My Pay2Win Experiment - Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online is Pay2Win. Spending large amounts of money will grant you levels of power, which you simply cannot reach any other way. But is any of that really necessary? And just how strong can you get, if you buy, upgrade and unlock absolutely everything to the max? I tried it and became a god.

Before I get to the experiment, let's get one thing out of the way: you can absolutely complete all non-competitive content in Star Trek Online without ever spending any real money. People will hate you when you show up to endgame group content with your crappy free gear and they will absolutely destroy you in PvP. If you're just here for the story, you'll be able to see all of it without using the cash shop, though the game is still going to badger the absolute shit out of you.

You get lootbox messages like that every ten or so seconds. This one was generated by Claire.

Everything lost its value
A little over three years ago, somebody in charge of the monetization of Star Trek Online had a brilliant idea: let's take every single endgame ship and every piece of endgame gear and make that shit worthless. That Dreadnought Cruiser you spent 20 bucks on? Well, you're gonna have to spend another 5 bucks on a partial upgrade or buy the newer, stronger version of that exact same ship for 30 bucks. It looks the same, works the same, there's really no difference except it's much tougher and stronger than your old version of the ship. And all these endgame set items you've been farming? You can upgrade them to a whole new power level for money. To make things more interesting, these upgrades fail more often than not, so you'll have to repeat the update process again and again until you luck out and actually get the desired power-up. Fantastic!

Again, none of these upgrades are needed to progress through the game unless you want to survive in PvP or stand a better chance in elite difficulty endgame missions. But imagine that one moment you have the best ship, the best items and the strongest shit you can get and with the next update it's all garbage-tier. Sure, every MMO does that. It's called a content update. Except, in other MMOs you'd just run some new dungeons, raids, daily quests, whatever it takes to raise your item level to the new cap. Star Trek Online doesn't drop anything at these new power levels. If you want to (attempt to) upgrade your stuff, it'll cost premium currency. That was the day I quit - alongside pretty much everyone I used to play with.

When I came back, I created the ship of my dreams and everyone else's nightmares.

Time for a new ship!
When I came back a couple weeks ago to have another look at the state of things, I was sitting on hundreds of Dollars worth of cash shop currency. The perks of being a games journalist! And since money wasn't an issue, I wanted to know just how difficult and expensive it really was to get some of the absolute best stuff in the game. I started by picking my absolute favourite ship: the Galaxy-X Dreadnought Cruiser from the final TNG episode 'All Good Things'. It's by no means considered special or extraordinarily powerful in any way, but it's the ship I wanted. And if I was going for god-tier upgrades, it really shouldn't matter too much which ship I'd go for. I wanted my dreadnought!

In order to get the absolute strongest version of this ship, I had to get the fleet (read: guild) version. Fleets have access to more powerful variants of ships, ship consoles and a bunch of other things, so I started asking around for a fleet, which would allow me to use their facilities. I got an invitation a few seconds later and learned that, on top of the ship and some of the fleet gear I wanted, you could also get additional trait slots by purchasing them in a fleet. Traits grant all sorts of bonuses from extra crit damage to resistances to added effects to your ship abilities and skills, so they can make a big difference!

This trait makes you practically unkillable for a while.

The top 1%
The extra trait slots I wanted cost hundreds of thousands of so-called Fleet Credits. You can earn fleet credits by donating various resources to fleet projects and upgrades. You can donate Fleet Marks, which are obtained for free by playing various missions in the game. However, you can only donate tiny amounts of these marks, making it very difficult for free players to earn any substantial amount of Fleet Credits. A much better way to earn fleet marks is by spending Dilithium. Free players can earn a measly 8,000 Dilithium each day. You can buy more dilithium spending real money. I had to donate about half a million Dilithium (around 20 Dollars while I'm writing this) to get my Fleet Marks. When that still wasn't enough, I had to donate several hundred so-called Duty Officers. Duty Officers can perform various tasks and daily missions aboard your ship. You can buy them with real money or trade for them on the exchange (read: auction house).

So I spent another 4 or so million Energy Credits (ingame currency worth ~1 Dollar) on Duty Officers. In this virtual universe, Starfleet is really fond of buying and selling human (and alien) beings for money. But I didn't care, because I now had my trait slots unlocked.
I also had enough credits to buy my fleet dreadnought. Unfortunately, said ship also requires five Fleet Ship Modules, which cost real money. Roughly 20 Dollars, in fact. By now I had spent about $41 just to get the ship I want and some extra trait slots. And I was far from done!

I had the ship. Now I needed some epix.

Gear Upgrades
Star Trek Online differentiates between space and ground acitivites. Both sections of the game require their own gear, traits, specialization and so forth. Also, nobody likes ground stuff, because it's shit. For now, I was only focusing on becoming the god of space. In order to get there, I had to upgrade all of my purple MK XII gear to the new cap of golden MK XIV gear. Basically, each and every item that goes on my ship needed to be raised by two quality tiers, then upped by two rarity levels. Each tier raises base stats (e.g. dps for weapons), each rarity level adds an extra affix (meaning extra crit, damage, accuracy etc. depending on the affix). If that sounds awkward and complicated, that's because it is awkward and complicated.

You put an item in one slot, a ridiculously expensive tech upgrade in the next, add an optional accelerator (they never drop, don't worry about them) and it'll show you the 'possible result'.

Crafting upgrades requires rare and expensive resources. Alternatively, you can find them on the exchange. Buying all the upgrades required to level up my gear to the highest possible level cost roughly 250 million Energy Credits (aka ~60ish Dollars). So, all I had to do now is slap all these upgrades on my gear until I got it all to the new level and quality cap, right? Well, not quite. Each and every time you apply an upgrade, you'll have to cough up some Dilitium. My upgrades cost me about 1.5 million of the stuff, which amounts to roughly 50 Dollars. Again, quality upgrades can fail, so the exact amount you'll spend on an upgrade varies and depends on how lucky you are. At this point, I had spent about $150 total.

Field Test
There was still more stuff for me to upgrade, but at this point I felt it was time for a little field test. There was a global daily mission, which rewarded people for taking part in PvP, so I seized the opportunity and queued up for some sweet space combat.

Considering I just got back after a 3 year break and didn't follow any build or spec guides, my first stab at PvP was pretty satisfying. I scored the majority of kills, could defend myself fairly well against enemy players and the only real trouble I had was with tanky players, who managed to outheal most of my damage. Of course most of the participants in both teams were really just there for the daily mission, so none of them were particularly skilled or well-geared for pvp and I won mostly due to the unfair advantage I had in item upgrades at that point. But that's the point of the experiment, so heyho.
There was still a bunch of other stuff I could improve. How about some premium weapons? Yep, that's a thing!

The basic version of this weapon costs up to $50, depending on your luck.

First of all, I wanted a heavy crescent wave cannon, because you can combine it with another item and get a set bonus to disruptor damage. The cannon costs 200 Lobi Crystals. These crystals are obtained from lock boxes. Each key to these boxes costs ~1 Dollar or 4.25 million Energy Credits. A lockbox contains 4 Lobi, but in some rare cases you might luck out and get 10 or in some ultra-rare cases up to 50 Lobi. Worst case scenario, you'll be opening 50 boxes to make enough Lobi for the cannon. That's another 50 bucks. And you'll still have to upgrade it, but let's pretend we've already done that. In order to benefit from the cannon set bonus, we now want the Bioneural Infusion Circuits, which cost another 200 Lobi (or up to another 50 Dollars). Depending on how lucky we are, we have now spent another 8-100 Dollars on top of the 150 we had spent thus far. And you're much more likely to spend 100 rather than 8 till you win all the random gamble curreny you need. We've now spent more than 200 bucks total.

Saucer Separation
I want to use my Dreadnought at its absolute highest potential, so I'm gonna want a saucer separation console. This turns the ship's saucer section into a battle pet, which fights stuff by my side. It also greatly buffs my weapon power levels and the overall maneuverability of my ship. And I can get it by purchasing a Galaxy Cruiser for the low, low price of 2.000 Zen (~14 Dollars). What a steal! I'd be a fool not to! The console also grants a strong set bonus to my turn-rate, engine power and resistances if I pair it up with another console, the Molecular Cohesion Nullifier. This one can only be obtained by spending 3.000 Zen (~22 Dollars) on a Tier 6 Exploration Cruiser. If we want the full 3-piece set bonus, there's only another 1.500 Zen left to spend on the Antimatter Spread console. And with that we're at about $250 Dollars spent on upgrades, total.

Since everyone enjoys gambling, let's dump some more money on re-rolling our weapon affixes. An epic ('golden') item has five affixes, which can grant all sorts of things from added base damage to extra crit chance to better accuracy or crit damage and so forth. We want absolute maximum crit damage on everything. Re-rolling requires salvage. You can turn loot into salvage. Alternatively, you can buy any random item off the exchange and salvage that, which costs more credits, which are easily obtained by spending some cash shop currency. Of course, re-rolling your affixes also requires Dilithium. And you'll be re-rolling a lot, because the system is a fucking slot machine:

This looks perfectly fair!

Let's pretend I was extremely lucky and got all the desired prefixes with as few re-rolls as possible and only had to spend another $10 on Dilithium and salvage. So we're now at $260 and there's still more to buy!

The perfect Crew
For the most part, Duty Officers are a gimmick. You send them on missions, get a little reward, more or less like your garrison on WoW. But not all Duty Officers are created equal. If you put a particular kind of Duty Officer on active space duty, using a certain ship ability will reduce all running ability cooldowns by 10%. You can slot up to 3 of these guys, so that's a whopping 30% cooldown reduction. The skill which triggers said reduction can be slotted twice, so you'll get another 30% reduction to the remaining cooldowns after using it for the first time. Can you see how this grants you a bit of an unfair advantage over players who don't use these officers?

It's so hard to find good personnel these days.

While we were at it, I went and bought a bridge officer with the Pirate trait, granting a passive 1.5% bonus to all damage I dish out. Sure, that's a tiny amount but it all adds up and only the best is good enough. Getting the perfect officers for my ship set be back another $10. So that's a total of 270 bucks and I'm still not done!

Star Trek: Discovery
In order to give my ship an edge over all those Free2Play cunts in PvP I need some beefy Pay2Win traits. Fortunately for me, they just added the Discovery Lootboxes to the game, which add a whole lot of new, broken space traits! I'm starting with the Discovery itself, because of its awesome Lorca Maneuver console and the Black Alert trait. This set me back a little over 500 million Credits ($100). There's also the Honored Dead trait, which can massively improve a ship's survivability in battle, but at a price of only 3 million credits at the time of this blog I'm not even gonna bother add it to the calculation.

You can tell that's a pretty big number, even if you don't play Star Trek Online.

Now all I wanted was the Shield Overload trait for good measure - because nothing is gonna damage my ship if they can't get past my shields. The trait comes with another cash shop ship, which costs a little over 20 bucks. And with that, my shopping is finally done and I've roughly spent $400 on Pay2Win crap in Star Trek Online. But does it really make a difference? Yeah, about that...

Destroyer of worlds
I went and queued for some random pickup PvP. I didn't join a premade group, didn't read any guides, I haven't played in years. I just spent an absolutely stupid amount of cash shop currency on upgrades, picked whatever I felt was awesome and blindly went into PvP. And I'm still laughing.

This is the entire massacre that ensued. I died exactly once after I got cocky and decided to attack the entire enemy team's spawn point by myself. Surprisingly, that plan actually went okay for some time until each and everyone of them started attacking me at the same time. There's only one other player on my team who is getting any kills at all, the rest is all me. It only takes a few minutes until the whole thing devolves into a nasty respawn-fuckfest, where we just blow them up the moment they reappear.

I have no doubt that there are players out there, who go just as crazy with their upgrades and who know a lot more about the pvp mechanics in this game than I do. But that wasn't the point of this experiment. I wanted to see how strong you can get just by upgrading the absolute shit out of everything, then randomly jumping into competitive content. I don't know what the best PvP build is, which ships, traits or abilities deal the most damage against other players or any of that stuff. I didn't 'optimize' for PvP. I just picked whatever looked cool or screamed damage at me. Clearly, that's far from the worst strategy. But skill or knowledge had very little meaning here. It's all about the unfair advantage bought with money. I haven't touched the game in years, didn't look up any builds, then went into a random PvP match with people, who willingly, actively take part in player vs player combat. And dominated the crap out of them.

It's equally hilarious and wrong. I won't lie - blowing up player after player after player whilst being more or less invincible without actually breaking any rules or using any cheats can be hysterically funny for a while, even though I did feel like a complete dick afterwards. But at the same time, I don't think any game should ever go this far and give people such a blatant advantage over everyone else for spending such completely dumb amounts of money on ingame stuff. It feels nice to have a ship so powerful, it basically breaks the game. On the other hand, it's really not an achievement. I didn't have to play any epic raid level content to get my gear, I didn't have to earn these traits - I just went and bought them. There's no sense of pride and accomplishment in buying upgrades.

Star Trek Online - Best enjoyed if you're stupidly rich

You can throw near-infinite amounts of money at Star Trek Online (STO). Money buys levels of power you cannot achieve by simply playing the game. And there's no guarantee the developers won't take that power away from you by raising the level-cap, forcing you to spend even more as a result.

I've been playing Star Trek Online since launch. Then came the new management, Perfect World Entertainment. Then came the lootboxes. Then came Delta Rising, which caused a huge part of the already angry playerbase to quit, myself included. I'll get to that in a moment. Delta Rising happened over three years ago. And then I couldn't sleep one night, got bored and reinstalled the game for the heck of it. I'll get to that as well.

Space is still pretty.

At first it was meh

In the beginning there was a pretty mediocre Star Trek MMO with clunky controls, unimpressive visuals and enough content to keep you entertained for an entire week, if you took your time. It didn't take long until STO did what every MMO that wasn't World of Warcraft did back then and went free to play. The optional gold membership added some benefits, but in its earliest free iteration, STO had next to no restrictions for players, who wanted to enjoy the game without ever spending anything. That was great for the player base and not so great for the game itself, which was quickly sold off to a new publisher: Perfect World Entertainment.

The new Chinese overlords brought annoying lootboxes. These were random drops, which popped up with a 50% drop chance after killing just about any type of enemy in space and on the ground. Until this day you cannot play a single mission on STO where you won't be picking these up by the dozen. Then they sit in your inventory until you either throw them away or purchase a key to open them. Naturally, the quickest way to obtain a key is to spend some real money. You can also buy these keys from the exchange (read: auction house) using ingame currency. Millions of it. For a single key.

STO lootboxes are the ultimate whale fodder.

For the most part, these boxes contain relatively worthless garbage. XP boosters, fashion items, fluff. But there's a minute, almost impossibly tiny chance you might loot an ultra rare ship from one of these boxes. Powerful, unique starships you could not obtain any other way, unless you bought them for a ludicrous sum in trade. So everyone wanted them in order to show off or to sell them to some rich idiot. And since that isn't evil enough, the game will spam a broadcast literally every single time a player obtains one of these rare ships until today. You get a chat message and an on-screen popup ("Player X has received ultra-rare ship Y"), which is exactly what you want in your immersive Star Trek experience.

Over the years they've finally made it possible to disable the pop-up text if you know where to look. The chat message, however, is a system message, so disabling it means you'll miss all system messages completely. Not a great solution. 

Whales helped create new content

People put up with this nonsense, because many couldn't resist buying these lootboxes, which in turn helped generate some new content for the game. Over the years they added characters like Worf, Tasha Yar, much of the Voyager Crew (sans Chakotay and Janeway) and La Forge in new stories and missions. The original actors behind these characters provided the voice acting, which was a huge improvement over what fans of the game had seen before then.

It's only Voyager, but we'll take it.

One reason why these lootboxes were hated but tolerated was the fact that they contained exotic stuff like a Jem'Hadar warship. Most folks wanted to fly around in their Federation (or Klingon or Romulan) ships, which were all obtainable with a bit of grind if you didn't want to spend any real money to get them right away. Fair free to play? This cannot stand! And it didn't.

It didn't take long and they started releasing star ship bundles in the cash shop. Instead of selling a certain ship only once, they'd offer it in three different variants, each of which came with slightly different stats or some unique console (gear), which would give it a powerful special ability. But only by buying all three variants could you combine their abilities and unlock the ship's full potential. So if you wanted to use your brand new ship with all its features and extras attached, you'd now have to grind (or pay) for three of them instead of just one. And those packs could easily cost as much as a whole new AAA-game. Sometimes more.

You have to whip out around $15 for this TNG-inspired bridge.

There was one redeeming factor to all this madness - you only had to buy your favourite ship (and possibly its variants) once, unless you played multiple characters. So let's say you've got a massive hardon for TNG and you absolutely want your galaxy class cruiser. The game itself costs nothing, you'll spend some money on your ship if you don't want to grind and that's it. No need to spend anything else, just fly around in your fun new starship and have all the fun trek adventures you want. But then came Delta Rising.

Endgame gear and ships were now worthless

The Delta Rising expansion brought new story content in the delta quadrant. For free. So that's pretty cool. Unfortunately, that's also when they raised the cap for ship tiers and gear (as in, ship and ground weapons, shields, warp cores, you get the idea). For anyone who owned what was a top-tier ship at the release of the expansion, this meant one of three things:

1. They had to shell our $5 for a ship upgrade token to boost their ship to the stats of the new tier.

2. Their ship could not be upgraded and they had to shell out $20 or (MUCH) more for the new top-tier version of their ship.

3. They could refuse to spend anything and be forever stuck in a ship, which used to be top-tier and was now worthless.

Just fucking assimilate me now.

Here's the best part: buying the new top-tier version of your ship meant you were buying the exact same ship you already had a second time, but with increased stats! It didn't look cooler, it wasn't an entirely new ship, it was simply the exact same ship you already had, but with stats appropriate to the new level cap. I love this bit! "Hey, remember that starship you spent $30 on? Well, it's now useless until you buy the exact same ship again for $40." Because these ships were a higher tier and had better stats now, so naturally, they were also more expensive than before. Genius!

And then there were the gear upgrades. Before the expansion, the best quality gear you could have was rare MK XII gear, with the odd ultra rare item strewn in. Thanks to Delta Rising, the new maximum was epic gear MK XIV. In simpler terms, you could now upgrade the rarity and item level of every single piece of equipment to a new maximum. With money.

Basically, you'd take a rare MK XII item and upgrade it to a rare MK XIII item. Then you'd upgrade that to a rare MK XIV item. Then upgrade that one to an ultra rare. And upgrade the result to an epic. That's four steps. For every single item. A ship has 7-8 weapons alone, a deflector dish, engine, shields, warp core, 11 consoles... add your ground gear to that (2 weapons, armor, shields, half a dozen skill 'kits'), multiply everything by four and you'll have to spend HUNDREDS of Dollars to upgrade absolutely everything to the new best item and rarity levels.

Go big or go home!

Money buys all the power

"But do you really need maximum upgrades on everything?", I imagine you interrupting me like a cunt. Not necessarily. STO's story content has always been extremely casual-friendly and it's possible to complete all the solo stuff using only whatever crap you loot on your adventures without having any clue wtf you're even doing. However, if you PvP, participate in endgame content or just about any of the competitive stuff, then you will be miles behind anyone who spends a fortune on upgrades if you don't. With the release of Delta Rising, money suddenly bought real power in STO, the gap between paying and free players became massive and there is simply no realistic way for free players to ever obtain their own epic max level gear. And that's where I hit the uninstaller and didn't look back for over three years.

Goodbye, tiny virtual earth!

Folks running the game must have been desperate, because over the coming years I've received a flood of emails containing special discounts, welcome back bonus packs and entire endgame ships for fucking free! I ignored all of them, didn't want them, didn't look back, because fuck you greedy bastards and your disgusting, massively evil anti-consumer attitude.

They sent me several of those.

Here's the thing, though - the sweet lady who was the game's PR manager at the time gave me a free lifetime subscription when I wrote a magazine review for the game. Back before they fucked it all up. And that subscription comes with a monthly stipend of four or five Dollars worth of cash shop money, even if you don't play the game at all.

3 years later

So I got curious when I saw STO pop up on Steam the other day. Surprisingly enough it was still around, there was a fair bit of new content and I wanted to see whether my old account still existed when they finally stopped spamming me free codes and starships after my first two or so years of absence. So I went through the whole password retrieval nonsense, installed their shitty ArcGames launcher, because every stupid game needs its own stupid launcher nowadays, spent hours patching STO and found that I now had cash shop currency worth roughly $200 just sitting there in my account. Excellent! Thanks, lifetime-subscription!

New ship, new gear, new everything!

I had to spend about a real-life day upgrading all my shit. First I had to read my way through the countless new top-tier ships, the multipacks, their upgraded fleet versions and so forth. I bought a deluxe triple-pack of ships and grabbed a TNG bridge, which cost nearly $15 all by itself. A fucking bridge which does absolutely nothing! But hey, I had more than 3 years worth of free cash shop money and I was gonna fucking spend it!

Next, I bought hundreds of lootbox keys and sold them for stupid amounts of ingame currency, bought tech upgrades with said currency and turned another $50 or so into Dilithium, a stupidly rare and expensive resource required to perform gear upgrades. This is the absolute worst way to handle item upgrades I've ever seen in any videogame. You can't just upgrade your gear (or get new max level stuff) by playing the game, taking part in endgame or pvp stuff. I have yet to receive any item by normal means, which is better than MK XII or XIII rare. So good luck trying to get your epic max level stuff without using the stupidly overpriced upgrades-for-cash system!

The Borg. Again. They're still doing this.

In space, no one can hear you

STO has gone quiet. Really quiet. There's hardly anything going on in the chat channels, nobody queues for the countless PvE and PvP activities and when I did try to queue up for the only event that had a few people waiting for it (Starbase 24), the queue failed to start five or six consecutive times, because too many players didn't hit their ready buttons. It took about half an hour to start the event, which was over in well under five minutes. Great!

Of course, like any sane person I only play MMOs for single-player content, to be on my own and to avoid interaction with other people as much as possible. So I tried some of the content, which came out after Delta Rising. I started off dicking around the Nexus (Star Trek: Generations) with La Forge, which seemed interesting, but the guy kept referring to events I had never even experienced in the game. STO kept throwing a pop-up for that mission in my face until I accepted it. And that was a bad idea.

In the end, I went for the episode selector and went back a couple seasons, checking out the Iconian War. So yeah, the Iconians are back, they're pissed off, they want to destroy everyone, so that makes a nice change from the Borg and the Breen and the Undine and the Dominion. However, this time they're so strong that the Alliance (Federation, Klingons, Romulans) decide to defeat them by traveling back in time and fucking with the timeline.

The overpriced TNG interior brings back memories.

Questionable writing

I didn't hate the Iconian missions. Tom Paris was there, even though he sounded like he didn't really care much and mostly just read out his lines. What's worse, Cryptic's own voice actors cannot really keep up with the Trek actors, so they all sound a bit shitty by comparison. Cutscenes are a bit crap, animations are stiff and ugly, some characters talk without moving their lips (or any facial animations, really) and it all looks and feels like you're playing a ten year old game. Which isn't very far from what's really happening. It's all a bit cheap and pathetic. I won't lie, I still enjoyed it a bit, because it's nice to get a bit of Star Trek that isn't in the fucking Kelvin timeline or yet another damn prequel.

What's worse is some of the writing in these missions. So they decide to alter the timeline in order to stop the Iconians from ever attacking. Conveniently, Iconians go insane if they travel through time, so they have no means to stop the Alliance from dicking around with history. They play out a few scenarios on the holodeck, all of which are somewhat catastrophic. In one setting, the Iconians were wiped out, but then the Dominion took over and everyone was still fucked. In another scenario, the Iconians' besties, the Elachi, got wiped out, so they just teamed up with some other aliens and still won. Scenario three, Romulus was suddenly back, there were no Iconians and "We're detecting more Borg activity than in our original timeline, but that's nothing we can't handle."

What could POSSIBLY go wrong??

Right. It's not like they didn't have to time-travel a lot and gather every last bit of strength to defeat the Borg by the skin of their dicks in the past. It's not like they were ever a dangerous threat or anything, right? Eh, let's defeat the Iconians by strengthening the Borg, there's no way this plan could backfire. So after just one test run on the holodeck, they do exactly that and - surpriiiiise - Romulus is now assimilated and the Borg have cloaking technology, because they weren't totally unbeatable before. Brilliant!

It's not terrible

In the end, you un-fuck the timeline, then solve the Iconian problem some other way and all this holodeck experimentation bullshit turns out to be a huge waste of time, which really just served to be a bit of filler-nonsense to make sure the season doesn't feel too short. But hey, despite the awkward cutscenes, some terrible voice acting and the occasional bit of plot stupidity, it was actually fairly enjoyable. Yeah, space battles are still just an exercise in mashing the spacebar whilst frantically clicking enough hotkeys and skills to fill up an entire four action bars, but it all looks fun and the music is still pretty epic. Ground battles are as much of a clusterfuck as ever, but I've acquired so much STF (read: raid) gear over the years that I can just stomp most of the bad guys with my away team, which seems to consist of a cat, a huge lizard person, some holographic robot and Doug, who is a massively fat bloke down from the engineering deck. It still feels and plays the way it did years ago and I liked it years ago, so I still like it today. Of course if you hated it back then, then you're still gonna hate it now.

Nostalgia makes terrible things berable.

I'm gonna finish the remaining new missions next. Maybe I'll get bored enough to wait for a PvP queue, so I can blow up a bunch of randos with my stupidly overpowered epic items, which cost hundreds of dollars to create. Though chances are that anyone who still joins PvP at this point in time will also be fully kitted out in endgame stuff or else why would you even bother anymore? 

STO is a perfect example for a game, that pissed off and drove away most of its playerbase by being a complete ripoff, by having zero decency and making their premium purchases as invasive as possible. At this rate I'll be surprised if the game is still gonna be around in a year or two, but stranger things have happened. Look at Everquest 2, for instance. It's still a thing for some reason. 

Nerf - Cats love it!

^ Remember this thing? If you wanted to be one of the cool kids in the early 90s, you absolutely had to have one. Before the Super Soaker was a thing, water pistols were just a bit shit. Sure, some of them looked badass. My younger brother had one shaped like an M16. It was stupidly huge, looked a LOT like a real gun (as far as five year old me could tell) and gave off such a pathetic little squirt, it may has well been a 90 year old with prostate problems.

So it took a NASA engineer to turn these boring toys into something even grownups would buy. I remember my uncle and his friends talking about how one of them would hide on the balcony with his Super Soaker, waiting to start an ambush, but he pumped the gun too much and built up so much pressure, the pressure tank came loose and hit him right in the head. Not sure how you're supposed to hold this thing to make hitting yourself that way even possible, but maybe it bounced off of something or maybe they were exaggerating a bit for the sake of drama. My point is, they were adults and they talked about the fun shit they got up to with their Super Soakers. I wanted one! I just had to nag the absolute shit out of my parents and...

They hated me.

Every kid has at least one family member, who asks what you want for Christmas, then goes ahead and kinda, sorta buys what you want, but not really. In my case, this applied for the entire family. I remember when I asked for a He-Man action figure one Christmas. I got Grizzlor. Not once. Not twice. I GOT FOUR FUCKING GRIZZLORS. One from my parents, one from my grandparents, another one from my other grandparents... you get the idea. "But you could just pretend they're mommy Grizzlor and daddy Grizzlor and baby Grizzlor!" Thanks, grandma. Thanks so fucking much.

Pictured: Crushing disappointment.

You'd think they at least talk to one another to make sure they're not all buying the same shit. But no - the same thing happened again when Moss Man came out! So I had an army of Grizzlors and Mossmen and a cheap knockoff Super Soaker and not an original toy in the house.

Years later, when I finally turned 16, I went and got a job, earned my own money and bought my own Super Soaker, long after they stopped being cool, yet long before they'd become cool again for a short period of time. It didn't really yield the satisfaction I had hoped for.

They changed so much, it just wasn't the same anymore. Also, nobody cared.

My friends and I were in our mid to late teens. Angsty, self-conscious, some a bit more depressed than the rest, DON'T POINT THAT THING AT ME! It was all pot, alcohol, fucking around and shitty poetry. Life was suddenly shit. No fun allowed. That Super Soaker was doomed to collect dust.

I still have that thing. Still works, too. Still not super into it. It's not the cool Super Soaker folks had in my childhood. And I live in fucking England now. 'Wet' is basically considered a pretty normal state in this country. It rains more often than it doesn't, 'summer' over here is the one day in the year where temperatures climb above 20 degrees centigrade and water guns just don't go well with British politeness. And my Super Soaker isn't just a lot weirder and less awesome than the original version, but it's also a lot less awesome than today's variants, which come with detachable magazines and shit. I'm not making this up!

Fill up a bunch of magazines and exchange them as you go. Playing around the house is more CoD than ever!

The only appropriate thing left to do with my crappy Super Soaker XP70 was target practice with my lab assistants Professor Cat and Professor Othercat.

Also pictured: Prof. Mothercat, who was later killed in a tragic Nerf accident.

Alas, the house if full of computers and games consoles and all that fun electronic shit I need for work. So, for as much as my cats enjoy being super-soaked, I had to keep the indoor water-shooting activities to a minimum. Safety first. Sorry, cats!

"I'm bored now."

Of course there's a fun, safe alternative, which one could consider the next evolutionary step up from the Super Soaker: Nerf. And just like the Super Soaker, the Nerf gun had an uncool alternative when I was a kid:

You can throw the little darts further than the pistol shoots them. And they stick to absolutely nothing. Then the gun splits apart in the middle, because it's made of cheap plastic and sadness.

Nerf guns are dumb, pointless and I absolutely don't need one. And I've been trying to get one for years, but now I had two new problems: my freelance job and my girlfriend. The former made sure I never had enough money to waste on stupid toy guns, the latter made sure I wouldn't attempt to waste money on stupid toy guns regardless.

They sell the basic Nerf blasters for ten Quid in just about every supermarket. I tried sneaking one into our shopping trolley on numerous occasions, but Mrs. Kitten spotted it every time. She was not amused, much to my disappointment. And that of my cats, obviously, who were running out of ideas for fun new science experiments.

"Fry me to the moon!"

But our luck was finally starting to change when I landed a job as the community manager for Owlcat Games. Suddenly I had money. Not just pay the bills money. Or buy real food money. Or buy real food and the occasional videogame money. I'm talking pay off all debt, put something in the bank and still have something left for fun shit levels of money. Of course the girlfriend still wasn't happy about the idea of a Nerf gun, because it's dumb and we don't need one. Heck, I'm not even gonna try to argue with that, but if we're being honest, that exact description applies to just about everything we own apart from food and toilet paper. I had to come up with something. In the name of fun. My sanity. The entertainment of my stunt cats.

"90 minutes, 90 degrees. Do it, human!"

And one day it finally happened! It was my birthday, so we decided to celebrate like all classy white people in the UK celebrate - with a trip to Greggs, followed with a visit to B&M. I filled up on delicious ham and cheese subs and Capri Sun, then we went to the store to look at throw pillows, shower curtains and rugs, picturing what our lives would be like if we treated our house like a home and not just some place where we eat, sleep and dump all our stuff on the floor.
And that's when I saw it. Just sitting there, collecting dust on a shelf, special offer, extra low price, Christmas is coming, somebody please just buy this garbage. And this time nobody could stop me, because it was my special day. BOOM:

Rawrrr!

It's called the Maverick. How fucking cool is that? Spinning drum revolver, loads six foam darts and shoots them with such a ridiculous amounts of force, Professor Othercat couldn't believe it when I fired a test shot at her stupid face. Don't worry, she's fine.

FINE!

Mrs. Kitten was a bit concerned, so I demonstrably shot myself in the face. I cried on the inside and told her I felt absolutely nothing, much like herself when we sleep with each other. Here's the thing, though - the cats are suddenly incredibly well-behaved. They used to climb up the curtains in the living room, knock shit down the shelves and just act like total dickheads in general. Now, if one of them even looks at the curtains, I just have to point at Mr. Maverick and the cat will instantly cease all assholery. Amazing!
I was really enjoying my new toy, so I spent some time looking around the internet and learned that there's Nerf everything - shotguns, bows, crossbows, even freaking sniper rifles and all the weird tactical attachments you could think of. I figured, hey, if I had a nerf gun that fired multiple darts, I could play with both cats at the same time! Only fair, right?

I am the Terminator!

I went and ordered a pump-action Nerf shotgun and damn is it satisfying to shoot! I can sit in the living room, fire all the way across the corridor and hit a cat that is misbehaving in the kitchen with two nerf darts at the same time. I wonder if there's some way to rig this thing to fire all 8 darts at once.
Of course I don't want to be the only complete idiot in this house, who should be way too old to be enjoying this shit and I felt a little guilty just ordering all the fun stuff for myself, so I went and ordered a blaster for Mrs. Kitten. You know, to win her over on the idea.

So adorable!

I figured she wouldn't want something big and unwieldy and might have a little more fun with a semi-automatic gun, which simply lets her fire all the darts rapidly. So the Stryfe has a cool name and it's fun and small and easy to use aaaaand then I saw they're selling mods and attachments like extra large magazines and foregrips and red dot sights and... well, long story short:

Adding ALL THE ATTACHMENTS!

Lets just say our cats will never be bored again.