Delta Rising

With the new Star Trek Online expansion: Delta Rising on the horizon, it’s been interesting watching the explosive uproar among the player base. It’s not exactly a surprise: the prevailing concern is over endgame ships. When someone has spent years investing, outfitting and polishing their favorite ships with time, effort, in-game currency and real money, you can expect them to be rightfully miffed when they’re told “by the way, your ship will be obsolete in a month from now”. The fact that they have a choice of upgrading those existing endgame ships (with money, of course) to be “competitive”, only seems to add to the anger — really, what is “competitive”? Is it almost as good, but not quite?

I have bought two ships since I started playing STO a few months ago: my main Feddie, Heidy (and hence the name of this blog) flies a Fleet Science Recon Ship; my main KDF, Gortusk the Gorn flies a Bortas’qu War cruiser. I paid real money for both, so I also have a vested interest in what’s going to happen to my ships. I was about halfway geared-up for both of them when Delta Rising hit, and without knowing the details behind ship upgrades and gear upgrades, I put everything on hold and have not purchased any more equipment.

I am doing the same with my remaining toons – including T’Leia. None of them has an endgame ship yet, including my Romulan main — whom I have been saving up for something but now that’s out the window — so here is an opportunity for them to jump straight to Tier 6 ships. That being said, it sounds like the free T5 ships may not be competitive enough in future STFs and queues, and frankly, I can’t afford to buy an endgame ship for all of them. It looks like I’ll have to be trimming back when Delta Rising gets here.

I find it interesting to see how the rollout of the expansion has been handled: I can see the reasoning behind revealing a bit at a time to entice the audience, but in this case I think Cryptic mismanaged the rollout. Like I said, this uproar and controversy should not have been a surprise; the Devs needed to be immediately upfront about details regarding ship-upgrades and new tier of ships. They needed to allay the main fear of their player base, not cause a massive outcry, anger and confusion; only then will the player base be excited with the new content. All that’s required is more transparency and information – even now the player base is operating on incomplete information and individual assumptions.

So come on, Crypic, give the players more information. You want your customers to be happy, not angry and frothing at the mouths.

P.S. And yes, I have to agree with everyone else on one point: the new T6 Federation cruiser is hideous. That’s not a Star Trek ship. >_<