As a 6 year vet of the MMO I am totally confused as to why the gear in STO is pretty much the same, Blue, green Purple, it's all the same.
I played WOW for years and pretty much all the other 12 million people play the game to get their character better and better gear, thats why the game is so popular, there is always better gear to be had. Blizzard make certain quests and team areas (Dungeons) that drop or reward the player with great gear, this is why people play these quests or team areas. It allows players to kit out their character in high DPS gear, however in STO the dps is exactly the same regardless of what colour the item.

In STO there are also some team areas scattered around the place such as the Crystal entity, yet no one ever goes there, whats the point, you get nothing for it. If Blizzard made this game there would be loads of team zones that had boss conflicts which awarded better gear and the game would be buzzing.
I am not asking that STO be WOW, all I am saying is there should be some carrot to keep me playing and there is simply nothing. I know of loads of lifers that only log on to STO on Saturday to play the new episodes, thats pathetic really considering how long this game has been out.
The basics of any MMO is gear, thats why people play them and yet for some mad reason STO gear is pointless. I went on the AH to buy some purple beams for my fed and after checking the DPS I just bought greens, saved myself 10 million credits, the DPS is exactly the same, oh I would get an extra 2% crit on the epics but big deal.
Last episode on Saturday and then whats the point playing anymore? What is there to work towards? Why even bother getting to high level, everyone has exactly the same gear, there is no carrot, game over.
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for example a green item has one extra special buff e.g. extra critical hit, whereas a blue item will have TWO buffs, e.g. crit hit and crit damage.
And a purple item has three buffs - e.g. capacity x3.
So if you look a shields for example, a purple shield with three times the capacity of a regular one at the same level is obviously better.
I imagine we'll see this game bounce out with all kinds of neat stuff. keep in mind Cryptic isn't as big as Blizzard....ie..more time to complete said tasks. Still they are moving right along. You will probably see a rehash of gear some time in the near future.
I would hate to think they're gonna flush out all this content with the up coming seasons and not contemplate a reshape of the drops and gear orginality.
I don't think even Cryptic is that obtuse.
All I can suggest is give er a little time to work out the rest of the kinks....you may actually be surprised at what comes out.
If the current mode of operation is still in effect after next April....well....Im sure we'll see things change by leaps and bounds.
There are dozens of other motivating factors in an MMO besides gear. That's not to say that gear in STO is a selling point (it isn't) but that there are other factors to consider.
there is missing the "thing" in this game, grinding that 5 hour over 2 days to get a roll on that epic loot. why, where you can just spend 10 minute each day doing the dailies and get them in a few days.
btw, to the op.... a good thing the STF only loot is coming soon, as far as i know they will even make a special slot on our ship to use these new loot. lets see who good they are and if it is worth the grind of doing all the STF again..
http://files.startrekonline.com.s3.amazonaws.com/img/askcryptic/100110/Ship_FE1_Borg.jpg
I cannot wait for the new loot set to be released. It actually makes me want to play through the STF missions now.
hmm You must have skipped out on Wrath, because you can get T10 in 3 days, 2 days if you do OS Naxx and Ulduar + weekly.
STO isn't about a HUGE grind or race to the finish to get the "gear" if you raid for gear in WoW you are doing it wrong, raid for the game/content (most people assume you need the gear to do the content and its not true, when naxx was first cleared they did it in T6) STO doesnt require gear to raid so everyone can start the STFs right away. The 5 mans are 10x better as getting a group even with 5 people is next to impossible, I couldn't imagen trying to get 10 or 25 for near impossible STFs. The only requirement to do the STFs is be RA5 or VA1, I like this aspect as I hate having to replace earned gear every 3-6 months.
I think that owes a little to the fact of how long the game has been around and all the different modifiers available that is in WoW for all the weapons and gear. Here, the only thing to close to that amount of variation in modifiers is the ground gear: HP; several probabilities modifications like HPP or Rev; Resistance; HPReg; SHReg. Nothing here really seems to have the ability to be as heavily modified as things can be in WoW with only 4 rarity levels or the modifiers we currently have for weapons, ground and space, and ship's equipment.
I don't think that opening up more rarity levels will help, though it would be awesome and make the game feel a little more epic. Nor do I think they can add much more in modifiers to weapons or gear that I think will make much sense beyond the Acc, Dmg, CrtH, CrtD, and DoT except for modifying the Proc of a weapon and that could get game breaking.
the loot sux
the grind is annoying...
annoying grind for sucking loot = meh
and the joke on top of it is i even know that the Mk XI items will be replaced by Mk XII or XIIIIII or whatever in time and then Emblems will be replaced by the next random currency and it all starts over, so why even bother?
It's not like i would gain anything by a few more DPS....
i don't PVP anymore because it got boring to do the same 2 maps over and over and over again
i don't do the daily Fleetactions anymore because... well they are allways the same too and only 3 emblems for that much work doesn't seem worth the effort (the missions are fun and good content though)
i never did the STF's because it is to annoying to search for a Group in Zonechat (why is there no Queue like in PvP???)
The Breen dailies got old by now... they were cool at the time but it took to long to get the new ones out, by now i practically stopped playing those too because it's got boring...
...besides the weekly episode i do nothing in this game anymore.
Reading Patchlog after Patchlog and NONE of the bugs that annoy me ( example ) every time i start up the game EVER get fixed...
Well and then there is Fallout New Vegas which eats up a lot of my time lately (the last 3 days i didn't even play it... i was bussy downloading and bugtesting Mods! If you get 10 new guns a day THAT is content! )
I understand the OP... I LOVE this game - its my favorite and I'm on almost every day playing - BUT I've complained since day one that all the junk looks the same. See, some hardcore people only look at the numbers - "man, the gear is TOTALLY different, can't you read the numbers?" but not everyone is about numbers, they want to see a visual change.
MONTHS ago I posted about the idea that items that change the ships appearance slightly - in ways you can't do in the ship customization screen. People love WoW because you get tons of armor sets and each set makes your character look totally different. This is what items need to start working on/doing in STO as well.
Now that you can outright forget mister!
They need Weeks and Months to get a 7of9 Suit or some Klingon 200 day reward uniform stuff out the door.
Probably like one guy doing everything costume releated alone and helping out in 3 other places too ;P
None of that has anything to do with the the OP's point: loot is all the same. I get bored with many games. I subscribe to 7 and play several more free ones. I have several maxed-out characters in WoW and have spent the last 5 months playtesting Cataclysm. How new is Cata going to seem to me when it's launched in December? I've been in the Alpha of 2 upcoming games for nearly a year. How exciting are they going to be to me when they launch next year?
Making you do something you don't like to do to get loot isn't any different whether it's raiding or grinding B'tran. If the act it's boring to you it's boring to you. Making the best loot only available via raiding or PvP will only alienate people who hate raiding or PvP. There's no perfect way to do it for everyone.
what?? at 105 emblems for an engine it has taken me 4 weeks (casual player)
yet on warhammer online a 1 hour dungeon gave me the best dagger i ever had
So in order to balance my characters in PVP. I would have to put hours and hours into two parts of the game I didn't want to play.
So the carrot doesn't keep everyone playing it makes some of us leave unhappily.
Some kind of progression, activities to look forward to is indeed important. Abilities to build on, including your own non-character based abilities AKA real life skill progression, new areas, varied activities, even story.
Gear is not automatically the basis for any of this, it's an addition to any of this. An addition that doesn't necessarily need to be there, you can remove it and still have progression like equipment access, getting new external certificates to vehicles and weapons, different character abilities AKA levels or skill point accumulation, gradual introduction to new areas or adventures.
Basically you don't need gear to create a sense of progression or participation, it can be baked into the environment, and you could instead focus on the development of abilities. Gear implementation is sadly a fix for an ever-static environment, where other methods of progression becomes stale or technically rigid.
Gear also tend to build divisions and object based player ratings ( can you get more static than that? ), this creates separation between those who technically should be peers, all based on individual pieces of junk, that's eternally going to be replaced at any rate. An evermoving platform of layered superiority. Gear is building heavily upon personal motivation, in an environment that should be about combining the efforts with others, in order to progress.
Hinging all of this upon personal motivation, and personal item acquisition, seems to be a backwards method of motivation to move forward, you build an utterly selfish world, where the object is given a greater weight than the person, or any other consideration for that matter. All weight goes towards the exterior layers of the person, not what's inside, or the landscape around.
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I have to agree on that one but for some of us too who enjoy wearing crafting gear also need more variant
When I said I like the WOW way gear is earned I don't mean I want to see 25man raids in STO. I do think there should be more epic encounters that you can join a queue system to join, boss fights that drop epic gear, Sci, Tac and Eng gear too.
I do think DPS should be higher the rarer the item, it's a farce that white phasers do the same base DPS as a purple epic item. Yes I know the purple gear is better because of the extra bonus of the gear but the difference should be massive, you should feel like your ship is truly epic, you should be able to annihilate ships that only have white versions of your gear, thats what rewards are for.
And last I checked, it is just as easy to gear up in STO than it was towards the end of WotLK just before I quit the game. In fact, it's a lot easier to get the base tier sets than it was in Burning Crusade. I was decked out in T9.0 tanking armor before I called it quits...and it only took a few weeks to get everything.
MMOs are about more than just making sure that you have the best items...if that's all you're playing for, then you're doing something wrong.
This type of scaling means the elitism in PvP and Raiding that people hated from WoW.
12 million people put up with it and besides I can not see STO going like that, it's a totally different game & community.
No it works nothing like STO. My paladin in wow has a pretty average epic axe that has the following stats:
892 dmg
212 dps
+106 Strength
+135 Stamina
Crit rating 62
haste rating 76
A normal green lvl 80 axe has the following stats
583 dmg
138 dps
+ some random crappy stat
As you can see there is a huge difference which is what makes WOW worth playing, it has good rewards. STO has terrible rewards that make playing end game pointless whish is why hardly anyone actually plays it.
STO has an end game? Why wasn't I notified?!
You know what makes one game worth playing doesn't necessarily mean that the same has to be said for every other game, right? I play for the experience, not the phat lewtz. The only reason that I barely play right now is that there is little to do, not because we have TRIBBLE for gear.
Personally, I HATED the gear grind in WoW. STO's offering is much better. This game practically screams casual....and I wouldn't mind seeing it kept that way. Besides, we're going to get gear sets that are specific to a certain area of the game. STFs are getting the Borgified ship parts, and crafting is getting some cool new stuff, too.
They cannot be, for then there would only be a need for one game. And that's almost the truth.
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I have millions of credits in STO but I just buy greens for my alt as it's almost as good as purple.