What is really needed is a system that is either unavoidable (i.e. ship repairs) or attractive enough (i.e. consumable buffs) to get people to spend their resources on a sink instead of exchanging it with other players.
Unavoidable? TRIBBLE that! I've got 13 alts, and the last upgrade weekend tapped me out.
Unavoidable......condescending whale cheese elitism is what that is. "I've got plenty, and the economy isn't going the way I'd like, so let's STICK IT TO ALL THOSE PLAYERS WHO HAVE LESS THAN ME."
Not surprising, his argument is pretty much, that there is so much dil that the value is small, and that its too valuable to dump on existing sinks.
I'm perfectly fine with the inflation of the dil exchange over time..... Zen is tied to actual money.... as such like real money it will slowly inflate, many of these idea people have of wanting to "fix" the exchange relies on devaluing Zen in relation to dilithium... devaluing what is effectively REAL money in comparison to free junk they can grind in game. Ultimately PWE wants to favor Zen sellers, because Zen sellers are what keeps the game going.... it's what keeps the lights on, and frankly there is nothing wrong with the currentl dil exchange because when we post Zen sales, people buy them up like hot-cakes.... and as long as people are buying the dil from the Zen we have bought to post, the system is working as intended. I'll reconsider the view once selling zen shows anything close to an issue on the market (which it does not).
I have to agree with skrapnel. I mean of course it's a two way street, a lot of Dil will flood the market and and make it go wonky to one side. But let's not forget that Dil is well controlled via the 8,000 daily refining cap.
So the Admiralty system aside, all that's doing is letting you physically grind less by getting some daily limits by clicking on it but last time I checked you could only put refined Dil on exchange.
Perhaps the R&D weekend saw a few Zen to Dil trade offs for people to upgrade their gear and not have to wait for refinement limit...and let's be honest Zen to Dil IS what Cryptic wants and we can't fault them for that.
Fleet Admiral Thomas Winston James a.k.a. The Grayfox Fleet Leader of:
Liberty Task Force/Liberty Honor Guard
Pride of the Federation/Pride of the Empire
Liberty Guardians U.S.S. Liberty, NX-42813-L, T-6 Legendary Odyssey Class
What is really needed is a system that is either unavoidable (i.e. ship repairs) or attractive enough (i.e. consumable buffs) to get people to spend their resources on a sink instead of exchanging it with other players.
Unavoidable? TRIBBLE that! I've got 13 alts, and the last upgrade weekend tapped me out.
Unavoidable......condescending whale cheese elitism is what that is. "I've got plenty, and the economy isn't going the way I'd like, so let's STICK IT TO ALL THOSE PLAYERS WHO HAVE LESS THAN ME."
I never actually stated I wanted an 'unavoidable' dilithium sink, I stated that as a possible solution for inflation. Personally I don't want any kind of unavoidable sink, or tax if you will, on my resources. But it may be necessary to keep the Dil exchange below 500. Unless Cryptic throws fleet holdings at us like they do lockboxes... lol
Could do without the attitude, though. With all due respect, you don't know me, how much money I've spent on STO, or if I'm a Zen seller or dil grinder, so if you'd please refrain from calling me an 'elitist whale' I'd appreciate it, thanks.
There's tons of dilithium sinks. Some big, some small:
- Rep projects (requisitions)
- Fleet projects (absolutely massive)
- Upgrades
- Fleet vendors
- Dilithium store (although the EV suits are a joke)
- Rep stores
- Basic ships (for filling out admiralty)
- Crafting (for impatient folk)
And more I've probably missed.
EC is a different story, as it is in desperate need of a few sinks of its own. What few exist are so small they're pretty much meaningless. And so, the total pool of player-owned energy credits keeps growing, and growing, and growing...
These are actually a few great dilithium sinks, but all lacking one important quality of a good sink. They're all temporary, as in once a player/character has completed their reputations, fleet projects, gear upgrades/purchases, there is nothing left for that person to spend their resources on...
Except the Dil exchange to buy new C-Store ships or Keys.
Which is the issue, we need a renewable dilithium sink, something that provides a useful (but temporary) function which will require the player to spend more dilithium to use again, I suggested earlier consumable buffs and packs of 1x Admiralty ships, both temporary in nature and useful to the average player. A good resource sink, assuming the packs/buffs are valued so that the average player perceives them as a good deal.
The problem is that the people that normally crash the exchange rate completed all of the dil sinks some time ago, so they no longer need to put zen into the exchange, instead you're now dealing with the market manipulators and they want a high exchange rate as they get "rich" that way.
The game needs a dil sink on a similar scale to a T5 starbase, something to get the whales fighting each other to be the first to complete it, that's about the only way the exchange rate will crash again.
I've sold zen for dilithium a couple times, just to round out a hanger pet purchase generally. I still have a ways to go outfitting my ships so I may buy more.
But I have no desire to be in a fleet, so all of those sinks are just meaningless to me. As I'm sure they are to many players.
Yup, pretty much...the higher the exchange goes, the higher the chance people will pay for zen instead of grinding dilithium.
Only to a point then when people see its a waste of time they will move on to other things. Not everyone can just pop open thier wallets and drop a $100, $50 or even $30 on a game just because a new shiny came out. I'm not suggesting the exchange should be back at 85 like it was shortly after DR launched. But if it continues to rise and you need over a million dilithium(which we are quite close to now) just to buy one T6 ship you will see casual players move on. Ive only seen the exchange higher during season 5, its already spiked to that recently which leads me to believe its only going to go higher. When starbases came out I saw people drop hundreds of dollars just for the dil to feed the starbase. That doesn't happen near as often now as you see more and more fleets are finished or have gone inactive because of dil. Make dil valuable enough again and people will spend money just to get it. Me personally, I like to offset my cash expenditure with dilithium and I have still spent hundreds on this game over the past 4 years. ATM there is nothing in the c-store I cant live without. Couple of smaller ship bundles I'm interested in, some services that would be useful. but I'm not interested in spending hundreds more for ships I don't really need. At least not without offsetting that cost some with dil and at its current value its just not worth it to me.
These are actually a few great dilithium sinks, but all lacking one important quality of a good sink. They're all temporary, as in once a player/character has completed their reputations, fleet projects, gear upgrades/purchases, there is nothing left for that person to spend their resources on...
Except the Dil exchange to buy new C-Store ships or Keys.
Which is the issue, we need a renewable dilithium sink, something that provides a useful (but temporary) function which will require the player to spend more dilithium to use again, I suggested earlier consumable buffs and packs of 1x Admiralty ships, both temporary in nature and useful to the average player. A good resource sink, assuming the packs/buffs are valued so that the average player perceives them as a good deal.
I'd actually argue that upgrades are a fairly evergreen dilithium sink. Unless someone wants to fly the exact same build with the exact same ship forever, Cryptic puts out enough new ships and gear that, eventually, someone will want to try something new. To do that, they'll need to jump through the upgrade hoops again, possibly work toward some new fleet consoles/etc, and so on.
The consumable idea is iffy. Personally, I don't see myself ever wasting dilithium on consumable items--be they 1x admiralty ships or other temporary buff items. This game isn't so hard that it requires such things, so I see them being used about as much as the random consumables in the romulan rep project tab. Practically not at all.
I disagree that there needs to be more dilithium sinks ..... There needs to be more worthwhile content and other things well beyond the idea of another sink. Dilithium is dirt cheap and easy to come by.......farm for a week or 2 with a dozen toons you will have all you need and the rest can be set aside for that special crafting project or what ever else you might need. As I said before there needs to be worthwhile content not a place to deposit dirt cheap commodities......this game has always been light in content and dilithium was an effort, IMO, to slow things down and control the rate at which players advanced......problem is it never worked.....I know of guys who have 30+ toons and they dil farm .......Content that actually took participation and was goal oriented would be a far better investment in the game. Just my opinions of course......A lifer since beta in STO
Today we fight the GAULS......monstrous and HAIRY beyond reason.
is no easy to belive the dil market go with the real market is the dollar is high in many countrys to change you current money to dollar is soo expensive,then in same way dil market is soo high to buy zen , one simple example
a: my current country money b= dollar ,some months ago i just use 2 A for buy 1 B in this day i have to use 3 A for buy 1 B
Before you post look at the date of joining of the person posting first. Then you will understand why this one is crying for more dilithium sinks in the game.
These are actually a few great dilithium sinks, but all lacking one important quality of a good sink. They're all temporary, as in once a player/character has completed their reputations, fleet projects, gear upgrades/purchases, there is nothing left for that person to spend their resources on...
Except the Dil exchange to buy new C-Store ships or Keys.
Which is the issue, we need a renewable dilithium sink, something that provides a useful (but temporary) function which will require the player to spend more dilithium to use again, I suggested earlier consumable buffs and packs of 1x Admiralty ships, both temporary in nature and useful to the average player. A good resource sink, assuming the packs/buffs are valued so that the average player perceives them as a good deal.
I'd actually argue that upgrades are a fairly evergreen dilithium sink. Unless someone wants to fly the exact same build with the exact same ship forever, Cryptic puts out enough new ships and gear that, eventually, someone will want to try something new. To do that, they'll need to jump through the upgrade hoops again, possibly work toward some new fleet consoles/etc, and so on.
The consumable idea is iffy. Personally, I don't see myself ever wasting dilithium on consumable items--be they 1x admiralty ships or other temporary buff items. This game isn't so hard that it requires such things, so I see them being used about as much as the random consumables in the romulan rep project tab. Practically not at all.
Therein lies the problem, I'm afraid. For many people, Dilithium is thought of only as a resource to buy fleet projects, weapons, upgrades, and ships, hardly a renewable resource sink, resulting in players eventually sitting on mountains of dilithium with nothing to use it for.
There is also the issue of dilithium grinding alts, it is common knowledge that an easy way around the 8k/day limit is to use another character. This also adds to inflation, especially since an F2P account can have up to 44 characters**, which means a single person can potentially refine 352,000 Dilithium/day (not counting fleet refinement or veteran refinement). I realize that grinding out 8k * 44 characters in one day isn't terribly feasable, but the potential still remains.
A solution to that (which would also curb inflation somewhat) would be to create an account dilithium refinement limit, say 32,000 - 36,000, enough for a F2P player to max out all four of their characters and keep pace with players who have many alts. This solution would not go over very well with the playerbase, however, as many players who have many alts use them for the express purpose of dil grinding...
**Got this number from Gamepedia (40 purchasable character slots) add 4 standard free as of Delta Recruitment, 44. Not 100% sure if this is accurate.
Before you post look at the date of joining of the person posting first. Then you will understand why this one is crying for more dilithium sinks in the game.
I ignore the join dates, they never were accurate.
Good point, just look at my join date. lol I've been around way longer than that.
Might I suggest in this vein the idea posited here? Short form: you still get the special visuals with certain shield sets, but once you have the entire set or, in the case of rep sets, hit T5, a project becomes available that unlocks that visual as a hull material for all your ships.
I like this idea as honestly I hate that a look of my shield/deflector/engine would be tied to those exclusively being slotted, and would love a system like the Tailor that allowed me to apply the details of these sets to my ship in the ship customization. I mean also with some of the older set's gear can be abit gimped making using them for the look gimps your ship performance at large, allowing us to be able to buy the ability to apply these cosmetic looks to our ships without having to equip the gear via a dil expanse would be nice. Also add in a dil expense to sync up your weapon visuals with each other if they are the same energy or damage type type (phaser, disruptor, plasma, trico, tranphasic, and such), though I would not mind if we could choose any type we have slotted on our ship (phased, bio-matter, thoron, romulan, and such.).
Also I would love to see them expand on the reputations with new weapons, shields, items, hanger-pets, even high dill/resource costing reputation ships you can obtain. Maybe even a project that you can convert an existing hanger-pet to use the design look, shield/engine/deflector visuals, and weapon types.
Maybe a system to gain access to improved, addition, or different rewards on a mission via a dill expense. If you spread the rewards across different difficulties like having three new rewards for a mission for each difficulty of the mission you can complete it on. Though I would agree that the dill pay out of some fo the content in the game could use some re-tuning to bring them down abit.
Last week before the announce of the flagships the dil exchange had nearly recovered from the winter event. But the Vday sale and the release of the ships immediately skyrocketed the exchange prices again. Though it recovered slightly, it has stopped and shows no signs of picking up again. If we want the dil exchange to recover we need another dil sink before next months inevitable ship release.
With the upgrade system we have a nearly infinite Dil sink. Cryptic also seems to “coincident” major zen store sales and releases with upgrade weekends.
What makes you think that more Dil sinks would make any sense compare to those we already have and which don’t seem to work?
Reading such posts make me wish that cryptic raises the general game difficulty even more making all epic items mandatory for every move you do at endgame.
We have enough Dil sinks already peeps, more than anybody who actually tends to them can take!
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
there are plenty of dil sinks the starbases are a massive sink, the crafting system is a massive sink. I would say if you got so much dil that you dont know what to do with it then dump it on the cstore for a low price and let someone else use it for what it was intended. but if your wanting dil to be worth more than cstore points so you can buy ships / costumes etc then it will always be a supply and demand system. if noone is buying dil through points and are farming it themselves then its an inherent fault in the game.
there are fleets out there that have been maxxed out for a while and when some new fleet project comes in, with the amount of people who are serious claiming away at millions of refined dilithium numbers, you think a 50k dilithium cost per project will even come close to threatening their hoard? even if it were 500k dilithium, with a few people chipping in to cut that number down, it still wouldn't make any difference.
there are too many ways to claim dilithium and not enough ways to remove it.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Fleet projects are a bit of a weird one though. Sure they need a tonne of dil but hell in my fleet we've got literally thousands of provisions of every kind so slotting projects for those is pointless. A lot of fleets are now at top tier and there's not enough decent projects to slot to keep fleet members donating. Why would I use my dil to donate to provisions for a base that has enough already for the fleet to buy near infinite supplie, just a waste of dilithium.
The R&D is the same, too much waste generated and I'm not blowing my dil on a 1% chance of a decent mod.
A decent dil sink needs to have a good return and unfortunately apart from buy zen to buy new ships there is really little else to spend the stuff on at present unless you're in a new/small fleet or just setting off on the upgrade trail.
I have several Dil sinks to work with. Crafting, Rep Gear, and Fleet Projects. How many more we need? And this hadn't dropped down Zen prices. Its all about the greedy sellers and the players who buys it at that price.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
I have several Dil sinks to work with. Crafting, Rep Gear, and Fleet Projects. How many more we need? And this hadn't dropped down Zen prices. Its all about the greedy sellers and the players who buys it at that price.
its the product of too much dilithium and not enough ways to get rid of it. when someone has everything they need, there is no point crafting or going for rep gear or fleet stuff because it is all done or not needed at all.
i mean when you have gotten multiple alts all making 8 k a day, and crafting doesnt require dilithium, upgrading does but the costs are insignificant.
right now unless cryptic add new ways to removing a lot of dilithium from the players hands and bring the prices down to a level that everyone can live with, otherwise we are stuck with dilithium prices that are too darned expensive to work with with everyone short of elitists, whales and grinders.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I was just assuming Cryptic was getting the exchange to a point where they would be moving back to a monthly subscription model.
I don't really see any other way f2p people can stay in the game, considering it would take a one character f2p player almost a whole year just to scrape enough Dilithium to get 5k zen to buy an endgame ship pack, in the current market....
Comments
Not surprising, his argument is pretty much, that there is so much dil that the value is small, and that its too valuable to dump on existing sinks.
I'm perfectly fine with the inflation of the dil exchange over time..... Zen is tied to actual money.... as such like real money it will slowly inflate, many of these idea people have of wanting to "fix" the exchange relies on devaluing Zen in relation to dilithium... devaluing what is effectively REAL money in comparison to free junk they can grind in game. Ultimately PWE wants to favor Zen sellers, because Zen sellers are what keeps the game going.... it's what keeps the lights on, and frankly there is nothing wrong with the currentl dil exchange because when we post Zen sales, people buy them up like hot-cakes.... and as long as people are buying the dil from the Zen we have bought to post, the system is working as intended. I'll reconsider the view once selling zen shows anything close to an issue on the market (which it does not).
So the Admiralty system aside, all that's doing is letting you physically grind less by getting some daily limits by clicking on it but last time I checked you could only put refined Dil on exchange.
Perhaps the R&D weekend saw a few Zen to Dil trade offs for people to upgrade their gear and not have to wait for refinement limit...and let's be honest Zen to Dil IS what Cryptic wants and we can't fault them for that.
Fleet Leader of:
Liberty Task Force/Liberty Honor Guard
Pride of the Federation/Pride of the Empire
Liberty Guardians
U.S.S. Liberty, NX-42813-L, T-6 Legendary Odyssey Class
Game Handle: Grayfox@GrayfoxJames
Website: https://www.libertytaskforce.com
Armada (STOFA Member Fleet): https://www.libertytaskforce.com/stofa
Discord: https://discord.gg/bGp9N7z
Twitter: STOFA@LTFGrayfox
Email: CSDynamix@Hotmail.com
I never actually stated I wanted an 'unavoidable' dilithium sink, I stated that as a possible solution for inflation. Personally I don't want any kind of unavoidable sink, or tax if you will, on my resources. But it may be necessary to keep the Dil exchange below 500. Unless Cryptic throws fleet holdings at us like they do lockboxes... lol
Could do without the attitude, though. With all due respect, you don't know me, how much money I've spent on STO, or if I'm a Zen seller or dil grinder, so if you'd please refrain from calling me an 'elitist whale' I'd appreciate it, thanks.
These are actually a few great dilithium sinks, but all lacking one important quality of a good sink. They're all temporary, as in once a player/character has completed their reputations, fleet projects, gear upgrades/purchases, there is nothing left for that person to spend their resources on...
Except the Dil exchange to buy new C-Store ships or Keys.
Which is the issue, we need a renewable dilithium sink, something that provides a useful (but temporary) function which will require the player to spend more dilithium to use again, I suggested earlier consumable buffs and packs of 1x Admiralty ships, both temporary in nature and useful to the average player. A good resource sink, assuming the packs/buffs are valued so that the average player perceives them as a good deal.
I say let those prices CLIMB! **Big Ferengi Smile**
This elitist attitude constantly annoys me. *I buy zen with RL money and I want more dil. Suck it F2P!*
The game needs a dil sink on a similar scale to a T5 starbase, something to get the whales fighting each other to be the first to complete it, that's about the only way the exchange rate will crash again.
Why are all you dil miners on the forums, get back to work!"cracks whip"
You can. Use it to buy zen, buy a lockbox key with the zen, collect 4-5 million EC.
But I have no desire to be in a fleet, so all of those sinks are just meaningless to me. As I'm sure they are to many players.
Also, allow me to suggest:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1211634/new-reputation-item-idea-hull-materials
Only to a point then when people see its a waste of time they will move on to other things. Not everyone can just pop open thier wallets and drop a $100, $50 or even $30 on a game just because a new shiny came out. I'm not suggesting the exchange should be back at 85 like it was shortly after DR launched. But if it continues to rise and you need over a million dilithium(which we are quite close to now) just to buy one T6 ship you will see casual players move on. Ive only seen the exchange higher during season 5, its already spiked to that recently which leads me to believe its only going to go higher. When starbases came out I saw people drop hundreds of dollars just for the dil to feed the starbase. That doesn't happen near as often now as you see more and more fleets are finished or have gone inactive because of dil. Make dil valuable enough again and people will spend money just to get it. Me personally, I like to offset my cash expenditure with dilithium and I have still spent hundreds on this game over the past 4 years. ATM there is nothing in the c-store I cant live without. Couple of smaller ship bundles I'm interested in, some services that would be useful. but I'm not interested in spending hundreds more for ships I don't really need. At least not without offsetting that cost some with dil and at its current value its just not worth it to me.
The consumable idea is iffy. Personally, I don't see myself ever wasting dilithium on consumable items--be they 1x admiralty ships or other temporary buff items. This game isn't so hard that it requires such things, so I see them being used about as much as the random consumables in the romulan rep project tab. Practically not at all.
a: my current country money b= dollar ,some months ago i just use 2 A for buy 1 B in this day i have to use 3 A for buy 1 B
Therein lies the problem, I'm afraid. For many people, Dilithium is thought of only as a resource to buy fleet projects, weapons, upgrades, and ships, hardly a renewable resource sink, resulting in players eventually sitting on mountains of dilithium with nothing to use it for.
There is also the issue of dilithium grinding alts, it is common knowledge that an easy way around the 8k/day limit is to use another character. This also adds to inflation, especially since an F2P account can have up to 44 characters**, which means a single person can potentially refine 352,000 Dilithium/day (not counting fleet refinement or veteran refinement). I realize that grinding out 8k * 44 characters in one day isn't terribly feasable, but the potential still remains.
A solution to that (which would also curb inflation somewhat) would be to create an account dilithium refinement limit, say 32,000 - 36,000, enough for a F2P player to max out all four of their characters and keep pace with players who have many alts. This solution would not go over very well with the playerbase, however, as many players who have many alts use them for the express purpose of dil grinding...
**Got this number from Gamepedia (40 purchasable character slots) add 4 standard free as of Delta Recruitment, 44. Not 100% sure if this is accurate.
Good point, just look at my join date. lol I've been around way longer than that.
That's no worse than expecting someone else to spend money on the game so that you can play it.
Truth!
I like this idea as honestly I hate that a look of my shield/deflector/engine would be tied to those exclusively being slotted, and would love a system like the Tailor that allowed me to apply the details of these sets to my ship in the ship customization. I mean also with some of the older set's gear can be abit gimped making using them for the look gimps your ship performance at large, allowing us to be able to buy the ability to apply these cosmetic looks to our ships without having to equip the gear via a dil expanse would be nice. Also add in a dil expense to sync up your weapon visuals with each other if they are the same energy or damage type type (phaser, disruptor, plasma, trico, tranphasic, and such), though I would not mind if we could choose any type we have slotted on our ship (phased, bio-matter, thoron, romulan, and such.).
Also I would love to see them expand on the reputations with new weapons, shields, items, hanger-pets, even high dill/resource costing reputation ships you can obtain. Maybe even a project that you can convert an existing hanger-pet to use the design look, shield/engine/deflector visuals, and weapon types.
Maybe a system to gain access to improved, addition, or different rewards on a mission via a dill expense. If you spread the rewards across different difficulties like having three new rewards for a mission for each difficulty of the mission you can complete it on. Though I would agree that the dill pay out of some fo the content in the game could use some re-tuning to bring them down abit.
With the upgrade system we have a nearly infinite Dil sink. Cryptic also seems to “coincident” major zen store sales and releases with upgrade weekends.
What makes you think that more Dil sinks would make any sense compare to those we already have and which don’t seem to work?
Reading such posts make me wish that cryptic raises the general game difficulty even more making all epic items mandatory for every move you do at endgame.
We have enough Dil sinks already peeps, more than anybody who actually tends to them can take!
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
there are fleets out there that have been maxxed out for a while and when some new fleet project comes in, with the amount of people who are serious claiming away at millions of refined dilithium numbers, you think a 50k dilithium cost per project will even come close to threatening their hoard? even if it were 500k dilithium, with a few people chipping in to cut that number down, it still wouldn't make any difference.
there are too many ways to claim dilithium and not enough ways to remove it.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
A lot of fleets are now at top tier and there's not enough decent projects to slot to keep fleet members donating.
Why would I use my dil to donate to provisions for a base that has enough already for the fleet to buy near infinite supplie, just a waste of dilithium.
The R&D is the same, too much waste generated and I'm not blowing my dil on a 1% chance of a decent mod.
A decent dil sink needs to have a good return and unfortunately apart from buy zen to buy new ships there is really little else to spend the stuff on at present unless you're in a new/small fleet or just setting off on the upgrade trail.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
its the product of too much dilithium and not enough ways to get rid of it. when someone has everything they need, there is no point crafting or going for rep gear or fleet stuff because it is all done or not needed at all.
i mean when you have gotten multiple alts all making 8 k a day, and crafting doesnt require dilithium, upgrading does but the costs are insignificant.
right now unless cryptic add new ways to removing a lot of dilithium from the players hands and bring the prices down to a level that everyone can live with, otherwise we are stuck with dilithium prices that are too darned expensive to work with with everyone short of elitists, whales and grinders.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I don't really see any other way f2p people can stay in the game, considering it would take a one character f2p player almost a whole year just to scrape enough Dilithium to get 5k zen to buy an endgame ship pack, in the current market....