On Ships and Communication
The testing of STO’s conversion to F2P continues on the Tribble test server. The Devs have been releasing information every so often in the form of Dev Blogs. Most of been pretty blah, but the two most recent ones raised some questions.
In this posting, the new Executive Producer Steven D’Angelo, revealed how he will be very differently than Dan Stahl did:
You may have noticed that while we have been posting to acknowledge that various game play elements are not working, we are not posting how we intend to fix them. We are not telegraphing changes until we get a chance to try them out internally to make sure that they’re satisfactory. Usually this happens all the way up until the next build makes it to Tribble. I have told the team that it’s better to be quiet than to post answers that turn out to be different from what we actually end up doing. Misinformation can be worse than silence in some cases
Now, while I can’t disagree with the sentiment, it is a major departure from one of Cryptic’s best achievements, Dev to Player communication. They have always been very open with information, even when sometimes it turns out to be wrong. They would share what is being worked on long before it’s final, and the community had a chance to chime in their opinions.
With that one bolded comment, all of that could change. If the devs can’t talk about things that might change, then they can’t talk about anything, because everything might change. That’s how most companies do things, and that’s what most players (who visit the forums) hate. Only time will tell how much of an extreme this goes too.
Another recent posting revealed some details about some changes their making to starships. The bright spot from this post, was that they announced they are reversing their decision not to give free starships at each rank up. They had been considering giving out discount tokens and some dilithium that would equal about 80% of the cost of a new starship. So instead of a new ship, players would have to grind t get one.
The new ship matrix makes it clear where they intend to get their revenue from. At each tier, most of the ships we have had access to are going to be available for purchase with in game dilithium or the rank up token. There will also be ships at every tier that are available in the C-store. Along with new skins, the ships in the C-store will also be more powerful than the ones available via in-game means. Usually coming with more Console slots or more bridge officer slots, these ships will also have special unique consoles that provide a special power.
In order to make the C-store ships appealing to people of all ranks, these consoles will be transferrable to other ships. So you could purchase all of the C-store ships, and then have a bunch of special powers on your Vice Admiral ship. Part of me thinks this is cool, and makes sense. Part of me sees it as “Pay 2 Win”. If it were just unique ship skin and console, it might be balanced. But the other extras make the C-store ships inherently more powerful.
But, it’s F2P, so that kind of makes sense. We’ll see how drastic these changes are. So far, C-store ships have just been minor improvements. This might change that.
