from advancing. you'd be stuck in the last free ship you could get forever. so yes, this is pay to win.
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
I'm serious, win what?
PvP is dead. PvE is laughably easy, they just upped the HP. The only things left to win is forum PvP and exchange speculating.
The answer is both yes, and no.
For example, to start out in the game, you can buy low level ships that offer slight advantages over the free ones you will get. But you will need to buy those from the C-Store with Zen.
After you reach level 50-60, you can use the T5 and T6 ships from the C-Store. Or, you can gamble on lockboxes to try to get ships, or just buy the ships off the exchange.
You can grind for the resources needed to buy stuff in the game, but if you are willing to spend money, it will make things go so much faster.
If you don't want to grind a rep system, there are other consoles that you can buy off the exchange, or join a fleet to obtain consoles or weapons. At which point yes, money will help you to obtain everything you need much faster. Even if you want to max out the weapons and gear you can get, real money will speed it up a lot.
So, even though money is not "required" to play the game, STO is heavily designed to encourage players to do the pay to win method. Otherwise, it is more of a grind fest, on top of the ridiculous xp grind after getting to level 50.
The only thing you will really miss from not grinding the rep systems are the passives. The gear in there is not the ultimate gear in the game. Depending on what you are after, the crafting system offers some really good alternatives.
So, as I said before, yes, and no. The game is being designed to become a DPS chasing grind fest. While money is not required, the game encourages paying to win so that you can get the next best power creep, upgrade to the highest DPS your weapons can get, etc.
If you want to go pay to win, you could. It will save a LOT of time.
That's a bad idea which will only hurt you, the grinder.
to advance in the game, stuck on free ships...think about how far you can go with those eh? this is pay to win, if someone wasn't buying stuff and reselling it everyone would be stuck on free ships until they paid some cash.
irrefutable fact.
i'm normally against any pay to win tag on mmo's unless there are certain conditions met. sto does meet those. you cannot advance without someone spending money, it doesn't matter if you consider PvP dead, cash shop ships/consoles will easily beat any free ship in PvP.
sto has all the qualifications of pay to win and pay to advance.
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
If your goal is to play through all of the Episodes for each faction, participate in special events, explore the galaxy (i.e. do patrols) and at least contribute to (if not excel at) any Standard level difficulty Task Forces that strike your fancy, then, no, the game is not pay to win.
If it is to tweak your character to have the best possible stats he or she can possibly have, then it depends on how valuable your time is to you. If the goal is best possible stats in shortest possible time, it is free to win in the sense that you can get there substantially faster by paying real money versus grinding. If time is no object, it isn't free to win since anything in the game can be got by grinding.
A minor point to those who insist that all zen on the market is paid for ... that's not technically, completely true. As long as the game is running, anyone with a lifetime membership is still getting their 500 zen stipend each month. That is zen being "added" to the market without any real money paid into it. Okay, yes, I'm not stupid ... sure, they DID pay for the lifetime membership, so it's technically a case of as time goes on, each unit of stipend zen corresponds to less and less of the real money that got paid, but that number does dwindle to far below what even stipend zen attached to a monthly subscription represents.
I'm one of those stubborn people.
There really is no P2W. If someone like me can take the time to work towards something like the Vesta Bundle or even the Delta Pack (Which I am working on BTW)... You just need to play the Dilithium Exchange. Knowing how it will fluctuate based on in game events, knowing good sources of Dilithium, and maybe even having alts, can all help speed up the process.
For example, whenever we have the Crystaline Event or Mirror Event, one of the rewards is 50,000 Dilithium Ore. Per Character. That is a good boost to that character. However these events usually tend to flood the Dilithium market, driving the conversion rate of DL>Zen up for a bit because of excess supply. Same thing happens when new C-Store ships are introduced. Increased Demand drives the exchange rate of DL>Zen up for a time.
The last couple months the exchange has been high because of several factors.
Usually at some point after a major event or C-Store release the exchange rates drop back down to a steady level, which I believe right now, due to lack of a real demand for Dilithium outside of upgrading gear, is about 145-150 range. If we have a new Fleet Holding, Dilithium would be in more demand, driving the Zen prices down a bit.
So you see... as a F2P player, learning how events affect the Exchange rates can help get just about anything you want in the C-Store.
You want P2W... look at TOR. Can't even EQUIP items above a certain rarity as F2P without an "Authorization something or other". And guess where you can get those the easiest.
You can have the best gear grinded, the best weapons crafted, the best ship selected, and you still lose if you dont know how to use it.
Like having an A-Bomb and killing yourself because you didnt know how to target something else.
You can have a powerful Porsche, and crash it because you dont know how to handle that much PS. Or however you measure the motor power.
You can have the oldest books by Shakespear, and cant read it because you cant decipher the letters.
Inferior alternatives, unless you have something specific in mind.
KCB & Assimilated console is still on practically every ship. They're fairly shallow into Omega rep, though.
STO however rides the line. You CAN get all the premium stuff but you have to grind, grind, grind and play the Dilithium Exchange game that has only gone higher and higher as time has gone on. You're going to spend more dil per zen point you want as time goes on. It doesn't help that the game has gotten more expensive requiring dil in more parts of the game that didn't need it before (i.e. R&D crafting and upgrading).
But yes, technically you can get everything for free. But you'll need to grind and have a lot of patience. The game is designed to throw these walls at you of higher dil costs to get you to buy zen with real money so you can convert them to dil at worse and worse exchange rates.
^^^ that
you dont need the pay stuff to "win" most game objectives.
its all just in you gorram heads, youll be fine with what ever free equipment you got lying around from missions and cheap excange stuff
yr coming to a forum where all but the most obsessive STO players hang out (like me i suppose)
of course we want the best stuff to "win"...i dunno, our pleasure?
but NO you dont HAVE to pay, to get to the end of the story line, you dont have to pay to be effective in PvE.
Interested in Role Playing? Join the 12th Fleet Science division!
It's; Pay to lose!
Because when you fall for the selling point for that new shiny ship, or mechanic, or what have you. You've just lost the game. Because you missed the point.
Even if you do pay out to get the best stuff quicker, the best builds are built around items which are acquired through fleet/rep grinding. (All the best DPS builds mostly involve Fleet, & Rep consoles, and weapons.)
You do not need to be a TryHard PVPer to have fun. MMO PvP is a futile exercise in popular game mechanic exploitation post predictable opprobrious Nerfing anyways. You A; need to avoid those popular game mechanics, because your going to get smacked upside the face by the Nerf Bat if you depend on them, & 2; You don't need to follow the other lemmings over the cliff to actually enjoy the content. Remember it's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. Apropos; steer clear of the frustration, lest you stop having fun.
You do not need to buy that newest game mechanic, (It usually sucks, or simply reiterates an older mechanic that already exists in a different way anyways.)
Yeah, those fancy new ships, with all the bells and whistles are costly. You don't need them! Unless you really want them. Ignore them!
Once you realize you don't need them. Then you win. You actually win the game. Because the true game. The real game here. Is avoiding the con of being sold something you don't need. And enjoying the game the way you want, don't let someone sell you on playing their way. Play the game on your own terms. That's how you win. It's Star Trek Online. What game do you want to be playing?
I see allot of them with a character, and ship.
though I'm not sure which ship to put on there...
I'll think about it. This will do for now.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I can clean up most PVE content using dropped gear and white stock gear. I have played STFs using ordinary purple and blue gear and had fun. I PVP with a select group of friends who play for fun, we like to come up with absurd builds and smash them together.
I have also payed more than I care to admit to get the toys I want... but they aren't strictly required -- as I said I can play the game and have fun with stock gear.
Contrary to what the forums will have you think, there is no top-prize for running a 3,000,000 DPS Tac Pawnscort with FAW-Spam II and Cannon FU III. And Aux2Battery still means you put your pants on one leg at a time. And there is no prize other than E-peen for melting everything in an STF in under 90 seconds.
Those things can be done using gear you grind out -- I've bought most of what there is to buy and I don't have any special advantage over the DPS-lords or the Aux2Battery Gods. I win my portion of the game and they win theirs.
Take this away from my rambling -- many people can and do play this game without putting a cent into it and they build some AMAZING ships and toons. Paying into the game helps us get nice things -- our money pays for development. But "winning"? No, paying doesn't help you win.
First, you mention two items that is found in one of the oldest rep systems. So it stands to reason that there will be a lot of players with those consoles, especially if they have a build with those in mind.
Also, there are still a lot of players out there with the Assimilated space set, but it is not necessarily the best space set for survivability.
Second, you mentioned that they are also "fairly shallow into the Omega rep". With the STFs being the queues that are usually run the most, it stands to reason that many will have these first, if they want rep gear, since they are some of the quickest to get in the rep system. Especially with the sponcorship token on alts.
Third, if you read what I wrote, I didn't say that other things in the game were necessarily better. I said it "Depending on what you are after, the crafting system offers some really good alternatives". Not to list all of them, but here is a site where you can see what some can offer: http://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/2e112l/ultra_rare_mk_xii_crafting_consoles/
Another thing to keep in mind is that in the opening post, the op said "Like if i throw enough Money at it can i buy all the best stuff riht out of the Exchange. Or are there still items stuff that have to be grind that are bind on pickup or somthing similar?"
Depending on what he is considering "the best stuff" there is a lot that can be bought off the exchange. As I said, it depends on what he is after. For the highest DPS weapons, he can buy them off the exchange with EC obtained by selling C-Store items on the exchange faster than grinding for the EC.
Therefore, like I said, the gear in the rep system is not the ultimate gear. That would vary depending on each person. However, it is possible to get a high DPS build, minus the passives from the rep system, with real money. C-Store ships and items, plus items from the C-Store that can be sold on the exchange to buy consoles, as well as fleet consoles that can be bought from fleet stores. And anyone that has the money for it can get tons of fleet credits very quickly from a lot of fleets.
So yes, it is possible to have an end game high DPS ship, with weapons MK XIV, as well as consoles just as good as the ones from rep systems, Doffs, and Boffs, with real money within a week on a level 50 character. The only thing missing is the passive abilities. But, they were not asking about passives, which cannot be sped up by Dil.
The only thing left will be to make sure they can properly fly the ship properly. If they already know how, or can catch on quick, then there is no problem there.
The can be P2W, and is pushed heavily that way by ridiculous dil sinks, nerfs, and other things to design it into a DPS race. You just don't have to do it. You can quit like many who have had enough, pay, or just do the uber-grind.
run an elite stf with the last free ship f2p players can get...with 4 others in the same boat as you, no pay consoles...let me know how that goes. QoL...yah, no one needs those t5, t5u, t6, or lockbox ships right?
i like how so many have come out defending this gme when it is indefensible. i said it in the other post, if players stopped putting zen on the exchange, if the stopped reselling cash items...f2p players would be stuck on that last free ship.
doesn't matter if YOU don't pay...someone else does. you remove those people that sell zen and cash items and advancement grinds to a halt. no t5u's, no fleet ships (they require another cash item) no t5 or t6 ships (also cash except the samsar...if you were here when the event was on)
you CANNOT advance, that in essence is pay to win, someone has to...no, required to pay so that f2p players can advance. 100% pay to win.
it is what it is, facetious to try and gloss it over, or attempt to say that all those things that people pay for aren't required. much less claiming that you don't have to pay as if that was the only criteria. someone has to. fact.
there are other mmo's that aren't pay to win or pay to advance, the farthest they go is pay for convenience and style. gear isn't locked into the cash shop. missions/quests/raids aren't massive gear checks to see if you bought new gear from a cash shop. sto is.
not even going to get into PvP nd it's cost vs totally free. it was cryptics/pwe's business decision to do this. why defend them when they explicitly made that choice?
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
What you have describe here, dose not qualify for P2W.
And no, you cant buy EC for money in the game (except if you are willing to buy tons of keys and sell them of the exchange).
Then, yes, you can buy everything of the exchange that you need to have best equipment (well, actually no, you cant buy "everything" of the exchange, now that i think of it).
This game is easy to play, but not easy to master.
You could call it P2R (relax), as everything you buy will help you in PVE content, not PVP..