Feeling Disconnected

[Jalification]

I just recently came back to the game and I’ve been playing now a bit more then a month. Started out just before DR launched. I’ve spend some money and worked my way up.

I’m not going to complain how Cryptic;
– Made leveling and spec points way to grindy
– Unbalanced gameplay
– Unclear mechanics
– Unclear communication
– Killed PVP (for my friends)
– Having multiple character not worthy
– Upgrading a ship way to expensive
– Ground Combat feeling clunky
– Countless contineus bugs
– Prices at Z-Store

However; This isn’t a Star Trek game anymore.. it only has the skin of a star trek game. My Reasons & Observation?

Star Trek is about the People around it, not only Equipment;
I totally feel disconnected with my ship and crew. When you think about the Enterprise & Voyager; The Crew made the ship for what it was; sure… the ships are a iconic symbol. But the ships were all standard issue Starfleet. Those who made the ship perform as it is was the crew.

Currently as it stands you only give them a set of abilities (which are determined by the ship Bo-Layout, not their “potential” personal skill). The only way to improve your performance on your ship is getting specific equipment and with specific modifiers, there is no room for personal development beside character creation.

But; The above results in another unwanted behavior with players. Since CrtH & CrtD are so important; it is obvious that Romulan characters are in demand to increase your DPS. Allll the other races are being ignored as they have no place on their bridge as their race traits are not good enough. You know what does sounds to me? Racism and Discrimination – Yet I toughed this wasn’t the place for it; and specially not in the universe of Star Trek where it’s basic principles are based on equality.

I don’t think I’ve to say how useless my main Character is (a Vulcan), I honestly feel he is also being a bottleneck if I want to improve the quality of my ship. Therefor I’m feeling also disconnected with my main character; no matter how many times I put him at the tailor and give him new clothing.

Starting a New character that suits me? ha… sorry, I simply don’t have the time and the will anymore to do that.

Now I’m considering what I’m going to do; keep playing and try to make a connection with my crew and (ship) or simply stop playing the game while being less effective; but that just results me in being forced into content that is too difficult or limited.

But I understand the rage of so many people; I don’t think they would care about bugs, game mechanics and whatever – aslong as they were connected to that character they have.

TL;DR; Cryptic & PWE are unintentionally promoting racism & discrimination and their focus on aquiring equipment instead of building upon your crew are in direct confrontation with the basic principles of Star Trek. Therefor I don’t think this is a Star Trek game anymore, but pure a skin.

[Damix]

Reason why I started playing this game is to be Science officer that would discover new things and explore the universe. This is my first MMO so I wasn’t sure what can I get from this game. Story missions were most enjoyable and for me that is the best part of the game. Soon I discovered that endgame is PvE so decision was to go that way to develop my character and get the best equipment I can. Mistake was made as I went into DPS race where I wanted to maximize everything and after some time that actually ruined my game because that is the path without end. I made a short pause to rest and realized there is absolutely no reason why I would need to have the best gear. To have fun, there is no reason for me to role a Romulan Tac captain that I made to maximize things. That is the reason why my fed Sci Trill that I created 2 years ago is my main again. If you looks past the dps, you can see some Star Trek in it. It is more than a month since expansion came and I still haven’t tried out Kobali adventure zone! And I’m really looking forward to exploring that game map.

Yeah, game could be better and has a lot of potential and my hopes are they will surprise me one day. I’m not happy with way it is going so only way for me is to change the way I play into something that I’ll enjoy.

Principles are based on equality in ST but there is also diversity between species. There is no reason why some species can’t have higher crit.chance. They have -40 power levels and less ships to choose from. How is this reflecting on game balance, I don’t know, probably not good – PvPers would know more. But my whole world changed when winner of last Fleet Olympics was Fed sci Nebula – THE MIGHTY PANCAKE!! captained by Fatman, he won against Romulan ships too! He probably had less dps.

[fatman592]

From the PvP perspective (which became my endgame over the past year):

To be fair, Feedback Pulse reflects between 0.5x to 1.5x base damage back at the recipient. I knew that most people in the fleet didn’t PvP and would bring their best PvE builds (as in DPS) with some minor tweaks. I also knew that PvE does absolutely nothing to prepare players for PvP. So if anything, I exploited the Tac Captain Romulan DPS race meta. Most people say FBP is as cheap as Vaping – it’s all just play, counter-play stuff to me…

Romulans are utterly imbalanced. It comes down to three points, crit rates, going invisible at will and singularity jump. The first is the only one that effects PvE, while the three together effect PvP greatly. But Feds got more traits and ships with DR and KDF got the biggest shaft as usual.

The problem – besides game breaking bugs – I have with DR, is that I feel much less powerful in all content at level 60 than I did at 50. In PvP, Vapers got more toys. Pre-DR it used to take a team to disable and quickly kill a target (drain/disable teams). Now with Intel powers, a lone ship can slow, disable, debuff and get 50k DHC shots in addition to their BOs and TSs… There’s not enough counters and what’s worse, is that to activate more counters twitch response is slower while the attacker can activate under cloak. If I died to a team, at least I felt I was bested by numbers, not broken powers and macros.

In addition, Marcase’s infographic shows how ridiculously high the barrier of entry for PvP has gotten. Couple that with the learning curve, it’s pretty much impossible to PvP these days. So DR essentially killed an entire portion of gameplay for me. It would be like removing the Foundry, Exploration Clusters (oh wait), RP or PvE queue.

My main is a Sci Captain, I wanted to explore too but I gave up on that pretty early. I like the pew-pew as much as the next guy, but not against HP sponge NPCs. So here I am, bored at an inservice, still active on our forums while inactive in game.

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." - Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

[Blackout]

But my whole world changed when winner of last Fleet Olympics was Fed sci Nebula – THE MIGHTY PANCAKE!! captained by Fatman, he won against Romulan ships too! He probably had less dps.

Pft. That only happened because I didn’t enter. I would have warped the metagame on my own 😉

Honestly though, this game stopped being about Star Trek the second the story writers decided that the Federation should be fighting like 50 wars. How the Federation isn’t collapsing under the weight of having to fight pretty much every single faction in the Galaxy is beyond me. It would be like if there was a Hello Kitty MMO like this:

[Sargon]

fisrt the hello kitty thing is great, but in reference to Jalif’s post….

indeed, having multiple characters is out of the question now. too bad I bought the DR pack. my last cash purchase no matter what. I do have LTS so 500 zen per month is my budget.

i’m not sure if cryptic intended to force people to play only one character because of the cost or if they thought people would, with cash, buy tons of dilithium. I am in no hurry. only have 1 character now, 3 ships, 2 of which share equipment and 3 dilithium farmers.

PVP has been a ghost town the last few times I visited. I don’t have the desire to grind for a pvp and pve build. I was never a great pvp’er anyway, so i’m done unless something big changes.

ground is rarely played. always been that way and unfortunately probably will always be that way.

as long as I enjoy it I will continue to play and hope cryptic can learn from their mistakes and make the game better.

live long and prosper

[fatman592]

@Blackout wrote:

Pft. That only happened because I didn’t enter. I would have warped the metagame on my own 😉

Honestly though, this game stopped being about Star Trek the second the story writers decided that the Federation should be fighting like 50 wars. How the Federation isn’t collapsing under the weight of having to fight pretty much every single faction in the Galaxy is beyond me.

First, I’ll put the “Pancake of Doom” back together and do a 1v1 anytime. You too can taste it’s syrupy-sweet wrath!

Second, this sounds like a Babylon 5 quote: “Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts.” – Londo Mollari

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." - Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

[horridperson]

I’m pretty sure I realized that STO didn’t quite feel Trek at some point during my first couple in game hours. Watching Tony Todd as Admiral Ramirez delivering his speech in Archer Arena in the Axanar prelude;THIS is what the Federation at war should feel like.

In spite of what I consider to be a radical departure from what I consider the ethical core of Star Trek I still enjoy the game. The recent expansion has created what I consider to be some very serious imbalances; The greatest in my mind being a, “shoot the moon” post 60 specialization system. Without a ceiling to a captain’s power it becomes difficult to create content that will create appropriate challenges and allowing for such potential power ranges between captain’s is a serious oversight that I think opened the door to the silly power levels that have been exhibited by the opposition in the recent PvE content. To scale challenge the potential power levels of players must to be quantified and limited to a specific ceiling. An open end made this an impossibility and an uphill battle through resource sinks and reduced experience only delays this inevitable realization.

There are a lot of ideas and issues in this thread and if I tried to share everything I’m thinking about having read all the posts this would be prohibitively long. I think I’ll write a post in the future about how I try to manage 13 characters, another about how I’d like to see crew play a more important role in the running of a ship and another still about who actually likes 40k (don’t like the game much, But I do enjoy modelling and painting 🙂 )

I remain optimistic there will be ongoing improvements to the present state of the game. I find it difficult to believe that with the volume of negative feedback the studio has received of late that things will remain as they are. As a final note remember that games are for your enjoyment and that it doesn’t have to be a race although I’m sorry that I have been unable to open some of the level gated content I can participate more actively with you all.

[Marcase]

You just hit my main problem with the whole leveling issue – because it’s so hard, arduous and expensive in terms of actual time investments, many in our fleet won’t be able to participate in future fleet runs. STO still is supposedly an MMO, so Cryptic should’ve focused on more “guild”/fleet playable content instead of required solo grinding to unlock higher tiers so you can finally join your fleet playing the “good” missions.

Ofcourse, you can run Elite PVE’s with mk XII gear, but future content will undoubtedly be even more level gated, creating a division within the playerbase that will alienate potential customers.

I still love this game, mainly because of all the ships I can play with – messing around with setups and loadouts is something I enjoy doing, so I’m here for the long run – yet I’m still “only” silver and I haven’t felt the need to radically increase the amount of cash I contributed so far.

I really enjoyed running ground and space STFs with you lot, Kancho and everything, but I foresee that a lot of fleeties won’t be able to keep up with the required leveling; and it’s not even a money issue, but a simple time issue. As Blackout mentioned earlier, time is indeed money.
We all have real lives with jobs and families and Orion mistresses (uh, strike that last) that require attention and we can’t waste hours on grinding when we have better things to do.

"Boldly bashing Borg to bits since 2012..."

[fatman592]

@Marcase wrote:

*snip*

… but I foresee that a lot of fleeties won’t be able to keep up with the required leveling; and it’s not even a money issue, but a simple time issue. As Blackout mentioned earlier, time is indeed money.
We all have real lives with jobs and families and Orion mistresses (uh, strike that last) that require attention and we can’t waste hours on grinding when we have better things to do.

I got my DR pack with in game dilithium. I’m not dissatisfied with the pack, I’m dissatisfied with other things. I love ships and Trek, but you hit the nail on the head for me. I’m just not interested in investing my time right now. Yet another XP nerf and not adding the T6 Intrepid to the DR Pack were just two more fails. Got a new job and I spent some money in the Steam store. I’ve adopted a wait and see approach for fixes, but the phrase “when hell freezes over” comes to mind.

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." - Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

[Author]

Posts