Star Trek Online Discussion Thread (now free to play!)

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

SW:TOR is going free on Thursday, think I'm going to check that out. Not that their system is guaranteed to be any better, might even be worse, but it'll be NEW, and those DEVs haven't made a history out of disappointing and/or (usually and) lying to me.

In TOR you can't even do endgame if you're a free player. At all; only subscribers can do the raids.

True, and with some very big restrictions on gameplay overall. But spending as little as 5 bucks already lifts some of those permanently (buying a game copy from a bargain bin is enough) and playing through all 8 PvE storyline takes literally months!
So even a F2Per will never be out of stuf to do for up to a year. if you are still on it by then and hooked it is even likely you will have subbed by then.

 

[Rocketeer]

Was able to get on this weekend and do a mission and some other things with the daughter. That was fun.

Didn't have time to test anything on S7 yet. Update was initially a 1.2GB patch. Apparently that got corrupted then it went to a 3.9GB patch and that errored out at the end and went back to a 1.2GB patch. So I have it, but haven't looked at it yet.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Meh, the possibility of 1440 dilithium per fleet action kind of negates any annoyance I have with the dilithium changes.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

If it were solely for having an easy source for dilithium I'd agree. grind whatever mindless task is, however, not enough.
I want to have a tiny bit of fun while doing that.
And I want it to be social at teh same time.

Cryptic destroyed that possibility for now.

It's either advance (which will never end by the way, they will always introduce twice as many resource sinks than you can fill) or be a social player who has fun but only until it stops fun because he is falling behind... great choice...

 

[Scout101]

yeah, it's not that you can't get DIL (or Omega Marks, or Fleet Marks, or Romulan Marks, or EC, or Lobi, or Borg Neural Processors, or...) anywhere, it's that you've got yet again that many more to get, and you have to do what they want, for a set period of time, to get them. STFs were decent in that you used to be able to get a good variety (minus Fleet Marks) all in one place, and there was a little strategy and teamwork involved.

The SB24 (the new farm zone) DOES award DIL, but it's nothing but spam the spacebar for 1 minute, collect rewards. Why in the hell would you want to do that, and why's it preferable to what we were doing? Boring as all hell.

 

[Jaro Stun]

Just seems shocking that a whole new season launch is going over with this big a thud. No excitement, angry players, not even a splashscreen on the loader announcing the damn thing happened. (Still trying to sell us DOFF packs instead. Important, as they just made getting them in-game more expensive so that we'd buy these for cash). Only positive in a sea of negative changes is I guess we got a pretty new map to grind on. Same repetitive missions, rep system, another resource sink in the embassy to have to do MORE grinding on, but hey, it's new content, right? Right?

yes, thats what happens when you take western high value IP property and hand it over to asian grindfest developers. This is becoming eastern grindgame / chest opener with every patch they provide. It is kind of hard to be excited about that.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I can certainly see the drawbacks. That said--for me it has been the Foundry content that has kept me coming back. People have been complaining about losing the console clickies, but from the standpoint of someone who does want missions that have a story behind them, it's not going to be any change for me in what I do in-game. I was already mostly using full-length missions for my Officer Reports anyway. Unfortunately the Nagus Dailies (which I used to sharpen my space combat skills) may not make it under the new system, but I am sure I can find a 20-minute fighting mission for those times when I just want to fight, go after an accolade, or whatever.

As far as the fleet I belong to goes...honestly I doubt there will be any changes for us even though we're not that large. We probably won't pursue the embassy (though it remains to be seen what fleet leadership does), but I would say that for my fleet, we have other reasons for playing as a group than the speed of leveling up either ourselves or our starbase.

 

[Scout101]

the 1-clicks should have been blocked ages ago, obvious exploit. Annoying that they allowed that this long

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Cryptic keeps somersaulting.

They returned the promised 480/960 dilithium rewards to STFs.
Unfortunately for those hoping for easy FA grinding, those rewards have been cut to 480-640 (may be tweaked again).

 

[Ruaidhri]

I'm most surprised by their apparent inability to predict how their player base will respond to their changes. The fact that they keep flip flopping makes it seem like they really thought people wouldn't bat an eyelash.

 

[Blamo]

The SB24 (the new farm zone) DOES award DIL, but it's nothing but spam the spacebar for 1 minute, collect rewards. Why in the hell would you want to do that, and why's it preferable to what we were doing? Boring as all hell.

To be honest I found STFs exactly the same, rather mindless and boring, especially having done something like 3 a day since the game went F2P.

On the otherhand fleet actions enabled me to get my dilithium grinding done quickly and allowed me to get on to doing something fun (like PvP and exploring new Romulus).

With cryptic nerfing the dilithium reward of fleet actions I've instead got to waste more time grinding it.

 

[sbk1234]

Am I the only one who can't access Foundry missions?

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

That's because the whole Foundry is disabled until all the missiosn are savely ported over into the new season code.

 

[sbk1234]

Thanks for the info. Any idea how long?

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Shouldn't be more than a few days. Somewhere next week at the latest I think.

 

[intrinsical]

Annndddddd Cryptic's opened Pandora's Box.

Elite STF channels have started forming level 1 private SB24 swarms that cut down those klingon ships as if they were butter. 1440 dilithium in 90 seconds tops, no cooldown.

So Cryptic wanted players to have more dilithium, they've got it.

 

[Rocketeer]

The SB24 (the new farm zone) DOES award DIL, but it's nothing but spam the spacebar for 1 minute, collect rewards. Why in the hell would you want to do that, and why's it preferable to what we were doing? Boring as all hell.

I ran SB24 several times during the double fleet marks. Can be done in 20 minutes with a bad pug, quicker if you have players that know what they're doing.

 

[Scout101]

I didn't say it took very long. I said it was boring as hell. ZERO strategy, no teamwork, just rush in, slam the spacebar for a minute or two, collect DIL.

Again, it's not that the new required farming is hard, it's that it's mind-numbingly boring. And I have no interest in playing it...

As for the New Romulus stuff? Kinda symptomatic of Cryptic's overall issue: visually, it's very nice. They've created a nice little adventure planet setting. But they didn't create any adventures to HAVE on the planet. Scan 5 of x, encourage Y number of workers to stop being lazy shits, go over there and click "f" 5 times. It's just grindy little mini-games, but no reason behind it, or much fun in it. They like to play with the systems, but have abandoned the gameplay portion, the reason to DO the things. It's just another new currency, grindfests to collect it 10 marks at a time, and then a massive sink to drop them in. Despite an obvious amount of work that went into it, I just don't see the point. Ran around for a couple hours there, and pretty much already had enough.

They did the same thing with Bajor. Created a great map, beautiful scenery. And then just put a couple tiny grind games in there and abandoned it. When was the last time you were there? They spend all this time on it, and it's wasted because they can't figure out how to make them ENGAGING. Just nice scenery or 'click f 5 times' missions.

They also can't seem to just TWEAK anything. They go in for wholesale changes to the entire system. If they weren't happy with DIL rates, could have tried adjusting things, more here, little less there, see what happens. Instead, they nuke the most popular ones (to the point where the backlash already has them reversing course), attach the big rewards to garbage missions that no one plays anymore (not because of the rewards, but because they are boring, awful missions), nuke several currencies (again), create whole new ones (screwing everyone yet again on the conversion rates), etc. Can't even make sense of half of what they changed. Even little stuff, like visual items like the PVE queue screen. Awful, muddled mess. What was wrong with that one? Or knowing roughly how many people were in the queue, whether it was worth signing up in the first place.

 

[Amaris]

Yep. So it's all about SB24, now. I queued up, was able to go in 2 seconds, and that was at 11:00 PM at night on a weeknight! Off we go. I figured I'd get in there, we'd work together and get them taken down in no time. Sure enough, I show up, everyone's already pewpewpewing, and 3 minutes later, we're all done. Ta da?

 

[intrinsical]

As for the New Romulus stuff? Kinda symptomatic of Cryptic's overall issue: visually, it's very nice. They've created a nice little adventure planet setting. But they didn't create any adventures to HAVE on the planet. Scan 5 of x, encourage Y number of workers to stop being lazy shits, go over there and click "f" 5 times. It's just grindy little mini-games, but no reason behind it, or much fun in it. They like to play with the systems, but have abandoned the gameplay portion, the reason to DO the things. It's just another new currency, grindfests to collect it 10 marks at a time, and then a massive sink to drop them in. Despite an obvious amount of work that went into it, I just don't see the point.

Agreed. It comes down to having only one writer on the team who seem to be treated as a junior staff and does not seem to have any power or say in what goes into the game.

Strangely, Champs Online seem to have a much stronger and more cohesive storyline with actual adventures and such.