I am someone who has bought a lifetime subscription, and do plan on sticking with this game despite my review and views of the game.
Pro's:
I really like the graphical world that they have created, along with ship design and use.
I really like what they did with the story arcs and found them very entertaining, even for someone who just read half of the text.
I liked the lore from which they drew the villains and what they did with the motivations of all the factions in this time line
I like the General game play of ship flight and combat.
I like the hard coding of the world(you simply can or can not do things, no penalties or disincentives to try to nudge players to perform certain behaviors).
I like the attention to pvp that cryptic has given.
I love all the big and little details from the star trek series. Such as the Vorta Rippleberries, mentioned only 1 time in 1 episode of DS9.
Con's:
First Con is the way the world is built, which is a series of instances, from astrometrics, systems, space stations and bridges. With an instanced world like this crafting and resource gathering will be next to impossible to implement in the future. The world was built on the cheap. Guildwars built their world the same way and their game is free to play after purchase. For all of you that believe this is a huge world, it is not. I would bet some zones in CoH are bigger than this whole game(independence port is too big for its own good). Guildwars ,which is also an instance based game, would take all day to walk through from start to finish the first time around. The game is too small to be a Space MMO that covers entire quadrants of space. Many of the systems in space are mission based and can no longer be accessed after the mission is over. So once a mission is over that piece of the world they made is no longer available to you and the universe that they have created is even smaller
Second is lack of content. I just came from fallen earth and there were hundreds of missions. WoW has thousands of quests. The number of missions in STO, (not including repeatables and exploration) do not even break the 50 mark. This games leveling is too fast, It has been suggested with talks with fleet mates that this games needs 50 more missions to slow down the gameplay.
Why do the Klingon side have most of all the planets in Klingon space going to pvp zones when you can access all the pvp areas from your radar tab? The answer is they simply do not have anything else to put into Klingon space. The "Klingons are not explorers" excuse really doesn't fly. Orcs are not nice but they have a fleshed out world.
The recent borg sector opening was good, for about a day. I did all the story arch missions within 2 hours.
3rd is lack of Challenge. There is no challenge to this game. I never have faced anything in any mission that posed a serious threat to me. Second, as long as you can plow through, you will always win, you can never lose in any mission. There were only 2 times when this game was a challenge to me. The first was when my BoFs didn't beam down with me and i was fighting groups solo, the second was in the fire cave mission and my BoFs would move on the walkway terrain and i was fighting every thing solo till i figured out how to force move my BoFs around. And in the latest Q mission I almost had a challenge when I was about to fight 3 borg cubes and Q stole it from me by making 2 of them disappear. When the borg sector opened i refused to group because I wanted a chance at dying, but alas, the Borg and Undin were weaklings. The missions are a big homage to the Star Trek Series, and not for competitive and challenging gameplay.
4th Endgame content unfinished to non-existent. PvP is very unbalanced with many skills and make pvp very unfun. Getting viral matrixed and are disabled so long that a miranda could kill you is BS. PvP is the mainline endgame content but power balancing for pvp has been an after thought. You have internal play testing, you have beta, you should be able to identify the "I win" buttons. PvP needs a ladder system, tournament system, rank system all that good pvp intensive stuff. Look to guildwars, it got this down pact.
Raidasodes will be nice but how long will that tide people over.
Suggestions:
What is the bread and butter of this game. Frankly, its not the world, there is not enough of it. From my experience from playing a myriad of other MMOs, IMO they need to invest a lot more resources to developing pvp. Guildwar's endgame, who's world is built the same way as STO, is ALL about pvp and they do it well. This game is not big enough, developed enough or long enough to be a PvE game. Guildwars has more PvE content and its their after thought. Allow 1 vs 1 pvp in the Fed/Klingon warzone sector in astrometrics(simply run into an enemy PC in that sector of space and it initiates a 1 vs 1 match. Introduce 3vs3 or 4vs4, with random and planned teaming seperated. Add rank and ladder system to the game. Forget making it loot intensive insentive because so far the best loot is not difficult to get.
World developement, make it 10x bigger and add hundreds of missions. Thats the only way your gonna get this to be any kind of PvE game. Make the game challenging. Damit i want to lose!
Make Racial traits optional. If i want to make the best ship character or ground character I have to choose an alien and make my own race, because the races have traits that will negate from specializing is space or ground combat. I have the Borg character option but i cant use it because if i want to specialize for ground or space combat one trait gets in the way of the other.
I would suggest more but I just got off work and its 4 am. Bye bye