STO F2P Beta Thoughts

I’ve spend some time on Tribble, the STO F2P test server. I’ve read the Dev Tracker and their postings. Here’s some thoughts:

Dilithium

The reward economy really needed to be cleaned up. There were way to many systems (Merits, Emblems, Honor, Badges, etc). Merging everything into just Dilithium is a good thing. But they are going to far with it. Making ships cost dilithium was unnecessary. Their pricing is also ridiculous.

During the leveling process, you could run a few exploration missions and acquire enough badges to equip your ship with all green/blue weapons. But now the prices are higher with dilithium, which you are also using for a bunch of other stuff.

They have also added a dilithium cost to crafting. So instead of just acquiring anomalies and special anomalies, you also need dilithium. And not just a little bit, but something like 60% of what it would cost to buy the same item from the store. There are 40+ pages of people complaining about this and no dev response as of this writing. We’ll see what they decide to do.

Duty Officer

The Duty Officer system seems nice. It’s a collection game for acquiring DOFF’s and you can use it to level and also get a bunch of other things (items, XP, EC, anomalies, etc). The interface is pretty nice and they even added the basics of a Department Head system, where you can assign your Bridge Officers as department heads, and they make recommendations. Basic, but a nice touch.

However, leveling the DOFF tiers is crazy. For each mission, you get only a handful of CXP (Commendation XP used for leveling DOFF tiers). Missions run from 30min to several days. The amount you get scales, longer missions give more, but shorter missions give more per minute.

Currently, you need 2500 CXP to get to Tier 1 in any of the multiple categories. At about 2-5 CXP per 30min mission, if you ran all 20 missions every 30min during a 3hr play session, plus a 12hr mission right when you logged off, you could get about 500 a day. So Tier 1 would take about a week.

Unfortunately, you could never do that. You get a small number of missions in each sector, so you’d have to move between sectors constantly. And each mission has a cooldown before you can get it again so you’d never get that much in a play session. In reality, it would take closer to a month. Many people have not gotten much past Tier 1 playing for the last month in beta.

Tier 4 requires 100,000 by the way. Some people have estimated that it would take about a year for a casual player (2-3hrs a day) to get to Tier 4 in just one category (there are 8 or 9 I think).

STF

They have split the 3 STF’s into 6, 3 ground and 3 space missions. For each mission, every player will get a loot bag after killing the boss which is guaranteed to give a piece of common salvage, with a chance for better salvage. You turn this common salvage in to acquire the new STF items. There are ground and space sets. Each piece requires 30 common salvage, or one of the special kind.

So to get a complete set, you need to play these missions 90 times, or 15 times each. Since each is supposed to take 30min, that’s 45hrs of play time. So for a casual player about 2 months doing ONLY STF’s.

Conclusion

On the surface, many of the things they are doing seem nice. In practice, they are making the game into a giant grindfest. Everything is going to require a lot of play time to acquire. I liked the casual effort required to get stuff before. STO just isn’t good enough to play the amount of time required to get the cool stuff. Especially the repitition of it all.