SRS Weekly NEWS 19:08:23

Hey folks, sorry this is late, I've been away at the weekend and very busy with work. For this week we are extending the cruiser event for the rest of this week and a new event will begin on Saturday.

Cryptic News (A WARNING)

Mudd's Taking a Cruise Pack - What a monumental ripoff

This pack which is priced at 29500 zen or $295 is half price for the first month. There are a lot of problems with this pack for me.

The ships are all quite old now and only the ships from the 23rd century pack are reasonably up to date but none of them are top tier. The Jem Light Cruiser is ok, I fly one sometimes and its double Command station makes it a powerful CRF platform. The Walker is hopelessly outdated. The 50 master keys are bound on pickup so you can only sell the items you open from boxes, so unless you are lucky and win a ship (ha) you can only get a fraction of the value from the keys that you would expect to get if you sold them. The 300 lobi is a total joke, you would get about that opening the 50 lock boxes plus all the fluff and possibly a ship from the lock boxes, the 300 lobi option is a trap to dupe people who don't fully understand STO to waste their money and is a very duplicitous and cynical ploy by Cryptic. It should be 600 lobi to make it actually worth something. The tech upgrades and Elite BOFF tokens simply aren't worth it. Now, to put this into perspective, what else could you get for $295, well how about these: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 - $70 Starfield - $70 Balders Gate 3 - $70 Hogwarts Legacy - $40 Elder Scrolls Online Necrom Chapter - $30

Cyperpunk Phantom Liberty DLC $30

Total $310

Even with the discount of 50% for a month, you could choose at least two of these top-selling AAA games for this price and for the full cost you could get all of them, Starfield, BG3 and Necrom will give you about 500 hours of content (possibly way more if Starfield is as big as it seems), the Cryptic pack gives you 0 hours of content unless you count new ships (new to you) as content. In my opinion, for these old ships, the entire pack of 5 ships is worth no more than $30 (remember these ships have been out for many years). It's Cryptic's policy to put ships into Mudds to make people pay extraordinary amounts for ships that were previously available for lower prices or in some cases free if you could earn them during an event. This pricing system is so toxic it has driven many players from the game and others like me simply refuse to pay a single penny to Cryptic any more. It wouldn't be so bad if there were sprawling new areas of the galaxy full of explorable star systems and amazing new stories in which you could use your expensive ships, but as we all know there is no new content of this sort and nor is there likely to be. So my advice folks for what it's worth is to keep your money in your pocket and spend it on something with actual value, not on a bunch of aged pixels in a game that's arguably in maintenance mode.