[Sul-Matuul]

So falling down a YouTube rabbit hole I came across this video and it got me thinking about what would be your own top 5 issues with the game currently?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8smxOGPwjs

Hopefully people can say things nicely!

I do still like playing the game though, and the friends I have there and here are well worth the complaints I have about it!
I'll start off with mine:

1). Monetization and Greed.
There's a clear argument to be made for needing money to pay for the game's running costs; I won't argue with at. But the way nearly everything is being monetised these days and to obscene levels just makes me feel ashamed to recommend this game to people sometimes.
Yes there's lots of stuff you can get for free or with a bit of playtime, but there is an increasing volume of gear that is becoming obscenely expensive and simply priced out of the range of the average player.
I know many here bought the legendary packs and will say they felt like they were good value personally but for someone who cannot just throw £200 at a game to buy some pixels; those prices are just insulting. I will never, ever be able to fly a legendary ship, to be able to experience that design side of the game that clearly is getting a lot of attention. I don't even want to fly them all as most are of little interest to me; but just one or two choice ones would be nice.
That's not even the full issue though, we've seen endless promotional boxes in the last 12 months at a time when many globally were losing jobs or struggling to pay bills. They've gone full on with the cash cow milking; shoving every potentially popular new design into a gamble box; or behind an insurmountable paywall.
Want a top end version of any hero ship? It's only in a FOMO legend bundle. Want a newer ship that was on screen for barely a minute? It's in a promo box.

2). Horrendous player balance.
I've never been much for DPS chasing and it doesn't bother me too much that others do enjoy this side of things; it's their call after all.
However it does make playing content within the social side of the game a bit off-putting I must admit. There's nothing worse than getting into a mission and two of the team are doing 10 times the damage of the others combined and killing everything before anyone else gets a shot off.
Or trying your best to pilot your ship and seeing yourself at the bottom of parses by a massive margin despite playing your socks off.
The fact that the game allows there to be such a massive disparity between players shows something is not working right. This isn't just good players being better; there's certain builds that just vaporise everything and they make others completely pointless. What's the use in trying to be helpful to your team in a build you think will be useful as a support ship etc when the top player can wipe out the whole map without even blinking or noticing you exist?
Is it just cheese builds being stacked up with top end gear? Is it a gulf between those with macro-bindings and those flying on manual? I don't know but tbh I don't really enjoy the team content anymore because i always feel like a spare wheel despite hours of developing my build and practising.

3). Pay-for-laziness
I'm not sure if that's the right term tbh.
The introduction of buyouts for events was a reasonably good thing I felt. They allow players to still get an item if they miss a few days etc. and the cost reduces over time. Most players can ignore this thing and just get stuff the old way still.
But the other side of this and things like the Reputation buyouts, and pay-2-skip buttons on things like crafting is a bit darker I feel and damages part of the game. They just seem to be pushing to get people to be lazy and skip playing the actual game; even if it costs money. Usually grinding out and event gets you playing the game content (and these days there's usually multiple paths to take in events or reps) but the access to all these skip buttons means some people are not even playing the content anymore! I mean it boggles the mind that someone would log in daily but not want to actually play the missions sometimes. I get you might miss a few days of and event and need to catch up; but skip the whole thing? Just for some macguffin you'll never use? Why are you even playing the game?

4). Lack of developer community involvement
I know there are dev streams on weekly but aside from those and the patch notes do we ever actually know what the hell they are thinking and do they interact with us in a way that encourages us to feel like valued customers?
Kael seems to be either terrible incompetent in his role or just does not care enough to do it properly because nobody making that many communication errors should be still in that role. And it's not just the errors that are a problem; it's the general lack of respect from them to us. We are paying for their game to run' we pay their wages and consume their products and yet often they can't even be bothered to communicate with us via their own official channels; hiding away on Twitter or posting on obscure Reddit threads.
The top guy at STO barely makes his presence be known or say anything to the community. The livestreams seem to consist of mostly a lot of excuses for why they won't do things. They just don't seem to make any effort to get people excited for the future of the game; no effort to keep players involved other than trying to sell us more things.

5). Limits to customisation.
As someone who enjoys the character tailor and the ship tailor one thing that really bugs me is the silly and antiquated limitation on certain customisation options. Why is there still uniform and off-duty sections still? Why do different parts of the same outfit have different colour palettes? Why are my boffs limited from wearing certain parts? Why do some ships have certain paint patterns but not others?
I know some of it is due to spaghetti coding but I do think some of it is just lack of concern for this side of things and a minimum effort being put in on some items.
These systems and still very good but there could be some massive improvements to make it even better.

[Solace]

So falling down a YouTube rabbit hole I came across this video and it got me thinking about what would be your own top 5 issues with the game currently?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8smxOGPwjs

Hopefully people can say things nicely!

I do still like playing the game though, and the friends I have there and here are well worth the complaints I have about it!
I'll start off with mine:

2). Horrendous player balance.
I've never been much for DPS chasing and it doesn't bother me too much that others do enjoy this side of things; it's their call after all.
However it does make playing content within the social side of the game a bit off-putting I must admit. There's nothing worse than getting into a mission and two of the team are doing 10 times the damage of the others combined and killing everything before anyone else gets a shot off.
Or trying your best to pilot your ship and seeing yourself at the bottom of parses by a massive margin despite playing your socks off.
The fact that the game allows there to be such a massive disparity between players shows something is not working right. This isn't just good players being better; there's certain builds that just vaporise everything and they make others completely pointless. What's the use in trying to be helpful to your team in a build you think will be useful as a support ship etc when the top player can wipe out the whole map without even blinking or noticing you exist?
Is it just cheese builds being stacked up with top end gear? Is it a gulf between those with macro-bindings and those flying on manual? I don't know but tbh I don't really enjoy the team content anymore because i always feel like a spare wheel despite hours of developing my build and practising.

I'd personally say that's a failing of the game to consider player balance. There will always be outliers in any video game that need tuning but STO doesn't tune because the sheer amount of power creep would take a small team like STO's a good couple of months they could making actual content with. Simply put there is not profit in balance.

Then you can argue that the fault lies with Perfect World for not giving the Cryptic development team the people it needs to truly succeed and for meaningful upgrades to the game to come more frequently.

Most AAA games have teams of 100+ people working on them. STO has like 12 people. That's covering Environmental Artists, to programmers to ship artists and system engineers.

The point you make about people having DPS being off putting in a social setting I feel its a unfair brush that you are painting everybody with. If somebody is going out of their to make you feel crappy for not having as high damage as them then that's obviously a no go and you should report it to the STO command team.

However since the game has a massive amount of power creep, overpowered equipment and traits most of which are locked behind insanely expensive paywalls can give people naturally high damage output with very little effort.
That's not their fault that the game isn't balanced. Add to the that, most content in this game is not challenging at all. Even Elite has become a bit of joke at this point. Power creep from systems like Endeavours only exacerbate this issue.

STO is in a unique spot as it doesn't really follow the holy trinity of typical MMO gaming Healer > Tank > DPS like WoW does. Also as I said before it doesn't have a big development team supporting it. This game is more a Trek themed action MMO.

[Sorotia]

I agree with all of them, but I would replace three since it's probably the least worry of all your five.

I would replace it with general laziness of the development team

For years the game has seen a decline of effort in anything that doesn't involve monetization, they stopped making bridges (It's just one room, I know it took a lot of effort but come on, these ships have a average cost of hundreds of dollars) then they stopped making new lobi ships. They stopped making new reputations and fleet holdings. They make promise to balance things and never live up to them (last so called "balance" pass made things even worse) Every TFO they make now seems like it's intentionally designed to be a slow drag just to forcibly keep players playing longer to finish them (Which is probably designed that way to bait people into buyouts)

When ever they nerf something that is OP they typically just nerf it to the point it's unusable rather than try and make any form of balance, balance is trash but that's covered in number two.

I get it STO staff is small, but even when the majority of the TOR staff was relocated to work on Anthem they were able to put out more content...more voiced content.

Honestly, if STO was just a random space game and not Star Trek, I would have quit years ago

[darthnovawave]

I see staffing being a big issue. Games with larger dev teams often have more specialized teams working on different aspects of graphics, different game systems, etc. but with STO the devs are more jack of all trades. Things like game balancing unfortunately get backburnered because it takes away from building new content and it is always thankless to take the nerf hammer out on stuff. I was surprised to hear that a lot of Command powers are getting reworked soon though.

As for the pricing, it very much stinks but clearly someone has done the math and at least for now see these legendary bundles as more profitable. It stinks for the casual players that don't have the time or disposable income to dump on this game. As for the buyouts, I think it is nice for those who aren't able to do the limited time events otherwise, but I question why people bother to buy it out early just for the sake of being first. I find the buyout options for the insta-65, tier 5 reps, and the like dumb though. It just leaves fewer things to focus on before you reach the endless TFO runs of end game.

[Taku]

5) Space Wizards -- You know who you are.
4) The pandering to Space Wizards by Cryptic.
3) Lack of new code to do what the old code clearly cannot (See also: The Foundry).
2) Lack of beta testing.
1) Unsplit bundles.
-- Discount the bundle by 20%, and let us buy pieces of the bundle at increased prices per piece.
-- 10 ship bundle: 24,000 Zen. Each ship in the bundle, individually: 3,000 Zen (for example).

[WelshAvenger]

5) Space Wizards -- You know who you are.
4) The pandering to Space Wizards by Cryptic.

As a sci/sci captain, I kinda feel like I should defend the honour of the blue shirt brigade.

I would agree that inconsiderate Space Wizards are an issue. Activating that weather control ship console and tossing every enemy to the corners of the map is dumb and doesn't make friends but, sadly, it doesn't stop people using it.

My main issue with STO is that there's too much visual spam. Granted, most of it is from space magic, (looking at you DRB and Delphic Tear) but Cryptic should realise that not every power needs a visual. It's difficult to be an effective member of the team when you retina's have been seared by someone dropping DRB, Delphic, Plasma Storm and the Approaching Agony clicky, closely followed by grav well, the overload cascade and spore infused anomalies.

[Petrarch]

I'd definitely agree with the money grab that's going on. Price gouging, rip offs, nickle and dime, call it whatever but the end result is still the same. Granted they're a business, not a charity, but STO now resembles something you'd get on mobiles rather than a fully fledged MMO. There are paywalls everywhere now and while the exchange may have just about everything on it, good luck trying to generate the quantities of EC needed for it without sticking your hand into your pocket.

The game's engine, while over a decade old now, I generally have no issue with how it looks, other than the space vomit of dozens of abilities going off at once, but it's what we can't see which is the issue. The coding is effectively spaghetti and from what I've heard in the past, none of the dev team fully understands how it fits together. Patch one thing, break 3 others. And I've noticed the rubber banding is back in force.

Comms with the community is very poor. A couple of them pop up here and there, otherwise it's copy pasted blogs, news posts etc that frequently have mistakes in them. Combined with the EP who merely seems concerned with finding ways to make money hand over fist, you could easily get the perception that they simply don't care so long as the money rolls in. To use an Americianism, you can bet dollars to donuts they won't change until they see the money starting to dip. The recent legendary pack had numerous complaints, especially on price, yet that was the one that fell on totally deaf ears.

The endless string of events. All MMO's have special events but STO seems to treat them as the very reason to justify the existence of the game. We used to get episodes frequently, as much as one a week back in the very early days, now we're lucky to get 4 a year and instead it's all rehashed content with an extra time gated shiny at the end of it to make the metrics look good. This is the main reason I took a major step back from the game.

It's only 4, but those are my main gripes.

[Sul-Matuul]

One thing I forgot about until after is written everything and would probably be in the top five is Visual Spam.

Sometimes there’s so much crap on screen that it ceases to look like a trek game and becomes more like some terrible seizure inducing anime.
I mean does every officer ability really need a massive icon to pop up over your ship? Do all of the firing modes really need to display some glowing effect on your ship’s weapon hard points all the time? Do all the science abilities really have to be such massive swirly FPS-drains?
Sometimes it’s impossible to see your ship at all if you fly smaller craft like escorts or raiders.

[darthnovawave]

5) Space Wizards -- You know who you are.
4) The pandering to Space Wizards by Cryptic.

As someone who plays sci captains and space wizard boats, I'd offer that there are those that do try to play nicely with others and learn the intricacies of making those builds work well, and then there are those who are the STO version of the D&D player that always answers "I cast Fireball!!!" even after their teammates have charged into the fray. That said, building an OP sci boat requires serious investments of EC, Lobi, and Zen to get it to the point where you can melt entire TFOs while you park and sip your tea. Building a competitive DEW or even a pure torp/kinetic build to elite levels is far cheaper.

I would definitely agree the visual spam often associated with many sci builds is a problem though. I avoid running space tornado consoles personally because I find it the height of rudeness to turn people's frames-per-second rates into seconds-per-frame rates. In most real science disciplines, big massive visual indicators are more often than not the sign that you've performed science horribly, horribly wrong.

I really wish Cryptic would have kept closer to the original science power visual effects like tractor beam fields, gravity wells, tyken's rifts, and at most shockwaves (these last ones are bigger, but mostly 2-dimensional animations). They were far less obnoxious and there are comparable visual effects in the shows and movies for at least some of these animations. Even Q knows better than to make multi-tornado space storms large enough to swallow gas giants, so why are we doing this with some of the smallest ships in the game?

[Sul-Matuul]

I think with things like the space tornado and other AOE sci spam it would be hilarious if in elite missions these did team damage if you shot them off into your own side.

Maybe then we'd see more careful use of things and better actual tactical thinking if you could kill your entire team by shooting blindly or dumping ridiculous amounts of AOE damage into the fray.