How to keep STO a fun game to play (not in terms of development)

When you look around the forums, there is one thing that will always meet your eye. People are complaining about grind fests, the game being too easy, bugs and so on. Ofcourse, I have encountered these issues myself. And somehow, after 22 months, I am still logging in a couple of days a week (would love to log in more often, but I'm a student, so my free time has a Battle Cloak equipped). So now, I'm going to share my secrets about how to keep the game fun.

Start with your ships. An educated guess based on my many PUG matches teach me that 70% of the ingame ships are escorts, with everybody attempting to max out their damage (I say attempted, not everybody succeeds). When LoR launched, I started building my Romulan to also do max damage. And although my Fleet Mogai really has a nasty bite, it is not my favourite ship. I tend to stick with my Fleet Excelsior that is build for tanking.
Now, why is that? With my Excelsior, I have the time to enjoy every fight I enter. I do not melt through a Battleship, I have a good fight with it. I am capable of taking down a Khitomer cube on my own, but it is never guaranteed and pushes me to the edges of my capabilities as a starship captain. By artificially keeping my damage below a certain amount of DPS (after 22 months, I still have a Polaron build, no Jem'Hadar set and an uncommon beam array aft) the game never is easy. Many fights are tough, and therefore my feeling of accomplishement is all the better. On occasion I enter the Mogai, especially when some Fleet members want to run a set of STF's, but the Excelsior is the absolute flagship of my large fleet.

Coming close to this is to avoid the grind fest as much as possible. When Season 7 launched, I started doing both reputations for one of my two characters. Now I have 6 characters, and I have only reached a total of 3 T5 reputation. I never entered Nukara or Dyson, and the only reason I'm doing Omega and Romulan again on my Romulan for the Mogai max-out. And only when I feel like it. That Romulan was born on May 21st, and still isn't full T5 on Omega reputation.
Next to avoiding this major grind fest as a pain in the neck for every character you create, it also helps with keeping the game on a fun difficulty. My ships and characters will never be maxed out, keeping my damage low, enhancing to the challenge offered by this game.
There are only 2 things I will ever grind for. One of them are items that I like for a special character (for example: my KDF tac has a biography as originating from the Gamma Quadrant. When a buddy offered me a great deal on a Jem HEC, I went for it. Same story applies with getting FSM for my FLeet Mogai, I don't own the regular) and the other is my fleet.

Since I am already discussing my fleet, that is another great piece of advice I can give you. Help leading a fleet. This doesn't necesarily mean that you need to create your own, but you can also work towards getting to the higher ranks. The rewards from helping members level up their characters, assist in ship-building and so on are greater than any amount of dilithium can ever express. It is the feeling of doing something good.
Personally, I will not enjoy this game without leading a fleet. This has a personal background story, with me climbing up to Fleet Leader in the 506th, then after months getting demoted back to member by an inactive Leader. I tried for a while to blend in with another fleet, but the call of leadership was to great. In June I founded the Delta Task Force, which has restored my fun in the game. And it is great to see that fleet at T3 starbase, almost T3 mine, T2 embassy and T1 spire.

Another great piece of advice in how to keep the game fun: look into the Foundry. Sure, there is always the Captain Bobo's Grind Fest covering up about 85% of this feature. Then there is another 10% of boring, bad, poorly-written missions. But if you can dig deep enough, you can find the remaining 5% of the Foundry, which contains great stories and really fun missions to play. To write a Foundry mission is also fun to do. I know that my missions can use some improvement, but the experience of creating them was great.

The biggest advice I can give is to form your group of friends. I have met with a lot of players, and a small group of them have become really great ingame friends. One of them is leading the Delta Task Force next to me, because we can trust each other to the point that we will never kick each other from fleet leadership. That is friendship. That is the best thing you can have to keep you in this game.

As a final advice, don't feel yourself forced to do anything. If you stop doing dailies (I gave up on them a long time, except for Q's wonderland and Risa summer event on half of my chars), don't feel yourself forced to do reputation to get a really good working ship (I've got a great tank with stuff worth of around 1 million ec) and just do whatever you feel like doing in Star Trek Online, you will discover an amazing game, capable of delivering you a lot of interesting content, all different from one another. I will be the last person to say that this game does not need further developing, especially in the areas of exploration, bugs and PvP (thats the sad part about not being the aforementioned Captain Bobo: you are currently unable to participate in PvP). But the game in its current shape will allow you to do so many things. You just need to have the right mind setting to go find it.