That made me laugh so hard. I don't know what you smoke but I want that too.
No.... every indication does not say that at all.
And even if it WOULD the case that doesn't mean they couldn't make more money with a little bit of thought.
In fact they wouldn't need to rely on Lockbox gambling then.
In fact, if they could care more about customers, im sure they will be winning A LOT more than now. By far.
You could have played STO without a sub. STO was F2P before the PWE purchase. You would have even kept most of the stuff you got for subbing. One of my accounts was Gold for about a month, because someone had purchased a STO box as a gift for me; that account still has its extra character slot and whatnot.
Now, if you didn't want to play for free, that's on you...
you win the haha i got more and better stuff then you like haha i got a bug ship jhad with pet ships and you dont haha
oh and haha took for sto to become a job to get every thing i do
and any one played wow know braggin rights are everything
and i may have been wrong about how many season Atari put out but their is this thing that bug me so i was paying pwe money when the game was a sub game up till season 5? something dont add up as they dont make you pay for content and i was subing or else i could not play sto...........
I am really bad writting in english (not my native languaje) but dude, your case is... i dont understand almost anything of what you said lol.
Anyways, the guy is right, you can play this game without even invest a ZEN. But the time you will need is.. well, you will need to play STO for your entire life. And i dont think STO will last more than a year from now.. so, STO is not a neverending game.
do you think i care? really do you? if you do i hate to say it i dont give one flying flip if you do or dont and i say that with love
If you dont care why you are responding??
¿? and if people is not going to understand what you write.. why you write it?? now, my intention was not to insult you or something, you missunderstood me. It was just a note.
¿? and if people is not going to understand what you write.. why you write it?? now, my intention was not to insult you or something, you missunderstood me. It was just a note.
your the only one to say something........ funny jo got what i said or else who was his reply to......
You could have played STO without a sub. STO was F2P before the PWE purchase. You would have even kept most of the stuff you got for subbing. One of my accounts was Gold for about a month, because someone had purchased a STO box as a gift for me; that account still has its extra character slot and whatnot.
Now, if you didn't want to play for free, that's on you...
STO went F2P after the PWE purchase. September 2011 is when the PWE purchase and F2P announcement was announced and January 2012 was when STO went F2P.
i cant see how you can fault the ftp model, especially with the dilithium exchange there is nothing other then lifetime or monthly subs that you cannot get in game for free.
i know there are other players who have bought the zen to exchange for dil but if there are players who are happy to exchange zen for dil and vice versa i cant see why anyone should complain about it.
some might say that this is a grind but even though i have a lifetime account and get 500zen stipend every month i am still happy to exchange dil for zen to buy extras from the c-store, to me there is no grind involved at all as i am having fun playing the parts of the game i enjoy and if i get dil for it i have no problem exchanging it for zen to save up for somthing i want and this is still bringing money into the game because if nobody exchanged dil there would be no money coming in to buy dil so it helps to keep the economy of the game thriveing.
it is quite surprising how quickly the zen mounts up without very much effort involved, even before when i was ftp i bought loads of stuff from the store and it didnt take very long at all to accomplish.
i say yet again thanks cryptic for all you do for us.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
STO went F2P after the PWE purchase. September 2011 is when the PWE purchase and F2P announcement was announced and January 2012 was when STO went F2P.
Yes, sto went ftp after the purchase by pw, but the purchase was on may 31st, 2011. The purchase was announced several months prior to that in a pw conference call, so everyone knew pw was buying the company since very early 2011. It simply took them several months to finalize the deal.
One problem with that. STO and SWTOR have 2 very different business models. Here's a small rundown.
Things that both games share:
-STO and SWTOR both give players full access to story content.
^^^
Not entirely true as the SWToR expansion with the new quest laden planet and level cap increase to 55 was a 'paid expansion' you had to buy using real currency (IE you couldn't use Cartel coins.) They eventually DID make it 'free' to subscription players. They plan to do more pay for playn expansions this year too.
I bring up the above because "legacy of Romulus" for STO was in fact 100% free (yes, they sold 'Legacy Packs' with items bundled at a discount; but those packs weren't/aren't required for access to LoR. They also gave every account another free character slot that could be used to create a new Romulan character (or any other type of character) if the account holder so chose.
-STO and SWTOR both have items that players cannot buy with regular in game free currency in their respective in-game markets.
-STO and SWTOR both have options for people to spend money if they so choose.
Cons of SWTOR
-PvP is limited in SWTOR.
-Endgame content is limited in SWTOR.
-No way to earn as much cash shop currency as you want.
-limited options for creating characters for free players.
-No regular bank access for free players.
-Worst of all: No UGC content.
I would honestly prefer to remain with STO over SWTOR. STO may not have worthwhile PvP and the ability to go where you want in the galaxy (yet), but when you consider that you aren't pressured to buy into things if you want to experience the rest of the game with STO like you are with SWTOR.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
"Other MMO's are far worse, so STO is good by comparison"
I find this particular line of reasoning irrational and I've been hearing it a lot lately. Just because others are much worse, this one is good? So I guess compared to getting a bullet to the head, a knife in the shoulder is good too? Has anyone heard of the "middle of the road" fallacy? STO is better than the majority of F2P MMO's. However, it still hasn't met the bar of what would be called acceptable. STO, for all its merits, still falls short on customer satisfaction.
Players should be getting more than they are when paying for subscriptions and the game should have content that's compelling to play despite the drops and other rewards. Playing content should, in itself, be a reward and it isn't. The episodes feel like nothing more than a barrier to a goal. The grind too. Grinding is not fun, it's work. Games should not be work. If I want to grind, I'll go to the local YMCA and hop on a treadmill. At least then, I'll get some tangible benefit from it. In STO, I grind for days to get what, a shiny new item? Whooptee-doo! How about a challenge? How about an adventure? How about some discovery and accomplishment aside from having the biggest numbers in the game? Give me a plot puzzle to solve. Make me seek out evidence and try to figure out what it means. Make me care about what happens.
Leveling is a pointless chore in this game because the journey from level 1 to 50 has no bearing on the end-game content and it's a bland experience that's highly forgettable. I know the devs work very hard on this stuff and it probably makes them feel quite jaded towards their customers when we complain about their work, but as a consumer, I feel quite jaded that quest design is built on outdated methods. They've been recycling the same tired design that's been analyzed and found lacking for quite a while. How about some quest arcs that branch based on your choices and actions? It can be done, even on this engine. It just takes some creative use of existing resources.
Let's talk about the story and dialog. There's all kinds of ways to make dialog important instead of completely skip-able. Make information you get in dialog important to remember. Make it pivotal in accomplishing future goals. Like in TNG: Gambit, Picard notices the inscriptions on the psionic weapon and figures out how to defeat it. Leaving these little clues behind that provide useful knowledge for the player makes them feel clever and resourceful. The quest design that pervades the game right now is nothing but a list of "kill these guys", "activate that", "kill some more guys", "activate that", "listen to inconsequential dialog", "do the next thing", and so on. The quests are a procedural list of actions. Nothing is left to question. The player is conditioned to do a task when prompted and move on to the next one. Boring!
STO may be the better than the rest of the MMO's, but it's really the the least of all evils, not an exemplar of MMO design.
Go here and show your support for a better Foundry!
SWTOR is great as long as you sub. And the in game currency that you buy for real money is much more reasonably priced than Zen.
For all the leechers that dont expect to pay anything at all towards a game, then yeah, STO is better. For players with jobs or see gaming as a hobby, SWTOR is far superior.
I play both games.
" Experience is a hard mistress, she gives the tests first, and the lessons after... "
SWTOR is great as long as you sub. And the in game currency that you buy for real money is much more reasonably priced than Zen.
For all the leechers that dont expect to pay anything at all towards a game, then yeah, STO is better. For players with jobs or see gaming as a hobby, SWTOR is far superior.
Wow, some of y'all get downright bitter and angry when called out on your misinformation.
Calendars are pretty easy to read. And as for "pay to win" - what exactly are you winning? I can do everything in the game with my free ships and equipment that either dropped from fights or was purchased from the Exchange. Haven't spent a dime on this game, and haven't felt the loss.
And I see that claim was repeated that there's been no free content since Facility 4028. I still want to know who tried to make you guys pay for LoR or the Dyson Sphere, because I got all that stuff for free...
Some of them can't grasp the concept of what it costs to run an MMORPG, let alone purchase one from a TRIBBLE sell out company like Attari.
And than they further bicker because they act like because we spend huge amounts of money, we should get everything in a hand basket delivered to their front door.
Sorry but no one has forced you ever to pay all that money to them, it was squarely your own desire to throw money at a game where nothing is real and owned by you in a RL environment.
It takes millions of dollars just to even consider starting an MMORPG from the ground up, than millions to keep it running for years to come, and even more million for another company to purchase it with years to try and make back what was spent and quite possibly turn a profit.
Bugs or no bugs, story content or no story content, the game dev's try to fulfill some content in a timely fashion considering they probably work a 9-5 job like most folks do, and it may not be to everyone's liking but at least they try and give you something to keep you busy.
Even for those other brand X MMORPG's out there, ok they may pop out some long and quite possibly creative content, but after you run it a few times it is just as easily boring and most often an even longer grind due to lootgens than STO.
This gentleman obviously is quite satisfied, and smart enough to know not to go overboard on the spending for something you can technically never own.
But there will always be those who have more money than common sense, and I say thank you for keeping this game alive and running because I know damn well my budget sure won't always allow for it, but I do spend some here and there.
I like this game, but how some people have the stones to say it is the best MMO around, or better than SWTOR i have no idea. People hating on SWTOR clearly havent played it since it released or at least within the last year. Its a damn good game, and has infinitely more content than this half hearted attempt at an MMO in all honesty.
Lets cut to the chase here. The reason so many people rave about this game is for one of two reason:
1) They either love star trek or they have not been playing for long and still have that 'new car smell' on everything. This quickly evaporates once the L50 rep grind begins and you are running the same 5-6 STF's over and over and over.....
2) It DOES have a great F2P model. There is no denying that, and this is the real crux of it. This is why people like STO so much. All the leechers, scrubs and farmers, that for reasons only known to themselves, think it is great never to pay a dime towards a game they invest a large portion of their time playing. I don't get how anyone thinks this is reasonable. Especially when the same leechers will go on to slander parts of the game where they feel they have not been gifted enough reward. It borders on craziness.
Where the F2P model fails is that for people who do wish to spend money on the game, to buy some of the cooler stuff or just to get more gear, it is substantially more expensive than some other MMO's.
SWTOR for example, i can sub to that for £9 a month. And i get everything. Then i can choose to spend more real life cash to buy certain cosmetic items and some extra cool gear. Even then, the cool stuff still costs considerably less in RL cash than it does in STO. Not to mention, SWTOR has a great deal of end game content, and a hell of a lot of content in general. Not the 2 days to hit max level that STO has that all the kids seem to love.
Ok, so £9 a month in STO gets me some dil or some keys. Not enough to buy anything of any game value. For a ship, you are looking at 40 keys which is around 4500 Zen and thats if its a relatively cheap lockbox ship say the 70-80 million EC range. More expensive ships cost substantially more. Same goes for BOFF's, consoles, traits. Some are in the range of 20-30 million EC. Thats 10-20 keys or 1000-2000 Zen. Expensive if you want anything without grinding for months refining dil. EXPENSIVE unless you are a scrub with nothing better to do than farm 16 characters every day like some weridos do. The worst part is, the leechers actually think this is awesome, that they have basically encouraged you to make STO into a job, where you earn the dil to sell to players using Zen. Way to go, you are the cheapest video game employees around!
So yeah if i am a F2P leech, STO is great, better than other MMO's. If i have money, then STO can be very expensive compared to some other MMO's.
THERE IS NO CONTENT FOR THIS GAME
Look at the 'big' much hyped LoR expansion. What new content did it bring to the game for long time players? It wasn't an expansion like for other MMO's, dropping lots of new content, end game stuff. It was an expansion to generate more revenue through attracting more new players and to encourage old players to make more characters. Since then we have had 2 new space STF's from season 8.5. So in almost a year, we have had 2 new space STF's to add to the already ancient content of Borg STF's etc. And they weren't even particularly good. Lets be generous and say 3 because of Crytsalline entity. Or go wild and say 4 if you add Elachi alert, even though it was the easiest STF known to STO players ever.
THERE IS NO CHALLENGE IN THIS GAME
Power creep is so insane now that Borg STF's can be completed with over 10 minutes left on the optional timers. 10 MINUTES. Think about that. That timer used to be a countdown to when you would have 'made' the optional. Now its a timer for how fast you can DPS the whole thing down. The laughable part is, these Borg STF's are still generally the most challenging PVE part of the game except for No Win Scenario.
PVP - Enough said. Just browse the PVP gameplay section of the forums.
These are 3 crucial factors in any MMO for holding onto a fanbase. Compared to Captain's names, outfit changes and other chaff, these things i mention are far more key to keeping the game alive. And no one wants to play a dead game, especially after investing a lot of hours or real money.
To summarise, all the money that gets pumped into this game at the moment, seems to be fed back into generating more revenue through new players by revamping tutorials, making alts more appealing, etc, than it does into pleasing old players and giving them exciting new content. If you think about that, it is a terrible business model for consumer loyalty. Basically means they will happily take a hit on losing older players that may have already paid into the game, as long as they can keep attracting new players that will restart the whole cycle of writing OP threads like this one and the possibility of dropping some cash for Zen.
I know this is extremely cynical, but don't get me wrong, i LOVE this game. This just makes it even more important to me that it succeeds and they start thinking about long term rather than making the quick cash and harvesting as many new players as they can.
" Experience is a hard mistress, she gives the tests first, and the lessons after... "
Honestly, to those who are just griping and griping, if you hate the game so much, why the hell are you bothering to stick around and why are you even on the game's forums?
Honestly if you dont like a mmo or its f2p mode or that it is a sub why do you go to another games forums to QQ about it? sto cryptic pwe has not control over swtor and for that im extremely happy about it to
Honestly, to those who are just griping and griping, if you hate the game so much, why the hell are you bothering to stick around and why are you even on the game's forums?
People get their kicks that way.
BioFAIL/EA is running that game into the ground. They haven't been the same company since EA bought them. To think of the last 3 games they did, I am surprised to think back on it and consider Dragon Age 2 (with the Legacy expac but not that crappy other one I refuse to name) is the best of the last 3. With Dragon Age 3 looking hopeful they may bounce back. But when DA2 hit, I thought it was TRIBBLE. Still do. But it's better than the follow-up 2 games BioFAIL released.
People blame everything on PWE but Cryptic didn't really change too much from the Atari days to PWE. Champions went though the changes while still with Atari and Cryptic said it helped the game make money. So PWE may have pushed STO changeover along but it was already bound to happen because of what happened with CO.
Bioware pre-EA compared to BioFAIL post-EA had a bigger change in quality in the wrong direction.
___________________
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
I guess I just think that instead of constantly griping, the ones who dislike the game should just pack up and move along leaving the game to those who do like it.
Makes a heck of a lot more sense to me. That way everyone is happier.
Ah, so that's what's going on! One of the Top 5 habbits of the STO community - trashing other games on the forum, regardless if they ever played them or not.
I like this game, but how some people have the stones to say it is the best MMO around, or better than SWTOR i have no idea. People hating on SWTOR clearly havent played it since it released or at least within the last year. Its a damn good game, and has infinitely more content than this half hearted attempt at an MMO in all honesty.
Lets cut to the chase here. The reason so many people rave about this game is for one of two reason:
1) They either love star trek or they have not been playing for long and still have that 'new car smell' on everything. This quickly evaporates once the L50 rep grind begins and you are running the same 5-6 STF's over and over and over.....
2) It DOES have a great F2P model. There is no denying that, and this is the real crux of it. This is why people like STO so much. All the leechers, scrubs and farmers, that for reasons only known to themselves, think it is great never to pay a dime towards a game they invest a large portion of their time playing. I don't get how anyone thinks this is reasonable. Especially when the same leechers will go on to slander parts of the game where they feel they have not been gifted enough reward. It borders on craziness.
Where the F2P model fails is that for people who do wish to spend money on the game, to buy some of the cooler stuff or just to get more gear, it is substantially more expensive than some other MMO's.
SWTOR for example, i can sub to that for £9 a month. And i get everything. Then i can choose to spend more real life cash to buy certain cosmetic items and some extra cool gear. Even then, the cool stuff still costs considerably less in RL cash than it does in STO. Not to mention, SWTOR has a great deal of end game content, and a hell of a lot of content in general. Not the 2 days to hit max level that STO has that all the kids seem to love.
Ok, so £9 a month in STO gets me some dil or some keys. Not enough to buy anything of any game value. For a ship, you are looking at 40 keys which is around 4500 Zen and thats if its a relatively cheap lockbox ship say the 70-80 million EC range. More expensive ships cost substantially more. Same goes for BOFF's, consoles, traits. Some are in the range of 20-30 million EC. Thats 10-20 keys or 1000-2000 Zen. Expensive if you want anything without grinding for months refining dil. EXPENSIVE unless you are a scrub with nothing better to do than farm 16 characters every day like some weridos do. The worst part is, the leechers actually think this is awesome, that they have basically encouraged you to make STO into a job, where you earn the dil to sell to players using Zen. Way to go, you are the cheapest video game employees around!
So yeah if i am a F2P leech, STO is great, better than other MMO's. If i have money, then STO can be very expensive compared to some other MMO's.
THERE IS NO CONTENT FOR THIS GAME
Look at the 'big' much hyped LoR expansion. What new content did it bring to the game for long time players? It wasn't an expansion like for other MMO's, dropping lots of new content, end game stuff. It was an expansion to generate more revenue through attracting more new players and to encourage old players to make more characters. Since then we have had 2 new space STF's from season 8.5. So in almost a year, we have had 2 new space STF's to add to the already ancient content of Borg STF's etc. And they weren't even particularly good. Lets be generous and say 3 because of Crytsalline entity. Or go wild and say 4 if you add Elachi alert, even though it was the easiest STF known to STO players ever.
THERE IS NO CHALLENGE IN THIS GAME
Power creep is so insane now that Borg STF's can be completed with over 10 minutes left on the optional timers. 10 MINUTES. Think about that. That timer used to be a countdown to when you would have 'made' the optional. Now its a timer for how fast you can DPS the whole thing down. The laughable part is, these Borg STF's are still generally the most challenging PVE part of the game except for No Win Scenario.
PVP - Enough said. Just browse the PVP gameplay section of the forums.
These are 3 crucial factors in any MMO for holding onto a fanbase. Compared to Captain's names, outfit changes and other chaff, these things i mention are far more key to keeping the game alive. And no one wants to play a dead game, especially after investing a lot of hours or real money.
To summarise, all the money that gets pumped into this game at the moment, seems to be fed back into generating more revenue through new players by revamping tutorials, making alts more appealing, etc, than it does into pleasing old players and giving them exciting new content. If you think about that, it is a terrible business model for consumer loyalty. Basically means they will happily take a hit on losing older players that may have already paid into the game, as long as they can keep attracting new players that will restart the whole cycle of writing OP threads like this one and the possibility of dropping some cash for Zen.
I know this is extremely cynical, but don't get me wrong, i LOVE this game. This just makes it even more important to me that it succeeds and they start thinking about long term rather than making the quick cash and harvesting as many new players as they can.
The issue with pretty much 100% of all MMORPG's, is they can never create enough content to fulfill everyone's play time, desires, needs, or interests.
Sure you can develop some randomness algorithms to create a differing adventure, but in reality after you have run every possible character type, every build type, and done all the content over and over it still becomes in time boring and in most cases a battle to get the shiny holy grail that is part of that content, thus becoming a grind.
And if that grind make use of lootgens as the only means to obtain that shiny holy grail, well it could be an indefinite struggle, or once around to ever obtain it.
All MMORPG's have to make money to not only survive, but to make investor's happy, and will always make changes to do so when the money supply isn't meeting the needed figures.
Again for those who do dish out considerable amounts of money into this game, I at least thank you because what little I can spend from time to time isn't very much, but you need remember that what you are spending it on is simple entertainment like TV, and not something you get to own so you are spending at your own risk with the understanding that they decide what programming to provide.
Sure there are those things you can buy in pretty much any MMORPG that may quicken things, or provide some different form of enjoyment than simply playing, but they resemble TV in a way like how you can get paid programming like HBO, cinemax, starz, payperview, sports, etc.... :P
I like this game, but how some people have the stones to say it is the best MMO around, or better than SWTOR i have no idea. People hating on SWTOR clearly havent played it since it released or at least within the last year. Its a damn good game, and has infinitely more content than this half hearted attempt at an MMO in all honesty.
Cancel sub less than 2 months ago. I was in the sub access group for their Galactic Starfighter which got boring very fast with limited types of matches. I don't even mean just slapping a new map with the same type objectives.
They will add another (YAWN) Buttball which is the dumbest concept of a WZ they have. Let's see... Imps fighting Reps to the death but they take time to go play their version of NFL Football? Which also can be TRIBBLE since beta and they haven't fixed those holes yet. But yet that's the new zone coming? I guess with Disney buying the IP, Mickey Mouse is running the show over there. Oh wait... Mickey's actually too smart to make that move. Adding another Buttball will now double the chances of landing in one of those when queing. STO has a better solution to the que system, you pick what you want to play not land in the ones you don't.
You get no support without a sub. Can't even submit bugs. Free people can find bugs too so closing that off shows that BioFAIL wants their game to remain broken like it is.
As someone said before though, DCUO has a better set up for those who do not sub than both games. Only thing with DCUO is there is no way to get more on hand cash. I ran a T3 (tier 3 dungeon basically for people who never played it) with a free player while I was subbed. One guy was preferred and the others on the team had to keep giving him cash to pay for his gear repair. I thought "Wait, he has gear with a CR to even play T3 but not a sub? I would sub to get to the top gear then unsub if it was me." In DCUO you can't play certain tiers until you get gear with a certain Combat Rating. Only thing as a preferred is lack of character slots but that's everywhere and not having access to my bases because I didn't pay for the DLC separately. If I play it again, I'll probably fork the 10 dollars per DLC so as a free player I have access to things.
___________________
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
I guess I just think that instead of constantly griping, the ones who dislike the game should just pack up and move along leaving the game to those who do like it.
Makes a heck of a lot more sense to me. That way everyone is happier.
This might come as a surprise to you, but saying nothing at all and just leaving doesn't fix anything. It won't change anything. Complaining about it on the forums probably won't either, but it stands a greater chance than not saying anything.
If you don't want to hear people complain, you could just not read these threads. Practice what you preach and such.
Go here and show your support for a better Foundry!
My opinion of STO vs SWTORs F2P model is that this games F2P model doesn't annoy you into paying money for things with all the little stupid things that are locked down if you don't have a subscription. Largely why I stopped actually playing SWTOR, even if I can play without paying a dime.
It's always amusing how many people think SWTOR is failing when it's doing better than the game they're touting...
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
It's always amusing how many people think SWTOR is failing when it's doing better than the game they're touting...
That's almost like saying "Sony is doing so much better than Attari", well of course they are they have so many other means to make money than the other.
Comments
In fact, if they could care more about customers, im sure they will be winning A LOT more than now. By far.
Now, if you didn't want to play for free, that's on you...
I am really bad writting in english (not my native languaje) but dude, your case is... i dont understand almost anything of what you said lol.
Anyways, the guy is right, you can play this game without even invest a ZEN. But the time you will need is.. well, you will need to play STO for your entire life. And i dont think STO will last more than a year from now.. so, STO is not a neverending game.
do you think i care? really do you? if you do i hate to say it i dont give one flying flip if you do or dont and i say that with love
system Lord Baal is dead
If you dont care why you are responding??
¿? and if people is not going to understand what you write.. why you write it?? now, my intention was not to insult you or something, you missunderstood me. It was just a note.
your the only one to say something........
system Lord Baal is dead
STO went F2P after the PWE purchase. September 2011 is when the PWE purchase and F2P announcement was announced and January 2012 was when STO went F2P.
i know there are other players who have bought the zen to exchange for dil but if there are players who are happy to exchange zen for dil and vice versa i cant see why anyone should complain about it.
some might say that this is a grind but even though i have a lifetime account and get 500zen stipend every month i am still happy to exchange dil for zen to buy extras from the c-store, to me there is no grind involved at all as i am having fun playing the parts of the game i enjoy and if i get dil for it i have no problem exchanging it for zen to save up for somthing i want and this is still bringing money into the game because if nobody exchanged dil there would be no money coming in to buy dil so it helps to keep the economy of the game thriveing.
it is quite surprising how quickly the zen mounts up without very much effort involved, even before when i was ftp i bought loads of stuff from the store and it didnt take very long at all to accomplish.
i say yet again thanks cryptic for all you do for us.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Exactly my point.
Not entirely true as the SWToR expansion with the new quest laden planet and level cap increase to 55 was a 'paid expansion' you had to buy using real currency (IE you couldn't use Cartel coins.) They eventually DID make it 'free' to subscription players. They plan to do more pay for playn expansions this year too.
I bring up the above because "legacy of Romulus" for STO was in fact 100% free (yes, they sold 'Legacy Packs' with items bundled at a discount; but those packs weren't/aren't required for access to LoR. They also gave every account another free character slot that could be used to create a new Romulan character (or any other type of character) if the account holder so chose.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I find this particular line of reasoning irrational and I've been hearing it a lot lately. Just because others are much worse, this one is good? So I guess compared to getting a bullet to the head, a knife in the shoulder is good too? Has anyone heard of the "middle of the road" fallacy? STO is better than the majority of F2P MMO's. However, it still hasn't met the bar of what would be called acceptable. STO, for all its merits, still falls short on customer satisfaction.
Players should be getting more than they are when paying for subscriptions and the game should have content that's compelling to play despite the drops and other rewards. Playing content should, in itself, be a reward and it isn't. The episodes feel like nothing more than a barrier to a goal. The grind too. Grinding is not fun, it's work. Games should not be work. If I want to grind, I'll go to the local YMCA and hop on a treadmill. At least then, I'll get some tangible benefit from it. In STO, I grind for days to get what, a shiny new item? Whooptee-doo! How about a challenge? How about an adventure? How about some discovery and accomplishment aside from having the biggest numbers in the game? Give me a plot puzzle to solve. Make me seek out evidence and try to figure out what it means. Make me care about what happens.
Leveling is a pointless chore in this game because the journey from level 1 to 50 has no bearing on the end-game content and it's a bland experience that's highly forgettable. I know the devs work very hard on this stuff and it probably makes them feel quite jaded towards their customers when we complain about their work, but as a consumer, I feel quite jaded that quest design is built on outdated methods. They've been recycling the same tired design that's been analyzed and found lacking for quite a while. How about some quest arcs that branch based on your choices and actions? It can be done, even on this engine. It just takes some creative use of existing resources.
Let's talk about the story and dialog. There's all kinds of ways to make dialog important instead of completely skip-able. Make information you get in dialog important to remember. Make it pivotal in accomplishing future goals. Like in TNG: Gambit, Picard notices the inscriptions on the psionic weapon and figures out how to defeat it. Leaving these little clues behind that provide useful knowledge for the player makes them feel clever and resourceful. The quest design that pervades the game right now is nothing but a list of "kill these guys", "activate that", "kill some more guys", "activate that", "listen to inconsequential dialog", "do the next thing", and so on. The quests are a procedural list of actions. Nothing is left to question. The player is conditioned to do a task when prompted and move on to the next one. Boring!
STO may be the better than the rest of the MMO's, but it's really the the least of all evils, not an exemplar of MMO design.
Yeah, but that doesn't make it good.
For all the leechers that dont expect to pay anything at all towards a game, then yeah, STO is better. For players with jobs or see gaming as a hobby, SWTOR is far superior.
I play both games.
very much this^^^^^^^ every word of it
system Lord Baal is dead
Some of them can't grasp the concept of what it costs to run an MMORPG, let alone purchase one from a TRIBBLE sell out company like Attari.
And than they further bicker because they act like because we spend huge amounts of money, we should get everything in a hand basket delivered to their front door.
Sorry but no one has forced you ever to pay all that money to them, it was squarely your own desire to throw money at a game where nothing is real and owned by you in a RL environment.
It takes millions of dollars just to even consider starting an MMORPG from the ground up, than millions to keep it running for years to come, and even more million for another company to purchase it with years to try and make back what was spent and quite possibly turn a profit.
Bugs or no bugs, story content or no story content, the game dev's try to fulfill some content in a timely fashion considering they probably work a 9-5 job like most folks do, and it may not be to everyone's liking but at least they try and give you something to keep you busy.
Even for those other brand X MMORPG's out there, ok they may pop out some long and quite possibly creative content, but after you run it a few times it is just as easily boring and most often an even longer grind due to lootgens than STO.
This gentleman obviously is quite satisfied, and smart enough to know not to go overboard on the spending for something you can technically never own.
But there will always be those who have more money than common sense, and I say thank you for keeping this game alive and running because I know damn well my budget sure won't always allow for it, but I do spend some here and there.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Lets cut to the chase here. The reason so many people rave about this game is for one of two reason:
1) They either love star trek or they have not been playing for long and still have that 'new car smell' on everything. This quickly evaporates once the L50 rep grind begins and you are running the same 5-6 STF's over and over and over.....
2) It DOES have a great F2P model. There is no denying that, and this is the real crux of it. This is why people like STO so much. All the leechers, scrubs and farmers, that for reasons only known to themselves, think it is great never to pay a dime towards a game they invest a large portion of their time playing. I don't get how anyone thinks this is reasonable. Especially when the same leechers will go on to slander parts of the game where they feel they have not been gifted enough reward. It borders on craziness.
Where the F2P model fails is that for people who do wish to spend money on the game, to buy some of the cooler stuff or just to get more gear, it is substantially more expensive than some other MMO's.
SWTOR for example, i can sub to that for £9 a month. And i get everything. Then i can choose to spend more real life cash to buy certain cosmetic items and some extra cool gear. Even then, the cool stuff still costs considerably less in RL cash than it does in STO. Not to mention, SWTOR has a great deal of end game content, and a hell of a lot of content in general. Not the 2 days to hit max level that STO has that all the kids seem to love.
Ok, so £9 a month in STO gets me some dil or some keys. Not enough to buy anything of any game value. For a ship, you are looking at 40 keys which is around 4500 Zen and thats if its a relatively cheap lockbox ship say the 70-80 million EC range. More expensive ships cost substantially more. Same goes for BOFF's, consoles, traits. Some are in the range of 20-30 million EC. Thats 10-20 keys or 1000-2000 Zen. Expensive if you want anything without grinding for months refining dil. EXPENSIVE unless you are a scrub with nothing better to do than farm 16 characters every day like some weridos do. The worst part is, the leechers actually think this is awesome, that they have basically encouraged you to make STO into a job, where you earn the dil to sell to players using Zen. Way to go, you are the cheapest video game employees around!
So yeah if i am a F2P leech, STO is great, better than other MMO's. If i have money, then STO can be very expensive compared to some other MMO's.
THERE IS NO CONTENT FOR THIS GAME
Look at the 'big' much hyped LoR expansion. What new content did it bring to the game for long time players? It wasn't an expansion like for other MMO's, dropping lots of new content, end game stuff. It was an expansion to generate more revenue through attracting more new players and to encourage old players to make more characters. Since then we have had 2 new space STF's from season 8.5. So in almost a year, we have had 2 new space STF's to add to the already ancient content of Borg STF's etc. And they weren't even particularly good. Lets be generous and say 3 because of Crytsalline entity. Or go wild and say 4 if you add Elachi alert, even though it was the easiest STF known to STO players ever.
THERE IS NO CHALLENGE IN THIS GAME
Power creep is so insane now that Borg STF's can be completed with over 10 minutes left on the optional timers. 10 MINUTES. Think about that. That timer used to be a countdown to when you would have 'made' the optional. Now its a timer for how fast you can DPS the whole thing down. The laughable part is, these Borg STF's are still generally the most challenging PVE part of the game except for No Win Scenario.
PVP - Enough said. Just browse the PVP gameplay section of the forums.
These are 3 crucial factors in any MMO for holding onto a fanbase. Compared to Captain's names, outfit changes and other chaff, these things i mention are far more key to keeping the game alive. And no one wants to play a dead game, especially after investing a lot of hours or real money.
To summarise, all the money that gets pumped into this game at the moment, seems to be fed back into generating more revenue through new players by revamping tutorials, making alts more appealing, etc, than it does into pleasing old players and giving them exciting new content. If you think about that, it is a terrible business model for consumer loyalty. Basically means they will happily take a hit on losing older players that may have already paid into the game, as long as they can keep attracting new players that will restart the whole cycle of writing OP threads like this one and the possibility of dropping some cash for Zen.
I know this is extremely cynical, but don't get me wrong, i LOVE this game. This just makes it even more important to me that it succeeds and they start thinking about long term rather than making the quick cash and harvesting as many new players as they can.
system Lord Baal is dead
People get their kicks that way.
BioFAIL/EA is running that game into the ground. They haven't been the same company since EA bought them. To think of the last 3 games they did, I am surprised to think back on it and consider Dragon Age 2 (with the Legacy expac but not that crappy other one I refuse to name) is the best of the last 3. With Dragon Age 3 looking hopeful they may bounce back. But when DA2 hit, I thought it was TRIBBLE. Still do. But it's better than the follow-up 2 games BioFAIL released.
People blame everything on PWE but Cryptic didn't really change too much from the Atari days to PWE. Champions went though the changes while still with Atari and Cryptic said it helped the game make money. So PWE may have pushed STO changeover along but it was already bound to happen because of what happened with CO.
Bioware pre-EA compared to BioFAIL post-EA had a bigger change in quality in the wrong direction.
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
Makes a heck of a lot more sense to me. That way everyone is happier.
Ah, so that's what's going on! One of the Top 5 habbits of the STO community - trashing other games on the forum, regardless if they ever played them or not.
The issue with pretty much 100% of all MMORPG's, is they can never create enough content to fulfill everyone's play time, desires, needs, or interests.
Sure you can develop some randomness algorithms to create a differing adventure, but in reality after you have run every possible character type, every build type, and done all the content over and over it still becomes in time boring and in most cases a battle to get the shiny holy grail that is part of that content, thus becoming a grind.
And if that grind make use of lootgens as the only means to obtain that shiny holy grail, well it could be an indefinite struggle, or once around to ever obtain it.
All MMORPG's have to make money to not only survive, but to make investor's happy, and will always make changes to do so when the money supply isn't meeting the needed figures.
Again for those who do dish out considerable amounts of money into this game, I at least thank you because what little I can spend from time to time isn't very much, but you need remember that what you are spending it on is simple entertainment like TV, and not something you get to own so you are spending at your own risk with the understanding that they decide what programming to provide.
Sure there are those things you can buy in pretty much any MMORPG that may quicken things, or provide some different form of enjoyment than simply playing, but they resemble TV in a way like how you can get paid programming like HBO, cinemax, starz, payperview, sports, etc.... :P
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Cancel sub less than 2 months ago. I was in the sub access group for their Galactic Starfighter which got boring very fast with limited types of matches. I don't even mean just slapping a new map with the same type objectives.
They will add another (YAWN) Buttball which is the dumbest concept of a WZ they have. Let's see... Imps fighting Reps to the death but they take time to go play their version of NFL Football? Which also can be TRIBBLE since beta and they haven't fixed those holes yet. But yet that's the new zone coming? I guess with Disney buying the IP, Mickey Mouse is running the show over there. Oh wait... Mickey's actually too smart to make that move. Adding another Buttball will now double the chances of landing in one of those when queing. STO has a better solution to the que system, you pick what you want to play not land in the ones you don't.
You get no support without a sub. Can't even submit bugs. Free people can find bugs too so closing that off shows that BioFAIL wants their game to remain broken like it is.
As someone said before though, DCUO has a better set up for those who do not sub than both games. Only thing with DCUO is there is no way to get more on hand cash. I ran a T3 (tier 3 dungeon basically for people who never played it) with a free player while I was subbed. One guy was preferred and the others on the team had to keep giving him cash to pay for his gear repair. I thought "Wait, he has gear with a CR to even play T3 but not a sub? I would sub to get to the top gear then unsub if it was me." In DCUO you can't play certain tiers until you get gear with a certain Combat Rating. Only thing as a preferred is lack of character slots but that's everywhere and not having access to my bases because I didn't pay for the DLC separately. If I play it again, I'll probably fork the 10 dollars per DLC so as a free player I have access to things.
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
This might come as a surprise to you, but saying nothing at all and just leaving doesn't fix anything. It won't change anything. Complaining about it on the forums probably won't either, but it stands a greater chance than not saying anything.
If you don't want to hear people complain, you could just not read these threads. Practice what you preach and such.
It's always amusing how many people think SWTOR is failing when it's doing better than the game they're touting...
That's almost like saying "Sony is doing so much better than Attari", well of course they are they have so many other means to make money than the other.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!