To be fair, ALL best selling Star Trek games have always been combat heavy.
The thing is STO is an MMORPG and in such fashion it throws waves of trash mobs at us much weaker than ourselves to mop up.
More simulator style games like Klingon Academy and Bridge Commander tend to be a bit more personal in their combat.
A Final Unity had little combat and it was a big seller.
For its time perhaps, but it never came anywhere remotely close to the games released under the Activision banner during the heydey of Star Trek gaming.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
I'd be interested in seeing what telltale could do with the license, they've done some amazing things with the walking dead franchise, all centered around dialogue and character development.
If you want a good non combat trek, that's the model you would need to follow.
No. Bloodthirsty warlords get to attack who they want. Our captains have to obey every feddybear NPC that comes along. I wasn't even allowed to shoot the annoying Benzite who came preaching Prime Directive at me about the Vaadwaur hostages on Kobali homeworld.
Seriously, we're just defending ourselves. It isn't our fault all the fools in the universe want to attack us.
In space it would be trickier but I think it could be possible to disable ships.
Stunning people and disabling ships *is* a mechanic in the game.
Guess as to why it rarely gets used 1: It leaves too many items on the map for the game to keep track of for an engine that once had lag issues due to coyotes in a desert(Champs).
Guess as to why it rarely gets used 2: Human beings are barely evolved from the apes we came from and like murder.
All of this doesn't work with STO as it is not a dventure game in core but a diablo clone. You mow down myriads of cannon fodder enemies, collect loot and make the best of it. Of course, STO even lacks the core elements of why hack & slay games work and are fun - random loot drops, uniques, sets to collect, possiblities to fine-tune your character not only dealing damage - all of this is abscent from STO which makes it feel empty.
I LIKE that difference. Uniques and sets in D2 were so annoying to get that some mods actually had special Horadric Cube recipes for creating them. Seriously.... that was the core of the dark side of D2... Players who would do anything and everything they could to get all the best loot. Such as Bots that would sneak up at the end of boss fights just to steal the loot. (drops in D2 were always free-for-all, even people who didn't help fight) Then there was an array of PKers and such things.
OP, no, it's perpetual war, kill or be killed scenarios where communication begins with incoming weapons fire. There is a bit of exploration, travel, diplomacy, puzzles/scenarios to solve, game economy, player interactions, space barbie, but the action is front and center and what it defaults to in the endless vitual-material continuum.
Of course it does not have to be this way, and the game engine surely can support alternate modes of play with equivalent incentives. I've made big paragraphs of suggestions over and over in the past but they go unheard since it's about keeping the servers alive and squeezing every bit of profit to PWE suits who clearly given the state of bugs funnel most of it away without reinvestment or thinking outside the box of complete market control and predictability.
Imagine this: a pvp ground battlezone linking to a space pvp battlezone with territory control that resets every week or two where fleets choose sides and whose conclusion awards valuable fleet resources depending on overall rank. Suddenly, there's a lot of fun to be had, a great need for new items, ship types, player strategy, and less Dilithium streaming in combined with the optional use of a tiny bit of Dil for small territory advantages meaning even the Dil-Ex would balance out, F2P players could grind stuff still and keep the game populated for those who can afford to pay a lot who in turn will have good incentive to buy Dil and keep the servers online and game expanding while having fun.
Devs: Provide the option to Turn OFF full screen flashes from enemy ship explosions
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I use STO for my "Starships going pew pew" fix. When it comes to authentic Trek, I accept nothing less than Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (PC) and Judgment Rites. Where I am concerned, those two games are THE definitive experience for a trekkie. They might as well be an extra season of TOS - good TOS, at that!
Where else do you represent Quetzalcoatl in a Klingon courtroom ? You can fight off Trelane, who is flying a biplane in space!
Just out of curiosity, has anyone added up how many sentient beings we or our ships kill as we progress through the story and queue missions (no repeats, of course).
My guess that the number is in the hundreds of thousands.
I was kinda sad in the anniversary mission there wasn't an option for my KDF characters to at least wound Noye before he stole the Annorax does that count?
Well, up to the other day, every time I ran 'Facility 4028' I always took the Non-lethal Option for dealing with the prisoners. To see what was different with the Lethal Option, I tried that the other day. Pretty much the same except you didn't have a bunch of prisoners with headaches that experienced a beam-out animation.
No new Accolades.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
I LIKE that difference. Uniques and sets in D2 were so annoying to get that some mods actually had special Horadric Cube recipes for creating them. Seriously.... that was the core of the dark side of D2... Players who would do anything and everything they could to get all the best loot. Such as Bots that would sneak up at the end of boss fights just to steal the loot. (drops in D2 were always free-for-all, even people who didn't help fight) Then there was an array of PKers and such things.
To be frank, if someone needs a mod that takes the item hunt out of an item hunt game they simply play the wrong game. Having pieces of sets you couldn't really use meant you could trade them like baseball cards, trade a "Sigurd's" you have a duplicate of for a "Tower" for your druid and so on. STO eliminates that from the get-go by binding everything worthwhile on pick-up.
I know the dark side of D2 very well, but you are writing this as if one would inevitably lead to the other. Cryptic should take care of that stuff regardless so we have a good loot system and no botting. But STO really doesn't offer any variety. For instance and for people who don't know, in Diablo 2 a lot of players created a character on their account that was specialized to find rare drops using items that incresed drop chances. This is something you don't even come close in STO as there are literally no drops you want to have.
With the old STFs you had to play all of them when you wanted the Mk XII elite gear. The other dear was obtainable via marks (mk x and xi) but the xii was dependant on very rare drops. And the queues were buzing, you made a lot of marks in the process you could later exchange for worthwhile stuff to complete your sets (but not the unique items themselves). It was only removed because people cried it was "unfair" - but what are you needing the elite gear for when you don't enjoy just playing the game in the first place? This is what baffles me about STOs playerbase - they hate the game, want everything now and instantly just so they can go on hating the game. In looter games, playing was fun and reward in and on itself, you log on, do your runs with friends or solo and have fun and maybe get rewarded with that super rare shiny and experience joy. STOs players play the same friggin map over and over and over and over again, shop the items and then go on play the same map over and over and over again. While searching for loot and tresure puts some kind of objective on the horizon, STO doesn't have that, at all.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Just out of curiosity, has anyone added up how many sentient beings we or our ships kill as we progress through the story and queue missions (no repeats, of course).
My guess that the number is in the hundreds of thousands.
That's probably by the Nimbus arc; Tens of thousands is by level 10 or so, or earlier.
I took a new Fed character to 11 recently, and it was just a few missions to get the "kill 20 Gorn ships" accolade, and that is probably a good 5000 Gorn... Never mind KDF forces in general, the first mission Fed-side has you kill upwards of 2000 Orions in the battleship, plus an unknown number in corvettes...
Just out of curiosity, has anyone added up how many sentient beings we or our ships kill as we progress through the story and queue missions (no repeats, of course).
My guess that the number is in the hundreds of thousands.
Depends how you count it, though in my mind if you take into account the supposed crew complement of a ship, it should be very high through all the content which is fine by me. I mean, every moron in the galaxy flocks to our doorstep and those of our allies, so its not really surprising that you end up in a lot of wars.
Edit: I will say though, we ought to have a mechanic where, occasionally, some escape pods launch from a ship or someone runs away from combat and beams out in a ground mission just for realities sake.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
My main is mirror universe Terran, I throw morality out of the window.
Shoot first, ask questions later is my MO
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
No. Bloodthirsty warlords get to attack who they want. Our captains have to obey every feddybear NPC that comes along. I wasn't even allowed to shoot the annoying Benzite who came preaching Prime Directive at me about the Vaadwaur hostages on Kobali homeworld.
I just ran that for the first time yesterday and my jaw literally dropped.
The Prime Directive is not an elastic excuse for every imaginable bit of bad writing that pops into a scenarios designer's head! How the green flopping bat pheromones does the Prime Directive relate to us picking a fight with a fully warp-capable civilization that's on the ground brawling with a non-warp capable but FULLY AWARE OF THE QUADRANT AROUND THEM civilization. There's no Prime Directive mandate here: these are fully knowledgeable interstellar citizens at this point. We might have political interests. We might be working off the shame of Federation meddling having provoked the entire war, but Prime Directive??! Not even faintly a factor.
Honestly I'd like to see the Prime Directive in some light other than being used to justify plot mandated stupid. And I'd like to see how this cult of inflexible insanity that heroic captains demonstrate is an immoral shackle far more than often than a guideline for righteous behavior came to be accepted at all. It's treated like some kind of commandment handed down from the Almighty rather than a policy that would have to withstand scrutiny and review ever damn day.
When you are joining to the Starfleet , they say that you will be an explorer, but the reality is different. They lied to you. You are a mercenary who killing for money. Starfleet is hypocrite corrupted organisation of "Argumentum ad hominem". Watch episode TNG 1x24 the Conspiracy, where was for the Bluegills relatively easy conquer Starfleet high command, in a way that changed the commanding officers. How is it so easy? Or an epizode TNG 4x21 the Drumhead, where one Enterprise crewman is interrogated for his romulan origin. Or during klingon civil war between Gowron and Duras, Starfleet openly helping one side and when Romulans do the same, Starfleet talking something about Prime Directive and creating blockades on borders. Who thinks the Starfleet is any peace army, he is wrong. Starfleet wants expand and expand. Starfleet is in permanent war with someone. And if anyone is still in war with each other, probably doing something very bad.
I LIKE that difference. Uniques and sets in D2 were so annoying to get that some mods actually had special Horadric Cube recipes for creating them. Seriously.... that was the core of the dark side of D2... Players who would do anything and everything they could to get all the best loot. Such as Bots that would sneak up at the end of boss fights just to steal the loot. (drops in D2 were always free-for-all, even people who didn't help fight) Then there was an array of PKers and such things.
To be frank, if someone needs a mod that takes the item hunt out of an item hunt game they simply play the wrong game. Having pieces of sets you couldn't really use meant you could trade them like baseball cards, trade a "Sigurd's" you have a duplicate of for a "Tower" for your druid and so on. STO eliminates that from the get-go by binding everything worthwhile on pick-up.
Also, the drop system in D2 almost guaranteed that any good drop you got was trade fodder and not something you actually wanted. Sorcs had the same odds of finding massive two-handed swords as Barbarians.... and no use for them. also, you were most likely to get drops that were either lower level or MUCH lower level.
I know the dark side of D2 very well, but you are writing this as if one would inevitably lead to the other. Cryptic should take care of that stuff regardless so we have a good loot system and no botting. But STO really doesn't offer any variety. For instance and for people who don't know, in Diablo 2 a lot of players created a character on their account that was specialized to find rare drops using items that incresed drop chances. This is something you don't even come close in STO as there are literally no drops you want to have.
With the old STFs you had to play all of them when you wanted the Mk XII elite gear. The other dear was obtainable via marks (mk x and xi) but the xii was dependant on very rare drops. And the queues were buzing, you made a lot of marks in the process you could later exchange for worthwhile stuff to complete your sets (but not the unique items themselves). It was only removed because people cried it was "unfair" - but what are you needing the elite gear for when you don't enjoy just playing the game in the first place? This is what baffles me about STOs playerbase - they hate the game, want everything now and instantly just so they can go on hating the game. In looter games, playing was fun and reward in and on itself, you log on, do your runs with friends or solo and have fun and maybe get rewarded with that super rare shiny and experience joy. STOs players play the same friggin map over and over and over and over again, shop the items and then go on play the same map over and over and over again. While searching for loot and tresure puts some kind of objective on the horizon, STO doesn't have that, at all.
as a counter-point... D2 had only one way to get gear at all..... random mission drops. There were no items as mission rewards at all. No unique sets to be had just by playing a mission... And non-boss enemies didn't have the ability to drop the best stuff.
Which was the point of the mod. Not to make Unique gear easy to get, but to add some predictability to how it is acquired.
Also, the drop system in D2 almost guaranteed that any good drop you got was trade fodder and not something you actually wanted. Sorcs had the same odds of finding massive two-handed swords as Barbarians.... and no use for them. also, you were most likely to get drops that were either lower level or MUCH lower level.
See, but that's a good thing. "Noice, my Amazon can use this!" or it "forced" you to be social and look for trading partners. I like that, it broadens the horizon and finding worthwhile stuff for a class you are currently not plaing did motivate you to save it and try that. Now, D2 isn't ideal and I know you can exhaust yourself on it fairly easy. But there's a fun and beauty in it simply unmatched (even by the successor. D3 doesn't even come close).
Which was the point of the mod. Not to make Unique gear easy to get, but to add some predictability to how it is acquired.
In my opinion, the "predictability" should be reduced to a bare minimum, like drop chance of everything increases with monster level/status and maybe you can have special stuff that only available in raid X or region Y but that should be about it.
It's really about playing (together) and getting there, not acquiring all these things. It's the "Woohoo! I found item Z!" moments. STO lacks that completely, you can see where you are going before you even start playing and you just cross out your grocery list. That's fatal for longevity, in my opinion. At one point even the Star Trek nuts will fold if there's nothing to keep you playing but empty marketing speak and expensive ship purchases.
By the way, I'm pretty sure there were unique mission rewards in D2. Skill points, runes and such. I think unique items only were given out in singleplayer, though, you are right. But mentioning uniques, one of the nice things was that you could even find blue items that, with a lucky roll, would bench your unique prestigeous weapon because it just synergizes with your build so well. But all of that was the thrill of "stumbling" over it and starting your journey every time wanting to find that. If course, if you reached the point where you botted or made teleport sorc baalruns over and over while getting hammered you kinda missed the point of the game as well. As I said, at some point you simply exhaust the game and need a break. But STO doesn't even get there.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
So for any not knowing what I mean it seems the running gag in STO is "We come in peace! Set phasers to kill!" And our standard space greeting seems to be a Torpedo aimed for the other ship's Bridge.
Am I the only one noticing this? Cause even on peaceful missions we seem to gank some poor fool! And I feel like the solution to this is that on ground mission starts you simply get a prompt telling your away team to set weapons to maximum stun or kill. In space it would be trickier but I think it could be possible to disable ships.
My Starfleet captains are soldiers forged in the fires of war. They destroy those who are obviously hostile.
A "bloodthirsty warlord" would use force against anybody to further their own aims.
Even my Klingon (KDF) only kills/destroys those who were asking for it to begin with.
That's just how the game is set up. It's mostly about combat and space battles. Knowing what to expect coming into the game, it doesn't bother me in the least.
Also, the drop system in D2 almost guaranteed that any good drop you got was trade fodder and not something you actually wanted. Sorcs had the same odds of finding massive two-handed swords as Barbarians.... and no use for them. also, you were most likely to get drops that were either lower level or MUCH lower level.
See, but that's a good thing. "Noice, my Amazon can use this!" or it "forced" you to be social and look for trading partners. I like that, it broadens the horizon and finding worthwhile stuff for a class you are currently not plaing did motivate you to save it and try that. Now, D2 isn't ideal and I know you can exhaust yourself on it fairly easy. But there's a fun and beauty in it simply unmatched (even by the successor. D3 doesn't even come close).
Which was the point of the mod. Not to make Unique gear easy to get, but to add some predictability to how it is acquired.
In my opinion, the "predictability" should be reduced to a bare minimum, like drop chance of everything increases with monster level/status and maybe you can have special stuff that only available in raid X or region Y but that should be about it.
It's really about playing (together) and getting there, not acquiring all these things. It's the "Woohoo! I found item Z!" moments. STO lacks that completely, you can see where you are going before you even start playing and you just cross out your grocery list. That's fatal for longevity, in my opinion. At one point even the Star Trek nuts will fold if there's nothing to keep you playing but empty marketing speak and expensive ship purchases.
By the way, I'm pretty sure there were unique mission rewards in D2. Skill points, runes and such. I think unique items only were given out in singleplayer, though, you are right. But mentioning uniques, one of the nice things was that you could even find blue items that, with a lucky roll, would bench your unique prestigeous weapon because it just synergizes with your build so well. But all of that was the thrill of "stumbling" over it and starting your journey every time wanting to find that. If course, if you reached the point where you botted or made teleport sorc baalruns over and over while getting hammered you kinda missed the point of the game as well. As I said, at some point you simply exhaust the game and need a break. But STO doesn't even get there.
Well, I do remember being really happy to find a Salamander staff. But then I took a second look and realized I'd already outleveled it and the Leaf staff I was currently using was actually better. Yeah I used a lot of socketed and crafted items. Leaf was actually better, and lower level.... So yeah, Unique hunting in D2 got old fast for me. I spent more time upgrading gear via crafting and runewords... or just making Diamond shields... I used those a lot... learning to mod D2 was part of why I played the game as long as I did.
So for any not knowing what I mean it seems the running gag in STO is "We come in peace! Set phasers to kill!" And our standard space greeting seems to be a Torpedo aimed for the other ship's Bridge.
Am I the only one noticing this? Cause even on peaceful missions we seem to gank some poor fool! And I feel like the solution to this is that on ground mission starts you simply get a prompt telling your away team to set weapons to maximum stun or kill. In space it would be trickier but I think it could be possible to disable ships.
Use your imagination...just an MMO. If you want to just explore and become a pacifist perhaps this might not do it for you. Would be nice if there are other "true" alternatives but I guess MMOs do not make money with that genre.
Comments
For its time perhaps, but it never came anywhere remotely close to the games released under the Activision banner during the heydey of Star Trek gaming.
If you want a good non combat trek, that's the model you would need to follow.
Seriously, we're just defending ourselves. It isn't our fault all the fools in the universe want to attack us.
Still even counting each encounter as a one time thing you're still talking thousands of people dead.
As a side note I think a bioware style RPG would be awesome for a star trek game. (Been playing mass effect)
They can't surrender to you if you "divert power from communications to weapon systems." Not that I've practiced that.
Stunning people and disabling ships *is* a mechanic in the game.
Guess as to why it rarely gets used 1: It leaves too many items on the map for the game to keep track of for an engine that once had lag issues due to coyotes in a desert(Champs).
Guess as to why it rarely gets used 2: Human beings are barely evolved from the apes we came from and like murder.
C) All of the above.
My character Tsin'xing
Of course it does not have to be this way, and the game engine surely can support alternate modes of play with equivalent incentives. I've made big paragraphs of suggestions over and over in the past but they go unheard since it's about keeping the servers alive and squeezing every bit of profit to PWE suits who clearly given the state of bugs funnel most of it away without reinvestment or thinking outside the box of complete market control and predictability.
Imagine this: a pvp ground battlezone linking to a space pvp battlezone with territory control that resets every week or two where fleets choose sides and whose conclusion awards valuable fleet resources depending on overall rank. Suddenly, there's a lot of fun to be had, a great need for new items, ship types, player strategy, and less Dilithium streaming in combined with the optional use of a tiny bit of Dil for small territory advantages meaning even the Dil-Ex would balance out, F2P players could grind stuff still and keep the game populated for those who can afford to pay a lot who in turn will have good incentive to buy Dil and keep the servers online and game expanding while having fun.
Where else do you represent Quetzalcoatl in a Klingon courtroom ? You can fight off Trelane, who is flying a biplane in space!
My guess that the number is in the hundreds of thousands.
No new Accolades.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
To be frank, if someone needs a mod that takes the item hunt out of an item hunt game they simply play the wrong game. Having pieces of sets you couldn't really use meant you could trade them like baseball cards, trade a "Sigurd's" you have a duplicate of for a "Tower" for your druid and so on. STO eliminates that from the get-go by binding everything worthwhile on pick-up.
I know the dark side of D2 very well, but you are writing this as if one would inevitably lead to the other. Cryptic should take care of that stuff regardless so we have a good loot system and no botting. But STO really doesn't offer any variety. For instance and for people who don't know, in Diablo 2 a lot of players created a character on their account that was specialized to find rare drops using items that incresed drop chances. This is something you don't even come close in STO as there are literally no drops you want to have.
With the old STFs you had to play all of them when you wanted the Mk XII elite gear. The other dear was obtainable via marks (mk x and xi) but the xii was dependant on very rare drops. And the queues were buzing, you made a lot of marks in the process you could later exchange for worthwhile stuff to complete your sets (but not the unique items themselves). It was only removed because people cried it was "unfair" - but what are you needing the elite gear for when you don't enjoy just playing the game in the first place? This is what baffles me about STOs playerbase - they hate the game, want everything now and instantly just so they can go on hating the game. In looter games, playing was fun and reward in and on itself, you log on, do your runs with friends or solo and have fun and maybe get rewarded with that super rare shiny and experience joy. STOs players play the same friggin map over and over and over and over again, shop the items and then go on play the same map over and over and over again. While searching for loot and tresure puts some kind of objective on the horizon, STO doesn't have that, at all.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
That's probably by the Nimbus arc; Tens of thousands is by level 10 or so, or earlier.
I took a new Fed character to 11 recently, and it was just a few missions to get the "kill 20 Gorn ships" accolade, and that is probably a good 5000 Gorn... Never mind KDF forces in general, the first mission Fed-side has you kill upwards of 2000 Orions in the battleship, plus an unknown number in corvettes...
This does assume all hands die of course.
Depends how you count it, though in my mind if you take into account the supposed crew complement of a ship, it should be very high through all the content which is fine by me. I mean, every moron in the galaxy flocks to our doorstep and those of our allies, so its not really surprising that you end up in a lot of wars.
Edit: I will say though, we ought to have a mechanic where, occasionally, some escape pods launch from a ship or someone runs away from combat and beams out in a ground mission just for realities sake.
Shoot first, ask questions later is my MO
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I just ran that for the first time yesterday and my jaw literally dropped.
The Prime Directive is not an elastic excuse for every imaginable bit of bad writing that pops into a scenarios designer's head! How the green flopping bat pheromones does the Prime Directive relate to us picking a fight with a fully warp-capable civilization that's on the ground brawling with a non-warp capable but FULLY AWARE OF THE QUADRANT AROUND THEM civilization. There's no Prime Directive mandate here: these are fully knowledgeable interstellar citizens at this point. We might have political interests. We might be working off the shame of Federation meddling having provoked the entire war, but Prime Directive??! Not even faintly a factor.
Honestly I'd like to see the Prime Directive in some light other than being used to justify plot mandated stupid. And I'd like to see how this cult of inflexible insanity that heroic captains demonstrate is an immoral shackle far more than often than a guideline for righteous behavior came to be accepted at all. It's treated like some kind of commandment handed down from the Almighty rather than a policy that would have to withstand scrutiny and review ever damn day.
Which was the point of the mod. Not to make Unique gear easy to get, but to add some predictability to how it is acquired.
My character Tsin'xing
See, but that's a good thing. "Noice, my Amazon can use this!" or it "forced" you to be social and look for trading partners. I like that, it broadens the horizon and finding worthwhile stuff for a class you are currently not plaing did motivate you to save it and try that. Now, D2 isn't ideal and I know you can exhaust yourself on it fairly easy. But there's a fun and beauty in it simply unmatched (even by the successor. D3 doesn't even come close).
In my opinion, the "predictability" should be reduced to a bare minimum, like drop chance of everything increases with monster level/status and maybe you can have special stuff that only available in raid X or region Y but that should be about it.
It's really about playing (together) and getting there, not acquiring all these things. It's the "Woohoo! I found item Z!" moments. STO lacks that completely, you can see where you are going before you even start playing and you just cross out your grocery list. That's fatal for longevity, in my opinion. At one point even the Star Trek nuts will fold if there's nothing to keep you playing but empty marketing speak and expensive ship purchases.
By the way, I'm pretty sure there were unique mission rewards in D2. Skill points, runes and such. I think unique items only were given out in singleplayer, though, you are right. But mentioning uniques, one of the nice things was that you could even find blue items that, with a lucky roll, would bench your unique prestigeous weapon because it just synergizes with your build so well. But all of that was the thrill of "stumbling" over it and starting your journey every time wanting to find that. If course, if you reached the point where you botted or made teleport sorc baalruns over and over while getting hammered you kinda missed the point of the game as well. As I said, at some point you simply exhaust the game and need a break. But STO doesn't even get there.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
My Starfleet captains are soldiers forged in the fires of war. They destroy those who are obviously hostile.
A "bloodthirsty warlord" would use force against anybody to further their own aims.
Even my Klingon (KDF) only kills/destroys those who were asking for it to begin with.
That's just how the game is set up. It's mostly about combat and space battles. Knowing what to expect coming into the game, it doesn't bother me in the least.
My character Tsin'xing
Use your imagination...just an MMO. If you want to just explore and become a pacifist perhaps this might not do it for you. Would be nice if there are other "true" alternatives but I guess MMOs do not make money with that genre.