STO questions

[White Haven]

Yeah...not sure why they think anyone gives any fucks about Voyager's stomping grounds. It's an especially odd choice given t hat t he Bajoran wormhole is..sorta right there, and without the baggage of, well, Voyager's largely bad writing. Beyond that, I'm still waiting for Cryptic to put out any actual information about what they're doing as opposed to where they're doing it.

Also, for fuck's sake, Pooky, you make Dragon's posts look finely-crafted and proofread, and that's really terrifying to be able to say.

[Steve]

I recall some poll from many months ago had most pollees wanting more stuff from Voyager than any other series. Bleh.

Although is suspect they're saving the Gamma Quadrant for a major Dominion-centric expansion, quite possibly including a new Cardassian-Dominion faction?

[Elheru Aran]

I think they're going to mostly write off the Delta Quadrant as random alien planets and Borg. At least that wouldn't surprise me.

Increasing a Dominion presence would be nice, if only to take all the attention off the stupid 8472 and Borg shit...

[PREDATOR490]

Delta Quadrant allows them to sell more shit that was on the show which eager fans will lap up at insane prices. They already screwed the Dominion by selling all of their ships so adding a Dominon Expansion would not give them much shilling material. The story / narrative of STO has been appalling from the start but now it is a picked clean corpse. I am kinda glad the Gamma Quadrant is being left out, I fully expect the would shit all over the place adding silly stuff.

Cap increase - Yeah, Cryptic ran out of shit to sell so now they bump up the levels so they can sell more upgraded ships. Hope you enjoyed your lockbox ships folks because now your fucked gambling for the upgraded version again. I suppose they might be generous and allow players to buy the upgraded versions at the Fleet Store for a fantastic sum of effort.
I.E Spend lots of money trying to upgrade the starbase and get in good with a fleet then still pay your fleet module tax to get the upgraded ship which most likely wont scale with the new generation.

New faction - Dominion / Cardassians are extremely unlikely to ever be a faction. They shot that horse when they sold all their iconic ships and the best Cryptic managed at a new faction was the Romulans being sucked into the Federation / Klingons.
That said, I suppose it would be rather amusing to have STO gradually end up without any factions at endgame because they all join at the end. Thus Cryptic can sell any ship they want to everyone.

New skills / Specialisations - For fuck sake, they nerfed the shit out of reputation passive powers because players were getting too powerful and the laundry list of abilities is already bloated badly.
More buttons to push on the hotbar along with the gimmick console abilities. Sure, add more skills but dont update the existing skills so they can at least train everything.

STO policy - Add lots of new shiny stuff to sell while ignoring the broken shit until it is financially convenient

[tim31]

It's easy to accuse them of being mean-spirited capitalists, but have you played any of the revamped story content? For example, the entire Borg/Undine campaign got redone, it looks and plays well, adds to the developing narrative and foreshadows a number of plot elements to follow. And Michael Dorn and Tim Russ have bills to pay, so they're not just going to do VA work for free just because the game is F2P. I get where you're coming from, I really do. The continuing demand for dilithium in order to advance endgame content is taxing and insanely transparent as a revenue raiser, but PWE aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and to suggest Cryptic aren't actually producing anything worthwhile tells me that your focus in the game may be somewhat blinkered.

[Elheru Aran]

They're going to be dangling a bunch of freebies in front of everybody, apparently, around when Delta Rising/S10 comes out. Log on at a certain time, score free stuff. This may include ships? Might be worth checking out, I suppose...

[Elheru Aran]

They're going to be dangling a bunch of freebies in front of everybody, apparently, around when Delta Rising/S10 comes out. Log on at a certain time, score free stuff. This may include ships? Might be worth checking out, I suppose...

Aaaaand it looks like they're gonna make some upper-tier missions hard enough to complete with an ordinary T4 or T5 ship that upgrading to T5.5 or T6 is going to be recommended. Some of these upgrades are free.

It's pay-to-win time...

[PREDATOR490]

Looking at the upgrade chart just makes me leary. They are obviously skewing the advantages in favor of encouraging people to buy the new Tier 6 but trying to further gouge by offering upgrades for the old ships to sub-par levels.

Specialist Bridge officers for Tier 6 vs. None for the upgraded ships
5 master levels for Tier 6 vs. 4 for upgraded
Special trait for Tier 6 vs. No trait for upgraded

If they wanted people to upgrade... why not just fucking let people upgrade the ships they like to tier 6 and you would not need the sub-par shit to begin with ?
Oh right, then noone would buy the tier 6 ships for insanely inflated prices because your buying a whole new ship model rather than an upgrade in stats.

Cryptic have already sold the majority of ships that were seen in Star Trek and if they start minting out Tier 6 versions of ships people have already paid to upgrade to tier 5.5 that will just be hilariously low.
Alternatively, they are going to introduce a T6 Kazon ship that can out perform the best the major powers can produce.

Cryptics idea:
Pay £$10 to upgrade an iconic ship tier 5.5 or charge people £$20 to get a new T6 ship

Smarter Model:
Allow players to pay £10 to upgrade a T5 all the way to T6 or £$20 for the T6 version outright

That is the principle they used for upgrading to fleet ships with the discounts on fleet module requirements if you had a lower tier version.

[RogueIce]

Well this

5 master levels for Tier 6 vs. 4 for upgraded
Special trait for Tier 6 vs. No trait for upgraded

is actually the same thing, since that fifth Master Level is the Starship Trait.

Anyway I don't see anything terrible here. If they keep the price point of $5 it's no worse than a Fleet Module, with the added bonus that the T5-U will be an account-wide unlock, whereas Fleet ships are per character, and if you dismiss it you can't reclaim, but have to spend FM(S) and FCs again. So if you want to use the same ship across multiple Captains that's a good thing.

And the Specialist Bridge Officers won't even be on all T6 ships, apparently, though we'll have to wait and see what happens on that front. Still, if so, that means all you're really losing on a T5-U vs. (general) T6 is the new trait, which is pretty minor. And those that have Spec Boffs will pretty much be whatever other 'unique' ships are currently out there, such as the Dyson Science Destroyers with their changing Boff seat.

So yeah, honestly, I don't see how Cryptic is being terrible here.

[Mr. Coffee]

Ok, so if I'm reading this right, the Avenger I spent real money on is about to havethe mother of all nerf bats swung at it in the name of "We have no fucking clue how to manage power creep"?

[RogueIce]

Not really. You can upgrade it, to be reasonably on the level of the T6 ships. Depending on just how "wow" these Traits and Specialist Boffs end up being will determine if it winds up as a 'nerf' in comparison, I guess.

[PREDATOR490]

Ok, so if I'm reading this right, the Avenger I spent real money on is about to havethe mother of all nerf bats swung at it in the name of "We have no fucking clue how to manage power creep"?

Cryptic have decided to introduce a new ship tier that makes all the previous ships obsolete however, you can pay real money to upgrade your obsolete ships to be less obsolete at $10 a pop.
Or... you can throw down even more money to buy the newest ship straight off the rack.

Result: You can spend a lot of money to get the powerful ship or spend money to upgrade the ships you have

Cryptic have literally decided to fuck over the entire game in their effort to wallet gouge.

All the iconic ships rendered inferior because Cryptic want to sell their new toys but they further piss on the players by expecting people to pay to upgrade the ships they like and STILL be inferior. Anyone that likes to switch ships or has multiple characters is effectively going to be shelling out just as much money to upgrade all of their ships as it takes to buy a T6 and not even get those ships to T6 quality.

So... my choice is to pay $30 each upgrading my multi-packs to still be inferior to T6.... or bite the bullet and simply buy a T6 ship because it is more cost effective.

Fuck you very much Cryptic.

[Simon_Jester]

Does anyone have an opinion on the new duty officer interface, the new crafting system, or both?

[Lord Revan]

the crafting system both works and doesn't work as it is now

the good part is that you no longer have hunt for plans and can craft anywhere making the system much more easier to use, on the flip side the actual interphase could use some polish as could the doff one.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally I think they made it too hard to craft the upper-level items without buying stuff on the Exchange. In the original, you could craft the highest level items if you were willing to spend the Dilithium and collect enough of those rare particle traces.

Here, it seems like the Rare R&D materials are only available randomly from duty officer missions, which means you can't count on having them at all... although come to think of it, you couldn't count on having particle traces either, you had to trawl for them.

The Very Rare R&D materials, I don't even know how you collect those.

It's particularly frustrating for me now because I have a ~30th level character and I keep wanting to craft some equipment... but the missions and such available at that level simply don't provide much if any of the materials required to craft level-appropriate items.

[Elheru Aran]

Man, I literally haven't signed on to STO in... two or three weeks now. It's a bit sad.

Apparently they're definitely bringing back some characters from Voyager. Harry Kim (who might be an ambassador now? white shoulder pads on his uniform), Neelix, Seven, the Doctor and Tuvok.

I am even less impressed now. I might have been able to tolerate the Doctor, and Tuvok's presence in a few missions was bearable, but the rest of them are useless wastes of digital air. I really don't understand why they don't resurrect some TNG stuff. Data, at the very least, would still be around, and they had the Riker clone having a son who appeared in one mission.

[Simon_Jester]

Son of Clone of Riker was an interesting character as a one-off, but I'm not sure he'd stand up well to recurrence. Especially since his canonical backstory was basically "guerilla Maquis-descendants who are STILL clashing with the True Way, refighting their fathers' wars three decades later." To see him again we'd either have to go back to Cardassian space (a possibility, especially if the Borg get riled up again), or we'd have to have him say "welp, I joined Starfleet as a captain and they accepted me because, um, because."

Come to think of it, Riker himself would be 74 in STO- old, possibly off active duty and certainly off single-ship command. But not older than 'Admiral McCoy' in the TNG pilot. He'd have made a damn good choice for a quest-giver character analogous to Admiral Quinn, if they'd been willing to spring for his voice-actor fees.

[Elheru Aran]

Data would make considerable sense as a quest-giver character in STO as well. He has the longevity to simply stay in service as long as he wants, and with his experience by STO-era he would easily be an Admiral in active service rather than a desk-jockey. Leading a fleet against the Borg or something like that, perhaps? Exploration missions? (which they've now dropped, unfortunately-- I thought they had a decent flavour to them)

La Forge would work if they created a story arc to ease players into the new Crafting setup. But that would make sense and cost money, so hey, just spring the new crafting onto players with a cheap tutorial...

I'd be fine with sweeping Crusher and Picard under the rug as a "they went away and lived happily ever after" kind of thing. Ditto Troi; about the most significant thing she did in TNG was listen thoughtfully to people and drive the Enterprise into a planet.

Could always throw Wes Crusher back into the mix as a Traveller. "Hey guys, I gotta get something done, wanna come help out?"

We already had Tasha Yar pop back up in that little time-travel adventure (not to mention Empress Sela), and Worf did fine as the token Klink quest-giver. That's about it for TNG characters unless you want to start pulling out the more obscure occasional recurring characters such as Nurse Ogawa or the more notable guest stars like Ambassador Spock, who IIRC won't be coming back because this is after nu-Trek...

[PREDATOR490]

The story for STO is pathetically inconsistent and only serves to push Cryptic's next marketing strategy to make more money by selling stuff. Thus we have the DQ which comes with the requirement of needing to pay to upgrade your ships. The game has been out for years and they barely have managed to continue the story the game initially launched with. What happened to Sela and what is really the goal with the Iconians ?
All Cryptic knows how to do is to grab onto threads of stuff from Star Trek and spin it into wisps of a bare-bones lore which they seem to have no interested in really moving beyond.

Granted, the playerbase for STO is woefully willing to accept the cameo voice from Tuvok on a single mission in exchange for little progress to actually improve the game with something simple like fixing stupid issues.
Biggest example: Bridge officers causing the player ship to decloak with their dialogue prompts. This has been an issue since launch and Cryptic basically turn around and told the playerbase they cant fix it because they would need to fix all the old dialogue. So... why the fuck are the NEW missions still doing it then ?

The Tuvok / Worf missions were extremely padded out shit. The missions basically involve them telling the player to push buttons because they are too lazy and Cryptic cant do fuck all else. Not to mention Cryptic's fiat for these missions usually ends up being appallingly bad.
Lets send the player and Tuvok alone to fight off the Undine enemies... because it makes sense that two admirals are going to go rambo rather than send the usual combat away team that is the norm for this game.

Personally, I would rather they go back to the Beta idea of having player bridge officers voiced. Let players have their bridge officers voiced by the actors they like which gets more mileage than voice cameos for niche missions.

As for cameos from new actors: If they are going to introduce cameos I would rather they serve a the plot rather than the plot being specifically written to serve the cameo.
As it is, I can just see the DQ expansion force feeding Voyager cameos via needlessly contrived storyline that ignores how things work in STO.

[Simon_Jester]

Data would make considerable sense as a quest-giver character in STO as well. He has the longevity to simply stay in service as long as he wants, and with his experience by STO-era he would easily be an Admiral in active service rather than a desk-jockey.

He'd be like, the god of all science officers or something.

La Forge would work if they created a story arc to ease players into the new Crafting setup. But that would make sense and cost money, so hey, just spring the new crafting onto players with a cheap tutorial...

Yeah, it's kind of frustrating because I had literally NO IDEA the rules had changed until I logged back on after a four month absence.

LaForge would be a very very senior engineering officer. Again, the original TNG crew would mostly be pushing retirement age or beyond it in a normal setting, and while we know people can live longer in Star Trek, it's an open question how much longer.

...or the more notable guest stars like Ambassador Spock, who IIRC won't be coming back because this is after nu-Trek...

This is the case.

[PREDATOR490]

Well... Cryptic certainly fucked the boat big time with their new T6 launch.

£120 price tag to get the full range of T6 warships with their unique universal consoles and magic powers.

They still cant upload images of the fucking T6 ships they are trying to sell and I am not impressed with their appearance. Apparently, a ship the size of a Scimitar cannot accommodate an "intelligence" officer.

Why the fuck are Cryptic so terminally stupid as to not make Tier 6 able to use ANY ship model the players own ? That way people can keep the ship look they want without having to be gimped and you can sell the cosmetic appearances. Instead they have turned a game that built up a Tier 5 selection over multiple years in the double digits and now relegated it to 8 options.

[Elheru Aran]

Those new Intel ships, at least the Starfleet ones, don't even look good... the Escort especially looks like a fucking elongated glow-in-the-dark Frisbee.

[Scottish Ninja]

I am at least a little intrigued by the Intelligence Officer boff they'll be adding - it just occurred to me that they might add a player career path to match, and then it'll be time to reroll Comrade Cosmonaut-Colonel Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov. T6 ships still leave a bad taste in my mouth on general principle, especially as (in game time) they just introduced a big fancy new cruiser to serve as the flagship of Starfleet and carry on the name Enterprise.

I guess they had to try to find something to keep player interest in the game and keep the money train rolling but I'm extremely far from being sold on this so far, especially as the tone of the game, despite being really a generation on, was so far meant to keep people feeling like they're playing in the TNG-DS9-VOY era with all the attendant worldbuilding, plus some new stuff - more Phase II than TNG. Departing from that is a risk and depressing the value of ships people have already paid $25 or more (potentially a lot more in case of lockbox and lobi ships) to have and play as endgame ships, particularly the ones with major IP value, like the Galaxy, Defiant, Intrepid, D'Deridex, etc. is an enormous risk, and I'm not so emotionally invested in STO for STO's sake that I'm gonna stay interested in whatever they try to do.

Regardless, I'm still playing after two and a half years(!) through whatever decisions Cryptic's made that I thought were questionable - the biggest advantage they have is their F2P model, since it never costs anything to come back.

[RogueIce]

Dev Post

These two points are the same thing. The fifth Mastery Level is simply the unlock of the a trait. It should be noted that all Starship Traits that you unlock can be used while using any starship. So, you could hop onto a T6 ship, level it up to 5 and then slot the trait while using any other ship. I think that you'll find the delta between a T5-U ship and a T6 ship to not be as vast as many suggest.

Regards,
Phil "Gorngonzolla" Zeleski

So it's not permanently off-limits, though you do need to get a T6 ship of whatever type that gives off the trait you want. But at least it's available if you prefer the T5-U ship. So the only thing you can't ever get is the new Boff.

[DarthPooky]

Their brining back those parasite goua ould bugs that ware in that episode in the end of the first season of TNG. The one ware Picard and Riker blew up the guys head. You can fight them in a story mission and a PvE