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.