Can't say I am, haven't even experienced it yet, and I mean one of the only things I'm really looking forward to is the new Deep Space 9, which looks like they have put a lot of work into. I don't care much for either of the new species, I won't be making a character for either of them.
I like how you guys are saying how MK12 gear is fine with content. You guys have no clue as how MK12 gear will perform after the expansion. What you guys are saying doesn't make sense because you know nothing until we get to play it.
Given that mk12 is STILL the standard reward despite the 10 level increase to players that came alongside the addition of upgrading to mk14 its a fairly safe bet that unless they really want to force that dil sink onto people not much is going to change.
Even a t1 connie with mk12 gear can clear level 60 missions given time, although some fights like the kethi motherships can be the most tedious experiences ever had in a game.
Given that mk12 is STILL the standard reward despite the 10 level increase to players that came alongside the addition of upgrading to mk14 its a fairly safe bet that unless they really want to force that dil sink onto people not much is going to change.
Even a t1 connie with mk12 gear can clear level 60 missions given time, although some fights like the kethi motherships can be the most tedious experiences ever had in a game.
Whenever Cryptic invalidates ALL your equipment/makes it drastically subpar (and no, that's no exaggeration, but in fact literally what they're doing), there are always ppl telling me "You really don't need the best gear!" Or "Everything can be done in a T1 Connie!" But you're all missing the point: I already HAD all the best gear, and in a month or so, I no longer will. We're not talking a small nerf here: we're talking about a global, and drastic nerf of everything! Way worse than Season 13.
Let me spell it out for you. For a space wep, from XIII to XIV, was double the cost, to 160,000 Upgrade experience. So, making the logical inference that going to the next Tier will now cost 320,000 per weapon, times 4-10 weps per type (DBB's/DHC's), including 5 Locators per type, and a few Exploiters, plus all my major consoles, we're looking at a total financial disaster here. But stay in denial all you want.
So, basically since they have come out with twin-turbo V-12s capable of road speeds of 240MPH, and raised the speed limit from 75 to 80, your measly 202 MPH muscle car is no good anymore ?
So, basically since they have come out with twin-turbo V-12s capable of road speeds of 240MPH, and raised the speed limit from 75 to 80, your measly 202 MPH muscle car is no good anymore ?
In STO, that's exactly what it means, yes: come June, all your gear will be subpar, overnight.
And as I stated in the previous post it is par for the course in MMO's that your gear will be made irrelevant at somepoint, sometimes via balancing more often by an expansion turning up.
Calling it a financial disaster is overdramatising things just a tad, unless you bought zen to convert for dumping into the dil sink.
So far is MEH at best. Let's just hope the new ships have the option for old skins or is a flop completely and that more things come in the future for the new faction.
Will Perfect World abandon ships like they did with the Galaxy, Sovereign, Saber, D'deridex, Negh'Var and others?
Will our Vonphs, Denuos and others will be trash bin material?
We shall see.
The power creep to MK XV is a major letdown. Upgrading from MK XII to MK XIV was a real pain in the ... neck. I can see rivers of tears, sorrow and hate because the high end gear people (and everyone else that spent a lot in MK XIV gear) will be dissapointed their hard earned money is going to waste, and you will need to spend a lot of it later only to upgrade. The PVP folks should be fumig at this hour.
I have to admit that upgrading to MK XIV was somewhat reasonable, however the epic MK XIV increase is really prohibitive. But IF the upgrade to MK XV costs in dilithium follows the same pattern IT WILL be a problem the company will face because people will be very angry about it.
I'm not against working hard for your stuff and spending a little here and there, I bought the pilot escorts and the 31st century ships; but forcing people to spend A LOT in gear upgrades alone is not going to end well.
The only solution I can see is to make cheaper the upgrades by a large margin from MK XII to MK XV rare and them make the cost from MK XV ultra-rare to MK XV epic really expensive if you wish; that way people will stay competitive at least.
You want to ATTRACT people, not make them feel like their effort and money is worth every day less and less; so they actually WANT to invest money to get fun.
How will new people fare? God knows we need a lot of these folks these days...
DO NOT make people to go to work and spend a fortune in a game they use to forget about work. That can only result in disaster from which no MMO has recovered yet.
As they've said t6 will remain the current top tier ships like the vonph etc will only fall by the way side if they continue to churn out umpteen ships rather than content to use those ships in.
With how saturated the game is by ships they're probably worried about scaring away folk with the introduction of t7's. A t6-u token would be a much safer bet.
But cryptic, sto and sensible are not words often used in the same sentence.
Whenever Cryptic invalidates ALL your equipment/makes it drastically subpar (and no, that's no exaggeration, but in fact literally what they're doing), there are always ppl telling me "You really don't need the best gear!" Or "Everything can be done in a T1 Connie!" But you're all missing the point: I already HAD all the best gear, and in a month or so, I no longer will. We're not talking a small nerf here: we're talking about a global, and drastic nerf of everything! Way worse than Season 13.
By Orelius' scales, not this again. That's actually called progression. I don't understand the mindset of coming into an online MMORPG and expecting your gear to have unlimited and indefinite usefulness in any and every new content. It's basically in every MMO out there.
Let me spell it out for you. For a space wep, from XIII to XIV, was double the cost, to 160,000 Upgrade experience. So, making the logical inference that going to the next Tier will now cost 320,000 per weapon, times 4-10 weps per type (DBB's/DHC's), including 5 Locators per type, and a few Exploiters, plus all my major consoles, we're looking at a total financial disaster here. But stay in denial all you want.
You mean you actually have to play the game? Who would have thought! The horror!
I mean, I'm sorry about my somewhat harsh reaction to this, but the way you put the words like "financial disaster", "you're in denial" really comes of as if someone is putting a gun to your head to play and you're not enjoying the game for what it is. We play the game, we play the new expansion, we accumulate wealth, we accumulate resources, we use them to upgrade our gear. Will I have everything maxed-out on day 1? No. But it helps me set goals and gives me something to work with. Eventually I will, and eventually you will too, just like last time. By simply playing the game, which I assume is the main reason we're all here.
So, basically since they have come out with twin-turbo V-12s capable of road speeds of 240MPH, and raised the speed limit from 75 to 80, your measly 202 MPH muscle car is no good anymore ?
In STO, that's exactly what it means, yes: come June, all your gear will be subpar, overnight.
I'm hoping we get another Phoenix box event between now and the expansion, because am going need those phoenix upgrades badly.
I was thinking the same thing! I will be needing a lot of those!
Whenever Cryptic invalidates ALL your equipment/makes it drastically subpar (and no, that's no exaggeration, but in fact literally what they're doing), there are always ppl telling me "You really don't need the best gear!" Or "Everything can be done in a T1 Connie!" But you're all missing the point: I already HAD all the best gear, and in a month or so, I no longer will. We're not talking a small nerf here: we're talking about a global, and drastic nerf of everything! Way worse than Season 13.
By Orelius' scales, not this again. That's actually called progression. I don't understand the mindset of coming into an online MMORPG and expecting your gear to have unlimited and indefinite usefulness in any and every new content. It's basically in every MMO out there.
Let me spell it out for you. For a space wep, from XIII to XIV, was double the cost, to 160,000 Upgrade experience. So, making the logical inference that going to the next Tier will now cost 320,000 per weapon, times 4-10 weps per type (DBB's/DHC's), including 5 Locators per type, and a few Exploiters, plus all my major consoles, we're looking at a total financial disaster here. But stay in denial all you want.
You mean you actually have to play the game? Who would have thought! The horror!
I mean, I'm sorry about my somewhat harsh reaction to this, but the way you put the words like "financial disaster", "you're in denial" really comes of as if someone is putting a gun to your head to play and you're not enjoying the game for what it is. We play the game, we play the new expansion, we accumulate wealth, we accumulate resources, we use them to upgrade our gear. Will I have everything maxed-out on day 1? No. But it helps me set goals and gives me something to work with. Eventually I will, and eventually you will too, just like last time. By simply playing the game, which I assume is the main reason we're all here.
I kinda agree. If the idea of having to play the game to earn more resources to improve your gear bothers you, maybe you really don't like playing the game, and you should consider acting accordingly.
And make no mistake - all that "grind" to get the newest, best gear. That is an essential part of every MMO. It is how they stay alive, how they manipulate you into playing them a lot and keep paying for a subscription, or keep spending money on their in-game shop, or keep interacting with people in the game so they keep subscribed or spending their money on the game.
It will never stop, unless the game stops entirely.
If you believe you will ever be "done" with your character - no, you won't. Cryptic will always put something new in the game that you will want and need to play the game for, because if they don't, the game is over.
If you can't stand this idea, and you need maxed characters and maxed gear and maxed every game subsystem, it might be better to just stop playing the game for good. If you can live with non-maxed characters, maybe you can keep playing, but focus on the aspects you prefer (like only playing for a new story mission or a new queue, or when your fleet is running some events, or when a good friend or family member is also able to play.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
In most other MMO's I can think of BiS gear is needed for doing actual content.
The only content that sto has that requires it is the player generated dps chase which means the actual ingame cryptic made stuff lasts even less time, assuming it doesn't bug out. Cryptic are happy with this as that heavily promotes the upgrading based dil sink which will in turn help push zen sales. Possibly one of the reasons they've never taken activities other than pewpew into account with the afk flag.
I think part of the reason they're wanting to avoid t7's is that they've realised that they're at a tipping point and another tier with the expense for players would potentially push away too many players unwilling to rebuy their current fleet of t6's and while they would make money it wouldn't be enough.
I think part of the reason they're wanting to avoid t7's is that they've realised that they're at a tipping point and another tier with the expense for players would potentially push away too many players unwilling to rebuy their current fleet of t6's and while they would make money it wouldn't be enough.
Yeah... this is the only mmo game I've ever played that had tier gear tied to an online store. If ships could be bought by tokens that dropped from mobs in STFs I wouldn't mind new tiers of ships at all. Since that isn't the case here I would be one of those people who'd leave if they ever did that. Once was more than enough for me from T5 to T6.
As I've said since they started releasing details on the new expansion: it's surprising how some people can complain about things they haven't experienced yet.
Those episodes may well be very interesting, maybe even very long in which case it doesn't matter that they are few.
Further, there is a new sector battlezone coming, new progression systems, a level cap increase, nice rewards for some of those new levels, a gear cap increase, more than a dozen new ships that can be used by all factions, two (or four if you count the premium ones) new playable species and probably an large new map.
Even if I wanted to try, I'd have to try very hard to be disappointed by all of these things being announced.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
Mark XII gear is in fact fine for all the content we've experienced so far. You can't shred new things like the Hur'q swarmers quite as quickly as you can with higher-tier gear, but you can still do it - it's not like, say, WoW, where if you're running "last season's" gear you simply cannot face even the NPCs in the latest expansion.
Now, if you have some strange need to have the Latest And Greatest, that's on you, but it's not a necessity, just a desire. Frankly, some folks here are starting to sound like my roommate, who quit playing when T6 ships came out because he'd purchased the T5 Defiant, and he thought now his ship was "worthless". (Of course, he didn't really enjoy the game anyway - he'd bulled his way to level 50 at Ker'rat before that exploit was fixed, and never did get around to running the actual missions of which the game is made...)
I was never as into DS9 as a series but nonetheless would like to be enthused about the upcoming expansion.
But being a somewhat cynical git I find that quite hard to do given cryptics track record.
I do honestly hope that they've been working on this for a long time and thats the real reason why the kethi BZ was never fixed or the lacklustre writing in some of the episodes in the lukari arc and the way a lot of the episodes were more like promo tools than episodes (nexus for ent bridge and son'a for that lockbox).
Just as I also hope that they didnt blow the budget getting in as many known trek actors as they have.
And of course I still remember the "biggest ever" expansion that was delta grinding, where big referred to the addition of the delta quadrant map rather than what you did there. Probably the main reason the cap is going to 65 and not 70
So far it sounds meh at best. VERY limited faction that has one race to choose from and 6 episodes... Oh boy...
To keep focus on what the OP was talking about.
In terms of content. IMO not the best ever and yeah 6 episodes is not an expansion but AOY was similar in content so with every year the threshold has been lower than previous cycles. Heck might be someday they might just call a single Feature Episode an expansion. LoR introduced the romulan faction as a half faction. AOY was like more like 1/10th of a faction but mostly a recruiting event. The new JemHadar faction will follow same pattern as AOY it looks like.
In terms of design graphics. Looks really promising and yes lots of people have been asking an upgrade to DS9. Kudos for that. Well done in that regard.
In terms of gearing. I understand that some peeps are flamed about losing the top gear in lieu of the MKXV. However, what does one expect? This MMO has been evolving since it went beta. Gear is a commodity and will change as time go on and with it also its value. I don't go around using the same gear from Season 1 to Season 14 and won't expect it to be in pair even going to Season 20. If one invests good money to have the latest and best gear that's on each of us NOT on Devs nor the MMO. After all this is a Free to Play still.
Overall, I'd say I will take a wait and see attitude. There are some great things about this new season but yeah a little disappointed in amount of content. I will still support Cryptic since it is the only Trek MMO with great evolving dynamics.
And as I stated in the previous post it is par for the course in MMO's that your gear will be made irrelevant at somepoint, sometimes via balancing more often by an expansion turning up.
Calling it a financial disaster is overdramatising things just a tad, unless you bought zen to convert for dumping into the dil sink.
When was the last time you played another mmo? When other mmo's increase lvl cap they also increase the gear you get from questing. Take Rift when they went from 50 to 60 they created new zones to quest in and the gear reward was green drops and much better than the blue lvl 50 gear you were wearing. Some quest even rewarded blues. Sto has never done this and never will because gear is tied to dil.and zen. Even though they don't charge you for the expansion ships and gear upgrades is how they get you to pay for it. Getting MK12 as mission reward after this expansion is insulting to all us players.
And as I stated in the previous post it is par for the course in MMO's that your gear will be made irrelevant at somepoint, sometimes via balancing more often by an expansion turning up.
Calling it a financial disaster is overdramatising things just a tad, unless you bought zen to convert for dumping into the dil sink.
When was the last time you played another mmo? When other mmo's increase lvl cap they also increase the gear you get from questing. Take Rift when they went from 50 to 60 they created new zones to quest in and the gear reward was green drops and much better than the blue lvl 50 gear you were wearing. Some quest even rewarded blues. Sto has never done this and never will because gear is tied to dil.and zen. Even though they don't charge you for the expansion ships and gear upgrades is how they get you to pay for it. Getting MK12 as mission reward after this expansion is insulting to all us players.
...The power creep to MK XV is a major letdown. Upgrading from MK XII to MK XIV was a real pain in the ... neck. I can see rivers of tears, sorrow and hate because the high end gear people (and everyone else that spent a lot in MK XIV gear) will be dissapointed their hard earned money is going to waste, and you will need to spend a lot of it later only to upgrade. The PVP folks should be fumig at this hour.
I have to admit that upgrading to MK XIV was somewhat reasonable, however the epic MK XIV increase is really prohibitive. But IF the upgrade to MK XV costs in dilithium follows the same pattern IT WILL be a problem the company will face because people will be very angry about it...
Well... We're not losing anything and anyone who already has epic MkXIV equipment has a leg up on those that don't since epic MkXV gear is likely to be even more expensive as one is likely to have to keep upgrading MkXVs (instead of MkXIVs) to get those epic mods. I'm not disappointed and in fact am glad that I managed to get that epic mod on much of my equipment before the increase. It's the new players and those who haven't already managed to get epics who will be more inconvenienced by this in my opinion. The trade off there for new players being that they will likely spend less getting to MkXV than those of us who kept upgrading MkXIVs to epic.
As to the expansion itself... There will be the expected letdown as I foresee the typical server maintenances and bugs for several weeks after release until a new equilibrium is reached.
And as I stated in the previous post it is par for the course in MMO's that your gear will be made irrelevant at somepoint, sometimes via balancing more often by an expansion turning up.
Calling it a financial disaster is overdramatising things just a tad, unless you bought zen to convert for dumping into the dil sink.
When was the last time you played another mmo? When other mmo's increase lvl cap they also increase the gear you get from questing. Take Rift when they went from 50 to 60 they created new zones to quest in and the gear reward was green drops and much better than the blue lvl 50 gear you were wearing. Some quest even rewarded blues. Sto has never done this and never will because gear is tied to dil.and zen. Even though they don't charge you for the expansion ships and gear upgrades is how they get you to pay for it. Getting MK12 as mission reward after this expansion is insulting to all us players.
Pretty much this. If this were World of Warcraft people would be getting Cata/MoP gear in Legion and need to upgrade it to the current artifact/armor setup they got for 110 item levels. That's just silly.
One other thing, STO historically had a new tier ship every 10 levels. This practice stopped once T6 ships came out. I think there should be a basic no frills T6 ship available to players 10 levels after you get a T5 ship. This could help bridge the gap new players have to travel and possibly draw more people in with easier access. No the event ships don't count, they aren't a part of the leveling mechanic I'm referring to and T5-U's aren't the same either really since they were created to help budget up from/extend the life of paid ships at T5 till you got enough money or event progress together for a T6 ship early on. The T5-U token they mentioned I think at 61? Is pretty underwhelming considering how past practices for ship upgrades went while leveling.
Comments
Thanks Arionisa, I now have chocolate milk all over my computer monitor after reading that
Though, honesty thank you for the laugh, this comment has had me smiling for the last 5 mins (after i cleaned the monitor of course)
Given that mk12 is STILL the standard reward despite the 10 level increase to players that came alongside the addition of upgrading to mk14 its a fairly safe bet that unless they really want to force that dil sink onto people not much is going to change.
Even a t1 connie with mk12 gear can clear level 60 missions given time, although some fights like the kethi motherships can be the most tedious experiences ever had in a game.
Whenever Cryptic invalidates ALL your equipment/makes it drastically subpar (and no, that's no exaggeration, but in fact literally what they're doing), there are always ppl telling me "You really don't need the best gear!" Or "Everything can be done in a T1 Connie!" But you're all missing the point: I already HAD all the best gear, and in a month or so, I no longer will. We're not talking a small nerf here: we're talking about a global, and drastic nerf of everything! Way worse than Season 13.
Let me spell it out for you. For a space wep, from XIII to XIV, was double the cost, to 160,000 Upgrade experience. So, making the logical inference that going to the next Tier will now cost 320,000 per weapon, times 4-10 weps per type (DBB's/DHC's), including 5 Locators per type, and a few Exploiters, plus all my major consoles, we're looking at a total financial disaster here. But stay in denial all you want.
In STO, that's exactly what it means, yes: come June, all your gear will be subpar, overnight.
Calling it a financial disaster is overdramatising things just a tad, unless you bought zen to convert for dumping into the dil sink.
Will Perfect World abandon ships like they did with the Galaxy, Sovereign, Saber, D'deridex, Negh'Var and others?
Will our Vonphs, Denuos and others will be trash bin material?
We shall see.
The power creep to MK XV is a major letdown. Upgrading from MK XII to MK XIV was a real pain in the ... neck. I can see rivers of tears, sorrow and hate because the high end gear people (and everyone else that spent a lot in MK XIV gear) will be dissapointed their hard earned money is going to waste, and you will need to spend a lot of it later only to upgrade. The PVP folks should be fumig at this hour.
I have to admit that upgrading to MK XIV was somewhat reasonable, however the epic MK XIV increase is really prohibitive. But IF the upgrade to MK XV costs in dilithium follows the same pattern IT WILL be a problem the company will face because people will be very angry about it.
I'm not against working hard for your stuff and spending a little here and there, I bought the pilot escorts and the 31st century ships; but forcing people to spend A LOT in gear upgrades alone is not going to end well.
The only solution I can see is to make cheaper the upgrades by a large margin from MK XII to MK XV rare and them make the cost from MK XV ultra-rare to MK XV epic really expensive if you wish; that way people will stay competitive at least.
You want to ATTRACT people, not make them feel like their effort and money is worth every day less and less; so they actually WANT to invest money to get fun.
How will new people fare? God knows we need a lot of these folks these days...
DO NOT make people to go to work and spend a fortune in a game they use to forget about work. That can only result in disaster from which no MMO has recovered yet.
With how saturated the game is by ships they're probably worried about scaring away folk with the introduction of t7's. A t6-u token would be a much safer bet.
But cryptic, sto and sensible are not words often used in the same sentence.
Oh, yeah, Season 16 is just the worst!
By Orelius' scales, not this again.
You mean you actually have to play the game?
I mean, I'm sorry about my somewhat harsh reaction to this, but the way you put the words like "financial disaster", "you're in denial" really comes of as if someone is putting a gun to your head to play and you're not enjoying the game for what it is. We play the game, we play the new expansion, we accumulate wealth, we accumulate resources, we use them to upgrade our gear. Will I have everything maxed-out on day 1? No. But it helps me set goals and gives me something to work with. Eventually I will, and eventually you will too, just like last time. By simply playing the game, which I assume is the main reason we're all here.
I was thinking the same thing!
I kinda agree. If the idea of having to play the game to earn more resources to improve your gear bothers you, maybe you really don't like playing the game, and you should consider acting accordingly.
And make no mistake - all that "grind" to get the newest, best gear. That is an essential part of every MMO. It is how they stay alive, how they manipulate you into playing them a lot and keep paying for a subscription, or keep spending money on their in-game shop, or keep interacting with people in the game so they keep subscribed or spending their money on the game.
It will never stop, unless the game stops entirely.
If you believe you will ever be "done" with your character - no, you won't. Cryptic will always put something new in the game that you will want and need to play the game for, because if they don't, the game is over.
If you can't stand this idea, and you need maxed characters and maxed gear and maxed every game subsystem, it might be better to just stop playing the game for good. If you can live with non-maxed characters, maybe you can keep playing, but focus on the aspects you prefer (like only playing for a new story mission or a new queue, or when your fleet is running some events, or when a good friend or family member is also able to play.)
The only content that sto has that requires it is the player generated dps chase which means the actual ingame cryptic made stuff lasts even less time, assuming it doesn't bug out. Cryptic are happy with this as that heavily promotes the upgrading based dil sink which will in turn help push zen sales. Possibly one of the reasons they've never taken activities other than pewpew into account with the afk flag.
I think part of the reason they're wanting to avoid t7's is that they've realised that they're at a tipping point and another tier with the expense for players would potentially push away too many players unwilling to rebuy their current fleet of t6's and while they would make money it wouldn't be enough.
Yeah... this is the only mmo game I've ever played that had tier gear tied to an online store. If ships could be bought by tokens that dropped from mobs in STFs I wouldn't mind new tiers of ships at all. Since that isn't the case here I would be one of those people who'd leave if they ever did that. Once was more than enough for me from T5 to T6.
As I've said since they started releasing details on the new expansion: it's surprising how some people can complain about things they haven't experienced yet.
Those episodes may well be very interesting, maybe even very long in which case it doesn't matter that they are few.
Further, there is a new sector battlezone coming, new progression systems, a level cap increase, nice rewards for some of those new levels, a gear cap increase, more than a dozen new ships that can be used by all factions, two (or four if you count the premium ones) new playable species and probably an large new map.
Even if I wanted to try, I'd have to try very hard to be disappointed by all of these things being announced.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
Now, if you have some strange need to have the Latest And Greatest, that's on you, but it's not a necessity, just a desire. Frankly, some folks here are starting to sound like my roommate, who quit playing when T6 ships came out because he'd purchased the T5 Defiant, and he thought now his ship was "worthless". (Of course, he didn't really enjoy the game anyway - he'd bulled his way to level 50 at Ker'rat before that exploit was fixed, and never did get around to running the actual missions of which the game is made...)
But being a somewhat cynical git I find that quite hard to do given cryptics track record.
I do honestly hope that they've been working on this for a long time and thats the real reason why the kethi BZ was never fixed or the lacklustre writing in some of the episodes in the lukari arc and the way a lot of the episodes were more like promo tools than episodes (nexus for ent bridge and son'a for that lockbox).
Just as I also hope that they didnt blow the budget getting in as many known trek actors as they have.
And of course I still remember the "biggest ever" expansion that was delta grinding, where big referred to the addition of the delta quadrant map rather than what you did there. Probably the main reason the cap is going to 65 and not 70
To keep focus on what the OP was talking about.
In terms of content. IMO not the best ever and yeah 6 episodes is not an expansion but AOY was similar in content so with every year the threshold has been lower than previous cycles. Heck might be someday they might just call a single Feature Episode an expansion. LoR introduced the romulan faction as a half faction. AOY was like more like 1/10th of a faction but mostly a recruiting event. The new JemHadar faction will follow same pattern as AOY it looks like.
In terms of design graphics. Looks really promising and yes lots of people have been asking an upgrade to DS9. Kudos for that. Well done in that regard.
In terms of gearing. I understand that some peeps are flamed about losing the top gear in lieu of the MKXV. However, what does one expect? This MMO has been evolving since it went beta. Gear is a commodity and will change as time go on and with it also its value. I don't go around using the same gear from Season 1 to Season 14 and won't expect it to be in pair even going to Season 20. If one invests good money to have the latest and best gear that's on each of us NOT on Devs nor the MMO. After all this is a Free to Play still.
Overall, I'd say I will take a wait and see attitude. There are some great things about this new season but yeah a little disappointed in amount of content. I will still support Cryptic since it is the only Trek MMO with great evolving dynamics.
When was the last time you played another mmo? When other mmo's increase lvl cap they also increase the gear you get from questing. Take Rift when they went from 50 to 60 they created new zones to quest in and the gear reward was green drops and much better than the blue lvl 50 gear you were wearing. Some quest even rewarded blues. Sto has never done this and never will because gear is tied to dil.and zen. Even though they don't charge you for the expansion ships and gear upgrades is how they get you to pay for it. Getting MK12 as mission reward after this expansion is insulting to all us players.
When was the last time you played another mmo? When other mmo's increase lvl cap they also increase the gear you get from questing. Take Rift when they went from 50 to 60 they created new zones to quest in and the gear reward was green drops and much better than the blue lvl 50 gear you were wearing. Some quest even rewarded blues. Sto has never done this and never will because gear is tied to dil.and zen. Even though they don't charge you for the expansion ships and gear upgrades is how they get you to pay for it. Getting MK12 as mission reward after this expansion is insulting to all us players.
Well... We're not losing anything and anyone who already has epic MkXIV equipment has a leg up on those that don't since epic MkXV gear is likely to be even more expensive as one is likely to have to keep upgrading MkXVs (instead of MkXIVs) to get those epic mods. I'm not disappointed and in fact am glad that I managed to get that epic mod on much of my equipment before the increase. It's the new players and those who haven't already managed to get epics who will be more inconvenienced by this in my opinion. The trade off there for new players being that they will likely spend less getting to MkXV than those of us who kept upgrading MkXIVs to epic.
As to the expansion itself... There will be the expected letdown as I foresee the typical server maintenances and bugs for several weeks after release until a new equilibrium is reached.
Pretty much this. If this were World of Warcraft people would be getting Cata/MoP gear in Legion and need to upgrade it to the current artifact/armor setup they got for 110 item levels. That's just silly.
One other thing, STO historically had a new tier ship every 10 levels. This practice stopped once T6 ships came out. I think there should be a basic no frills T6 ship available to players 10 levels after you get a T5 ship. This could help bridge the gap new players have to travel and possibly draw more people in with easier access. No the event ships don't count, they aren't a part of the leveling mechanic I'm referring to and T5-U's aren't the same either really since they were created to help budget up from/extend the life of paid ships at T5 till you got enough money or event progress together for a T6 ship early on. The T5-U token they mentioned I think at 61? Is pretty underwhelming considering how past practices for ship upgrades went while leveling.