I find the Admiralty System (AS) to be more like DOffing than I expected. We have become accustomed to letting the AI decide which DOffs to use in many cases, but this does not apply to the AS. Ship selection requires at least a modest amount of planning, but a mission failure does not even have the consequences of DOffing (no "sick bay" assignments). Some ships spend more in repair dock than others based on their rarity, but there is really no penalty for failure.
Granted, I already paid for a LTS, so I got a few good ships free, but none of my alts have more than 14, and I dismissed the ones I don't plan to personally fly, so I have never bought a ship slot. If you (over)plan some missions, and really load up the crit points, the AS will sometimes give VR ship cards that are consumable; in many cases these cards have been better than my owned ships! Save these consumables for the really high requirement missions, and you'll be able to reach the higher tiers more easily.
So far, I have only reached T5 in the AS, and I have yet to use a pass token, even though I've now accumulated about 13-17 per alt. Just because you have slots for up to eight missions, there is no reason to do so if you are having any difficulty reaching the mission crit scores. I've only ever gotten a few MU ships from (500+) lockboxes, so the more cost-effective path to expanding your AS fleet is to take it slowly, as others have already mentioned. Consider the crafting levels; Cryptic turned leveling from a curve to nearly a straight line, once you get past level 15; the AS is nowhere near as bad.
Expendables Fleet: Andrew - Bajoran Fed Engineer Ken'taura - Rom/Fed Scientist Gwyllim - Human Fed Delta Tac Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
If you have the FREE Kobali, Breen carrier, Nandi ships they work together to give you 100+ in each stat AND give -60% to maintenance. FREE SHIPS. GOOD SHIPS. HAPPY SHIPS!
If you (over)plan some missions, and really load up the crit points, the AS will sometimes give VR ship cards that are consumable; in many cases these cards have been better than my owned ships! Save these consumables for the really high requirement missions, and you'll be able to reach the higher tiers more easily.
Ship cards are actually a regular mission reward for some missions. You don't have to crit.
If you have the FREE Kobali, Breen carrier, Nandi ships they work together to give you 100+ in each stat AND give -60% to maintenance. FREE SHIPS. GOOD SHIPS. HAPPY SHIPS!
Got only 1 of those.
Seek and ye shall find. Ask and ye shall receive. Rabboni
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" (Benjamin Franklin).
Most unexpectedly, this turned into a flame-fest! Closed it goes!. /sigh What flamefestery is this? pwlaughingtrendy
If you have the FREE Kobali, Breen carrier, Nandi ships they work together to give you 100+ in each stat AND give -60% to maintenance. FREE SHIPS. GOOD SHIPS. HAPPY SHIPS!
Got only 1 of those.
Well I guess AS isn't "do nothing to win." Did you claim the recent free T5 ships and free NX?
FYI, I still get 15-15-15 missions at level 6 so once you use pass tokens and get more 1x use ship cards you'll be OK.
There is a funny sort of feeling to the balance of the Admiralty system, because its requirements expand faster than your resources do.
It takes relatively little time to go from one mission slot to six or seven - but maintenance times don't change on your ships, and your available roster only grows when you acquire a new ship. So, what starts out as a very simple exercise in matching the best ships to the best available mission, soon becomes a matter of filling as many slots as you can with whatever resources you've got available. (I am quite happy sending a single T'Liss warbird out to fight pirates and a Doomsday Machine... so it only has a 2% chance, that's still better than nothing, and it's not like I lose anything by making the attempt.)
Unlocking the extra slots is kinda superfluous what with how easily it comes. Could've just had all 8 open from the start.
The dilemma of trying to max out each assignment vs trying to run as many assignments as you can with available ships is, IMO, what makes Admiralty much more interesting than doffing. It feels like you're an actual admiral making actual strategic decisions, between playing it safe or risking failure to accomplish more. Vs doffing where each assignment requires a certain team of officers and you just send them, its more of a managerial job.
Yes the system rewards those who have put some money into the game, but it's a totally optional system. Yeah it's helped me out some with alts and leveling.
But seriously, get some dil(good chance for the weekend and the mirror event) convert, get some freebie ships to help out some.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
To support the experiences of @davefenestrator - I also regularily get the low assignments (like 10-10-10), and not always with the "Wormhole" or similar funny events (my poor Miranda, I wonder how many hopeless wormholes and Borgs and similar she will have to suffer) but instead with lucky veins or suchlike. So yeah, I bash away 2 missions a day with low tier ships (maybe one day that 5% chance will come to fruition), get a couple of save ones with my mid tier or event ships (the Samsar-Sarr Theln-Nandi trinity really is nice but since I am only on once a day it doesn't have too much uses for me), and gamble on the others, usually in the mid 90% range.
Yes, I do get odd fails even apart from Miranda hopeless, but in the end I make half a level (will lessen with XP event ending) plus dil plus colonists to send off for 500 more dil plus a couple of ec. And that adds up over the weeks for only about 5 minutes a day per toon. Combine it with doffing and it really is a convenient way to keep your lesser used alts in the running so next time you ask them to do a mission they can get their stuff together.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
BTW, the one time use ship cards usually come from missions called along the lines of "escort ambassador through enemy territory" or "look for ship gone missing" and do not depend on a crit.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
And another hint: look out for the event names. You will soon see that there are some events which offer decent rewards for little stat additions. Apart from the XP the events are often more interesting than the original rewards - Scavenger Party e.g. gives you 2 of every VR mat for only (I think) 10 each of Sci and Eng added. Which is IMO worth much more than "+100 Tac +200 Crit" on a lame assignment or - depending on your schedule - cooldown reductions. With saving my better ships for these events I managed to get a lot of VR mats (plus some salvaged tech, but that's a different reard and can drop from any mat reward box, even the white ones) on toons who never ran any advanced STFs
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
If spending money gives you an advantage, you can only get with money then yes, it is pay2win.
It's not about pvp capture the flag matches "winning".
So yes and no, because it's not cash exclusive - you can grind it out for free, meaning it's available without using money.
Admiralty system I feel is filling in for the nerfed Delta Rising regime dating back a year. They nerfed many things including exp and dil but the real problem is all the queues died with the DR nerfs.
So okay I guess that we get semi un-nerfed exp back a year later but it doesn't fix the dead queues.
And much like upgrading, or rather completely and totally it, there isn't any new gameplay going on. It's rehearse content, you already bought.
Mainly to me I ask why would the whales. who already DR grinded for a year, want to play admiralty? But I guess the whales will play anything right, go collect every ship in the game, probably doesn't even seem insane to them at this point.
BTW, the one time use ship cards usually come from missions called along the lines of "escort ambassador through enemy territory" or "look for ship gone missing" and do not depend on a crit.
Partly true. While only missions like that will give you a ship card (you can see the distinctive box in the reward section before starting), a critical success on such missions will give you two cards.
And another hint: look out for the event names. You will soon see that there are some events which offer decent rewards for little stat additions. Apart from the XP the events are often more interesting than the original rewards - Scavenger Party e.g. gives you 2 of every VR mat for only (I think) 10 each of Sci and Eng added. Which is IMO worth much more than "+100 Tac +200 Crit" on a lame assignment or - depending on your schedule - cooldown reductions. With saving my better ships for these events I managed to get a lot of VR mats (plus some salvaged tech, but that's a different reard and can drop from any mat reward box, even the white ones) on toons who never ran any advanced STFs
You can also mouse over the event name to get a description.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
There are low level (T3?) ships that ignore certain event stats - really helps on those +100 missions.
Also some of the event ships. The Dyson Science Destroyer ignores +SCI events. I'm not sure about the others, but there are some options to clear those massive crisis events.
I may have the wrong logic on this, but if STO wasn't P2W before admiralty it just cannot become P2W through admiralty. Why? Because before people were succesful in optimizing their builds already, admiralty only gives a shortcut to some resources that you could easily acquire (only in a way taking more time) otherwise. Admiralty does not award a single exclusive thing (except for the cards but they are only used within admiralty) unlike even doffing. So yes, it is easier to play when you have a lot of ships, but even if you have only a few and do only get one mission a day completed you are still faster than you were before in acquiring stuff.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Then again, I paid stuff to get things done right away and ended up not really winning anything. I got bored out of my mind not having anything to do. I guess you can say admiralty gives you incentives to grind more ships?
It does. But, it's also entirely viable to log in, queue up some Admiralty missions and come back tomorrow, or, if you've got time to kill in the game, go run some actual content. This is a much more finite system than DOffing, so if you've got 40+ ships and enough stats to burn all day on the system, you can actually (mostly) complete the system in a couple months.
As it is, it's really almost more of a roleplaying option, and a source for easy XP for players who don't have much time to play.
it isn't pay to win, because there is nothing to win
Ive been playing it a little bit. Made sure I claimed all my available ships. I'm a single char player so I had a total of 19 available. Havent spent a penny. I don't even bother with optimising what ships I send on missions. I simply select whatever the top three are and send them on their way. So far I have had about 3 failures, and I do not care.
Wait the free ship tokens come when campaign is lvl 10 not tour? Ouch.
Also, I thought events changed at some point.. is this not the case? I hadn't looked at my fed campaign because all 3 missions had +100 to a few stats. But base missions of under 30 everything. Should I skip them cause of stupid events or will I get better ones?
The events are random and happen at any level. Also, some events are - X not + X. At 5 or 6 I've had missions that were 15 - 15- 15 with -20 tac so 15-0-15.
If something has low rewards, low XP yet is +100 something, I'll just use a pass token.
P2W? In general, no it is not. But if you will notice, some of the requirements in ship stats make you wonder if the system is set up as Pay to Succeed.
Sure, you can use a Pass token or send a single low-point ship to "skip" a mission. However, it does make one wonder...
-AoP- Warrior's Blood (KDF Armada) / -AoP- Qu' raD qulbo'Degh / -AoP- ProjectPhoenix Join Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
P2W? In general, no it is not. But if you will notice, some of the requirements in ship stats make you wonder if the system is set up as Pay to Succeed.
Sure, you can use a Pass token or send a single low-point ship to "skip" a mission. However, it does make one wonder...
that still doesn't necessarily make it pay to win in my eyes, as far as I am concerned pay to win would suggest that if you don't pay you cant win and even the mission with the highest possible stats you can have a good chance of winning even with mediocre ships that everyone can have access to if they play the game long enough, also even with the lowest ship stats there is still a slim chance you can get a success if the dice fall in your favour.
sure being able to buy certain ships will mean you will have more wins and even maybe no fails at all but the players who have these ships have spent a lot more money to keep the game afloat so deserve an advantage and the more they spend the more advantages they will have but equally we who spend very little or even nothing will also have more advantages in the form of new content that would not be released if they had not spent money.
in that respect if you consider this game pay to win I can only say I hope it stays that way and the payers keep paying for a very long time to come.
finally I will say ok some players will spend enough money to guarantee a win every time but I would say where is the fun in that, fun to me is that anticipation of will in succeed or will it fail that you don't know the answer to until the mission is finished, especially when you get a success on a mission you had very little chance of winning.
so as long as I get a modicum of sure things and top it off with a few ifs and maybes I will be happy.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
I may have the wrong logic on this, but if STO wasn't P2W before admiralty it just cannot become P2W through admiralty. Why? Because before people were succesful in optimizing their builds already, admiralty only gives a shortcut to some resources that you could easily acquire (only in a way taking more time) otherwise. Admiralty does not award a single exclusive thing (except for the cards but they are only used within admiralty) unlike even doffing. So yes, it is easier to play when you have a lot of ships, but even if you have only a few and do only get one mission a day completed you are still faster than you were before in acquiring stuff.
Your logic is quiet sound there.
Why the daily STO practice of playing for Dil to turn it to Zen to buy new ships suddenly is supposed to be something dirty just because of the Admiralty System is beyond me.
Other than that this thread turns out to be a very informative platform. I approach the new system with 9 toons which all have some 33-38 ships on them. 20 of those I got for free the past 3,5 years and another 10 for almost free. The means to get ships have been described well by previous posters. Such an amount of ships is fairly enough to play the new system up to 3 times a day. My strategy is to skip or deliberately fail purple assignments while watching out for events on low quality assignments that grand dil/ec. Gives me a nice additional income each day.
I only hope cryptic stays truthful to the new system as far as the rewards are concerned and doesn’t nerf them in the long run.
Admiralty has put an end to the grind in this game for me. Instead of going around “Ok, now I have to grind Dil. Then I could use more XP. Oh, EC is low”, I just log on and have some fun.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Mustrum's Medium-Short-Brief-Eassay on Pay-To-Win in Star Trek Online
TL;DR: Thanks to to he Dilithium Exchange, STO escapes the fundamental P2W problem. But it isn't all perfect and rosy for that.
The first time I was introduced to the concept of Pay-To-Win, it was World of Tanks. It used to be (I think that has partially changed) that Gold Ammunition in the game could only be had for real world money, and it considerably increased your chance to penetrate the armor of enemy tanks. That means with gold ammo, your chances of winning were a lot higher.
This has colored my view on P2W strongly, because it's pretty evident that in such a system, you basically have a two-class system . People that pay always have an advantage over the people that don't. And it gets worse since it's a PvP only game, so you can't just ignore the advantage as you could if you just play some single player missions and don't need to care what other players do.
As I said, i believe WoT changed this and gold ammo is no longer a monetary exclusive, but that's how it started out, basically.
Star Trek Online has the Dilithium/Zen Exchange. That changes a lot. Because yes - to get the cool stuff into the game, someone needs to spend money. But it doesn't have to be you. You can grind Dilithium, sell it for Zen. Someone beats you up with his cool new Defiant (which is of course impossible, since everyone on the forum knows the Defiant sucks), you can exchange some Dilithium for Zen and you can have the Defiant, too. Of course, it might take you days, weeks or months to get there, but basically - you can always advanve to be on the level of the payers. (at least in equipment wise. Skills are another matter). And of course, PvP in STO is an afterthought, so it's not even a competititon.
But even if it takes a lot of grinding, there is never a pay-gate in your way that makes it impossible to get to the other side. Every advantage others can have for money is only temporary
So, ultimately, I think that Star Trek Online has never been Pay-To-Win - thanks to the particular way its F2P is set up.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't face some of the same problems that Pay-To-Win also easily has. If the stuff you pay for is permanent part of your character (like a space ship), to get you to pay for another one, they have to convince you the other one is worth leaving behind the previous one, or having on top of the previus one. And that tends to lead to power creep. And STO has had that basically since they introduced the first set items (which was even before F2P).
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Mustrum's Medium-Short-Brief-Eassay on Pay-To-Win in Star Trek Online
TL;DR: Thanks to to he Dilithium Exchange, STO escapes the fundamental P2W problem. But it isn't all perfect and rosy for that.
Well, you could spend the next several years grinding out enough dil to convert to Zen for free and buy all the ships you want....
Takes me around 44 (usually less) days to grind enough zen for a T6 ship. And thats only using 2/4 characters and with absolute minimal effort (I'm usually online for an average of 15-20 mins per day). Thats what? 8 free T6 ships in a year with the bare minimum effort if I had the energy to do that every day.
Even if I was lazy about it I'm sure I could grab enough for one every six months.
It's not really pay to win anymore than other parts of the game. Sure you could go buy every ship and have every card but you'll not really gain anything other than being able to slot more missions. It doesn't help you defeat enemies, or in PVP or help you win in queues. Everything available in the A.S.S is freely available for anyone in due time, you just gotta put in the effort and there's enough free ships to keep anyone going slowly at it. Pay to win qound be a system where you could only get ahead with bought ships and where it relied solely on how much money you spent to determine your success.
You can't fail really, sure missions may fail but the ships never die nor cost you anything other than time to run those missions.
Comments
Most unexpectedly, this turned into a flame-fest! Closed it goes!. /sigh What flamefestery is this? pwlaughingtrendy
Granted, I already paid for a LTS, so I got a few good ships free, but none of my alts have more than 14, and I dismissed the ones I don't plan to personally fly, so I have never bought a ship slot. If you (over)plan some missions, and really load up the crit points, the AS will sometimes give VR ship cards that are consumable; in many cases these cards have been better than my owned ships! Save these consumables for the really high requirement missions, and you'll be able to reach the higher tiers more easily.
So far, I have only reached T5 in the AS, and I have yet to use a pass token, even though I've now accumulated about 13-17 per alt. Just because you have slots for up to eight missions, there is no reason to do so if you are having any difficulty reaching the mission crit scores. I've only ever gotten a few MU ships from (500+) lockboxes, so the more cost-effective path to expanding your AS fleet is to take it slowly, as others have already mentioned. Consider the crafting levels; Cryptic turned leveling from a curve to nearly a straight line, once you get past level 15; the AS is nowhere near as bad.
Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci
Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac
Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
If you have the FREE Kobali, Breen carrier, Nandi ships they work together to give you 100+ in each stat AND give -60% to maintenance. FREE SHIPS. GOOD SHIPS. HAPPY SHIPS!
Ship cards are actually a regular mission reward for some missions. You don't have to crit.
Got only 1 of those.
Most unexpectedly, this turned into a flame-fest! Closed it goes!. /sigh What flamefestery is this? pwlaughingtrendy
Well I guess AS isn't "do nothing to win." Did you claim the recent free T5 ships and free NX?
FYI, I still get 15-15-15 missions at level 6 so once you use pass tokens and get more 1x use ship cards you'll be OK.
Unlocking the extra slots is kinda superfluous what with how easily it comes. Could've just had all 8 open from the start.
The dilemma of trying to max out each assignment vs trying to run as many assignments as you can with available ships is, IMO, what makes Admiralty much more interesting than doffing. It feels like you're an actual admiral making actual strategic decisions, between playing it safe or risking failure to accomplish more. Vs doffing where each assignment requires a certain team of officers and you just send them, its more of a managerial job.
But seriously, get some dil(good chance for the weekend and the mirror event) convert, get some freebie ships to help out some.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
Yes, I do get odd fails even apart from Miranda hopeless, but in the end I make half a level (will lessen with XP event ending) plus dil plus colonists to send off for 500 more dil plus a couple of ec. And that adds up over the weeks for only about 5 minutes a day per toon. Combine it with doffing and it really is a convenient way to keep your lesser used alts in the running so next time you ask them to do a mission they can get their stuff together.
It's not about pvp capture the flag matches "winning".
So yes and no, because it's not cash exclusive - you can grind it out for free, meaning it's available without using money.
Admiralty system I feel is filling in for the nerfed Delta Rising regime dating back a year. They nerfed many things including exp and dil but the real problem is all the queues died with the DR nerfs.
So okay I guess that we get semi un-nerfed exp back a year later but it doesn't fix the dead queues.
And much like upgrading, or rather completely and totally it, there isn't any new gameplay going on. It's rehearse content, you already bought.
Mainly to me I ask why would the whales. who already DR grinded for a year, want to play admiralty? But I guess the whales will play anything right, go collect every ship in the game, probably doesn't even seem insane to them at this point.
Partly true. While only missions like that will give you a ship card (you can see the distinctive box in the reward section before starting), a critical success on such missions will give you two cards.
You can also mouse over the event name to get a description.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Also some of the event ships. The Dyson Science Destroyer ignores +SCI events. I'm not sure about the others, but there are some options to clear those massive crisis events.
It does. But, it's also entirely viable to log in, queue up some Admiralty missions and come back tomorrow, or, if you've got time to kill in the game, go run some actual content. This is a much more finite system than DOffing, so if you've got 40+ ships and enough stats to burn all day on the system, you can actually (mostly) complete the system in a couple months.
As it is, it's really almost more of a roleplaying option, and a source for easy XP for players who don't have much time to play.
Ive been playing it a little bit. Made sure I claimed all my available ships. I'm a single char player so I had a total of 19 available. Havent spent a penny. I don't even bother with optimising what ships I send on missions. I simply select whatever the top three are and send them on their way. So far I have had about 3 failures, and I do not care.
/end
Also, I thought events changed at some point.. is this not the case? I hadn't looked at my fed campaign because all 3 missions had +100 to a few stats. But base missions of under 30 everything. Should I skip them cause of stupid events or will I get better ones?
If something has low rewards, low XP yet is +100 something, I'll just use a pass token.
Sure, you can use a Pass token or send a single low-point ship to "skip" a mission. However, it does make one wonder...
Join Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
that still doesn't necessarily make it pay to win in my eyes, as far as I am concerned pay to win would suggest that if you don't pay you cant win and even the mission with the highest possible stats you can have a good chance of winning even with mediocre ships that everyone can have access to if they play the game long enough, also even with the lowest ship stats there is still a slim chance you can get a success if the dice fall in your favour.
sure being able to buy certain ships will mean you will have more wins and even maybe no fails at all but the players who have these ships have spent a lot more money to keep the game afloat so deserve an advantage and the more they spend the more advantages they will have but equally we who spend very little or even nothing will also have more advantages in the form of new content that would not be released if they had not spent money.
in that respect if you consider this game pay to win I can only say I hope it stays that way and the payers keep paying for a very long time to come.
finally I will say ok some players will spend enough money to guarantee a win every time but I would say where is the fun in that, fun to me is that anticipation of will in succeed or will it fail that you don't know the answer to until the mission is finished, especially when you get a success on a mission you had very little chance of winning.
so as long as I get a modicum of sure things and top it off with a few ifs and maybes I will be happy.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Of course it is! Silly question!
Your logic is quiet sound there.
Why the daily STO practice of playing for Dil to turn it to Zen to buy new ships suddenly is supposed to be something dirty just because of the Admiralty System is beyond me.
Other than that this thread turns out to be a very informative platform. I approach the new system with 9 toons which all have some 33-38 ships on them. 20 of those I got for free the past 3,5 years and another 10 for almost free. The means to get ships have been described well by previous posters. Such an amount of ships is fairly enough to play the new system up to 3 times a day. My strategy is to skip or deliberately fail purple assignments while watching out for events on low quality assignments that grand dil/ec. Gives me a nice additional income each day.
I only hope cryptic stays truthful to the new system as far as the rewards are concerned and doesn’t nerf them in the long run.
Admiralty has put an end to the grind in this game for me. Instead of going around “Ok, now I have to grind Dil. Then I could use more XP. Oh, EC is low”, I just log on and have some fun.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
TL;DR: Thanks to to he Dilithium Exchange, STO escapes the fundamental P2W problem. But it isn't all perfect and rosy for that.
The first time I was introduced to the concept of Pay-To-Win, it was World of Tanks. It used to be (I think that has partially changed) that Gold Ammunition in the game could only be had for real world money, and it considerably increased your chance to penetrate the armor of enemy tanks. That means with gold ammo, your chances of winning were a lot higher.
This has colored my view on P2W strongly, because it's pretty evident that in such a system, you basically have a two-class system . People that pay always have an advantage over the people that don't. And it gets worse since it's a PvP only game, so you can't just ignore the advantage as you could if you just play some single player missions and don't need to care what other players do.
As I said, i believe WoT changed this and gold ammo is no longer a monetary exclusive, but that's how it started out, basically.
Star Trek Online has the Dilithium/Zen Exchange. That changes a lot. Because yes - to get the cool stuff into the game, someone needs to spend money. But it doesn't have to be you. You can grind Dilithium, sell it for Zen. Someone beats you up with his cool new Defiant (which is of course impossible, since everyone on the forum knows the Defiant sucks), you can exchange some Dilithium for Zen and you can have the Defiant, too. Of course, it might take you days, weeks or months to get there, but basically - you can always advanve to be on the level of the payers. (at least in equipment wise. Skills are another matter). And of course, PvP in STO is an afterthought, so it's not even a competititon.
But even if it takes a lot of grinding, there is never a pay-gate in your way that makes it impossible to get to the other side. Every advantage others can have for money is only temporary
So, ultimately, I think that Star Trek Online has never been Pay-To-Win - thanks to the particular way its F2P is set up.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't face some of the same problems that Pay-To-Win also easily has. If the stuff you pay for is permanent part of your character (like a space ship), to get you to pay for another one, they have to convince you the other one is worth leaving behind the previous one, or having on top of the previus one. And that tends to lead to power creep. And STO has had that basically since they introduced the first set items (which was even before F2P).
perfectly put.
Takes me around 44 (usually less) days to grind enough zen for a T6 ship. And thats only using 2/4 characters and with absolute minimal effort (I'm usually online for an average of 15-20 mins per day). Thats what? 8 free T6 ships in a year with the bare minimum effort if I had the energy to do that every day.
Even if I was lazy about it I'm sure I could grab enough for one every six months.
'Several Years' seems a bit much,
Sure you could go buy every ship and have every card but you'll not really gain anything other than being able to slot more missions. It doesn't help you defeat enemies, or in PVP or help you win in queues.
Everything available in the A.S.S is freely available for anyone in due time, you just gotta put in the effort and there's enough free ships to keep anyone going slowly at it.
Pay to win qound be a system where you could only get ahead with bought ships and where it relied solely on how much money you spent to determine your success.
You can't fail really, sure missions may fail but the ships never die nor cost you anything other than time to run those missions.