Star Trek: Online
- Thread starter tranya
- Start date
- Status
I will definitely enjoy 
wow, I have seen the lack of "love" for silvers on the Champions Online forums! I guess, if you arn't paying, who gives a shit about you or your questions/ideas/problems! (i.e. you can't even post except on the technical issues forum!) Thus another reason to subscribe for life with STO!
Exactly! There is no "welcome back veteren players" or anything! In fact, if you want to even play on your old account, you either have to convert one of your old characters to silver (thus reducing his effectivness) OR deleting some old characters to get to the TWO silver character limit!!! How is that for a find how do you do? The best choice right now is to simply create a new account to make your two new silver characters. And heaven help you if you have any questions about anything.... So far, not liking this F2P model. Let's hope STO NEVER goes this route!
The people at STO are going to be looking at Champions Online and see how it goes with F2P, and they'll learn from the mistakes and pitfalls.
Personally, I don't like Champions. I downloaded it and started to play it, but it was so clunky and difficult to play, especially when compared to STO. It could have been my computer, but it was laggy and not very responsive. I never had those problems with STO.
Personally, I don't like Champions. I downloaded it and started to play it, but it was so clunky and difficult to play, especially when compared to STO. It could have been my computer, but it was laggy and not very responsive. I never had those problems with STO.
Well for me it's a combination of things.
1. I like Star Trek and I like Starfleet Command (which is what the space combat system slightly resembles)
2. The game is getting updated constantly.
Examples:-
*Extending the level cap to Vice Admiral (level 51)
*Whole host of new ships for both Federation(Excelsior and Nebula class) and Klingons.
*Newer, better missions (both in how the play out and how they're written). I do get the feeling the original missions were a rush job.
*Updated the crafting system to make it relevant... Which made me facepalm since I got rid of all my data samples.
*Improved sector space so it's more impressive.
*etc etc etc
The devs are revisiting some old missions and updating them.
And upcoming is a cool revamp of the Earth Spacedock, which looks like it's being changed into the Starbase from Star Trek III.
3. For me personally - PvP. Once you've fought against experienced players and adjusted your set up to fight them, you'll find NPC battles to be easy.
They should have extended each player level quite a bit. The number of points you get is stupid considering they only put 51 levels in the thing and no real endgame. I just started a new character, played the tutorial/intro level, and did that rescue mission right outside Sol, and I'm almost finished LT (2). Should I be 3 out of 51 levels complete for surviving the tutorial? 
Next revamp maybe needs to double the points required to level, at a minimum. Not sure what you an do about the people already at rank, other than ignore them and just make it slower from there on, but it will fix any new people...
Next revamp maybe needs to double the points required to level, at a minimum. Not sure what you an do about the people already at rank, other than ignore them and just make it slower from there on, but it will fix any new people...
They should have extended each player level quite a bit. The number of points you get is stupid considering they only put 51 levels in the thing and no real endgame. I just started a new character, played the tutorial/intro level, and did that rescue mission right outside Sol, and I'm almost finished LT (2). Should I be 3 out of 51 levels complete for surviving the tutorial?
Next revamp maybe needs to double the points required to level, at a minimum. Not sure what you an do about the people already at rank, other than ignore them and just make it slower from there on, but it will fix any new people...
They can't do that until they can put in content to match it; if they just double the points required, it'll force everybody to grind, and most people don't like grinding.
I have been playing for a year now, and my main is STILL only a Captain 6! Normally I would be happy to stay a Captain (as that is the quintessesional rank of Star Trek) but all the good stuff is for RA's! So am ready to make that rank. HOWEVER, once I do make it, I am going to continue to keep my Captain's pip's/stripes.
Not only that, but you can keep flying the title "Captain" as part of your name.
Your Captain-rank ships won't be able to compete even with RA/VA gear, but the RA ships are identical to VA ships, and there's a selection of iconic ships from other parts of the spectrum. Also, the VA ships themselves are just RA-level refits of lower level ships with an iconic power, to wit:
Galaxy class, with Saucer Separation
Intrepid class, with Ablative Armor Generator
Defiant class, with Cloaking Device
So you can tool around competitively at RA and VA in those, a Nebula, or an Excelsior (those last two are C-Store purchases, or use umpteen Emblems from running STFs) and not be even a little gimped.
Ok, well whose fault is it that they didn't think it through before releasing the game, then?
I guess the question would be: which do people hate more? Grinding out missions (less painful once the weeklies started), and slowly moving through the ranks, or essentially beating the game within six months, and sitting around doing NOTHING between episodes, or just not playing much?
At least with grinding it out, it forces you to play more of the game, do PvP stuff for points, do the defense missions more than once, etc. And still has the reward of getting that new ship, or extra pip, or whatever drives you.
Getting to the 'end' of a game that's supposed to be years long, all within a short span, isn't a good plan. People paying on any other scale than Lifetime are now essentially paying to sit around and wait for the developers to catch up.
Atari's, for spending the amount of money they did, instead of some hypothetical other amount that would produce the amount of content that you would have preferred.
BTW, according to their data mining, the VAST majority (their emphasis on "vast") of players haven't hit RA 1 yet, on any characters. Only active subscribers were sampled in that.
Vast majority? Have a rough number on that? Seems like there's nothing but level 51 players around when I look. Plus, like I said, i only played with a 6 month sub, missed most of the last month, and didn't play more than a couple hours a week, plus maybe a couple more on the weekends, and managed to max out. Doesn't seem like it takes a whole lot...
Either way, this thing is designed to last YEARS, right? How long until the VAST majority ARE RA1 or higher?
Just saying it doesn't seem like they designed this thing to be a long term game if it can be maxed out so quickly. They're adding new stuff in as quickly as they can, but once you hit the cap, there's not a lot going on anymore. Other than to start over again with a different specialty, I guess.
For my original character, I logged in and caught back up on the weeklies. After that, flew around for a few, did a couple PvP fights, and looked for new missions. Since it was pretty much just Defend missions or stuff like the god-awful Big Dig mission again, that was about it for that character. Not sure a lot of people are going to keep re-upping the non-lifetime subs if that's really all that's left short of starting over.
Your/their emphasis on ACTIVE subscribers may be the key there, as well. What percentage of TOTAL subscribers was that? If 100 people join, 50 race through it and finish, but then don't re-up, I guess you can say that since the other 50 aren't RA or higher yet, the vast majority of subs aren't that high. It's artificially skewing that number towards what they want, which is defending the lack of endgame or advanced content. I'm sure the number IS correct, though, as the people that would remain active subscribers probably haven't gotten to the end and gotten bored yet. I'd probably bet that the VAST majority of NON-ACTIVE accounts are either those that sampled it and didn't decide to keep it (likely mid-LT or lower), or level 51 and then just let the account lapse. Some of those may return if enough new content is added, but who knows?
Sound about right?
The TrekBBS fleet is a pretty perfect example, actually. Most of the people show up as Level 51, and I've never seen most of those people logged in and playing. I think I saw 3 people at the same time once, but that was it. They maxed out, found out there's not much after that, and let it go.
Either way, this thing is designed to last YEARS, right? How long until the VAST majority ARE RA1 or higher?
Just saying it doesn't seem like they designed this thing to be a long term game if it can be maxed out so quickly. They're adding new stuff in as quickly as they can, but once you hit the cap, there's not a lot going on anymore. Other than to start over again with a different specialty, I guess.
For my original character, I logged in and caught back up on the weeklies. After that, flew around for a few, did a couple PvP fights, and looked for new missions. Since it was pretty much just Defend missions or stuff like the god-awful Big Dig mission again, that was about it for that character. Not sure a lot of people are going to keep re-upping the non-lifetime subs if that's really all that's left short of starting over.
Your/their emphasis on ACTIVE subscribers may be the key there, as well. What percentage of TOTAL subscribers was that? If 100 people join, 50 race through it and finish, but then don't re-up, I guess you can say that since the other 50 aren't RA or higher yet, the vast majority of subs aren't that high. It's artificially skewing that number towards what they want, which is defending the lack of endgame or advanced content. I'm sure the number IS correct, though, as the people that would remain active subscribers probably haven't gotten to the end and gotten bored yet. I'd probably bet that the VAST majority of NON-ACTIVE accounts are either those that sampled it and didn't decide to keep it (likely mid-LT or lower), or level 51 and then just let the account lapse. Some of those may return if enough new content is added, but who knows?
Sound about right?
The TrekBBS fleet is a pretty perfect example, actually. Most of the people show up as Level 51, and I've never seen most of those people logged in and playing. I think I saw 3 people at the same time once, but that was it. They maxed out, found out there's not much after that, and let it go.
Not quite true... I still actively play, Although I have 6 characters....
only 3 of them are in TrekBBS. The newer ones are in a different fleet, hat's why you dont see me around anymore.
Another problem might be that, people are scattererd out though different timezones, so a lot end up playing alone, because the other fleet members logged of earlier or are not logged in yet.
The TrekBBS Armada never had enough members to generate a critical mass for 24/7 activity.
So I guess after one year a lot of its members moved on to other fleets at least with new characters....
only 3 of them are in TrekBBS. The newer ones are in a different fleet, hat's why you dont see me around anymore.
Another problem might be that, people are scattererd out though different timezones, so a lot end up playing alone, because the other fleet members logged of earlier or are not logged in yet.
The TrekBBS Armada never had enough members to generate a critical mass for 24/7 activity.
So I guess after one year a lot of its members moved on to other fleets at least with new characters....
Nope; they just said "VAST majority".
Well, if the vast majority aren't yet, and it's been a year, then they've probably got another year to double the content. Since they're also increasing the size of the dev team (based on both an offhand comment from Dan Stahl and the fact that jobs posted around the same time), I think it's doable.
They're also working on more endgame stuff for the folks who hit it quickly, but since that's a minority of the users, it doesn't get the majority of the work.
"active subscribers" means "people who currently have an account with the ability to play the game due to having purchased time, either through their initial 30 days from buying the game, or through paying for a sub or using a time card". "total subscribers" in that context is another term for the same group of people.
I don't know what the percentage is for people who don't have active accounts anymore, and you're right that it's meaningful; it's not something we've been provided though. I know that Dan has access to those numbers, and I know that he knows they're meaningful, so I assume he knows what they are; he's really good about responding to questions, hit him up on the forums.
Interesting. StormShade confirms there's been a surge in Life memberships lately:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?p=3310444#post3310444
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?p=3310444#post3310444
Wouldn't you expect that right after you cut the price down by 20%? The price for the game seems a bit high, or at least that's why I waited until the other day to buy a subscription. If the number of subs has shot up since the price went down, that probably tells you that a lot of people agreed with me...
If people like the game. I wouldn't expect to see a surge in $240 purchases by people who think it sucks.
- Status
