STO Post Mortem

This is likely one of many threads that come out at the announcement of a new mmo expansion. I realize I am not blazing a trail here, but I've played since launch and I wanted to get a few things down. I am going to try and focus on the positive things I've enjoyed about STO over the years, and maybe by doing so I can constructively call out some of the recent additions and future additions to the game and why they concern me.

I, like many players, was stoked to play STO at launch. I'm a huge Star Trek fan, and the thought of going full blown capital ship captain in the final frontier really had my geek endorphins pumping. The game was modest in size at launch, the klingon faction almost an after-thought. There was very little to do, but the system was sound, and they were taking on an incredibly challenging concept. The ships were there, the characters had a solid customization system, and it was Star Trek. I leveled up my kling, pvp'd like crazy, swaggered around granalda station like I owned the place and then took a break until more content was released.

Once I returned I believe the borg invasion and deferi space had been added, and maybe drozana station. The feature episodes were fun, and the borg STFs finally gave us some repeatable and rewarding end game content. I particularly liked the new gear changing your ships appearance. To this day one of my favorite things to do when I'm between missions is park in a high population area and watch peoples ships go by.

Also around this time the duty officer system was implemented, and I can't say enough good things about it. It was extremely addicting and in line with what a Star Trek captain would have to be doing. Hunting down some of the very rare duty officers in the galaxy and tweaking my ship builds with their special abilities added an enjoyable new dimension to this game.

The duty officer system soon grew into the reputation system and the fleet holdings. I will say fleet holdings were another welcome addition to the game. Anything that binds a large number of players together towards a common goal is a good thing, and I felt that up until this point STO lacked the multiplayer feel that some other games have.

The reputation system, on the other hand, wasn't something any of us needed. It was put in to replace the STF gear drops, and made it exponentially more difficult to gear an avatar or a ship. Where before you could run elites for a week or so and have 8x mkii weapons and a full set of omega gear, now you had weeks of reputation projects to grind, endless amounts of cash, mats and dili. A real drag in a game that up until this point had been very grind friendly, especially for new players.

But the content kept coming. Nukara. Romulans. Solanae. And I had a large stock pile of mkii gear across my 4 captains so I never was forced to rely on reputation to outfit a ship. And the apprentice system allowed me to speed up the rep grind on my alts after completing it on my main, so that was something.

Then the new crafting system came out this summer. I can't really speak about it so I won't. I haven't been playing STO much lately, I got tired of the endless patching, and I have only heard second hand reports of the revamp. I'm sure there are other posts that can tell you about it's pluses and minuses, I invite you to go read them. I will say that any cash grab aspects of this system are unfortunate. STO had an excellent F2P model, indeed that model is the only thing that has kept it alive for so long, and trying to milk the existing player base for more $$ will only help to kill the game in the long run.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. The T6 ship announcement. I'm not here to bash the increase of the level cap, it is common in mmos for a new expansion to render obsolete all the old gear, and usually the expansion has enough of a hook to justify it. And I am confident that just as T4 ships are still usable with the right build now, a well-geared T5 or T5-U ship will still be able to hang in the brave new world of the delta quadrant (BTW what a great choice for a new expansion theme, devs, VOY has always ranked my sixth most favorite Star Trek TV show of all time).

No, what bothers me is the announcement that you will have to level up each ship individually. That means even though I am level 60, for each ship I want to max out I will have to grind out 5 levels worth of xp each. This is just another one of those pointless grinds that turns a solid MMO into a crappy timesink. It's disappointing, but after the reputation system and what I have heard about the crafting revamp, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

The last thing I want to mention in this rant is PVP. The real great crime of STO is the complete and utter lack of any additional PVP content since launch. It's laughable that in a major IP mmo like this we are expected to content ourselves with a handful of warzones and one crappy, glitched to all heal, open pvp zone in Kerrat. The only thing that has kept PVP alive in this game is the great community of competitive players. It has been a joy and a privileged to lock horns with them over the years, and it's a real shame that the devs never shown them any love. Solanae practically begged for some sort of zone capture PVP arena, what a missed opportunity.

STO is most cases was done right, as I said they were taking on a huge concept, they could have phoned in aspects of the game, could have ignored ground altogether. Instead we got an imperfect love letter to the fans, a niche game that has kept a large group of us very happy over the years. My only hope is that greed doesn't destroy this game like it has so many other mmos.