STATE OF THE GAME & SRS

Our latest special event, Liberation is over, thanks to all those who took part.

This event was the least well attended with only two events needing more than one team. In total 11 people took part for some of the events, 5 people took part in most of the events. This was a disappointing turnout and makes me question the whole idea of special events as they take a lot of time and effort and cost a lot in prizes. There probably will be another Special Event, simply because I enjoy the creative side of making them, however, it will not be until mid-September at the earliest as I am very busy IRL and will be on holiday at the end of August. The second run of the Liberation Browser game, which was open to everyone, even those who had done it before, and would net you 100 million EC for winning was only entered by two people. This I find doubly hard to understand. Is 100 million such a tiny amount in-game that it's not worth 10 min of time to enter a competition nowadays? Should I have made it 1 billion, or 5 billion to get people to enter?

Running a fleet within an MMO is all about maximising participation and just recently it's felt like a losing battle. We only have one other CFOPs who shows up to run events most of the time, thanks to Matt Doody, and recruiting has completely stopped by those who told me they wanted to do it. We have seen many people join, take part for a month or two then just completely disappear, sometimes for the most bizarre reasons, other times with no reason at all, these were people who were really getting involved and flying up the leaderboard, they were regularly on Discord and helping out in-game and then wham, gone. I understand that Real Life can throw a spanner in the best-maintained works but this is odd based on our history, it is happening far more frequently now, like tolerance for burn out has suddenly collapsed.

STO itself is not without a myriad of issues, mostly lag, rubber banding, constant map transfer disconnects, empty patch notes, late events, unannounced events, bugs, etc, all these things have been present since the start of the game but seem to be getting worse. We can probably blame the pandemic for some of it but as we never hear any feedback from the devs it's hard to say.

Our Facebook group is also quiet, most news I publish to it gets a single like if that, almost never any comments, and the page is being filled by memes and ST related news from outside the game.

I suppose what I have noticed if you consider all of the above is a general lack of interest in the game. The events we run with the MRP system and the special events, the league tables etc these are the only things we can do to try and pull people back into the game, the bulk of it remains down to Cryptic, they need to do something that injects new life into STO, something dramatic. I'm not going to speculate what that should be but I am going to guess that they have nothing like that planned.

SRS will continue doing what it's always been doing with the following notification. If you are a senior role in these fleets, then we expect you to attend the events from time to time and to login to the game. If you have lost interest to the point you hardly ever show up then don't be surprised if your senior role is given to someone who does show up, that's nothing personal, we just want the right people in the right jobs, if you decide to play more in the future then there's a good chance that role will be again up for grabs as soon as it's available.

See you in-game

Matt Johnson