Spacesuit Fiasco

I have another rant against Cryptic today. Seems to be a growing trend.

This rant is about their recent addition of the spacesuits from First Contact.  Like most Star Trek, STO did not have any need for space suits (environmental suits) for most of its run. Its not something you see very often on the shows (at least until Enterprise, which used them fairly regularly). The last featured episode series added a space suit mission and the new Nukara Prime missions against Tholians requires suits. So not a lot of content.

When suits were introduced, players were given these ugly non-Federation style suits. Everyone wanted Starfleet versions, since you know, our characters are in Starfleet. Cryptic finally got around to adding Starfleet suits in the form of the suits seen in First Contact.  But they added them to the C-store.

So, for free, you can run around in a non-starfleet suit, but for something every ship should have standard in its inventory, you have to pay real money. Okay, I can accept that. It’s F2P, need to make money.

But then they decided to charge $7 for the suits. For each character.  That’s an outrageous price for a crappy piece of gear (its stats are inferior to other suits you get in game). It’s not a costume piece so you have to actually wear it. And its per character so if you have more than one, you’re out of luck. Or if you wanted to have an entire away team wearing them, to bad.

The announcement thread for the suits got 186 posts, pretty much all of them saying the same thing; the items to expensive for a per character item.  Not a single comment by a Dev. But they usually don’t respond to complaints. They look at the actual sales, and sadly, I expect those will do well. Because people are idiots.

There’s no way to actually gauge how well they sell, unfortunately.  When new starships come out, you’ll typically see sector space and around ESD full of the new ship. I have yet to see anyone wearing them on ESD, but doesn’t mean much. There a couple dozen for sale on the Exchange, so they’ve sold that many at least.

We’ll know when the next item comes out. If it’s single character and $7, then it sold well. If it’s cheaper or account wide, then it didn’t do well.