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.