Along with Champions Online, I've also been playing Star Trek Online a lot recently. I mainly picked it back up because it was the closest I could get to Star Wars: The Old Republic at the time (I fail to acknowledge the existence of that "other" Star Wars MMO), but I also really wanted to see how far it had come from it's launch back in February.
I'm going to get the bad out of the way first, and this may be a bit of a rant. Cryptic doesn't know how MMO business models work. Actually, no, they do. They're just incredibly greedy. If you followed STO (Star Trek Online) at launch, you know that the game was basically released unfinished. It had no PvE content for the Klingon faction, none at all. Every single mission on Republic was the same thing over and over. Yes, you could say every MMO does this, but in other MMO's you're actually using different spells/abilities for different situations, getting new ones every 2 or so levels, things like that. In STO you're just spinning your ship in a circle with all your weapons on auto-cast not doing anything, which makes every mission feel the same, even if you're doing different things every time.
Now, here's where it really gets to me. Micro transactions. STO has been out for about 5 or 6 months now and already has more Paid DLC than any other subscription based MMO on the market. They've released more content that you have to pay for (not talking about a monthly fee here) than content that comes free with your $15 a month subscription. Why should I pay you on a monthly bases, and pay you another $10 a month because I don't want to have all of the crappy stuff? Cryptic is using the stupidest model I've ever seen. Most games are either a monthly subscription and little to no micro transactions, or free to play with the option to buy things. Cryptic has taken both of those things, and combined them, which is a step backward in terms of MMO's.
They were hanging by a thread with me until just this week when they released all the limited edition/pre-order/lifetime subscription items on the C-Store. The thread broke. Actually, Cryptic walked up and cut the thread into a million pieces. At no point can you tell me that Cryptic cares about anything but their money, they've resorted to completely screwing people over now. Because pre-order items were different depending on where you bought them, tons of people bought multiple copies of the game to get these items, and Cryptic new they would, they supported it. They knew Star Trek was such a huge IP that any items from the original series or things of that nature would just get people to go crazy. That means that what people payed $120+ for (Not to mention the $200 lifetime subscription) you can now buy on the C-Store for $10. There is nothing Cryptic can do to redeem themselves at this point.
I'm honestly upset that Cryptic was the first ones to get their hands on the Star Trek IP, and bring it to the MMO market.
More about the actual game tomorrow..
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