The State of STO and Next Week's MRP
- Matt Johnson
- Mar 24, 2023
- 3 min read
Full Carriers Science Career DPS Bonus Threat Bonus Fleet of the week - SRS xBs
SRS Weekly Endeavour - Achieve 10 MRP events for a rank point The State of STO You can also follow this discussion on Reddit here:
I think Cryptic is running a Skeleton crew for STO. Look at their content releases, it took about 16 months to finish the last Terran arc which you can complete in a few hours. The quality of the missions is there apart from silly bugs, but they seem to have got themselves locked into a ship-centric economic system. They may realise that seasonal purchasable expansions are possible but simply don't have the staff to make it happen, the same for player housing and Foundry 2.0. It's a catch-22, all these things could be monetized and bring in a ton of cash for the company but they can't do it without the content creators on board and they need to pay these people for some time before the ROI is seen. This is why there are continual sales, years ago sales were not that common, but now they are back to back, people are leaving in their droves and only logging in to play the daily events with just a few die-hards playing all evening every evening, and many of them such as myself and most of our fleet mates are reluctant to spend cash on the game right now.
What Cryptic need is to be bought out by a company that has the vision to see where this IP could go in terms of the genre, I was hoping that Gearbox could be such a company but as we have seen no evidence of any investment at all it seems they thought they were buying a way into MMOs rather than into the Star Trek IP.
As it stands now I don't see anything changing for STO, the slow trickle of content will pull people back for a couple of hours every 3-4 months as they release an episode then they will be gone again. This kind of content does not require new ships and can be completed on almost any tier ship on normal difficulty, players buy the ships for one of two reasons, either they love the model and want to fly it in the same old events we are stuck with, or they buy the ship because it has a trait/console or is just good enough to slightly increase their damage should they be DPS chasers, e.g. the new Hydra.
We haven't had a new battlezone in years and the ones we have are ludicrously easy or flawed or both and have never been updated beyond the odd bug fix. The only missions in the game that are slightly challenging to the veteran player are those which are bugged, e.g. Dranuur Gauntlet elite.
The game is riddled with bugs as seen in our month-long play-through of the game which you can watch here https://youtu.be/saOt8lsdu2s
STO is still an enjoyable game but when they are releasing previously free subpar ships for hundreds of dollars (the Alliance pack) you can smell the desperation for cash. Unless there is a massive change in the business plan involving actual real investment into the game proper I think STO has reached the end of the road. What I think we will see from now on is more of the same, very slow content releases, no new factions, no engine upgrades, no new battlezones, continual sales, and the vast majority of their resources aimed at bringing in ships from the TV shows as the latest gamble box prize.
If only Elon was a Star Trek fan.
I agree with a lot of this. I'm one of those folks that logs in every day, kind of a comfortable habit rather than out of excitement, to do the dailies and a bit of DOff dil stuff.
I enjoy it when they bring new content out, but yes, it is too infrequent and often quite buggy at first. They also lean too heavily on ground stuff which has always been much weaker and less Trekky than the space stuff. And in space, there's way too much reliance on disposable swarms of enemy ships as an adversary.
I've increasingly found myself rolling my eyes at the latest event announcements, as it is almost always "re-run this stuff we did years…