1) Certain members of the community. Trek fans associate themselves with Star Trek, and the vision of the future it represents. However, since before launch there have been self proclaimed fans of Star Trek in this community which fall abysmally short of this ideal. Very disappointing.
1) Forced to change ships frequently rather than the ability to upgrade my favorites.
2) Crafting system and economy are slightly underwhelming
3) Ship interiors are largely asthetic rather than being and integral part of the experience
I also wanted what I hadn't seen before too, and something that I had always dreamed for in a Star Trek game...the ability to actually make my own starship from scratch. So as you can see high hopes"
I agree I too was very disappointed was hoping you would be able to truly create a unique ship from scratch rather than just swapping bits around which is ok for the stock ships but I think if they could figure out how to do that then it would really open the game up for you would see pretty interesting ships not too mention different ships rather just block colours in certain areas but not in others on the hull. I for example am a huge fan of the Monarch class star ship also known as the Enterprise J mentioned in Enterprise and in the ships of the line book. I thinks its an awesome looking ship plus it has kick *** weapons!!!! lol
If the Ship Builder was as robust as the toon creator, I would rub my nipples clean off my chest in sheer delight.
If the Ship Builder was as robust as the toon creator, I would rub my nipples clean off my chest in sheer delight.
I love the idea!
However, I can see the possibility of the "Phallus" class starship becoming a blight in the game. I'd rather sacrifice a really cool ship building system to avoid it..
However, I can see the possibility of the "Phallus" class starship becoming a blight in the game. I'd rather sacrifice a really cool ship building system to avoid it..
That or people making giant flying swastikas. I have found throughout my time on the internet while gaming a ***** and a swastika is usually the guarantee of any creative outlet. Therefore I would prefer not having either flying around IMHO.
1-no salad bar on ESD
2-I cant make a naked toon and name him streak mcgillicutty
3-no BO death match
4-no salad bar on K-7
5-First city looks like china town and the brothel doesn't work.
but mostly,
NO SALAD BAR ON ESD....................instead we get fish fridays....:mad:
I don't really have any disappointments with Star Trek Online or Cryptic. I would like to see more stuff for Klingons and have the Romulan and Cardassians for new races but thats it.
I have been playing STO since beta and before that I played EVE online for years, so you can see I am a huge PvP players. I dont mind some PvE here and there but PvP is where its at for any game realy. My biggest complaint (you can add all 5 complaint options into this one) is PvP, it sucks.
I want to be able to have an open system where I can build stations, defense batteries, my own ships and items etc etc and then grab my fleet and invade my neighbour. I know its not "Star Trek" to go kill everyone but to do missions that say go scan 5 of this or talk to some npc a billion times gets old quickly. I dont feal like i am shaping the universe or atleast my pocket of it, so instead of a complaint this is what i would want to see.....
1. Open PvP: To be able to invade another fleets system to either take it or steal there items and women
2. Territory: To be able to claim territory for your faction and or fleet for bonuses or ability to get new materials for building ships and stations etc. Then having to defend it against others.
3. Death: An actual death system that if you get ganked yo lose your ships an items (just not your character and bofs) makes the game feal like more of a challenge well to me anyway (was spoiled by EVE game play)
4. Mass game events: the borg invade say a bunch of systems and threaten everyone for say a week and you have to fight them back with your friends and enemies or yah all die
5. NO MORE FREAKEN COSTUMES!!!!!!!!! stop wasting time on making these and get going on actualy usefull content
1. Lax game support, they're too busy with new shiney to fix whats broken.
2. Lack of KDF content, we were promised a complete faction.
3. Lack of content as a whole, we're getting close to 2 years and we've barely improved.
4. No GM attention on the forums in the bug section, they're quick to correct people who break forums rules though.
5. See 1 and 4
1.) S4 dropping the ball in terms of promised features dropped. On top of that the stability of S4 is the worst I've experienced since beta, for the simple fact that its getting worse not better.
2.) Lack of accountability from Cryptic/ GM etc
3.) Foundry
4.) Space PvP - Lack of content
5.) General inconsistency in experience Fed vs. KDF in all respects.
1. Too concerned about making useless content (SFA, more costumes) and ignoring bugs for too long (incomplete faction, lacking endgame, broken missions, more frustrating than fun STFs).
2. Thou shalt not speak of anything negative about Cryptic, even its well founded
3. See 1 and 2
4.see 3
5.see 4
1. Starship interiors need vastly more functionality and customization, especially bridges. If we can get a viewscreen usable for communication, that would be a huge step in the right direction. Note: I know and accept space combat from the bridge due to the engine and that is okay with me.
2. STO lacks territory control open PVP.
3. Non-advancing storyline/timeline. It should be 2411 now, right? Let's have at least some of the game reflect that. Why isn't time moving in the game? We need events happening around us.
4. Diplomacy/non-combat options are extremely limited.
Much dissatisfaction in this thread. I'm going to share these thoughts only because I've been up all night, it's 7am, and I gotta let the dog out before I finally fall asleep. She hasn't started complaining yet so here goes.
The top 5 disapointments in STO... feels kinda like the wailing wall. Prayers shoved into the cracks of the forums to be ignored by a god that hasn't existed. Our collective god in this case is what we had all imagined this game should be, as we all had pretty much hoped for it. A lot of us die hards were doing this years in advance without a shiny interface. We'd Role Play. We'd take part in a world larger than us. That's the world I come from, and it's the particular 'sort' of god I worship when it comes to what Star Trek ultimately is.
Star Trek Online, and it's creators, face a difficult challenge. And I'm not just referring to a diehard fanbase having to cope with a game that isn't everything they imagined.
The question as to, "what exactly is it about Star Trek that makes it fundamentally work", and what were the things that didn't are hard to answer. They were difficult to know when they were producing the television shows, or even now in the novels.
You go back to the original series, first few episodes. You'd hear Kirk enter a log entry, talking about how the SS Valent had breached the galactic barrier, as 'we are about to do'. In those few words, it speaks implicitly about the openness of space, the infinate black Kirk's Enterprise shot across like some celestial ejaculate.
At the heart of Trek has always, as Stephen Fry pointed out, the greek tragedy. The id (passion) locked in combat with the reason, or the logic. It was a conflict that played out between McCoy and Spock, or Data and Geordie (albeit more passively), Neelix and Tuvok, or Seven and Janeway, or Dax and Worf, Starfleet Scientist Ben Sisko vs. Emessary of the Prophet's Ben Sisko. These characters were always at their strongest in the midst of these conflicts. Further still, this greek tragedy dynamic fueled most of the plot for original series episodes. They'd come to a world either glutenous. organized to a fault.
Rodenberry's original vision for Humanity (not the federation but humanity) allowed writers to force Star Trek down a narrower and narrower range of expression. The Federation became an allegory for reason. It would be pitted up against the Klingons who are the archetype for passion in the form of violence. Or the Romulans who are the allegory for violence in the form of manipulation. The borg, the allegory for violence in the form of social conformity and the destruction of the individual.
Each faction in the Star Trek universe took on allegorical persona's of humanity's own fault, and the final frontier metaphorically became the exploration of the human soul itself.
These literary dynamics that fueled the show, and various stories with the Borg, or the Dominion, or the Khitomer Accords, don't translate well into a game. In a game, you have to have something to win. In any great game, you have to be able to also... lose.
What is my greatest disappointment in Star Trek Online? That in victory there is no real triumph, and in losing... 99% of the time, you don't actually suffer any consequence inside of the game, outside of the game however, what you do suffer from is a loss of time. Huge swatches of it. The original launch missions would take 1-2 hours to complete a piece. It was like walking through the swamp; and most of it for the singular purpose of proping up the storyline 'the Road to 2409'. Turn up the difficulty level. Damage your ship. What do you lose? Time. More time. Exceptional lengths of time and effort and energy put into a game with no real rewarding experience for the player.
The game shouldn't so much be focused around combat, or exploration, but influencing the political outcomes of this game. There should be political bodies in this game, civilians in this game, there should be militaries, and spies and militias. Romance, and economics, structures to purchase, fleets to buy. The starting factions should have been Federation, Frengi and Klingon. No one starts in Starfleet. Everyone has a career path to chose.
There should be plots, and coups, and elections and starbase construction and places to build secret bases. Territory to control, and to lose, Star Systems and strategy. Fleets competing with each other for these systems. Fleets coordinating their efforts to win and lose space.There should be entire star systems, and entire worlds. Spacial anomolies, Spacial non-anomolies, like pulsars and binary star systems and trinary star systems and black holes, and dark matter.
And I know ti's do able because many games now use a fractal compression method of creating almost boundless and endless worlds. Star Trek online should be the history of the future that we all in some way get to participate in.
No levels, just raw performance. You do well, your fleet leader promotes you, you get demoted. No items based on level, that's not star trek. You earn pay, you earn prestige. Prestige buys you a new ship or a better ship, you blow up your ship you go to an escape pod. You wait for rescue. Someone will rescue you you. Items are only limited via hull mass limitations. A saber class can only support 10,000 metric tons. A Soverign class, 100,000 metric tonnes. You earn prestige through PvE. You earn credits or latnium through various economical markets. If your in starfleet you might want to find a way to earn credits, but you don't have to, it's starfleet. Based on what a hull mass limitations could support, you betcha.
Strategic ship customization of items, real time advantages and disadvages to a saucer design or a pylon configuation, not just an astetic, but a strategy to find a better edge in the midst of a dynamic landscape.
This is the god I prayed too when I thought about what this game should be.
Star Trek online will never be what I wrote above, but it is something and I must delight in it for what it is worth.
I'm diehard about the foundry. At least there we get to build the stories and the world the game itself doesn't exactly let us have. We get to roleplay through many voices, and further the narriatve. I think, more than anything people, approaching this game by and large don't realize it, but they want to affect the narrative.
PvP combat that involves territorial control, comes from that vein. End game content comes from that vein. Experiencing the interior of your star-ship, as if it were actually part of the world and not just one of 3 templates based on scale, comes from the vein of being part of that narrative in a conving way, of owning something phenomenal that could be lost. The Department head system or First officer system i've heard so much about springs from the desire to reinforce a more compelling narrative, where lives matter.
See nothing matters in star trek online. Except for shinies. The game's history has been stuck in the year 2409. It technically should be 2410 at this point. The weekly episodic missions promised back in may stopped, which combined with the game ultimately not feeling like it mattres, as a game... or even as a story, convinces many people the devs don't care. And so these very same people scream louder and Louder and LOUDER, and cancel their subscriptions or leave 'I quit' posts here when their forbidden.
Now the worst part about that is, the devs care. From going these forums and reading the devs posts, or reading Dan Stahl's writing. Or following these guys on twitter and seeing what they're excited about, tells me, they care more about this game then any of us could because they own it more then we ever can. Someone got a flippn' wicked buzz off designing the new borg tactical cube. Someone got a HUGE kick out of buidling an entire level around piloting a shuttle and making it work and telling a story in a new and fantastic way in STO.
Then you look at this episodic mission like the Romulan front, or The Breen missions. Their phenomenal.
If we were to have another faction, it shouldn't be romulan. It needs to breen. Why? Because the breen... we don't know what they are, and this is our chance to define the breen. To explore what they mean us because when we do that, we get understand ourselves better. Or maybe not. Maybe their the archetype of our fear of the unknown. Just violent enough to be frighteningly dangerous, just far enough away to never quite be understood. The borg started off that way, and they were such a terrifying idea the writers of the show tripped over themselves to explain them, to fight them, because the borg live in our nightmares, point blank. Every last one of us the borg haunt us, especially in U.S. culture where individualism and self reliance are tantamount to how we see ourselves. We try to do many things to make ourselves unique and special, but in doing so we fall into very same gaggle of conformity.
Would I make a romulan character? Sure! I love romulan design. But being part of something like that... I dunno. Without territory control, without some way to impact the universe at large as one of these races, just flying around in a ship I like with race that I know feels more like mental masturbation then actually being enriched by something that I pay 20 bucks a month, to invest hours of time into.
The foundry missions are what they are, they're novella's. And you can feel the passion of the writer behind it because... that's all it's there for and it's wonderful to partake those novellas. And i can't wait to start contributing to them in my own vein.
Anyways I'm well past the point of rambling, I just hope everyone noticed that not a single Dev has posted in this thread. It keeps coming back from the dead, and what for? So we can all have a pot to pee in and feel better when we're done complaining. Probably. This is the bathroom of the forums of star trek online where we can puke or TRIBBLE all over the damn game.
This righteous indignation thing has to stop. We have to find a way as a community to be a community and make the best of what we have, and we have something pretty damn good, it just suffers from being one of the most popular franchises, and the most difficult to quantify in any medium. Let alone PC Gaming.
1. Federation Ambassador- Why is it such a grind? The mission @ SB39, Vulcan, and Bajor only provide 10XP. I can do 1 aid the planet in 90% less time for the same reward. There should be MORE Diplomacy missions, but the rewards need to be increased to 50XP or so 10XP for aid the planet and such.
2. Ships- The year is 2409. Why on Earth are there 100+ year old ships flying around. The hull life is suppossedly roughly 100 years. Anything made before 2309 needs to be at the Federation surplus depot at Qualor Two!
3. Ships again- I still can't understand why my old Excelsior refit can hang nose to nose with a Soverign. Excelsiors were 2nd tier back in DS9 and TNG days. Don't give me the US Battleships from WWII still operational in the 1990's analogy. The cost to add say a nucelear reactor, and wire the ship for glass cockpit electonics and computers would be more expensive than building a new one from scratch.
3. Ships-No Ambassadore class still??? At roughly 80 years old we should still get another 20 out of her.
4. Star Bases- Should have at least 1 in every sector.
I have been playing STO since beta and before that I played EVE online for years, so you can see I am a huge PvP players. I dont mind some PvE here and there but PvP is where its at for any game realy. My biggest complaint (you can add all 5 complaint options into this one) is PvP, it sucks.
I want to be able to have an open system where I can build stations, defense batteries, my own ships and items etc etc and then grab my fleet and invade my neighbour. I know its not "Star Trek" to go kill everyone but to do missions that say go scan 5 of this or talk to some npc a billion times gets old quickly. I dont feal like i am shaping the universe or atleast my pocket of it, so instead of a complaint this is what i would want to see.....
1. Open PvP: To be able to invade another fleets system to either take it or steal there items and women
2. Territory: To be able to claim territory for your faction and or fleet for bonuses or ability to get new materials for building ships and stations etc. Then having to defend it against others.
3. Death: An actual death system that if you get ganked yo lose your ships an items (just not your character and bofs) makes the game feal like more of a challenge well to me anyway (was spoiled by EVE game play)
4. Mass game events: the borg invade say a bunch of systems and threaten everyone for say a week and you have to fight them back with your friends and enemies or yah all die
5. NO MORE FREAKEN COSTUMES!!!!!!!!! stop wasting time on making these and get going on actualy usefull content
No offense but these ideas are the same thing many MMO's have tried to do and the reason most of them have gone almost completely PvE due to grieving other players. Certain player base/population of factions has to balance out before your ideas could come to fruition and thats if anyone subscribes for the month after they were to go in. As far as the Death issue, dream on because these fleets who have around 500 members would just grieve players as a recruiting tactic to blackmail them into joining their fleet (We won't let you play unless you join us kinda deal). Mass game events "existed" on other games until crashes and persistent hardware failures come about, its just like Dstahl was trying to explain on something I listened to about how you can't have too many ships in one area it taxes the lower budgeted machines out there too much (is why you got the happy medium known as fleet actions). I would not say no more costumes, just not anymore for awhile except for KDF side which doesn't have much to choose from. The only issue I have that i'm disappointed with is that STO as a MMO company hasn't started taking the leap that is going to be the new age of MMO's breaking away from the classic xp grind, and tank, nuke, healer setup. I think most would agree though that a lot of the tactical and science abilities should be integrated in all the classes such as weapons training, and healing abilities so that it can help to bring certain classes but not definately needed to play a tact or sci, and exclude engineers a lot like I see on a daily basis (waiting over 6 hours for a science officer is horrifying).
I encourage everyone to sound off in a civil manner where they feel sto falls short for them but please keep it on topic and civil or this thread will be locked faster that you can say "wishy give me a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream, please."
This thread had a really good run and we had some good feedback.
Sadly over time it's degraded and by now we get little useable feedback from it.
If you have more feedback to specific issues, please use precise and specific threads that directly address one concern you have. It makes it much easier for us to separate 'background noise' from your core concerns - which in turn helps us get more out of what you wish to tell us in a constructive manner.
However: Hot chocolate with whipped cream and chocolate shavings are in order. *passes out cups*
Comments
2. Missing KDF Ship skins
3. Missing KDF clothing and customization
4. Story arcs which end in nowhere
5. boring fleet actions
1) Certain members of the community. Trek fans associate themselves with Star Trek, and the vision of the future it represents. However, since before launch there have been self proclaimed fans of Star Trek in this community which fall abysmally short of this ideal. Very disappointing.
1) Forced to change ships frequently rather than the ability to upgrade my favorites.
2) Crafting system and economy are slightly underwhelming
3) Ship interiors are largely asthetic rather than being and integral part of the experience
Not necessarily true. SAN storage is still very, very exepnsive yet I couldn't imagine STO running on anything else.
If the Ship Builder was as robust as the toon creator, I would rub my nipples clean off my chest in sheer delight.
I love the idea!
However, I can see the possibility of the "Phallus" class starship becoming a blight in the game. I'd rather sacrifice a really cool ship building system to avoid it..
That or people making giant flying swastikas. I have found throughout my time on the internet while gaming a ***** and a swastika is usually the guarantee of any creative outlet. Therefore I would prefer not having either flying around IMHO.
The Ent-F, from now until the heat death of the universe.
1-no salad bar on ESD
2-I cant make a naked toon and name him streak mcgillicutty
3-no BO death match
4-no salad bar on K-7
5-First city looks like china town and the brothel doesn't work.
but mostly,
NO SALAD BAR ON ESD....................instead we get fish fridays....:mad:
I want to be able to have an open system where I can build stations, defense batteries, my own ships and items etc etc and then grab my fleet and invade my neighbour. I know its not "Star Trek" to go kill everyone but to do missions that say go scan 5 of this or talk to some npc a billion times gets old quickly. I dont feal like i am shaping the universe or atleast my pocket of it, so instead of a complaint this is what i would want to see.....
1. Open PvP: To be able to invade another fleets system to either take it or steal there items and women
2. Territory: To be able to claim territory for your faction and or fleet for bonuses or ability to get new materials for building ships and stations etc. Then having to defend it against others.
3. Death: An actual death system that if you get ganked yo lose your ships an items (just not your character and bofs) makes the game feal like more of a challenge well to me anyway (was spoiled by EVE game play)
4. Mass game events: the borg invade say a bunch of systems and threaten everyone for say a week and you have to fight them back with your friends and enemies or yah all die
5. NO MORE FREAKEN COSTUMES!!!!!!!!! stop wasting time on making these and get going on actualy usefull content
2. Lack of KDF content, we were promised a complete faction.
3. Lack of content as a whole, we're getting close to 2 years and we've barely improved.
4. No GM attention on the forums in the bug section, they're quick to correct people who break forums rules though.
5. See 1 and 4
2.) Lack of accountability from Cryptic/ GM etc
3.) Foundry
4.) Space PvP - Lack of content
5.) General inconsistency in experience Fed vs. KDF in all respects.
2. Thou shalt not speak of anything negative about Cryptic, even its well founded
3. See 1 and 2
4.see 3
5.see 4
2. STO lacks territory control open PVP.
3. Non-advancing storyline/timeline. It should be 2411 now, right? Let's have at least some of the game reflect that. Why isn't time moving in the game? We need events happening around us.
4. Diplomacy/non-combat options are extremely limited.
5. Boff voices are still not available
The top 5 disapointments in STO... feels kinda like the wailing wall. Prayers shoved into the cracks of the forums to be ignored by a god that hasn't existed. Our collective god in this case is what we had all imagined this game should be, as we all had pretty much hoped for it. A lot of us die hards were doing this years in advance without a shiny interface. We'd Role Play. We'd take part in a world larger than us. That's the world I come from, and it's the particular 'sort' of god I worship when it comes to what Star Trek ultimately is.
Star Trek Online, and it's creators, face a difficult challenge. And I'm not just referring to a diehard fanbase having to cope with a game that isn't everything they imagined.
The question as to, "what exactly is it about Star Trek that makes it fundamentally work", and what were the things that didn't are hard to answer. They were difficult to know when they were producing the television shows, or even now in the novels.
You go back to the original series, first few episodes. You'd hear Kirk enter a log entry, talking about how the SS Valent had breached the galactic barrier, as 'we are about to do'. In those few words, it speaks implicitly about the openness of space, the infinate black Kirk's Enterprise shot across like some celestial ejaculate.
At the heart of Trek has always, as Stephen Fry pointed out, the greek tragedy. The id (passion) locked in combat with the reason, or the logic. It was a conflict that played out between McCoy and Spock, or Data and Geordie (albeit more passively), Neelix and Tuvok, or Seven and Janeway, or Dax and Worf, Starfleet Scientist Ben Sisko vs. Emessary of the Prophet's Ben Sisko. These characters were always at their strongest in the midst of these conflicts. Further still, this greek tragedy dynamic fueled most of the plot for original series episodes. They'd come to a world either glutenous. organized to a fault.
Rodenberry's original vision for Humanity (not the federation but humanity) allowed writers to force Star Trek down a narrower and narrower range of expression. The Federation became an allegory for reason. It would be pitted up against the Klingons who are the archetype for passion in the form of violence. Or the Romulans who are the allegory for violence in the form of manipulation. The borg, the allegory for violence in the form of social conformity and the destruction of the individual.
Each faction in the Star Trek universe took on allegorical persona's of humanity's own fault, and the final frontier metaphorically became the exploration of the human soul itself.
These literary dynamics that fueled the show, and various stories with the Borg, or the Dominion, or the Khitomer Accords, don't translate well into a game. In a game, you have to have something to win. In any great game, you have to be able to also... lose.
What is my greatest disappointment in Star Trek Online? That in victory there is no real triumph, and in losing... 99% of the time, you don't actually suffer any consequence inside of the game, outside of the game however, what you do suffer from is a loss of time. Huge swatches of it. The original launch missions would take 1-2 hours to complete a piece. It was like walking through the swamp; and most of it for the singular purpose of proping up the storyline 'the Road to 2409'. Turn up the difficulty level. Damage your ship. What do you lose? Time. More time. Exceptional lengths of time and effort and energy put into a game with no real rewarding experience for the player.
The game shouldn't so much be focused around combat, or exploration, but influencing the political outcomes of this game. There should be political bodies in this game, civilians in this game, there should be militaries, and spies and militias. Romance, and economics, structures to purchase, fleets to buy. The starting factions should have been Federation, Frengi and Klingon. No one starts in Starfleet. Everyone has a career path to chose.
There should be plots, and coups, and elections and starbase construction and places to build secret bases. Territory to control, and to lose, Star Systems and strategy. Fleets competing with each other for these systems. Fleets coordinating their efforts to win and lose space.There should be entire star systems, and entire worlds. Spacial anomolies, Spacial non-anomolies, like pulsars and binary star systems and trinary star systems and black holes, and dark matter.
And I know ti's do able because many games now use a fractal compression method of creating almost boundless and endless worlds. Star Trek online should be the history of the future that we all in some way get to participate in.
No levels, just raw performance. You do well, your fleet leader promotes you, you get demoted. No items based on level, that's not star trek. You earn pay, you earn prestige. Prestige buys you a new ship or a better ship, you blow up your ship you go to an escape pod. You wait for rescue. Someone will rescue you you. Items are only limited via hull mass limitations. A saber class can only support 10,000 metric tons. A Soverign class, 100,000 metric tonnes. You earn prestige through PvE. You earn credits or latnium through various economical markets. If your in starfleet you might want to find a way to earn credits, but you don't have to, it's starfleet. Based on what a hull mass limitations could support, you betcha.
Strategic ship customization of items, real time advantages and disadvages to a saucer design or a pylon configuation, not just an astetic, but a strategy to find a better edge in the midst of a dynamic landscape.
This is the god I prayed too when I thought about what this game should be.
Star Trek online will never be what I wrote above, but it is something and I must delight in it for what it is worth.
I'm diehard about the foundry. At least there we get to build the stories and the world the game itself doesn't exactly let us have. We get to roleplay through many voices, and further the narriatve. I think, more than anything people, approaching this game by and large don't realize it, but they want to affect the narrative.
PvP combat that involves territorial control, comes from that vein. End game content comes from that vein. Experiencing the interior of your star-ship, as if it were actually part of the world and not just one of 3 templates based on scale, comes from the vein of being part of that narrative in a conving way, of owning something phenomenal that could be lost. The Department head system or First officer system i've heard so much about springs from the desire to reinforce a more compelling narrative, where lives matter.
See nothing matters in star trek online. Except for shinies. The game's history has been stuck in the year 2409. It technically should be 2410 at this point. The weekly episodic missions promised back in may stopped, which combined with the game ultimately not feeling like it mattres, as a game... or even as a story, convinces many people the devs don't care. And so these very same people scream louder and Louder and LOUDER, and cancel their subscriptions or leave 'I quit' posts here when their forbidden.
Now the worst part about that is, the devs care. From going these forums and reading the devs posts, or reading Dan Stahl's writing. Or following these guys on twitter and seeing what they're excited about, tells me, they care more about this game then any of us could because they own it more then we ever can. Someone got a flippn' wicked buzz off designing the new borg tactical cube. Someone got a HUGE kick out of buidling an entire level around piloting a shuttle and making it work and telling a story in a new and fantastic way in STO.
Then you look at this episodic mission like the Romulan front, or The Breen missions. Their phenomenal.
If we were to have another faction, it shouldn't be romulan. It needs to breen. Why? Because the breen... we don't know what they are, and this is our chance to define the breen. To explore what they mean us because when we do that, we get understand ourselves better. Or maybe not. Maybe their the archetype of our fear of the unknown. Just violent enough to be frighteningly dangerous, just far enough away to never quite be understood. The borg started off that way, and they were such a terrifying idea the writers of the show tripped over themselves to explain them, to fight them, because the borg live in our nightmares, point blank. Every last one of us the borg haunt us, especially in U.S. culture where individualism and self reliance are tantamount to how we see ourselves. We try to do many things to make ourselves unique and special, but in doing so we fall into very same gaggle of conformity.
Would I make a romulan character? Sure! I love romulan design. But being part of something like that... I dunno. Without territory control, without some way to impact the universe at large as one of these races, just flying around in a ship I like with race that I know feels more like mental masturbation then actually being enriched by something that I pay 20 bucks a month, to invest hours of time into.
The foundry missions are what they are, they're novella's. And you can feel the passion of the writer behind it because... that's all it's there for and it's wonderful to partake those novellas. And i can't wait to start contributing to them in my own vein.
Anyways I'm well past the point of rambling, I just hope everyone noticed that not a single Dev has posted in this thread. It keeps coming back from the dead, and what for? So we can all have a pot to pee in and feel better when we're done complaining. Probably. This is the bathroom of the forums of star trek online where we can puke or TRIBBLE all over the damn game.
This righteous indignation thing has to stop. We have to find a way as a community to be a community and make the best of what we have, and we have something pretty damn good, it just suffers from being one of the most popular franchises, and the most difficult to quantify in any medium. Let alone PC Gaming.
Signing out. Much love peep-a-dillos.
2. Ships- The year is 2409. Why on Earth are there 100+ year old ships flying around. The hull life is suppossedly roughly 100 years. Anything made before 2309 needs to be at the Federation surplus depot at Qualor Two!
3. Ships again- I still can't understand why my old Excelsior refit can hang nose to nose with a Soverign. Excelsiors were 2nd tier back in DS9 and TNG days. Don't give me the US Battleships from WWII still operational in the 1990's analogy. The cost to add say a nucelear reactor, and wire the ship for glass cockpit electonics and computers would be more expensive than building a new one from scratch.
3. Ships-No Ambassadore class still??? At roughly 80 years old we should still get another 20 out of her.
4. Star Bases- Should have at least 1 in every sector.
5. More missops like TNG and less combat.
No offense but these ideas are the same thing many MMO's have tried to do and the reason most of them have gone almost completely PvE due to grieving other players. Certain player base/population of factions has to balance out before your ideas could come to fruition and thats if anyone subscribes for the month after they were to go in. As far as the Death issue, dream on because these fleets who have around 500 members would just grieve players as a recruiting tactic to blackmail them into joining their fleet (We won't let you play unless you join us kinda deal). Mass game events "existed" on other games until crashes and persistent hardware failures come about, its just like Dstahl was trying to explain on something I listened to about how you can't have too many ships in one area it taxes the lower budgeted machines out there too much (is why you got the happy medium known as fleet actions). I would not say no more costumes, just not anymore for awhile except for KDF side which doesn't have much to choose from. The only issue I have that i'm disappointed with is that STO as a MMO company hasn't started taking the leap that is going to be the new age of MMO's breaking away from the classic xp grind, and tank, nuke, healer setup. I think most would agree though that a lot of the tactical and science abilities should be integrated in all the classes such as weapons training, and healing abilities so that it can help to bring certain classes but not definately needed to play a tact or sci, and exclude engineers a lot like I see on a daily basis (waiting over 6 hours for a science officer is horrifying).
Sadly over time it's degraded and by now we get little useable feedback from it.
If you have more feedback to specific issues, please use precise and specific threads that directly address one concern you have. It makes it much easier for us to separate 'background noise' from your core concerns - which in turn helps us get more out of what you wish to tell us in a constructive manner.
However: Hot chocolate with whipped cream and chocolate shavings are in order. *passes out cups*