CAPTAIN'S BLOG

Wow..!!! It's so true... You know where you went wrong? You started to get greedy.. Money, money, money..!!! You forgot about the players make the game, not you..!! Give the players more quality things, giving us a double cheeseburger at a big mac price. Stop making everything take so dang long to do... And make it more like real space in the game and in battles. Make it so you can really take out engines, shields and weapons. More real stuff, it's too squishy... And for the love of all that is good .... Give us PVP BACK..!!! Listen to the players or you will not recover from this ever. I told Branflakes over a year ago, at the Vegas convention, have PVP tournaments with real cash prizes ..!!! People wanna be the top dog, make your money off of that if you want money so bad ... But leave the game to the players and give us back Real substance..!!

I will be participating, however I don't think this is isolated to STO. These days new games are rolling out daily and if you are on Steam, flooded with new ones at every login. Even WoT must be suffering, as they are offering 50,000 credits just for logging in over the next 60 days. It maybe due to some of the new offerings having less complexity.,then again could be a variety of factors.

It's true. I ahven't been able to play for awhile. Whenever I tried, I was experiencing so much lag that it was hard to move. I had to turn off everything on my computer and then play when no one else was on the network to even move. Even then it was too hard to do things. Especially some of the new content. Some of those instances are so laggy, you can do nothing but die over and over. I gave up after awhile. I can play any other game just fine with no problem, but this one I can't. They need to fix the lag, then maybe people will start playing again.

I have no problem with this event except 1.... The truth is, this game has turned into a money grabbing grind fest. So I could care less that I will have to grind again(i.e leveling) because it's just par for the course. However, this is just me, but when I make a character.. I typically already know what ship he/she will be flying at lvl 50. But let's be honest, It's T6 or nothing. I have plenty of C-store T5's that I could grind to get fleet versions of and then grind again to get it to T5-U but what's the point? There are now 3( technically 2 and a half) different types of T6 ships. Command,Intel, and specials (lobi, lockbox, event, and promo). Soon there will be fleet T6 intel ships becuase they are the only 10 console T6's in the game. I have 2 T6 Intel ships... the Faeht and the Guardian (technically isn't intel but has 10 consoles and was debuted at the same time). I fly the faeht with 2 toons and the guardian with 2 toons... so it would be redundant to fly either with a new toon. So my problem is that I won't have a ship for my "delta recruit" once I get to the 40-50 range. This, for me, is where the obvious money/grind sink is. So, for me, fingers crossed that an adequate ship will be a reward because I am done spending money and I'm done grinding. I already have 10 toons that are all lvl 50 or above (none are 60 yet). I'm not going to start EC/dil grinding for a ship on a character, as many have said, will be left to collect dust for a while.

I am a life time sub..altogether I have spent in excess of $500.00 on this game, I have never spent anywhere near that amount on a game in my life. I will not spend any more on this game. They have raised the prices on the T6 ships, they have added 30 min cds on the patrols, which I liked to do back to back to back, I cant now, lag is terrible, I think that this is because the lack of servers in more than 1 location as most games have servers on the west and east coast, some have west, east and central, and sto only has west coast servers. The management of STO to me has always held the players in contempt, lack of any real customer service, bugs and issues that seem to never be fixed. I have to be honest, Im only logging in to do the events for the day then I play something else for the rest of the day, I used to play STO for more than 12 hours a day, not so now. They have lost touch with the players and Im not saying that they ever were in touch with them. I used to do STFs all day long but, they have become so dps dependent and the players have become dependent also on dps, they only way now to have the most dps that you can is to spend cash, cash has become king and Im poor white trash. I will look over the new Delta recruitment but Im not sure if its gonna be anything that I want to put the time into and I will not spend any more money on it.

Personally, I am a bit disappointed that I am force to make a new Toon for the Delta recruitment. So far with the little information at hand, I am still not convinced if it will be worth my time to grind that Delta Recruit to Level 50 to unlock the account rewards, whatever they will be anyway.

Death To Multiple Characters ... unless Cryptic changes the way we can transfer "items" between characters why bother.
Personally, I think that this is just a ploy to get new players into the game, get them hooked, then after making lvl 50 spending money to make decent ships.
This is all about money.
What Crytic should be doing is fixing all the game bugs and being more customer friendly. That said, I will look over the new Delta Recruitment but Im not sure if its gonna be anything that I want to put the time into.

I play STO mostly every day but only on the treadmill. There hasn't been much to captivate me to spend other time outside of work playing it but I'm on the computer all day so I might be a bit biased.

Hello!

I've been a member of the STOAcademy fleet for some time, although not the most active. I tend to have periods of high activity and low activity. I haven't played in months now.

There are several contributing factors to this.

For one thing, I got married last year, and my wife is a gamer. I tried to get her into Star Trek, but she never really developed much interest in the game.

The game that she was interested in was Elder Scrolls Online. We played that for the first month together, but decided not to subscribe at that time due to time and money concerns, as well as the buggy and gold-farmer ridden state of the game. However, ESO has improved tremendously, and we renewed our subscriptions in December.

There are certain similarities between the two games, oddly enough. 1 to 50 is pretty fast, followed by a slow crawl through higher levels (51 to 60 for STP, Veteran Ranks 1 to 14 for ESO). ESO recently introduced a Champion Point system, similar to STO's specialization points. ESO just went Buy to Play today, and is now offering a cash shop called the Crown Store.

However, ESO's Champion Points are earned account-wide. Get a single character to Veteran Rank, even VR1, and you earn Champion Points for all your characters (up to 8 characters per account by default, with a rumored upcoming Crown Store option to buy more character slots). Crown Store items are vanity items, not power-ups. Mounts, for example, are just unique skins, and don't offer any advantages in speed, endurance, or carrying capacity over regular mounts obtained through gameplay. And, no gambling whatsoever!

Now, it is still early days in ESO's new BTP economy. Possibly if Zenimax feels the game isn't earning enough money, they may get sleazier. Right now, however, rather than luring players into paying money for power, they rely on the players' enjoyment of the game by offering vanity items like mounts, pets, costumes, all of which have no mechanical advantage in the game, but do add to enjoyment and personalization of the game experience.

What I have alluded to above is that STO's changes have curtailed my enjoyment of the game. Playing Alts is now counterproductive to advancement. Top-level play basically requires the purchase of new, top-level starships. Such purchases require either the sacrifice of hard-earned real world money, or the sacrifice of in-game time to grinding instead of purely enjoyable activities. And, once you've got your top-level equipment, there is a fairly limited set of successful strategies for using this equipment, mostly based on exploiting whichever set of powers, energy types, etc., to which the latest update has shifted the unbalance. One might argue that the fun is in the journey, not the destination, but when everyone you meet on the trip is a Ferengi, one starts to get a little suspicious...

STO has always been an odd duck of a game. It's a hodgepodge of parts that don't really mesh well. Beautiful art, mediocre game engine. There is some good, creative writing going on, but insufficient support for the professional writers except for the rare moments when the executives realize that good stories bring in the player base. There is a tremendously loyal, creative, hard-working fan base, who are also given poor tools and insufficient support to boost the game. And for a science fiction franchise which made its mark for visionary science fiction story telling, the driving vision of the game seems to be focused solely on the players' wallets.

There is a game, due to be released later this year, called No Man's Sky. It offers a procedurally generated, infinite universe. The game is an MMO. Supposedly, the game code is capable of generating 18 quintillion possible different worlds. That means that, while you could hang around discovered worlds, partner with or fight other players, you could also just aim in one direction and keep going, never seeing another human player again for your entire game experience. This sort of thing is possible, with vision, and I think it might be the sort of thing that appeals to many STO players. I would love to see a new STO that embraced this sort of awesomeness, and offered a real experience of exploration on top of the space opera drama of the setting. However, the rights to Star Trek are held by CBS and Paramount, PWE probably has a grip on the MMO Trek experience, and if there is one thing that mass media companies never do, it is go boldly anywhere.

Saw a YouTube vid about star citizen and what the details realy are, how's it's being developed etc, very interesting the thing that got me,.....mod support complete servers running one mod, at this point the presenter puts on a star trek baseball cap. Star citizen engine running a trek universe.....could see that last of the die hards leaving sto and only he casual almost tempory crowd left.
Maybe the devs are sensing whats happening, new player incentives constant specials, seems to smack of panic promotions.