Star Trek Online Season 6 is up!

[RangerXML]

But then again, nothing seems to be working. Servers are burning and the website seems to have been taken out by demand as well.

 

[XvMMvX]

What is season 6, like a complete reset? If so I might try the game out since it is F2P.

 

[RangerXML]

Added a Fleet Starbases, a bunch of knew endgame ships (40) and endgame mission (including Tholian missions).

 

[Spewn]

Figured this was coming when I saw a >1GB patch today. When you say new endgame missions are you talking about STF's/Fleet actions, or episodic missions?

 

[RangerXML]

Level 50 missions, lots of them. No new eps, but a new area for individual or group raids/missions. Also new queue-able 5 man missions and a 20 man that is actually very fun.

 

[Lith1um]

The ground missions are what killed STO for me.

I'd get to a planet like the defera invasion zone, see everyone running around, and never figure out how to form a squad or join one. Teams seemed pretty useless for public matchups, but more functional for people in fleets (clans).

To make matters worse, there were multiple instances of servers all chatting in the same channel. I'd see someone looking for team members, and they'd be on a different sever.

Too confusing for me. Then some of the levels were impossible without a good team, the enemies spawning in endless waves on a timer.

People would do the first part or two of a mission, then leave server in exasperation. 20 + times I tried to take that damn pyramid, only to be left by myself with 1 or 2 resolute players against endless waves.

Space combat was a bit better though.

I'd like to see what state it's in one decade from now.

 

[TheGamerZ]

Yay?

 

[CEpeep]

I'd like to see what state it's in one decade from now.

A decade? You've got to be kidding me. WoW hasn't even been out that long. Hell, even Everquest is only 13 years old. STO is pretty good as far as space-themed MMOs go, but I seriously doubt it has the staying power to stick around for another decade.

 

[Deleted member 232162]

I saw this one time on a review site, can't remember which, but never really gave it another thought. Is this actually a good/true MMO?

 

[Zohar78]

Hell, you cant beat the price.. For free try it and see. From what i understand, theyve ironed out alot of the issues that was present at launch. I cant say, i only played it after it went ftp before season 6 drop. It has potential, they just need to get more end game content in. So your not running the same couple stfs for good gear. Kinda an issue considering 1 quest is done alot like an episode of the show. Coming from WoW, i dont think its quite as deep. If you really enjoy the tv shows, you should enjoy the game. It has quite a few in jokes from the series scattered around. If anything else, since there isnt a star trek show on, enjoy it for what it is.

 

[RangerXML]

Well, if you want more end game content its here and it was even a bit to overwhelming for me. No longer the same 6 STF (3 space and 3 ground), which award end game gear sets and MK XII weapons (highest lvl), but now we have Nakaru Prime which has lvl 50 missions spread out in two areas each with three difficulty areas, which award a new ground set and new type of weapon with sonic damage. You also now have the Fleet Events, which you can queue like most others, but award Fleet Marks which can be turned in for Fleet Credit to buy new Retro Fit versions of all the ships except the tier 0 and the Conni, new uber rare weapons/fighter hangers and yet to be unlocked (by lvling the fleet system) sets and operational assets which you can use during the fleet events (adds fighter/escort wings, gives team buffs and even gives the Starbase some uber weapons, which are needed for 20 man events/raids).

Only down side to the Season 6 update are Fleet Ship Modules (FSM), which are bought for realy money and you need them if you want the uber versions of the ships with the prefix "Fleet", these ships have 10 consoles, new Bridge Officer layouts (what give your ships powers) and improved hull, the cost is 200k fleet credit which isn't to bad considering you'll constantly be contributing Marks and items to the base, but also 4 FSM (or 1 FSM if you own the tier 5 version of the ships, Defiant, Galaxy or Voyager Retrofit or the Heavy Escort Carrier). But on the other hand, you can get the currency to purchase FSM from the Dilithium Exchange where you trade a limited in game currency for the really money currency called Zen ($1 to 100zen) or people are selling them for between 6-15million EC (energy credits, which is the standard currency) on the regular exchange. EC, can easily be earn (about 1 million EC for about two hours of STF for example if you sell the gear to vendors and the better stuff on the exchange, the gear you want from the STFs you buy with the STF currency from the STF store anyways.

The Foundry has been down since the season 6 update, but should be back up on Thursday and this is another good selling point for the game, which is user made content. If your curious about them, there are review sites up where you can get an idea of how creative some of these folks can be.

EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfiyBz3lSLM

 

[RangerXML]

Added some STO screen grabs ^^

 

[Ruahrc]

Fuck Cryptic and fuck STO. Don't even waste your time with that shit. Cryptic can't code a game to save their life, literally every single patch they released something else broke. There are major bugs in the game that have gone unfixed for well over a year. One game-breaking exploit in particular went unfixed and ignored by Cryptic for so long that finally a podcast host had to get a dev on his show and demonstrate right in front of his face that there was a bug.

Literally every patch they released had some 2nd-grade spelling or grammar error somewhere. These are supposed to be professional developers getting paid for this garbage?

And PWE being their new master isn't helping things either. Really, you think Ubisoft, EA, Activistion are bad? Go look at PWE and their games. They're in an entirely different league. Blacklight Retribution, another PWE game, is an F2P online shooter where you literally pay real money just to "rent" enhanced weapons and perks. If you want to unlock them permanently, you need to pay exorbitantly higher prices.

STO has been totally gutted and turned into a cookie-cutter PWE MMO, i.e. everything worthwhile is either absurdly expensive or you have to gamble for it via lockboxes, making it even more absurdly expensive. A 3-pack of ships, which are all identical except for having one unique skill on each ship, costs $50 in their store... I could buy almost any recent AAA title for that, and get a whole game in return.

They nerfed the dilithium exchange (where you can trade earned-in-game currency for cash shop tokens to buy things) when they got rid of cryptic points and moved to an all-Zen system under PWE. They lowered the cap on conversion rates so it is harder now to earn Zen by grinding in-game currency. Not to mention when they implemented the dilithium system with the launch of F2P and converted everyone's legacy currency to dilithium, they outright robbed every single loyal paying STO player of minimum 30% of their in-game assets, and as much as 70% or more if you were really wealthy. At first, the conversion formula was kept secret because it was "too complicated to go into". Until after the community got together, compared their conversion results, and figured the (relatively straightforward) conversion equation out. And everybody learned they were getting shafted up the ass.

PWE's cash-shop lottery mechanics went so far to the extreme that the Danish government actually started investigating STO and PWE/Cryptic specifically for violations of online gambling laws. I think Cryptic got scared and backed it off a little, but that's how extreme they were trying to take it- and finally someone in a big seat noticed.

With the Ferengi lockboxes, when I quit playing, the highest "prize" cost on average $800-$1000 in lockboxes if you looked at the statistical distribution of the prizes. The players figured that one out on their own too, since Cryptic won't release drop rates/loot tables for the lockboxes. And that was after PWE put in the "loser prizes" (lobi crystals) to make people feel like they were getting something each time they opened a lock box.

I read that to get the highest-tier, maxed out fleet starbase in Season 6 it will cost around $1500 total.

Things were so bad the game's #1 video podcast went off the air twice, once because there was nothing positive to talk about for so long just prior to F2P that the host decided to quit until there was, and the second time for the same reason except this time the host was smart enough to call it quits for good. In one of his last episodes he remarked that he had pretty strong evidence suggesting that more people listened to his podcast than played the game. I'm not surprised, I was one of them for a while (watched his vidcast but was not actively playing).

Cryptic are so bad at releasing content. The game went around a full year with literally zero meaningful mission/content update. And this was when the game was still under the subscription model, so every active player was paying a monthly fee during that entire time. The developers promised 5 or 6 mission series in one year, and ended up delivering 1. Then after almost a year of nothing, 2012 rolled around and they finally released another, with the launch of F2P. But just barely, that new mission series (the Bajoran series) was literally being put together the week before each new episode was supposed to come out. One of the missions even had to be released in a partially-unfinished state because they couldn't release it on time. At least this time around they had more realistic projections, the lead producer said it would be "epic win" if they could get 2 mission series out in 2012. Just FYI, a mission series runs about 4 or 5 missions long with one released each week for a month or so. Played back-to-back, you can finish a series in about 2 hours. So for the entire 2012 calendar year, Cryptic feels that releasing 4 hours worth of story mission content is "epic win". That should speak volumes about Cryptic's ability to sustain a game with content.

After 2+ years of empty promises for a fully fleshed-out klingon faction, only to finally own up to the fact that they can't be assed to finish it. 2 full factions was one feature they specifically touted long before the original launch of the game. Now they just call it the "monster play" faction. Back in 2010 or 2011 the lead producer of the game claimed that half the dev team was working on klingon content... it eventually came to be revealed that literally nobody was working on klingon content at all.

Good god I could just go on and on... Since launch (and especially since PWE's takeover and F2P) Cryptic has misled, lied to, and outright scammed the playerbase all to make more profit. They said that they were introducing dilithium to simplify the game economy because there were too many forms of in-game currency beforehand. Except then they introduced specific "currency" for STFs (raids), Lobi crystals, borg salvage, etc. Basically there are just as many if not more currencies in the game now, and most of them take up inventory space now. Oops hey that bank storage expansion is just another $5 though, amirite?

The devs even conned a bunch of players into buying a 2-ship bundle off the cash store shortly before the game went F2P because the prices were going to go up, and once a bunch of people bought the 2-ship pack but then only got one of the ships, Cryptic said "oops! Our bad- we mistyped the terms of that deal. It was actually referring to a different ship bundle that we actually never put on the store. Oh well! Oh by the way, we're not going to do jack shit to fix it- no refunds, no giving away the other ship for those who bought the bundle under false pretenses, you're SOL. Have fun! The other ship is now on the store for $10." If I remember right, this kind of "scam" situation happened at least twice where players were misled (intentionally or not) due to an error on Cryptic's behalf and Cryptic refused to make their mistake right to their paying customers.

Speaking of prices, when F2P came out they promised that most of the cash shop items would be cheaper since the game was F2P and previously free items would now have to be purchased with money. Oops! By "cheaper" they really meant that 90% of the items in the cash shop got more expensive... coincidentally they got more expensive by exactly the amount of the stipend that subscription-paying and lifetime members get each month. Nothing to see here folks just move along...

To cap it all off their account server got hacked and everybody's info was stolen- 16 (yes, sixteen) months later they finally realized it and said "oh yeah we were checking up on some stuff recently and noticed that our account info was compromised". That's the kind of company you want to trust your credit card info with, yeah.

Seriously, if you're curious about STO, I'll save you the trouble. Don't even waste your time just because it's "free". Your time is more valuable than that. Go find a quality title from a competent developer and enjoy your gaming time. If you want to play a F2P MMO there are tons out there more worthy than STO. Cryptic is the laughing stock of the MMO world and deservedly so.

 

[XvMMvX]

After I saw this topic I gave it a try for a few hours. Seems fun, but after the rant above I am questioning if I want to continue playing.

 

[CEpeep]

Thanks for the comments, Ruahrc. I don't have enough experience with the cash purchase part of the game to knowledgeably comment, but it sounds like it's poorly managed at best and deceptive at worst. I will say though that expecting the developer to release drop formulas or lottery percentages for items is unreasonable. Formulas for converting to dilithium should have been released (if only so players could have calculated in advance and used their currency for best advantage), but the devs shouldn't release stats on how likely certain items drop or how likely you are to win certain items from lockboxes. If players want to calculate based on their own observations and release unofficial stats, that's fine, but the true numbers are part of the proprietary information that keeps the game going. I play the game only casually, and have no intention of ever paying real money for it, but it's good to hear the insights of a (former?) serious player.

 

[Ruahrc]

It may not be quite the same, but I think Valve releases the odds of getting various hats from their in-game TF2 lockboxes. It's also a little different but I also believe Blizzard publishes loot tables and drop rates for the bosses in the game so raiding parties know their chances of success on rolling the best loot(?).

You can go and look at Cryptic's website yourself and see how they market the lockboxes at you, what I will tell you is that to the best of my knowledge (unless it's changed in the last few months which I doubt), getting the "grand prize" starship from one lockbox is a chance of 0.5%. And getting the starship from the more lucrative golden lock boxes is a 1% chance. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions from there.

The game is transparently a cash grab PWE MMO, and the very definition of P2W. There is a button on the UI that is a gear and weapon vendor which sells things using dilithium (the in-game currency you can interchange for real currency). You can access this vendor from literally anywhere. Even during a firefight in the middle of a mission. I mean I guess in the 24th century, you would expect commerce to be quite advanced (except that the Federation has no currency because everything is free for federation citizens) but it's so game-breakingly transparent that all you need to do is flip out your wallet anywhere and you can have whatever you need.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

Well, if you want more end game content its here and it was even a bit to overwhelming for me. No longer the same 6 STF (3 space and 3 ground), which award end game gear sets and MK XII weapons (highest lvl), but now we have Nakaru Prime which has lvl 50 missions spread out in two areas each with three difficulty areas, which award a new ground set and new type of weapon with sonic damage. You also now have the Fleet Events, which you can queue like most others, but award Fleet Marks which can be turned in for Fleet Credit to buy new Retro Fit versions of all the ships except the tier 0 and the Conni, new uber rare weapons/fighter hangers and yet to be unlocked (by lvling the fleet system) sets and operational assets which you can use during the fleet events (adds fighter/escort wings, gives team buffs and even gives the Starbase some uber weapons, which are needed for 20 man events/raids).

Only down side to the Season 6 update are Fleet Ship Modules (FSM), which are bought for realy money and you need them if you want the uber versions of the ships with the prefix "Fleet", these ships have 10 consoles, new Bridge Officer layouts (what give your ships powers) and improved hull, the cost is 200k fleet credit which isn't to bad considering you'll constantly be contributing Marks and items to the base, but also 4 FSM (or 1 FSM if you own the tier 5 version of the ships, Defiant, Galaxy or Voyager Retrofit or the Heavy Escort Carrier). But on the other hand, you can get the currency to purchase FSM from the Dilithium Exchange where you trade a limited in game currency for the really money currency called Zen ($1 to 100zen) or people are selling them for between 6-15million EC (energy credits, which is the standard currency) on the regular exchange. EC, can easily be earn (about 1 million EC for about two hours of STF for example if you sell the gear to vendors and the better stuff on the exchange, the gear you want from the STFs you buy with the STF currency from the STF store anyways.

The Foundry has been down since the season 6 update, but should be back up on Thursday and this is another good selling point for the game, which is user made content. If your curious about them, there are review sites up where you can get an idea of how creative some of these folks can be.

EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfiyBz3lSLM

ok you convinced me to re-install STO.. more shit to do finally!

 

[fdiaz78]

I wish Paramount would cancel or not renew the license to Cryptic. What an absolute disgrace what they have done to the IP in the hands of these incompetent people.

 

[Sycraft]

Ya sadly enough most "free" MMOs turn in to nothing but insane money-grabs. They try to figure out a way to maximally monetize every single little thing and thus screw over the game.

One of the few games I have seen that isn't like that is DDO, probably due to its modular nature. You can either pay $15/month and receive access to all modules, now an in the future, so long as you keep paying, or you can buy modules on a per module basis for a one time cost. When you throw a little math at it you find that it is pretty much the same price either way, just lets people pay how they want, or pay less if they can't afford it all. I have a friend who plays it and likes it for that. He buys all the modules, but he'd rather pay $50 for a pack of points a few times a year and then buy the modules as they come out rather than $15/month. He knows it isn't saving him money, just how he likes to do things.

However STO seems to be all about the money grab. Nickle and dime people for every little thing, try to grab cash from any and everything, try to make it more expensive than when it was a subscription MMO. They aren't concerned with overall fun, just with "How can we get people to spend as much as possible right away?"

In terms of Paramount canceling the license, don't count on it. Paramount appears to have howler monkey who make decisions for what game studios to give licenses to. I can't think of a good Star Trek game in a long, long time. That isn't because nothing good could be done with the license, there's tons of story and visuals to make a great game. It is because they license it to stupid devs that fuck it up.

As far as Paramount is concerned, this is probably a success .

 

[sirmonkey1985]

I wish Paramount would cancel or not renew the license to Cryptic. What an absolute disgrace what they have done to the IP in the hands of these incompetent people.

honestly i blame cryptics parent company more then them.. but either way i gave the game another try and honestly its just as boring as it was before.. how hard is it to fucking understand how to add more levels to the game and give us something to play for. why do game developers not understand this.. quit putting level caps in your games ffs!