You are missing the point,the requirements in resources and time are so stupendous,that upgrading the gear on even one ship,one toon isn't feasible without spending (a lot) of cash.
And then there is the other thing....you say you don't need the epic gear,well...yeah....if you know what you are doing and have some skill playing the game you don't need them.But not all players are created equally....more than a few players need that extra bit of power the epic gear provides.
Epics are a tax on rich people. Everyone with more sense than money will realize he doesn't need it. The cost of upgrading to Mark XIV are in the same range as the original cost to get to Mark XII gear. (Maybe even lower if you consider that some Mark XII gear people use will be fleet gear, which requires investment into fleets.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Only the stupid, impatient, gotta-have-the-very-best masses.
I personally have upgraded quite a lot of gear with ZERO cash spent on dilithium and very little targeted grinding (I mean, I've done quite a lot of "farming" or "grinding" but not optimized for this specific purpose). You won't go broke if you do it the smart way.
First of all, crafting low mark items is incredibly cheap - although time consuming to trial-and-error the mods you want. Still, Mk II's only take white materials and 5 minutes per item (6 if you count the components projects as well).
Assuming you're willing to take the time to craft mk II's until you get the starter mods you want, then it's a matter of upgrading it. It takes something like six to twelve (I do not remember the precise number) of superior tech upgrades to take a mk II item to mk XII, at 1075 dil each. If you're buying the packs, you're looking at something like 4 million EC, but you can sidestep that by making the packs yourself.
At that point, you have an item which is roughly equivalent to a Fleet vendor weapon or a reputation store weapon... at a lower dilithium cost.
Meanwhile, you've got about a 30% (or more) chance of getting the ultra upgrade and the resulting mod. If it gets the "wrong" mod, you can back off immediately and trash or sell the item. Oh, and over half of that chance is on the first pack!
And you do not need epic. Epic gets a fixed modifier which in the case of most items (especially beam weapons) is a combo of the two least desirable mods... Ultra XIV is a much more reasonable goal.
Oh, and you can also make a profit of EC by selling off the reject Mk II items (assuming you didn't buy the white materials to make them).
You begin your post, right in the first sentence, with name-calling.
What do you mean by "packs" in this context?
I've done a fair amount of upgrading. I understand what you mean by starting with Mk II. And a good deal of what you have to say is true. But don't start your post with insults, please.
The biggest hole in your argument is the incredibly ****ed-up nature of the RNG in STO. It's utterly hosed. And that combined with the fail-based nature of the crafting system, leaves us with a terribly frustrating situation. A situation which certainly looks like it was designed to milk us for RL cash.
It would be nice if the Upgrade system cost a little less dil, but the amount of upgrade kits needed to get to the next level seems right to me. Especially if you craft the upgrade kits yourself. Now I did buy a few off the exchange in the beginning to to see what the upgrading was like, and then I backed off till I had my R&D schools at lvl 10 min for the improved upgrades (pretty good for the mk XII - XIII). Now I'll be holding off till I get to lvl 15 to make the Superior Upgrades for the XIII - XIV.
The R&D system is still a work in progress as well, just a few updates ago they recently brought the mat cost down for making items so they may still bring down the dil cost as well (15%-25%) would be my suggestion.
I can agree it can be tough for the F2P casual player to get the materials necessary to get the upgrades they need/want for their ships but as time goes on and more and more people get their crafting levels up the price on the exchange for the upgrade kits will go down. I have gotten 2 characters to lvl 60 so far and both of them can pug Bug Hunt Elite and get the salvaged tech for the superior upgrades. Its not that hard to get the mats necessary to make the upgrade kits (the only thing I keep running out of is Tritanium).
If you feel as if you have to upgrade your EQ to the Epic Max it can be, that's fine do it but expect to spend a lot of your resources doing it, especially for those mats you buy off the exchange because the players that rushed the process and burned thru a lot of dil to max out their crafting want to get something in return for the resources they burned.
About a week after DR launched i went looking on the exchange for the 360* firing beams because I wanted some for my ships, the pickings were slim and the prices were thru the roof. I waited a couple of more weeks and their was a lot more to choose from and the prices were more reasonable.
See where we stand in the way of upgrading on 1st contact day you will see a lot more people with Mk XIII and XIV gear VR or better. By the 1 year anniversary of DR launching MKXIV UR will probably be the norm that end gamers will be using.
Maybe the next set of rep gear but probably the one after that will probably be mk XIII or mk XIV base on req. The free loot boxes for filling the projects will probably be MK XII version of that gear.
So is this a Pay 2 win game, only if you want to win right now, is it a pay 4 convenience game pretty much. You can buy boosts if you want them but you don't need them to finish this game all it takes is time.
Another thing I have seen is people saying that the upgrade system "Locks" them into a build, I guess I can kinda understand this statement but I always choose 1 type of build for a character and stick to it. I have Plasma builds, Phaser builds, Disruptor builds, Polaron builds, (haven't done Tetryon in a while). So if you want to have multi-builds for 1 ship do it but it will cost to have the higher eq for that ship.
Lets face it this game had been kinda stagnate for a while and LoR breathed new life into the game and DR did as well, the difference is DR is meant to be a long running expansion, I got thru LoR in less than 1 month it was fun but it was short lived fun. DR is going to a long grind to the end and it is what STO needed. Are there parts that need tweaked, oh god yes. Are the Dev's working on those problems yes but it is slow going as expected. And all of the posts on the forums about how bad things are or that things are ending, I see a lot of them by the people that keep playing for the long haul. So I guess we are either too stubborn to go some where else or we are a glutton for punishment or we actually enjoy the new content we are here, and a lot of us are here to stay.
So will we grind Aragala until our finger and eyes bleed, a lot of us will. Will we keep trying to get those perfect mods on the upgraded eq and make stuff epic, some of us will. Why will we do these things, because we are gamers and Trek fans, whether die hard or casual we will tackle what comes out and keep Treking on
You are missing the point,the requirements in resources and time are so stupendous,that upgrading the gear on even one ship,one toon isn't feasible without spending (a lot) of cash.
Why do you NEED to spend cash on the upgrade/crafting system? Do you need to have every bit of equipment Epic Mk 14 NOW? No you don't. I can attest to aht because I'm running Advanced Content with my old VR Mk 12 Gear. The only bit of expense was upgrading ships to T5-U.
You and everyone else don't realize is that hte Upgrade system and Specializations are not meant to be done in the short term. They are meant to be long terms goals. Something to keep you logging into the game. They provide you with long term goals so your don't get everyone at once and then go "I'm bored" because you get tired on the content.
Doing the long term Upgrades in STO and having to contribute to a Fleet Base is a balancing act that you've already have to do. The only dufference are the goals. You can save up Refine Dilithium and Upgrades and go on upgrade frenzy. Or contribute a big chunk to the Fleet base. Or you can allocate a certain a amount of you daily Dil refining towards Upgrades and Fleet contributions.
P.S. If you want to have every Epic Mk 14 NOW, yes it is going to cost you a lot of cash in a short amount of time. But that's the prices of convenience.
Well, I was sitting on around 500k dil when DR hit. But honestly, I can grind out enough for a T6 in around 3 months if I had to from scratch...with my limited play time anyways.
Say you have a t5u and a t6, both are balanced (tact,sci,eng) the same way and have similar gear.Only difference is that the t6 has t6 abilities. Now you pit these to ships against each other, both players have similar skill. Who would win? How often would he win?
About the same since T6 abilities ain't that big of a deal honestly. Well other then the AoE sub nuc if your in team PvP. But the vast majority of this game ain't PvP. It's PvE. And I like my sub par ships just fine and they can take on the easy peasy PvE just fine.
So you are saying that |A|+|B|=|A|+|B|+|C| because C=0? If that were the case, we would have to assume that the intel powers, the work that Cryptic/PWE has gone through to generate sales, does nothing.
For PvP, C is almost zero...not quite zero. So it might have a slight difference...but not much. 15+15 is almost the same as 15+15+1. Besides which, the ships aren't the same anyways. The most OP ship is still a scimmy (well arguably now with the elachi dread being a contender). For PvE, there is a bit more bang for intel slots...but honestly, like I said, you don't need it. You may WANT it...but you sure as hell don't need it to run advanced and elite ques.
The organizers have decided to execute the competition in a 3v3 PvP-system due to the shortage of actively playing PvPers. In addition to that, the implementation of a new tier of ships and a new Bridge officer class has impacted the pvp-gameplay significantly. For this reason it has been determined to restrict the maximum tier of usable vessels to T5U.
I don't see why people really need epic. I think MK XIV is fine and the cost of getting epic for 2% gain is a waste of time. I did my ship in stages MK XIII first on everything and now working MK XIV. If after that I want epic I might do it but no rush. Getting one thing to epic all at once is a waste and will take longer to me. I'm making my superior upgrade tech now for weapons slowly and when I have enough to upgrade 3 weapons to MK XIV Then I will.
There is need to hurry to get epic. Which sounds better a ship with one epic or all MK XIII first?
P.S. If you spent real money to upgrade stuff your an idiot and should slap yourself. I know I would slap myself if I did spent real money on upgrading gear lol.
So some dude with 144 hours said
"Game is a sham now. Devs have openly admitted that they have no interest in PVP balance and are only interested in devising ways to extract more money out of players."
New player sounds discouraged. That raises a point:
If you were new to STO, and you want to play PvP, would you rather spend months working PvE to participate with the small PvP population with gear that may be obsolete by the time you get it so you find yourself fighting players who bought all the new gear very fast? Or would you play a game that pits you against players with similar hours and similar gear?
Epic is a waste of time for most things, Consoles not so much.
Thing is the cost of getting items to Mk XII from Mk II is literally about 3-4 Upgrade Tokens. Getting them from XII to XIV without a crit is around 20. That in turn makes it really expensive straight off the bat whether you buy them with EC (cheapest way) or craft them (not cheap way).
Then there's the application of Dil. That gets ridiculous as soon as you do the XII to XIV maths. Especially for weapons. The ships core items aren't even worth upgrading for the most part and cost an absolute fortune to do so. Rep gear is around 40% more costly than normal gear. Insane really when you consider the costs involved to get Rep Gear in the first place. XII to XIII for normal gear and Weapons is ~64,000 Tech Points, for Rep Gear like Engines etc it's around ~106,240. That's 5 Upgrade Tokens for normal and 9 for Rep Gear. Straight up ~5K to ~9K Dil costs. Apparently Fleet gear counts as normal too.
So for 8 weapons that's 40K Dil and 8M EC. For the 4 core items items it's 20K Dil and 4M EC for normal gear and 36K Dil and 7.2M EC for Rep Gear. (Going off 200k per Superior Upgrade Token).
Consoles are easier but still suffer that 40% extra for Rep Gear. So that's 34K Tech Points for 12-13 and 69K Tech Points for 13-14 for Rep Gear. For normal gear that's reduce to 20.8K and 46.8K respectively.
Now going on standard Gear (Fleet gear like locators aren't considered Rep) that equates to a 10 slot ship costing 5 Upgrade tokens from XII to XIV for each console (2 for XII to XIII and 3 for XIII to XIV). So 1M EC per console along with 5K Dil = 10M EC and 50K Dil for all 10.
Rep Gear gets worse again as it requires 9 upgrade tokens for XII to XIV. If you use 10 Rep Gear consoles (unlikely usually it's about 4-6) it would be 9K Dil and 1.8M EC per console = 90K Dil and 18M EC per 10 console ship.
Obviously you have to adjust depending on ship loadout's and Gear requirements, but it's all costing a TRIBBLE load to upgrade. BTW I'm not going for Epic or UR there. Just for VR XII to VR XIV. If any pop to UR on the way it costs MORE to upgrade those items.
Not even factoring in costs of weapon purchase or creation in the first place to get the needed modifiers for the builds you are after....
Chris Robert's on SC:
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Not so sure there..if a person is going into an advanced or elite stf..with gear that's not epic then the team has to carry the person or fail the mission. The players that fail get 10 marks and are locked out of that que for 30 min. part of this is due to the crafting system short cut requires parts that only drop from advanced and elites...so your right ..not every thing has to be a "bloody epic", but I do have a point..when you don't have epics and come into an stf elite and can't pull your weight... I think to meet half way in all this..PWE should put in a system that can detect gear..not allowing player with out the right gear to use a que that they are not geared for..
Example ...
normal mode ques .. Mk 9, 10, 11 & 12 green, blue, very rare, ultra rare, gold
Advanced mode,,,, mk 12 epice, gold mk13 blue, very rare , ultra rare, gold, mk 14 blue, very rare , ultra rare, gold
Elite mode...mk 14 ultra rare, gold
Something like this would allow players that don't feel they need epics to still que and not have to upgrade to epics or gold..or have someone carry them through an stf...
The rewards would have to be adjusted accordingly with out a doubt..
You guys are so missing the point. And you are so missing the point for two reasons:
Number 1) you are focussing over-and-over on the fact that I based the post around epic items... The ridiculous upgrade costs do not apply to just epic items, they apply to getting anything above mark 12, and they apply to any kind of rarity upgrade. The ridiculous upgrade costs also apply to achieving the modifiers you want (for example crtd3).. and here I'm not just talking about standard off the shelf gear, I'm also talking about gear like romulan or corrosive plasma beams, elachi pvp weapons, phased biomatter weapons.. Etc. The ridiculous upgrade costs also apply to ANY kind of rep gear, which, as stated in a recent reply also has a massively increased upgrade/tech point requirement cost.
Number 2) the second reason, and perhaps the most important why you have missed the point behind my post is that it is plainly obvious from reading many responses here, that you are offering your opinions in regards to the cost of the upgrade system, but in fact many of you are speaking without having actually used the upgrade system to get most of your gear to mark 14 yet. I can promise you that when you do try to achieve this goal - especially for those of you who like to grind your way there - you will find that the current system is so exponential in terms of dilithium and tech upgrade/cost requirements, that you are going to find out the hard way EXACTLY what I am talking about. You will either a) give up on upgrading your gear to achieve the level and standard that you want, because the costs are simply up realistically achievable, or b) you will settle for having a ship and gear that is under-par for achieving the things that will be the 'standard' achievements in this game in 6 months time (I'm talking about - for example.. Into the hive on adv or elite, no win scen on adv or elite, storming the spire on elite... Etc.)
The current upgrade system is ridiculously broken, is ridiculously expensive, and a complete rip-off for those players who do want to use it to achieve anything like end-game content.
Now - I know some of you are simply trying to be positive about the upgrade system, but I can assure you, in six months time, when you have started to have some real experience of having tried to use it to achieve what you want, you are going to see exactly what I am talking about in this post. You can either believe me or not on this point it's up to you, and in fact it makes no difference..
I am actually not trying to be a doomsayers, I am simply trying to be realistic and honest about this game for all it's good and not-so-good (or in this case ridiculously broken) points and features. Now - as a community, you have to start being honest with yourselves and to the devs of this game if you EVER want things to be changed/fixed/improved, and start fighting for some of the positive changes that we all, in our hearts, know need to be sorted in this game. Otherwise Cryptic will simply keep taking our money, keep things stagnant and not sort out issues and basically keep taking advantage of its player-base and customers.
It's time, in my opinion to stop burying heads in the sand, and start having a voice for this game, this can be done by respecting and influencing players opinions, and making our cases heard, both through these forums and by getting more players to fight for those changes that need to be implemented.
And on a finishing note - any game that asks for $8 of real-life cash to unlock 8 slots in your bag is pay-to-play/pay-to-win.
Remember Candy-Crush-saga? and how it was all in the news for being so easy to take players' money at the click of a button? that's EXACTLY how I would describe the model of STO, and how Cryptic/PWE have set it up to be to take our money at every opportunity possible, and milk its' players for all the 'real-life energy credits' they have...
It's fine that that is how they 'choose to be' it doesn't make it right, fair or morally correct. Or desirable for what ANY kind of computer game (or MMO) should be about.
Comments
Did you grind all of your gear?
Do you think you would have managed a T6 with all mk xiv betwene dr and now?
Epics are a tax on rich people. Everyone with more sense than money will realize he doesn't need it. The cost of upgrading to Mark XIV are in the same range as the original cost to get to Mark XII gear. (Maybe even lower if you consider that some Mark XII gear people use will be fleet gear, which requires investment into fleets.)
You begin your post, right in the first sentence, with name-calling.
What do you mean by "packs" in this context?
I've done a fair amount of upgrading. I understand what you mean by starting with Mk II. And a good deal of what you have to say is true. But don't start your post with insults, please.
The biggest hole in your argument is the incredibly ****ed-up nature of the RNG in STO. It's utterly hosed. And that combined with the fail-based nature of the crafting system, leaves us with a terribly frustrating situation. A situation which certainly looks like it was designed to milk us for RL cash.
Did you manage your t6s with just grinding, and how many hours did it take you to grind just 1?
The R&D system is still a work in progress as well, just a few updates ago they recently brought the mat cost down for making items so they may still bring down the dil cost as well (15%-25%) would be my suggestion.
I can agree it can be tough for the F2P casual player to get the materials necessary to get the upgrades they need/want for their ships but as time goes on and more and more people get their crafting levels up the price on the exchange for the upgrade kits will go down. I have gotten 2 characters to lvl 60 so far and both of them can pug Bug Hunt Elite and get the salvaged tech for the superior upgrades. Its not that hard to get the mats necessary to make the upgrade kits (the only thing I keep running out of is Tritanium).
If you feel as if you have to upgrade your EQ to the Epic Max it can be, that's fine do it but expect to spend a lot of your resources doing it, especially for those mats you buy off the exchange because the players that rushed the process and burned thru a lot of dil to max out their crafting want to get something in return for the resources they burned.
About a week after DR launched i went looking on the exchange for the 360* firing beams because I wanted some for my ships, the pickings were slim and the prices were thru the roof. I waited a couple of more weeks and their was a lot more to choose from and the prices were more reasonable.
See where we stand in the way of upgrading on 1st contact day you will see a lot more people with Mk XIII and XIV gear VR or better. By the 1 year anniversary of DR launching MKXIV UR will probably be the norm that end gamers will be using.
Maybe the next set of rep gear but probably the one after that will probably be mk XIII or mk XIV base on req. The free loot boxes for filling the projects will probably be MK XII version of that gear.
So is this a Pay 2 win game, only if you want to win right now, is it a pay 4 convenience game pretty much. You can buy boosts if you want them but you don't need them to finish this game all it takes is time.
Another thing I have seen is people saying that the upgrade system "Locks" them into a build, I guess I can kinda understand this statement but I always choose 1 type of build for a character and stick to it. I have Plasma builds, Phaser builds, Disruptor builds, Polaron builds, (haven't done Tetryon in a while). So if you want to have multi-builds for 1 ship do it but it will cost to have the higher eq for that ship.
Lets face it this game had been kinda stagnate for a while and LoR breathed new life into the game and DR did as well, the difference is DR is meant to be a long running expansion, I got thru LoR in less than 1 month it was fun but it was short lived fun. DR is going to a long grind to the end and it is what STO needed. Are there parts that need tweaked, oh god yes. Are the Dev's working on those problems yes but it is slow going as expected. And all of the posts on the forums about how bad things are or that things are ending, I see a lot of them by the people that keep playing for the long haul. So I guess we are either too stubborn to go some where else or we are a glutton for punishment or we actually enjoy the new content we are here, and a lot of us are here to stay.
So will we grind Aragala until our finger and eyes bleed, a lot of us will. Will we keep trying to get those perfect mods on the upgraded eq and make stuff epic, some of us will. Why will we do these things, because we are gamers and Trek fans, whether die hard or casual we will tackle what comes out and keep Treking on
Why do you NEED to spend cash on the upgrade/crafting system? Do you need to have every bit of equipment Epic Mk 14 NOW? No you don't. I can attest to aht because I'm running Advanced Content with my old VR Mk 12 Gear. The only bit of expense was upgrading ships to T5-U.
You and everyone else don't realize is that hte Upgrade system and Specializations are not meant to be done in the short term. They are meant to be long terms goals. Something to keep you logging into the game. They provide you with long term goals so your don't get everyone at once and then go "I'm bored" because you get tired on the content.
Doing the long term Upgrades in STO and having to contribute to a Fleet Base is a balancing act that you've already have to do. The only dufference are the goals. You can save up Refine Dilithium and Upgrades and go on upgrade frenzy. Or contribute a big chunk to the Fleet base. Or you can allocate a certain a amount of you daily Dil refining towards Upgrades and Fleet contributions.
P.S. If you want to have every Epic Mk 14 NOW, yes it is going to cost you a lot of cash in a short amount of time. But that's the prices of convenience.
So you are saying that |A|+|B|=|A|+|B|+|C| because C=0? If that were the case, we would have to assume that the intel powers, the work that Cryptic/PWE has gone through to generate sales, does nothing.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1331751:
There is need to hurry to get epic. Which sounds better a ship with one epic or all MK XIII first?
P.S. If you spent real money to upgrade stuff your an idiot and should slap yourself. I know I would slap myself if I did spent real money on upgrading gear lol.
"Game is a sham now. Devs have openly admitted that they have no interest in PVP balance and are only interested in devising ways to extract more money out of players."
New player sounds discouraged. That raises a point:
If you were new to STO, and you want to play PvP, would you rather spend months working PvE to participate with the small PvP population with gear that may be obsolete by the time you get it so you find yourself fighting players who bought all the new gear very fast? Or would you play a game that pits you against players with similar hours and similar gear?
Thing is the cost of getting items to Mk XII from Mk II is literally about 3-4 Upgrade Tokens. Getting them from XII to XIV without a crit is around 20. That in turn makes it really expensive straight off the bat whether you buy them with EC (cheapest way) or craft them (not cheap way).
Then there's the application of Dil. That gets ridiculous as soon as you do the XII to XIV maths. Especially for weapons. The ships core items aren't even worth upgrading for the most part and cost an absolute fortune to do so. Rep gear is around 40% more costly than normal gear. Insane really when you consider the costs involved to get Rep Gear in the first place. XII to XIII for normal gear and Weapons is ~64,000 Tech Points, for Rep Gear like Engines etc it's around ~106,240. That's 5 Upgrade Tokens for normal and 9 for Rep Gear. Straight up ~5K to ~9K Dil costs. Apparently Fleet gear counts as normal too.
So for 8 weapons that's 40K Dil and 8M EC. For the 4 core items items it's 20K Dil and 4M EC for normal gear and 36K Dil and 7.2M EC for Rep Gear. (Going off 200k per Superior Upgrade Token).
Consoles are easier but still suffer that 40% extra for Rep Gear. So that's 34K Tech Points for 12-13 and 69K Tech Points for 13-14 for Rep Gear. For normal gear that's reduce to 20.8K and 46.8K respectively.
Now going on standard Gear (Fleet gear like locators aren't considered Rep) that equates to a 10 slot ship costing 5 Upgrade tokens from XII to XIV for each console (2 for XII to XIII and 3 for XIII to XIV). So 1M EC per console along with 5K Dil = 10M EC and 50K Dil for all 10.
Rep Gear gets worse again as it requires 9 upgrade tokens for XII to XIV. If you use 10 Rep Gear consoles (unlikely usually it's about 4-6) it would be 9K Dil and 1.8M EC per console = 90K Dil and 18M EC per 10 console ship.
Obviously you have to adjust depending on ship loadout's and Gear requirements, but it's all costing a TRIBBLE load to upgrade. BTW I'm not going for Epic or UR there. Just for VR XII to VR XIV. If any pop to UR on the way it costs MORE to upgrade those items.
Not even factoring in costs of weapon purchase or creation in the first place to get the needed modifiers for the builds you are after....
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Example ...
normal mode ques .. Mk 9, 10, 11 & 12 green, blue, very rare, ultra rare, gold
Advanced mode,,,, mk 12 epice, gold mk13 blue, very rare , ultra rare, gold, mk 14 blue, very rare , ultra rare, gold
Elite mode...mk 14 ultra rare, gold
Something like this would allow players that don't feel they need epics to still que and not have to upgrade to epics or gold..or have someone carry them through an stf...
The rewards would have to be adjusted accordingly with out a doubt..
Number 1) you are focussing over-and-over on the fact that I based the post around epic items... The ridiculous upgrade costs do not apply to just epic items, they apply to getting anything above mark 12, and they apply to any kind of rarity upgrade. The ridiculous upgrade costs also apply to achieving the modifiers you want (for example crtd3).. and here I'm not just talking about standard off the shelf gear, I'm also talking about gear like romulan or corrosive plasma beams, elachi pvp weapons, phased biomatter weapons.. Etc. The ridiculous upgrade costs also apply to ANY kind of rep gear, which, as stated in a recent reply also has a massively increased upgrade/tech point requirement cost.
Number 2) the second reason, and perhaps the most important why you have missed the point behind my post is that it is plainly obvious from reading many responses here, that you are offering your opinions in regards to the cost of the upgrade system, but in fact many of you are speaking without having actually used the upgrade system to get most of your gear to mark 14 yet. I can promise you that when you do try to achieve this goal - especially for those of you who like to grind your way there - you will find that the current system is so exponential in terms of dilithium and tech upgrade/cost requirements, that you are going to find out the hard way EXACTLY what I am talking about. You will either a) give up on upgrading your gear to achieve the level and standard that you want, because the costs are simply up realistically achievable, or b) you will settle for having a ship and gear that is under-par for achieving the things that will be the 'standard' achievements in this game in 6 months time (I'm talking about - for example.. Into the hive on adv or elite, no win scen on adv or elite, storming the spire on elite... Etc.)
The current upgrade system is ridiculously broken, is ridiculously expensive, and a complete rip-off for those players who do want to use it to achieve anything like end-game content.
Now - I know some of you are simply trying to be positive about the upgrade system, but I can assure you, in six months time, when you have started to have some real experience of having tried to use it to achieve what you want, you are going to see exactly what I am talking about in this post. You can either believe me or not on this point it's up to you, and in fact it makes no difference..
I am actually not trying to be a doomsayers, I am simply trying to be realistic and honest about this game for all it's good and not-so-good (or in this case ridiculously broken) points and features. Now - as a community, you have to start being honest with yourselves and to the devs of this game if you EVER want things to be changed/fixed/improved, and start fighting for some of the positive changes that we all, in our hearts, know need to be sorted in this game. Otherwise Cryptic will simply keep taking our money, keep things stagnant and not sort out issues and basically keep taking advantage of its player-base and customers.
It's time, in my opinion to stop burying heads in the sand, and start having a voice for this game, this can be done by respecting and influencing players opinions, and making our cases heard, both through these forums and by getting more players to fight for those changes that need to be implemented.
And on a finishing note - any game that asks for $8 of real-life cash to unlock 8 slots in your bag is pay-to-play/pay-to-win.
Remember Candy-Crush-saga? and how it was all in the news for being so easy to take players' money at the click of a button? that's EXACTLY how I would describe the model of STO, and how Cryptic/PWE have set it up to be to take our money at every opportunity possible, and milk its' players for all the 'real-life energy credits' they have...
It's fine that that is how they 'choose to be' it doesn't make it right, fair or morally correct. Or desirable for what ANY kind of computer game (or MMO) should be about.
Thoughts?
It's grind 2 play and pay not 2 grind. That's quite the difference.