Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well Cryptic has finally, finally released the T6 Nova that players have been asking for literally years, along with another ship that is far less interesting. The release is also in concert with a long double-XP and Red Alert event, which is great news for those of us with many ships still to master, I'm going to be doing a lot of moving equipment and assigning BOFFS to each new ships, it gets tedious after a while The "ready ship" option is supposed to bring gear across from existing ships but it doesn't always work meaning it has to be done manually. At some point I'm going to have to do an audit of the unique equipment and traits I have available as there are way too many to deal with as is!

The exchange has been stuck at 500 for weeks now so if you want to buy Zen you really need to get in line as I couldn't get any in time for the discount for new ships (as in, made the offer on Thursday and still haven't gotten the Zen as of today) so I could only get one of the two. Sneakily Cryptic only let you use the 100% discount coupon for ships not in the new items tab, but the 50% coupons do work on those.

[Sammy00]

The game is quite playable without spending a single cent, which many "free" MMOs can't claim. They give out Tier-6 ships (the best ones in the game) 2-3 times a year for fairly low effort. Progress is also fairly rapid. You can go from Level 1 to 50 in about a month. Levels 50-65 are more of a climb, but at that point, you'll have a decent ship.

[Elheru Aran]

The issue for me is mostly just how little flavor there is to each faction. While there's some faction-specific stuff, it's almost all early-level stuff. After that point, everything is the same. Including that fucking Nimbus stage where you have to run about the stupid planet from Star Trek V for hours to track down more pointless Tal Shiar bullshit.

Like, at least Klingons got a good solid 3-4 unique storylines. The Romulan Republic gets maybe two... one of which (Reman Rebellion or whatever) everybody else gets in on the action. I started the Jem'Hadar bit for a while, but didn't get very far... because after the intro storyline, it was more of the exact same plots.

Lord of the Rings Online, for all it's kind of a crappy grindy game, at least gave its factions (Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit) serious, different storylines. Like, completely different. Maybe once you leveled up enough they started repeating stuff, I don't know, but the stories were unique for as long as I played each. There's really nothing stopping STO from doing this other than, I suppose, game size. But it seems like every faction in STO ends up running the same missions in whatever skin you're using. They don't even change the map or anything.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The game is quite playable without spending a single cent, which many "free" MMOs can't claim. They give out Tier-6 ships (the best ones in the game) 2-3 times a year for fairly low effort. Progress is also fairly rapid. You can go from Level 1 to 50 in about a month. Levels 50-65 are more of a climb, but at that point, you'll have a decent ship.

You can climb the levels way faster by doing DOFF assignments compared to episodes, those give out more XP than you might think. You can easily get there inside of a week, especially if you have other characters send you things to help you on your way- my newest characters make use of the overflow weapons that my original ones do not.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

New content is out, Shadow's Advance and they've brought in one Admiral Janeway, replacing Tuvok as the one giving the orders. With the later addition of Tom Paris, the only Voyager characters now not featuring are Chakotay and Torres, the latter being more interesting than the former unless the Maquis somehow become relevant again.

The increased rewards for Lifetime Subscription (more inventory, bank and BOFF slots) is really good as all my characters were struggling for space, most of the bank slots are occupied by consoles after all. I'm going to be moving a lot of stuff around as a result, this is gonna be fun!