Star Trek Online is free

[Skgoa]

So I just learned STO has been made f5p a couple of days ago. (http://startrekonline.com/f2p) IIRC some of you guys play it. Is it any fun?

[CaptHawkeye]

I'm curious about it too. I'd play it but right now my computer is in the shop. I remember seeing it back when it came out and thought it looked awful but 1 year later it looks like it's improved substantially and Free to Play literally gives you no reason not to try it.

[White Haven]

Also unlike many F2Ps, it's actually fully playable without paying a dime. You honestly don't miss a whole lot, which is economically dubious, but really cool from a player perspective.

[Tolya]

A more serious question: is it worth playing?

[Stofsk]

Download it, try it out? For free?

That's what I'm gonna do.

[Stark]

He's probably asking the important question of whether the midgame is interesting enough to make it worth spending ten hours getting into the game. You can't judge an MMO's ability to sustain interest by the noob zones.

[Stofsk]

Ah, fair enough.

[wautd]

What's the difference between perfect world and cryptic?

[Scottish Ninja]

Cryptic is the developer, Perfect World is the publisher who bought them after they got dropped by Atari.

I picked it up when it went free on Tuesday and, because I'm a twit, already spent money on it.

I'm having fun, though that has a lot to do with me enjoying just being silly a bit of the time. I made an elf with an all-elf bridge crew, partly to yank a friend's chain, partly because I like elves. (I'd yell "DON'T JUDGE ME" but I don't think that would stop anyone.) Anyhoo, I'm liking the gameplay a decent bit, and the main quest line (presented as series of 'episodes') is decently entertaining and structured so that I think you don't really have to worry about leveling to get to the next bit. Grinding will open up access to better gear but otherwise the XP comes fast enough so that you can keep playing.

It does help quite a bit if you like Star Trek to begin with, otherwise it may be a little harder to care about what's going on, but I suspect that's not going to be a major issue here.

[Feil]

It's pretty good. STO has come a long, long way in two years. Ground combat is actually tolerably fun now, and the Duty Officer system is a lot of fun for those of us who like our gaming in ten minute increments. It still suffers from poorly implemented pick-up grouping, but not as much as it did at the beginning; and the "Go kill three groups of fifteen Bad Guy space ships" grindquest missions, which were the primary source of instance-based auto-grouping outside of PVP, have been entirely removed and replaced with actual fun content in the leveling progression. Usually I frown upon the practice of fixing something broken by removing it entirely, but in this case it's good riddance to bad rubbish.

It's still far too violent for a Star Trek theme, which clashes with the fact that the main reason for anybody to be playing this over other MMOs being a love of Star Trek, and the non-combat gameplay (outside of Duty Officers) is still largely limited to "scan five X," "click the dialog options in the right order," "reading comprehension," and "elementary algebra." It would benefit tremendously from the addition of some reskinned minigames along the lines of ME2's bopit reskin or Bioshock's Pipe Dream reskin.

There are still some aggravating bugs lingering from launch, and some new ones from F2P. Most of them can be solved by logging out and logging back in, but that doesn't make it any less infuriating to suddenly lose the ability to use any of your abilities in the middle of a PVP match, or have to log out and back in to send a private message because the game thinks your year old account with over a hundreds of hours of accumulated play is a newly created account that needs to be prevented from goldseller spam.

The character creation and dress-up system is even better than it was at launch, and it's still the best on the market. The alien creator is a joy to play with, and although Starfleet uniforms necessarily make for much fewer options than a superhero game's patterns on spandex, it's still more than enough to create an attractive and unique custom look for your captain and crew. There are some annoying little lingering problems when it comes to undoing and redoing changes with the provided buttons, and sorting through a large number of saved costumes can be time consuming because of the flashy saved costume UI taking too much time to swoop in all your costumes and failing to let you label them, but these are minor quibbles on an excellent system.

Non-custom-match PVP at max level is a waste of time unless you want to blow twenty dollars of real cash on a ship that's good enough to compete and grind for hours to get good enough equipment and bridge officers. There's no matchmaking system to speak of; the game just throws people into teams at random and sends them off to the slaughter. PVP is fun from level 5 when it becomes available to level 49, but then it becomes a question of who has spent the most money and grinding time at level 50.

[Korgeta]

Free play is good but it does come with its own issues. I remember playing Atlantica Online nearly two years back, it was free with option to purchse items, only as you buy one you tend to get another as you realise the price is low, but also the leveling system was annoying, hours spent grinding your level by killing enemy parties over and over. At one stage ittook me a year to improve a level, a YEAR! Then you realise you can speed up your exp by buying items, which was great at first till when I decided to quite the game I realised i had a character who was an actual amount in cash (due to buying special items) and I got rid of that character I got rid of all that money I actually spent. I know, foolish but it's so subtle as well, and I can see why some games opt a grinding out exp because of how many try buying special stuff to get through it all asap.

I don't mind trying a new free online game but if it has a very slow leveling up system like atlantica online I may just give it a pass.

[Feil]

You can easily hit maximum level in two or three months with a relaxed playing schedule and without grinding. If anything the leveling system is too fast.

[Korgeta]

That sounds good actually, the big drawback on atlantica online was the time it takes on levelling up, when you join groups on Atlantica they unite to do a 'quest' or defend their base from a monster atttack, great in one sense bad in that these monsters are lvl 100, characters, and I was on that game for two years, highest lvl I reached by buying was lvl98 and still i couldn't do quests! I gladly hit max level on a online game fast if it means doing more things sooner.

[Anacronian]

You can easily hit maximum level in two or three months with a relaxed playing schedule and without grinding. If anything the leveling system is too fast.

A friend of mine went from lvl 1 to 50 in just 5 days, Granted he had a broken leg at the time and not really anything else to do with his time other than playing STO but that is still damn fast.

[CaptHawkeye]

I'd rather the game be on the faster side than slower side. I'm really not interested in a long term grind and no MMORPG in the world has been able to hold my interest for long because of that.

Space combat looks Starfleet Command-ish which is interesting.

[Singular Intellect]

I'm downloading it and gonna give it a go. Worst case scenario hit the delete button if it's shitty.

[Agent Sorchus]

I've got it downloaded, since sometime in december. However my current computer is just lacking enough that it won't run. Maybe in Febuary when some of the graphics cards drop in price I'll give it a go.

[RogueIce]

You can easily hit maximum level in two or three months with a relaxed playing schedule and without grinding. If anything the leveling system is too fast.

To expand upon this a bit, pretty much every story mission you do will level you up a grade. Heck if you look at the list of them all, they assume you go up a grade after the vast majority of missions with their "Minimum Rank" thing, and so far the experience you earn (between killing things and the mission rewards) is right on track with that assumption.

It's not even hard to get a little 'ahead of the curve' if you luck out with some of the accolades. If you've got a buddy to group with, give it a shot. It seems most (all?) of the missions will scale up a bit if you have a team, and while it's not too hard providing you work together (it was pretty cake when I teamed up with some VAs from here and we did runs, but that was well before F2P; I dunno if they changed that or not) you'll wind up killing more ships and getting more experience, as well as dealing more damage (more targets) for the accolades, which also give you decent exp.

[Stark]

You can easily hit maximum level in two or three months with a relaxed playing schedule and without grinding. If anything the leveling system is too fast.

Whats the endgame like? What still exists to do once you max out?

[RogueIce]

You can easily hit maximum level in two or three months with a relaxed playing schedule and without grinding. If anything the leveling system is too fast.

Whats the endgame like? What still exists to do once you max out?

PVP, STFs (raids basically) and the Doffs. Mostly the usual MMO grind, from what I gather. Do a bunch of STFs, get some high level gear, and so on.

Now, they do have the Featured Episode series thing, which means new story missions that will come out. Apparently they're only doing two series (each of which, last time, had five missions per) but in theory they may or may not be able to increase that output in the future. So there's that, but it's admittedly a long term thing rather than being currently in place.

There's also the Foundry, which has user created missions you can do. I haven't done many of them myself, but from what I've heard there are some real gems out there. But people have basically created entire story arcs of their own.

Whether you'll enjoy the stories they've created is, of course, highly variable.

[Dartzap]

Decided to give this a shot - managed to get a level 7 engineer and would like to progress to bigger, more badarse warships - when the hell do I start earning dilithium?

[Sarevok]

With so many free to play games who is going to pay for MMOs anymore ? Is the paid MMO model dead ?

[Scottish Ninja]

Decided to give this a shot - managed to get a level 7 engineer and would like to progress to bigger, more badarse warships - when the hell do I start earning dilithium?

Certain missions (mainly dailies) will give you dilithium ore - there's one tied to exploration missions, one for doing player-created content (and there's a series of quick missions called the Nagus Dailies to make that easier), and a few others. If you're worried about the dilithium cost of new ships, though, don't be - you get a new ship for free every time you rank up.

[Simon_Jester]

With so many free to play games who is going to pay for MMOs anymore ? Is the paid MMO model dead ?

Paid MMOs will rely on having content people engage in mentally (World of Warcraft) and won't want to walk away from. "Free to play, pay for cool stuff" games are competing for the pool of people who don't give a shit which game they play, as long as they play some game.

Those are arguably different groups, and I doubt you can say that one of them will vanish in favor of the other.

[White Haven]

SWTOR and WoW say that no, the sub model isn't dead. It's just inferior for low-budget games.. Nobody's yet tried a real AAA-title on the F2P model yet, so there's no real way of telling how it'd work or not work. I'm quite curious to see how it ends up working once someone works up the guts to try...but it's not hard to see why people are reluctant to do so given the astronomical outlay of a content-heavy AAA title. Nobody wants to be first out the gate only to discover that no, it doesn't scale well enough.