I like some of the things done with Season 9, the new Kit system for example is great, and graphics updates are always a good thing, though to be honest a bigger problem has been some of the voice acting.
That said I am going to say flat out this new Trait system has to go. I understand WHY it was done, but understand that the Rep system was created as a way of advancing characters and growing more powerful in lieu of adding more levels and re-naming the ranks. A big part of this of course being how focused the game was on a set number of levels and skill points, and of course the "Tier" system of ships and people being rightfully concerned about having their expensive C-store ships rendered obsolete if more tiers were added. Not to mention the simple problem of most of the canon ships already being in the game system with a reasonable job having been done of putting them into Tiers. Creating things that are yet more powerful and making them the focus of endgame play would of course kill a lot of the "Trek" Vibe.
The thing is though, that if I'm putting hundreds, or thousands of hours into a character (casual or not) I expect it to become incrementally more powerful. The trait system as it was managed to achieve this without the need of adding more levels and/or ship tiers. Under the current system where I have to swap out my hard earned traits, my character is not really becoming much more powerful. Indeed at the best it's giving me a headache of having to swap traits in and out for each specific thing I want to do in an attempt to optimize myself for the moment. In some MMOs like "Guild Wars" designed with that kind of thing, and to largely have a PVP component, it works, but for something like STO it's less true.
What's more as someone who primarily PVEs and does STFs with pugs, it's the cumulative effect of some of those traits that were letting me get away with running concept characters, as opposed to having to min-max everything out for optimum results... which is kind of why I keep coming back to STO, it's a game I play to get away from that kind of garbage in other games.
Sure, some people who DO Min-Max can wipe out STFs single handedly, but so what? PVP in STO has largely been a sideline, and honestly if there were balance issues there you can always just limit trait selection to PVP arenas, setting up a screen like a FPS loadout when people queue or whatever without interfering with everyone else.
To be honest the changes here with Season 9 remind me a lot of what happened with "Star Wars Galaxies" where Sony pretty much took an axe to a lot of the game engine for a lot of the same reasons (power creep) some people were simply taking combinations of professional skills that when combined with ridiculously high quality gear were allowing them to decimate the game content and totally rock the world of any player who wasn't doing the same (which was admittedly an issue in part because after a while there seemed to be little to do except shoot each other in Cantinas).
Right now I'm sitting here looking at my characters and wondering exactly what the point is, you can add any number of new reps into the game and my character isn't going to become any stronger anymore unless it's through itemization. The most new traits will do is change the optimum configurations. What's more, why bother to advance through ALL the reps (which is being made easier) as opposed to just grinding out the relevant traits to optimize whatever it is your character does?
There are of course other options here, namely the creation of tougher content, rather than nerfing characters. Min-maxers are going to decimate everything anyway, so it's not like anything is ever going to challenge them for long anyway. If nothing else, gate some of it off. Come up with a "gearscore" similar to Neverwinter based around ship equipment and your rep advancement. I mean obviously military organizations are only going to send those with a chance, so on some levels "special missions" (Solo or STF) having your basic "you must be this cool to enter" rule should apply. What's more given how easy it's become to get one's hands on high end fleet gear, the rep system serves to get people to put in time and gradually learn how to play against different types of enemies.
On the off chance anyone of note read this far, I'll also speak "corporate" for a second here. In the terms of game company get togethers like the GDC I am what is de-humanizingly referred to as a "whale". I'm one of those long term players who has also put a pretty decent chunk of cash into your games, and has done so pretty reliably over a period of time. I do this to support development and because I've liked some of the ideas involved and where Cryptic has gone with some of their products. A big part of the appeal has been that I can get on, frag some space ships, and keep my characters growing even if I'm on sporadically. New content and new rep systems to advance through and grow my characters has been fairly regular. If I can't continue to grow my favorite STO characters though, I'm going to see no real point in playing, even sporadically, and if I don't like where your game development is going, why should I continue to pay you guys anything? I mean the shiniest lockbox prize only has meaning if it's in a game I still want to play.
We'll see what happens, maybe the changes will grow on me, but right now I am hating this, to the point where I almost feel it's a slap in the face of all my time spent gaming. I do not seem to be alone in these sentiments either.
What STO needs is some way for characters to advance and noticibly grow stronger as they are played.... and yeah, part of being stronger is being able to blow strong opponents to pieces (otherwise your not really stronger).
Cryptic might also consider embracing the holy MMO trinity a bit more. Half the problem with power creep is because the entire game is designed where DPS solves all problems. I haven't really seen any STFs where you need say a tank and a healer, despite the tools for both of those roles being in the game. At this point you don't even need to get really technical, add GS, require players to apply for a "role" in the group finder (basic stuff in Neverwinter), and honestly just some basic "tank and spank" would be a breath of fresh air for this game (teamwork at it's most basic) and as the community mastered it things could get more complicated. Things need to be gradually eased in though, as has been seen when people have complained about encounters (Legacy Of Romulus) where a glass cannon with overwhelming DPS wasn't an "I win" button.
The new ESD is kind of nice, it strikes me of more of a big room than anything Star Fleet would actually operate.
The featured episode is great.
The new rep gear is pretty cool.
The Undine are the best Voyager villain, so it's good to see them get some content.
The new rep trait system is good, but nerfing the omega weapons trait and taking away half our passives is criminal. The ground Omega weapons trait stayed the same so the space one should have been able to as well.
Cryptic used fleet marks to justify giving the Undine STF's terrible rewards again.
So really, it's a whole bunch of meh with taking away my passives.
Well, thus far the experience has been a mixed bag for me.
1. Logging on, I noticed my nacelles were green. I thought that was strange and checked my equipment. I lost my covariant shields and they were replaced by an old set of borg shields I still had in inventory.
2. Had to reset my graphics, no big deal really.
3. Earth Space dock looks pretty nice.
4. Major lag going on at least on my end. I really didn't bother staying in the game due to barely being able to move.
5. The new season doesn't look too bad from what I could find of it on youtube vids. I'm hoping once I resolve the lag issue, I can get back on and check it out for myself.
You're comparing S9 to SWG's NGE? You're absolutely and totally way off base. The NGE took the core game of SWG into a completely different affair. It negated entire segments of gameplay, overly simplified the game, absolutely killed the once thriving player economy and community. The entire affair was an absolute downgrade of everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that the existing players signed up to play for. Not talking about a few aspects, I mean the entire game was fundamentally, irrevocably changed to something unrecognizable. I know... I was there, too.
For STO and S9, and your gripe...
Power Creep.
The less, the better.
You have to Pick & Choose now.
Let's be serious here, because your post OP is about the Reputation Traits. Nothing more. That entire long post was, at the heart of it, the fact of you missing being able to have 20 Active Rep Traits at any given time with all the offensive and defensive boosts that entailed. It's what's been carrying you all this time. It's about your hangover over having all those Reputation abilities active at one time. This game had become a joke because of Power Creep, and the Reputation was a significant part of that.
Let's look at this again:
Under the old system, provided you maxed your Rep tiers, before the 8472 Rep, you could have 20 active traits. WITH the new 8472 Rep, you can work your way up to 5. It gets ridiculous to now having 25 active traits. But wait, what happens when Cryptic introduces the next rep after 8472? Why, it jumps to 30. Then 35 after the next. Then 40.
Do you see how ridiculous that is? Do you see how INSANE the Power Creep is in that? The funny fact is that I'm not throwing "New Shinies" of gear & ships into that equation either. But ships, consoles, equipment, however have limitations that reign you in... you can only put so many weapons, consoles, etc. onto a ship. Not so with Reputation... Cryptic makes more and the players get exponentially more powerful than before once they work up the chain.
And don't give me that TRIBBLE about simply making harder content. That's alot of B.S. and you know it! The Power Creep is what enabled players to rip apart "Elite" content to begin with! And with more Reputations added with more traits to add more Power to a build, nothing Cryptic can do will stop that.
They let the Power Creep Genie out long ago, and it's only recently they realized they ****ed themselves over and are now trying to reign us back in.
So... now you have to Pick & Choose. No longer can you have ALL those traits and be solid offensively, defensively, all at once due to these traits. No. No more of that. You can be solid on defense. You can be a monster offensively. You can try to make some balance between the two. But no longer will you be overpoweringly strong in both ways brought about by unbridled Reputation abilities and traits.
You're comparing S9 to SWG's NGE? You're absolutely and totally way off base. The NGE took the core game of SWG into a completely different affair. It negated entire segments of gameplay, overly simplified the game, absolutely killed the once thriving player economy and community. The entire affair was an absolute downgrade of everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that the existing players signed up to play for. Not talking about a few aspects, I mean the entire game was fundamentally, irrevocably changed to something unrecognizable. I know... I was there, too.
For STO and S9, and your gripe...
Power Creep.
The less, the better.
You have to Pick & Choose now.
Let's be serious here, because your post OP is about the Reputation Traits. Nothing more. That entire long post was, at the heart of it, the fact of you missing being able to have 20 Active Rep Traits at any given time with all the offensive and defensive boosts that entailed. It's what's been carrying you all this time. It's about your hangover over having all those Reputation abilities active at one time. This game had become a joke because of Power Creep, and the Reputation was a significant part of that.
Let's look at this again:
Under the old system, provided you maxed your Rep tiers, before the 8472 Rep, you could have 20 active traits. WITH the new 8472 Rep, you can work your way up to 5. It gets ridiculous to now having 25 active traits. But wait, what happens when Cryptic introduces the next rep after 8472? Why, it jumps to 30. Then 35 after the next. Then 40.
Do you see how ridiculous that is? Do you see how INSANE the Power Creep is in that? The funny fact is that I'm not throwing "New Shinies" of gear & ships into that equation either. But ships, consoles, equipment, however have limitations that reign you in... you can only put so many weapons, consoles, etc. onto a ship. Not so with Reputation... Cryptic makes more and the players get exponentially more powerful than before once they work up the chain.
And don't give me that TRIBBLE about simply making harder content. That's alot of B.S. and you know it! The Power Creep is what enabled players to rip apart "Elite" content to begin with! And with more Reputations added with more traits to add more Power to a build, nothing Cryptic can do will stop that.
They let the Power Creep Genie out long ago, and it's only recently they realized they ****ed themselves over and are now trying to reign us back in.
So... now you have to Pick & Choose. No longer can you have ALL those traits and be solid offensively, defensively, all at once due to these traits. No. No more of that. You can be solid on defense. You can be a monster offensively. You can try to make some balance between the two. But no longer will you be overpoweringly strong in both ways brought about by unbridled Reputation abilities and traits.
Pick & Choose now.
Time to get weaned off the Power Creep teats.
I was going to make a post but this covers what I was going to say, thank you
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
This was all said in testing, sadly. When Cryptic gets stubborn about something, the silence from them is deafening.
It is especially frustrating when they holler over how this was done in the name of balance and power creep, yet then release a lockbox full of stuff that throws balance under the bus.
It would seem that power creep is okay, so long as you pay them money for it....
This game had become a joke because of Power Creep, and the Reputation was a significant part of that.
I'm not sure I'd call it significant, but a I fully agree it demanded attention.
The bigger issues at present is DOffs and ships. Not much they can do about the latter retroactively, but the former is radically out of control and desperately needs whacked by the nerf bat.
Still, this was a forward-thinking move on Cryptic's part that will solve a lot of problems before they happen. Assuming future rep passives are kept in-line with previous ones, anyway.
I do like the new ESD and the new zone, great work. I was a bit surprised by the respect I should have written down current traits before the update.
The main question I have is a reason for a reduction in 10 accolade points. Tried reviewing the completed and in process list but cannot decern which accolades were cancelled or changed.
I'm not sure I'd call it significant, but a I fully agree it demanded attention.
The bigger issues at present is DOffs and ships. Not much they can do about the latter retroactively, but the former is radically out of control and desperately needs whacked by the nerf bat.
Still, this was a forward-thinking move on Cryptic's part that will solve a lot of problems before they happen. Assuming future rep passives are kept in-line with previous ones, anyway.
Oh, don't get me wrong. The restriction on Reputation is only the tip of the iceberg. As you said, there's more out there were that came from.
But as Picard said in First Contact, "The line must be drawn here!"
Still, this was a forward-thinking move on Cryptic's part that will solve a lot of problems before they happen. Assuming future rep passives are kept in-line with previous ones, anyway.
Kind of I suppose. The problem is, either they're going to have to make any new rep trait simply so much better then previous ones to make people want to go through the hell of doing the rep system to get them (in other words bringing power creep back into it) or make them balanced, and people simply saying "why the hell should I bother with the rep system when I've already got the same traits from other rep systems years ago.
Also as someone else said, they take away traits in the name of "balance" but then turn around and make gear and ships even more and more overpowered in order to make people want to buy them, but make the traits "balanced?
Kind of I suppose. The problem is, either they're going to have to make any new rep trait simply so much better then previous ones to make people want to go through the hell of doing the rep system to get them (in other words bringing power creep back into it) or make them balanced, and people simply saying "why the hell should I bother with the rep system when I've already got the same traits from other rep systems years ago.
Also as someone else said, they take away traits in the name of "balance" but then turn around and make gear and ships even more and more overpowered in order to make people want to buy them, but make the traits "balanced?
They will make traits that are more effective against certain enemies like double damage vs. Borg or double the chance of activating vs. Undine. So players will have loadouts of what passives they use against certain enemies.
I choose to think of the power creep issue like a broken down car. Some of the OP ships are like a blown engine, the Doffs are like 4 flat tires and rep traits are like being out of gas. Cryptic being the ace mechanics they are chose to fill the gas tank first ....
I am very disappointed with this season. Esd looks good. The new FE is also good., but other then that there is nothing exciting to do. I hate the new trait system.. All that work for nothing. Its been how long since season 8 has been realesed and this is all they came out with???
I am very disappointed with this season. Esd looks good. The new FE is also good., but other then that there is nothing exciting to do. I hate the new trait system.. All that work for nothing. Its been how long since season 8 has been realesed and this is all they came out with???
Huge disappointment Cryptic.
I recommend giving the Borg/Undine arc a replay. The revamped missions are pretty good.
This was all said in testing, sadly. When Cryptic gets stubborn about something, the silence from them is deafening.
Because feedback like "Don't remove the power creep from the reputation system" is not useful feedback if Cryptic wants to remove power creep from the reputation system.
Saying something like "The new User Interface is difficult to use" or "I can't seem to find Trait X anymore" is useful feedback.
It is especially frustrating when they holler over how this was done in the name of balance and power creep, yet then release a lockbox full of stuff that throws balance under the bus.
It would seem that power creep is okay, so long as you pay them money for it....
No, that's not okay either, but one battle at a time.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
In Undine Assault during the end battle, my Bird of Prey was stuck in cloak until the mission was over.
Surface Tension was excellent! 'STANDING OVATION'
I got a new tactical kit for the end reward. Since I have never gotten a fleet kit for any tactical officer, I had no modules for it. I looked for a place to buy modules that didn't require dilithium, and found none. I did shop at the fleet Spire, but I didn't understand what module goes to what qualifying slot, and I didn't want to waste dilithium for the experiment. Disappointing.
You're comparing S9 to SWG's NGE? You're absolutely and totally way off base. The NGE took the core game of SWG into a completely different affair. It negated entire segments of gameplay, overly simplified the game, absolutely killed the once thriving player economy and community. The entire affair was an absolute downgrade of everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that the existing players signed up to play for. Not talking about a few aspects, I mean the entire game was fundamentally, irrevocably changed to something unrecognizable. I know... I was there, too.
For STO and S9, and your gripe...
Power Creep.
The less, the better.
You have to Pick & Choose now.
Let's be serious here, because your post OP is about the Reputation Traits. Nothing more. That entire long post was, at the heart of it, the fact of you missing being able to have 20 Active Rep Traits at any given time with all the offensive and defensive boosts that entailed. It's what's been carrying you all this time. It's about your hangover over having all those Reputation abilities active at one time. This game had become a joke because of Power Creep, and the Reputation was a significant part of that.
Let's look at this again:
Under the old system, provided you maxed your Rep tiers, before the 8472 Rep, you could have 20 active traits. WITH the new 8472 Rep, you can work your way up to 5. It gets ridiculous to now having 25 active traits. But wait, what happens when Cryptic introduces the next rep after 8472? Why, it jumps to 30. Then 35 after the next. Then 40.
Do you see how ridiculous that is? Do you see how INSANE the Power Creep is in that? The funny fact is that I'm not throwing "New Shinies" of gear & ships into that equation either. But ships, consoles, equipment, however have limitations that reign you in... you can only put so many weapons, consoles, etc. onto a ship. Not so with Reputation... Cryptic makes more and the players get exponentially more powerful than before once they work up the chain.
And don't give me that TRIBBLE about simply making harder content. That's alot of B.S. and you know it! The Power Creep is what enabled players to rip apart "Elite" content to begin with! And with more Reputations added with more traits to add more Power to a build, nothing Cryptic can do will stop that.
They let the Power Creep Genie out long ago, and it's only recently they realized they ****ed themselves over and are now trying to reign us back in.
So... now you have to Pick & Choose. No longer can you have ALL those traits and be solid offensively, defensively, all at once due to these traits. No. No more of that. You can be solid on defense. You can be a monster offensively. You can try to make some balance between the two. But no longer will you be overpoweringly strong in both ways brought about by unbridled Reputation abilities and traits.
Pick & Choose now.
Time to get weaned off the Power Creep teats.
My basic attitude is this. The Reputation system and it's traits were put into the game in lieu of more levels, given how it would be problematic to add more skill points, or come up with higher tier ships. The "power creep" here is simply the effect of "leveling up" and advancing a character. Just as say an Admiral is better than a Lt. Commander. 20 levels of reputation, with associated traits is like having 20 more levels as a character. The entire POINT of the reputation system was to have characters continue to expand and grow and become more powerful after hitting the level cap. If your going to call this power creep, then you should by definition call leveling up power creep too, because honestly that's what this was intended to emulate without causing problems with the initial framework.
To be honest the Rep system seems to mostly function like, and was perhaps inspired by, things like Everquest and Age Of Conan and their "alternate advancement" systems. That is to say as you advance beyond level cap you continually buy traits that increase the power of existing traits, or remove weaknesses inherent in your class. Someone with say 40 levels of AAs is going to be massively more powerful and versatile than someone without them. The point being again, advancement without needing to tamper with an initial, self-contained framework.
As I said in my initial post, they should leave things as they were. Of course that DOES mean that they need to plan content based around characters that have advanced beyond the normal level cap, just as other games expand their endgames to consider AA factors. New content should probably be gated based on something like a gear score, or "functional level".
If I can no longer grow my character, what's the point? All the changes do is make advancement pointless and replace it with min-maxing based on what traits are out there, and needing to shuffle them continually for the optimal combinations for whatever I'm doing.
-
As far as my comparison to the NGE, I was indeed there (and actually came back, and was there the servers went down post-NGE). I mentioned it because the reason for doing it was very similar to the reasons behind the changes to STO, even if the specifics were different. Basically under the old system there was no way to prevent certain combinations of skills/training from being optimal, and what's more an absolute ton of "perfect gear" wound up in the game. The NGE and going to a class based system (removing a lot of player customization) allowed balance to be hardwired, and gave the GMs an ability to "reboot" crafting by rendering pre-NGE gear pretty weak while at the same time making it a bit more difficult to get the materials needed to craft at the highest levels. It wasn't until they started combining servers and transferring people around that you started seeing the highest quality stuff appear as some servers might not have ever had a really high quality version of a material, but with materials coming in from different servers options were opened. Hence towards the end you were able to create things like 97-99% quality lightsabers fairly easily if you knew people, where previously it was pretty much impossible because you were at the mercy of the random resource generation.... but this is getting increasingly off topic. Basically I think the radical change to the traits "to address power creep" has a fair analogy in the NGE which it reminds me of, but you (and others) are free to disagree.
My basic attitude is that I play largely to keep advancing my favorite characters. I was content to plink away at reps and get new traits periodically which made my characters stronger. It worked. Some games had "AA" of their own, others have "tiered" raid gear, etc... this was STO's system and I was pretty much in support of it as Cryptic was adding in new reps periodically to give me things to work towards and a bit of new content to pound on. The changes largely mean I am no longer advancing.
As far as I'm concerned if they are going to nuke the traits system this way, they should work on all the other problems that caused them to create this system as an alternative and start raising the level cap periodically.
Because feedback like "Don't remove the power creep from the reputation system" is not useful feedback if Cryptic wants to remove power creep from the reputation system.
Saying something like "The new User Interface is difficult to use" or "I can't seem to find Trait X anymore" is useful feedback.
No, that's not okay either, but one battle at a time.
Actually it *IS* useful feedback. Just by using a term like "Power Creep" and letting it slip unchecked into the vernacular of this kind of conversation, it's becoming apparent that this feedback is both necessary and has been held back too long. If the "reasons" for the changes are accurate, then it seems Cryptic has forgotten why the Reputation system exists in the first place. It was created specifically to make characters substantially more powerful, so they could continue to advance without having to add more levels and ship tiers and address all those problems.
Sure, a character with 20-30 traits from Rep is going to be massively powerful compared to one without them, but then again he should be, he's basically got 20-30 levels on a newbie VA. It's like comparing two top level characters in "Age Of Conan" or "Everquest" where one has say 100 AAs and the other doesn't. What's more you deserve this power because you've been putting in the hours on that character to level them up and improve them.
See, basically if I've maxxed every rep tree in the game, my character should be massively more powerful than someone who hasn't, or is further behind in the process. That's identical to a VA being more powerful than a Lieutenant.
As far as content, I do agree they do need to create content considering people with tons and tons of traits. Such content should be gated based on a formula based on stats or a functional level.
What's more when it come to rep grinds and such, I've had mixed opinions about making it easier, since advancing a high level character should take time (which keeps people playing). Granted any persistent player will get there eventually (and it's expected at the endgame), but the recent push to get everyone through the rep process and make it less daunting, and not only enabling but encouraging fleets to pass around ultra-rare gear to anyone who asks is a big part of what caused the "creep" problem.
If Cryptic *REALLY* wants to address power creep, the first thing it should be doing is remove the ability of people to invite visitors to fleet star bases to go shopping. Then it might want to lock fleet assets (such as warp cores, kits, elite fleet gear and fighters, etc...) to fleets of the appropriate level. There should probably be a stat attached to a character for "max fleet rank obtained" in each thing which is required to use the gear. Basically if your a member of a top level fleet (or were for while but went inactive or whatever) you can use this stuff. If you never put in the time however and were never a member in good standing of say a fleet with a Tier 5 base, there is no way you should be say packing elite fleet pets or weapons.
Don't misunderstand that point though, I'm not attacking anyone, or saying there has been anything terrible about fleet asset trading (it has done a lot to bring the community together) just that it's a huge source of power creep. With the talents you showed up regularly to earn rep marks and slotted projects X number of days to earn them (plus whatever rep gear you bought), the player deserves a definite reward there. With fleet gear trading though all you likely did was ask in the right channel after throwing some garbage into your Podunk fleet that hasn't gone through the headache of organization, farming, and of course months of survival and effort from casuals and hardcore alike to get to that point. There is no way to say this without being harsh but if your going to start screaming "power creep" and swinging around a nerf bat, the people who actually earned things (and did so in a system intended for this kind of advancement) should be on the bottom of the list, the first people that should be experimented on are the ones who simply hopped into a starbase bread line.
I doubt anybody will really read this, and even fewer will actually care, but for me personally, season nine seemed to be everything i didn't like from Season eight, which was the same issue from season 7 and LoR. It's just another useless grind and a zone to grind in, with a mission or two to grind as well.
The Undine battle zone was just a mash-up between the two voth maps that got old after the first few runs.
The Space portal mission was the mirror event all over again, where even on normal, my ship was quickly over run by ships spamming the same 3 abilities. (evasive, that teleport, and the uber torp)
The Ground missions was okay at best, but really didn't seem to have much substance other than making the Bajorans look like a-holes being oppressed.
The Kit revamp really didn't seem to change, fix, improve, or really touch anything other than making them modular with some skill boosts, making it the Character creator 2.0 all over again.
The actual FE wasn't bad though. It started kind of weak and the ending was really predictable, but at the same time, once the conference was over, it did get more interesting though really outside the realm of suspendable disbelief (even for Trek).
The traits got a nice buff, but much like the hourly events, it really seems like more of a nerf than a bonus or improvement.
I don't know if it's just PWE interference to blame, or if Cryptic has dropped the devs to a minimum just to work more on their next game, but really, the quality in these updates just don't really seem to be that great, or even really what they're advertising in some cases.
Over all, I was really disappointed. The only thing i was really looking forward to, was the Lobi suit, but that was because the description made it sound like it was getting a melee bonus like one of the Nukara EV suits has. Needless to say, I have the lobi, but without the damage boost, the suit isn't enough to make me drop what i'm already using.
It's as useful as advice you sometimes read on other forums:
"How can I make software X work on my Windows 7 PC?"
"You shoudn't use software X, use Software Y!"
"Windows? Just throw this garbage system away and buy yourself a Mac / install Linux".
It's just not helpful.
It was created specifically to make characters substantially more powerful, so they could continue to advance without having to add more levels and ship tiers and address all those problems.
Was it? I challenge that claim.
It was to create a form of "alternate advancement". If you just want more power, nothing would stop Cryptic from adding a few new levels (they don't have to create new ships for that and invalidate old ones, though they could). Alternate forms of advancement can be a lot about more choices, enabling different specializations and the like.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Ok, my thoughts on the season 9 content, here goes:
I'm not too sure about the new ESD, I guess I can maybe get used to it, though I'm not sure why they're allowing food to be sold so close to the transporters, imagine if someone spills their coffee! Besides that seems more like a Ferengi thing to do.
I'm glad that they've FINALLY allowed us to essentially make our own kits and that we don't have to do stupid amounts of crafting to get there, though I do have two major issues with the way they've done it; firstly, the default starting kit that they give you you can't use until lieutenant commander rank which is dumb as s**t, secondly, if you want to get specific modules without having to grind for them you're gonna have to stump up dil, isn't this game already monetised enough?!? The more they monetise, the less I want to pay stupid amounts of money for lifetime sub! O.o
I can even find a way of overlooking all of that but there is one thing tht majorly p***es me off about what they've done here:
"You're orders, captain?"
"One moment, ensign, I'm gong to forget all about astrophysics and magically become a warp theorist!"
"Uh... Captain?... Are you feeling okay? It's just, we're in the middle of a mission, sir."
"Hold on a second, damnit! I'm switching my traits!"
"... Security, please escort the captain back to quarters... Oh and get me Starfleet medical, this is becoming an epidemic!"
Cryptic, you already do enough to kill my immersion, please stop beating it with the revamp stick? I understand, the "Revamp 'O' Dumb" battle stick has some neat stats but can't you whack something else with it for a change? The traits worked just fine before you "fixed" it, just leave it alone!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I'm not THAT difficult to please, I just have a very low tolerance threshold for stupid BS! - George Carlin.
Let me start by saying that I am not terribly active in posting to fourms, but I have been playing STO since day one. STO has been a large part of my free time activities; I have 6 level 50 toons, several with max reputation. I am a paying gold member, have been for a long time now. I dont purchase a lot of zen, maybe a couple hundred euros worth over the years. Now I have seen STO do some radical changes, and it is fair to say thay this is not the same game that was released, however I have not seen a season or a patch that has screwed over as many of the players as season 9.
Many people who have been playing for a while have spent considerable resources in the reputation system. I have sepnt hundreds of thousands of refined dilithum over my toons to buy rep gear and weapons. Now the reputation system gives out this expensive store gear for the simple task of slotting a project. on my newestt reman toon, who I just got to level 50 right before this season came out, slotted a romulan rep project and was rewarded with the same mk xi romulan plasma cannon that I spent 17k dilithum, 3 days of refining, hours of collecting romulan marks (which is now given much easier) and time of my life to obtain! Now the gear is only MK XII in my other toons rom rep system, which is 24k dil when the mk XI was only 17k dil before, and I was perfectly happy and successful with the mkXI. So I am forced to spend many more of my resources for minimal improvement!
The trait system is also unfair to us. We are forced to use four space traits, and four ground traits from the rep system, which again screws over us who have spent resources to unlock those traits, that we enjoyed use of, and now are denied. People who have spend resources on the retrain tokens are also screwed in this process. Why do we pay for a house and forced to live in a trailer?
You completely look over us who have played since early on in the games life. In the past I have not complained about the updates because there was an equal trade off. we lost something but we gained something. Here he have none of that! You take our resources and dont care about us. After all the time and money (about 200 more euro trying to get jem'hadar atrack ship this month) I am no longer having fun with STO if I only get screwed like this. Obviously you dont care, but I fully intend to cancel my subscription and go back to Blizzard. If this is the future of STO, maybe it is time for it to die.
Comments
That said I am going to say flat out this new Trait system has to go. I understand WHY it was done, but understand that the Rep system was created as a way of advancing characters and growing more powerful in lieu of adding more levels and re-naming the ranks. A big part of this of course being how focused the game was on a set number of levels and skill points, and of course the "Tier" system of ships and people being rightfully concerned about having their expensive C-store ships rendered obsolete if more tiers were added. Not to mention the simple problem of most of the canon ships already being in the game system with a reasonable job having been done of putting them into Tiers. Creating things that are yet more powerful and making them the focus of endgame play would of course kill a lot of the "Trek" Vibe.
The thing is though, that if I'm putting hundreds, or thousands of hours into a character (casual or not) I expect it to become incrementally more powerful. The trait system as it was managed to achieve this without the need of adding more levels and/or ship tiers. Under the current system where I have to swap out my hard earned traits, my character is not really becoming much more powerful. Indeed at the best it's giving me a headache of having to swap traits in and out for each specific thing I want to do in an attempt to optimize myself for the moment. In some MMOs like "Guild Wars" designed with that kind of thing, and to largely have a PVP component, it works, but for something like STO it's less true.
What's more as someone who primarily PVEs and does STFs with pugs, it's the cumulative effect of some of those traits that were letting me get away with running concept characters, as opposed to having to min-max everything out for optimum results... which is kind of why I keep coming back to STO, it's a game I play to get away from that kind of garbage in other games.
Sure, some people who DO Min-Max can wipe out STFs single handedly, but so what? PVP in STO has largely been a sideline, and honestly if there were balance issues there you can always just limit trait selection to PVP arenas, setting up a screen like a FPS loadout when people queue or whatever without interfering with everyone else.
To be honest the changes here with Season 9 remind me a lot of what happened with "Star Wars Galaxies" where Sony pretty much took an axe to a lot of the game engine for a lot of the same reasons (power creep) some people were simply taking combinations of professional skills that when combined with ridiculously high quality gear were allowing them to decimate the game content and totally rock the world of any player who wasn't doing the same (which was admittedly an issue in part because after a while there seemed to be little to do except shoot each other in Cantinas).
Right now I'm sitting here looking at my characters and wondering exactly what the point is, you can add any number of new reps into the game and my character isn't going to become any stronger anymore unless it's through itemization. The most new traits will do is change the optimum configurations. What's more, why bother to advance through ALL the reps (which is being made easier) as opposed to just grinding out the relevant traits to optimize whatever it is your character does?
There are of course other options here, namely the creation of tougher content, rather than nerfing characters. Min-maxers are going to decimate everything anyway, so it's not like anything is ever going to challenge them for long anyway. If nothing else, gate some of it off. Come up with a "gearscore" similar to Neverwinter based around ship equipment and your rep advancement. I mean obviously military organizations are only going to send those with a chance, so on some levels "special missions" (Solo or STF) having your basic "you must be this cool to enter" rule should apply. What's more given how easy it's become to get one's hands on high end fleet gear, the rep system serves to get people to put in time and gradually learn how to play against different types of enemies.
On the off chance anyone of note read this far, I'll also speak "corporate" for a second here. In the terms of game company get togethers like the GDC I am what is de-humanizingly referred to as a "whale". I'm one of those long term players who has also put a pretty decent chunk of cash into your games, and has done so pretty reliably over a period of time. I do this to support development and because I've liked some of the ideas involved and where Cryptic has gone with some of their products. A big part of the appeal has been that I can get on, frag some space ships, and keep my characters growing even if I'm on sporadically. New content and new rep systems to advance through and grow my characters has been fairly regular. If I can't continue to grow my favorite STO characters though, I'm going to see no real point in playing, even sporadically, and if I don't like where your game development is going, why should I continue to pay you guys anything? I mean the shiniest lockbox prize only has meaning if it's in a game I still want to play.
We'll see what happens, maybe the changes will grow on me, but right now I am hating this, to the point where I almost feel it's a slap in the face of all my time spent gaming. I do not seem to be alone in these sentiments either.
What STO needs is some way for characters to advance and noticibly grow stronger as they are played.... and yeah, part of being stronger is being able to blow strong opponents to pieces (otherwise your not really stronger).
Cryptic might also consider embracing the holy MMO trinity a bit more. Half the problem with power creep is because the entire game is designed where DPS solves all problems. I haven't really seen any STFs where you need say a tank and a healer, despite the tools for both of those roles being in the game. At this point you don't even need to get really technical, add GS, require players to apply for a "role" in the group finder (basic stuff in Neverwinter), and honestly just some basic "tank and spank" would be a breath of fresh air for this game (teamwork at it's most basic) and as the community mastered it things could get more complicated. Things need to be gradually eased in though, as has been seen when people have complained about encounters (Legacy Of Romulus) where a glass cannon with overwhelming DPS wasn't an "I win" button.
The featured episode is great.
The new rep gear is pretty cool.
The Undine are the best Voyager villain, so it's good to see them get some content.
The new rep trait system is good, but nerfing the omega weapons trait and taking away half our passives is criminal. The ground Omega weapons trait stayed the same so the space one should have been able to as well.
Cryptic used fleet marks to justify giving the Undine STF's terrible rewards again.
So really, it's a whole bunch of meh with taking away my passives.
5/10
https://youtube.com/channel/UCJZ5FBJ9bFaZ6yAFiNpZiRQ/featured?view_as=subscriber
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/CaptainCidStorm
Few could have written it beter than this.
1. Logging on, I noticed my nacelles were green. I thought that was strange and checked my equipment. I lost my covariant shields and they were replaced by an old set of borg shields I still had in inventory.
2. Had to reset my graphics, no big deal really.
3. Earth Space dock looks pretty nice.
4. Major lag going on at least on my end. I really didn't bother staying in the game due to barely being able to move.
5. The new season doesn't look too bad from what I could find of it on youtube vids. I'm hoping once I resolve the lag issue, I can get back on and check it out for myself.
Did you ever actually do the NGE? All the changes to STO not one of them is nearly as bad as what the NGE was, even the trait system.
For STO and S9, and your gripe...
Power Creep.
The less, the better.
You have to Pick & Choose now.
Let's be serious here, because your post OP is about the Reputation Traits. Nothing more. That entire long post was, at the heart of it, the fact of you missing being able to have 20 Active Rep Traits at any given time with all the offensive and defensive boosts that entailed. It's what's been carrying you all this time. It's about your hangover over having all those Reputation abilities active at one time. This game had become a joke because of Power Creep, and the Reputation was a significant part of that.
Let's look at this again:
Under the old system, provided you maxed your Rep tiers, before the 8472 Rep, you could have 20 active traits. WITH the new 8472 Rep, you can work your way up to 5. It gets ridiculous to now having 25 active traits. But wait, what happens when Cryptic introduces the next rep after 8472? Why, it jumps to 30. Then 35 after the next. Then 40.
Do you see how ridiculous that is? Do you see how INSANE the Power Creep is in that? The funny fact is that I'm not throwing "New Shinies" of gear & ships into that equation either. But ships, consoles, equipment, however have limitations that reign you in... you can only put so many weapons, consoles, etc. onto a ship. Not so with Reputation... Cryptic makes more and the players get exponentially more powerful than before once they work up the chain.
And don't give me that TRIBBLE about simply making harder content. That's alot of B.S. and you know it! The Power Creep is what enabled players to rip apart "Elite" content to begin with! And with more Reputations added with more traits to add more Power to a build, nothing Cryptic can do will stop that.
They let the Power Creep Genie out long ago, and it's only recently they realized they ****ed themselves over and are now trying to reign us back in.
So... now you have to Pick & Choose. No longer can you have ALL those traits and be solid offensively, defensively, all at once due to these traits. No. No more of that. You can be solid on defense. You can be a monster offensively. You can try to make some balance between the two. But no longer will you be overpoweringly strong in both ways brought about by unbridled Reputation abilities and traits.
Pick & Choose now.
Time to get weaned off the Power Creep teats.
I was going to make a post but this covers what I was going to say, thank you
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
It is especially frustrating when they holler over how this was done in the name of balance and power creep, yet then release a lockbox full of stuff that throws balance under the bus.
It would seem that power creep is okay, so long as you pay them money for it....
I'm not sure I'd call it significant, but a I fully agree it demanded attention.
The bigger issues at present is DOffs and ships. Not much they can do about the latter retroactively, but the former is radically out of control and desperately needs whacked by the nerf bat.
Still, this was a forward-thinking move on Cryptic's part that will solve a lot of problems before they happen. Assuming future rep passives are kept in-line with previous ones, anyway.
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
The main question I have is a reason for a reduction in 10 accolade points. Tried reviewing the completed and in process list but cannot decern which accolades were cancelled or changed.
Oh, don't get me wrong. The restriction on Reputation is only the tip of the iceberg. As you said, there's more out there were that came from.
But as Picard said in First Contact, "The line must be drawn here!"
Kind of I suppose. The problem is, either they're going to have to make any new rep trait simply so much better then previous ones to make people want to go through the hell of doing the rep system to get them (in other words bringing power creep back into it) or make them balanced, and people simply saying "why the hell should I bother with the rep system when I've already got the same traits from other rep systems years ago.
Also as someone else said, they take away traits in the name of "balance" but then turn around and make gear and ships even more and more overpowered in order to make people want to buy them, but make the traits "balanced?
They will make traits that are more effective against certain enemies like double damage vs. Borg or double the chance of activating vs. Undine. So players will have loadouts of what passives they use against certain enemies.
Huge disappointment Cryptic.
I recommend giving the Borg/Undine arc a replay. The revamped missions are pretty good.
I have. And i couldnt take the horrible voice overs.. Ugh..
Saying something like "The new User Interface is difficult to use" or "I can't seem to find Trait X anymore" is useful feedback.
No, that's not okay either, but one battle at a time.
Surface Tension was excellent! 'STANDING OVATION'
I got a new tactical kit for the end reward. Since I have never gotten a fleet kit for any tactical officer, I had no modules for it. I looked for a place to buy modules that didn't require dilithium, and found none. I did shop at the fleet Spire, but I didn't understand what module goes to what qualifying slot, and I didn't want to waste dilithium for the experiment. Disappointing.
Member since December 2009
My basic attitude is this. The Reputation system and it's traits were put into the game in lieu of more levels, given how it would be problematic to add more skill points, or come up with higher tier ships. The "power creep" here is simply the effect of "leveling up" and advancing a character. Just as say an Admiral is better than a Lt. Commander. 20 levels of reputation, with associated traits is like having 20 more levels as a character. The entire POINT of the reputation system was to have characters continue to expand and grow and become more powerful after hitting the level cap. If your going to call this power creep, then you should by definition call leveling up power creep too, because honestly that's what this was intended to emulate without causing problems with the initial framework.
To be honest the Rep system seems to mostly function like, and was perhaps inspired by, things like Everquest and Age Of Conan and their "alternate advancement" systems. That is to say as you advance beyond level cap you continually buy traits that increase the power of existing traits, or remove weaknesses inherent in your class. Someone with say 40 levels of AAs is going to be massively more powerful and versatile than someone without them. The point being again, advancement without needing to tamper with an initial, self-contained framework.
As I said in my initial post, they should leave things as they were. Of course that DOES mean that they need to plan content based around characters that have advanced beyond the normal level cap, just as other games expand their endgames to consider AA factors. New content should probably be gated based on something like a gear score, or "functional level".
If I can no longer grow my character, what's the point? All the changes do is make advancement pointless and replace it with min-maxing based on what traits are out there, and needing to shuffle them continually for the optimal combinations for whatever I'm doing.
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As far as my comparison to the NGE, I was indeed there (and actually came back, and was there the servers went down post-NGE). I mentioned it because the reason for doing it was very similar to the reasons behind the changes to STO, even if the specifics were different. Basically under the old system there was no way to prevent certain combinations of skills/training from being optimal, and what's more an absolute ton of "perfect gear" wound up in the game. The NGE and going to a class based system (removing a lot of player customization) allowed balance to be hardwired, and gave the GMs an ability to "reboot" crafting by rendering pre-NGE gear pretty weak while at the same time making it a bit more difficult to get the materials needed to craft at the highest levels. It wasn't until they started combining servers and transferring people around that you started seeing the highest quality stuff appear as some servers might not have ever had a really high quality version of a material, but with materials coming in from different servers options were opened. Hence towards the end you were able to create things like 97-99% quality lightsabers fairly easily if you knew people, where previously it was pretty much impossible because you were at the mercy of the random resource generation.... but this is getting increasingly off topic. Basically I think the radical change to the traits "to address power creep" has a fair analogy in the NGE which it reminds me of, but you (and others) are free to disagree.
My basic attitude is that I play largely to keep advancing my favorite characters. I was content to plink away at reps and get new traits periodically which made my characters stronger. It worked. Some games had "AA" of their own, others have "tiered" raid gear, etc... this was STO's system and I was pretty much in support of it as Cryptic was adding in new reps periodically to give me things to work towards and a bit of new content to pound on. The changes largely mean I am no longer advancing.
As far as I'm concerned if they are going to nuke the traits system this way, they should work on all the other problems that caused them to create this system as an alternative and start raising the level cap periodically.
Actually it *IS* useful feedback. Just by using a term like "Power Creep" and letting it slip unchecked into the vernacular of this kind of conversation, it's becoming apparent that this feedback is both necessary and has been held back too long. If the "reasons" for the changes are accurate, then it seems Cryptic has forgotten why the Reputation system exists in the first place. It was created specifically to make characters substantially more powerful, so they could continue to advance without having to add more levels and ship tiers and address all those problems.
Sure, a character with 20-30 traits from Rep is going to be massively powerful compared to one without them, but then again he should be, he's basically got 20-30 levels on a newbie VA. It's like comparing two top level characters in "Age Of Conan" or "Everquest" where one has say 100 AAs and the other doesn't. What's more you deserve this power because you've been putting in the hours on that character to level them up and improve them.
See, basically if I've maxxed every rep tree in the game, my character should be massively more powerful than someone who hasn't, or is further behind in the process. That's identical to a VA being more powerful than a Lieutenant.
As far as content, I do agree they do need to create content considering people with tons and tons of traits. Such content should be gated based on a formula based on stats or a functional level.
What's more when it come to rep grinds and such, I've had mixed opinions about making it easier, since advancing a high level character should take time (which keeps people playing). Granted any persistent player will get there eventually (and it's expected at the endgame), but the recent push to get everyone through the rep process and make it less daunting, and not only enabling but encouraging fleets to pass around ultra-rare gear to anyone who asks is a big part of what caused the "creep" problem.
If Cryptic *REALLY* wants to address power creep, the first thing it should be doing is remove the ability of people to invite visitors to fleet star bases to go shopping. Then it might want to lock fleet assets (such as warp cores, kits, elite fleet gear and fighters, etc...) to fleets of the appropriate level. There should probably be a stat attached to a character for "max fleet rank obtained" in each thing which is required to use the gear. Basically if your a member of a top level fleet (or were for while but went inactive or whatever) you can use this stuff. If you never put in the time however and were never a member in good standing of say a fleet with a Tier 5 base, there is no way you should be say packing elite fleet pets or weapons.
Don't misunderstand that point though, I'm not attacking anyone, or saying there has been anything terrible about fleet asset trading (it has done a lot to bring the community together) just that it's a huge source of power creep. With the talents you showed up regularly to earn rep marks and slotted projects X number of days to earn them (plus whatever rep gear you bought), the player deserves a definite reward there. With fleet gear trading though all you likely did was ask in the right channel after throwing some garbage into your Podunk fleet that hasn't gone through the headache of organization, farming, and of course months of survival and effort from casuals and hardcore alike to get to that point. There is no way to say this without being harsh but if your going to start screaming "power creep" and swinging around a nerf bat, the people who actually earned things (and did so in a system intended for this kind of advancement) should be on the bottom of the list, the first people that should be experimented on are the ones who simply hopped into a starbase bread line.
The Undine battle zone was just a mash-up between the two voth maps that got old after the first few runs.
The Space portal mission was the mirror event all over again, where even on normal, my ship was quickly over run by ships spamming the same 3 abilities. (evasive, that teleport, and the uber torp)
The Ground missions was okay at best, but really didn't seem to have much substance other than making the Bajorans look like a-holes being oppressed.
The Kit revamp really didn't seem to change, fix, improve, or really touch anything other than making them modular with some skill boosts, making it the Character creator 2.0 all over again.
The actual FE wasn't bad though. It started kind of weak and the ending was really predictable, but at the same time, once the conference was over, it did get more interesting though really outside the realm of suspendable disbelief (even for Trek).
The traits got a nice buff, but much like the hourly events, it really seems like more of a nerf than a bonus or improvement.
I don't know if it's just PWE interference to blame, or if Cryptic has dropped the devs to a minimum just to work more on their next game, but really, the quality in these updates just don't really seem to be that great, or even really what they're advertising in some cases.
Over all, I was really disappointed. The only thing i was really looking forward to, was the Lobi suit, but that was because the description made it sound like it was getting a melee bonus like one of the Nukara EV suits has. Needless to say, I have the lobi, but without the damage boost, the suit isn't enough to make me drop what i'm already using.
Season Nine: Another Disappointment.
It's as useful as advice you sometimes read on other forums:
"How can I make software X work on my Windows 7 PC?"
"You shoudn't use software X, use Software Y!"
"Windows? Just throw this garbage system away and buy yourself a Mac / install Linux".
It's just not helpful.
Was it? I challenge that claim.
It was to create a form of "alternate advancement". If you just want more power, nothing would stop Cryptic from adding a few new levels (they don't have to create new ships for that and invalidate old ones, though they could). Alternate forms of advancement can be a lot about more choices, enabling different specializations and the like.
I'm not too sure about the new ESD, I guess I can maybe get used to it, though I'm not sure why they're allowing food to be sold so close to the transporters, imagine if someone spills their coffee! Besides that seems more like a Ferengi thing to do.
I'm glad that they've FINALLY allowed us to essentially make our own kits and that we don't have to do stupid amounts of crafting to get there, though I do have two major issues with the way they've done it; firstly, the default starting kit that they give you you can't use until lieutenant commander rank which is dumb as s**t, secondly, if you want to get specific modules without having to grind for them you're gonna have to stump up dil, isn't this game already monetised enough?!? The more they monetise, the less I want to pay stupid amounts of money for lifetime sub! O.o
I can even find a way of overlooking all of that but there is one thing tht majorly p***es me off about what they've done here:
"You're orders, captain?"
"One moment, ensign, I'm gong to forget all about astrophysics and magically become a warp theorist!"
"Uh... Captain?... Are you feeling okay? It's just, we're in the middle of a mission, sir."
"Hold on a second, damnit! I'm switching my traits!"
"... Security, please escort the captain back to quarters... Oh and get me Starfleet medical, this is becoming an epidemic!"
Cryptic, you already do enough to kill my immersion, please stop beating it with the revamp stick? I understand, the "Revamp 'O' Dumb" battle stick has some neat stats but can't you whack something else with it for a change? The traits worked just fine before you "fixed" it, just leave it alone!
I'm not THAT difficult to please, I just have a very low tolerance threshold for stupid BS! - George Carlin.
Many people who have been playing for a while have spent considerable resources in the reputation system. I have sepnt hundreds of thousands of refined dilithum over my toons to buy rep gear and weapons. Now the reputation system gives out this expensive store gear for the simple task of slotting a project. on my newestt reman toon, who I just got to level 50 right before this season came out, slotted a romulan rep project and was rewarded with the same mk xi romulan plasma cannon that I spent 17k dilithum, 3 days of refining, hours of collecting romulan marks (which is now given much easier) and time of my life to obtain! Now the gear is only MK XII in my other toons rom rep system, which is 24k dil when the mk XI was only 17k dil before, and I was perfectly happy and successful with the mkXI. So I am forced to spend many more of my resources for minimal improvement!
The trait system is also unfair to us. We are forced to use four space traits, and four ground traits from the rep system, which again screws over us who have spent resources to unlock those traits, that we enjoyed use of, and now are denied. People who have spend resources on the retrain tokens are also screwed in this process. Why do we pay for a house and forced to live in a trailer?
You completely look over us who have played since early on in the games life. In the past I have not complained about the updates because there was an equal trade off. we lost something but we gained something. Here he have none of that! You take our resources and dont care about us. After all the time and money (about 200 more euro trying to get jem'hadar atrack ship this month) I am no longer having fun with STO if I only get screwed like this. Obviously you dont care, but I fully intend to cancel my subscription and go back to Blizzard. If this is the future of STO, maybe it is time for it to die.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]