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Honest question about STO content/getting money's worth
Cemm
Member UncommonPosts: 64
I just saw a really interesting thought in another thread. They weren't intending to point this out, but it begs the question I'm about to ask.
The poster suggested that Star Trek Online has about 60-80 hours of good content. They also suggested this was just fine for a single player game but not for an MMO. Finally, it was pointed out that they bought the game for $29.99.
My question is this: How does this hurt anyone but Cryptic?
It sounds to me that anyone buying STO and playing through the content in their free month of playtime will more than get their money's worth right? Most good single player games sell for $49.99 starting out, and you're doing great if you can get 60-80 hours of playtime out of them. I got 60ish for both Mass Effects and Dragon Age Origins, for instance.
Yeah, as an MMO player you really want to get a world you can sink your teeth into and spend hundreds of hours in for a couple of years, but as a consumer if the 60-80 hours of content you do get is genuinely entertaining and you play through it in a month or two, all with the option to play with as many friends as you'd like (the MMO supported aspect), that seems like a pretty decent deal right?
What do you all think? I tried STO in beta and was not impressed and didn't continue playing it. I also completely understand the disappointment of fans looking for their next big MMO, but I have to wonder at the severity of the complaints if the game is actually fun at least for long enough for players to get their money's worth like they'd expect from a single player game.
Comments
Quite frankly STO looks so lackluster I'm not willing to pay a penny for it until I can try out a free trial, or get the game at a hugely discounted price.
I got Age of Conan for $15 and I played the free mnth, that was worth it. I bought Everquest and all it's expansions for that $2 deal they had going on on Steam, and that was worth it. I think $29.99 is still far too much, I'm still completely unwilling to pay that price for it. I think the guy who bought it for that price got ripped off.
I personally won't buy STO until it's in the $5 bin at WalMart in six months (or less.) Even then that price seems a little steep.
If i was buying a single player game it would have been fine but since i do not play single player games and only play MMO's for their socialization and character building(which was nerfed 3 days before live and after i had already payed) i feel that this game is a total ripoff for MMO players.
And the 80 hours of content is bogus it was the same damn three types of missions all the way up the ladder.
Kill 5 ships or scan 5 objects or find 5 peices of wreckage ad neasuem
Blahhhhh on craptic
Being an mmo the number of content hours is really kind of irrelevent to a certain degree. You make a game, call it an MMO, call it Star Trek, you'd better be prepared to offer more than the number of hours of content you'd get in a single player game.
MMO's should be designed to offer many months of not necessarily content, but of desire to play, either from content or from design dynamics that reward playing the game with other people.
If you played in the open beta period, nothing of any substance has changed. Its been a lot of lip service from Cryptic. The 45 day patch was a horrible job of spin doctoring. This game still lacks in the same ways it did during beta, and suffers from the same core problems caused by the games engine. This is still a Champions online Star Trek themed mod. I wish it where different, but its not. All of the bad reviews are not lying to you. It really is sad for Trek fans.
I wish! I love the gameplay of Champions Online, especially the PvP, and I am a big fan of Star Trek, but even back in closed beta I was already saying that STO would be an unmitigated disaster. See, CO is at least has some good and different features to offset its widely acknowledged flaws. STO really has no redeeming features besides the Star Trek name and some of the art. I think that even the STO lifetimers will not be able to force themselves to keep playing, and eventually they will turn into haters and demand their money back, it will be epic.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
I wouldn't buy STO fr a dollar TBH. That would still be supporting a company I feel is without any ethics, however small. Not to mention I've now inflated their next "We have more than X subs!" marketing sales pitch.
The game is terrible, that's one thing. This company though, is worse. They not only made two rotten games in a row, but they displayed so much arrogance, disdain for some of us, and plain deceit and nickle & diming that I'll never support anything they touch.
That's just me though, I take the way I and the playerbase on the whole are treated by MMO companies seriously. I can forgive a rocky launch, I can deal with waiting for content and bugs, as long as I see proof the company is working on it. In other words, results. Cryptic not only showed no results, they seem to have gone from the "We're working on it, please be patient.", to "You don't know what you're talking about, everything is fine...unless you don't get it."
You dont have to wish, thats exactly what it is.
See the problem is that engine can get a super hero MMO by, that same engine shows its ass very bad in STO. If you take an honest look at the gameplay between both, there is really little difference between them.
I think CO is a bad game as well, but thats for a different thread.
Im not sure what happened to the team that made CoH, Im sure some are still working on it for NCsoft, but these last two games are hollow shells that share only the name Cryptic and nothing else with CoH.
To be honest that is my general assessment of STO except I'm not big into raids and such and with the totally uninteresting universe they created it gave me no incentive to do them so I got something around 40 hours out of it. My only problem is that since it in fact is an mmo and I should easily be able to get hundreds if not thousands of hours if they didn't do everything you could think of totally backwards. Also I think it most important that the community makes it a point to shine a bright light on companies with games like this with very little content a sub fee and an item shop.
I've mentioned that at times that it really only hurts Cryptic which is true unless they can actually find a great revenue stream doing what they are doing to lifers and from then we can expect mmo's to certainly get worse not better.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Its odd, but STO is almost a step backwards compared to CO. CO had some pretty big maps in some of the starter zones like the desert, canada, mc ect. Even if you weren't doing missions you could uncover more of the map, discover new points of interest, mission location ect. In STO it just felt like you were in a box with nowhere to go that was really interesting except mission locations. In CO crafting actually offered some incentive to do it, either to craft bigger bags to add more storage space, craft equipent that unlock different weapon/costume pieces ect. In STO, it's kind of pointless because you find better equipment from drops/ mission rewards than you can craft.
Not really, when you stop to consider STO was in development for about a years less than CO. Sure Cryptic was selling that the most time in development was spent on the engine, but that's not really the case; most companies spend a year or two getting their engine up to par so that other work can get done (and of course work will still continue on it), but most of the development time in MMO is in adding the content. Had STO been in development for another year, I think it would have resembled CO a lot more in level of completion than it does now.
I'd be willing to bet that another year of development would have seen the Klingon content be fleshed out to the Federation's level of content, like they were saying until the Klingon information 'blitz .' Heck, CO has a far superior level of 3D movement than STO does, and they're both using the same engine.
"Oh my, how horrible, someone is criticizing a MMO. Oh yeah, that is what a forum is about, looking at both sides. You rather have to be critical of anything in this genre as of late because the track record of these major studios has just been appalling." -Ozmodan
It should also be mentioned that lots of work can be done on the game while the engine is in development. i.e. concept art, quest writing, working out game mechanics on paper, etc.
Oh well and this is exactly what I was afraid of. I played the beta, and I was so disapointed. I was hoping that as time went that things would get better. All I keep seeing however is more and more c-shop stuff and not enough enhancements to the game to make it better.
Oh well I will come back in 3 months and check again, by that time it will either be doing better or dead in the water.
I'm really glad that I didn't let curiosity get me on this game. I'm not generally fond of space games, but...I did grow up watching Star Trek, so...I'm glad that I didn't wax nostalgic and buy into this anyway.
I saw a Craigslist ad today that I thought of when I read some of this thread and another one that's posted:
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Toilet Bowl - Not Tank, just the bowl. White porcelain, fairly new
Kansas City, MO
11 miles
Free Stuff
3 days ago
ReplyForward
This toilet was installed & only used for a couple months. My wife wanted a fancier one. I have just the bowl (not the tank) - it's white, standard sized. Perfectly fine, pretty clean - just some wax ...
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It's kind of like that, it seems.
If you're trying to get rid of a toilet....it's probably better to have a WHOLE toilet at least. And it's NOT good advertising, generally, to list it as "pretty clean"......
Seriously. At least the toilet bowl is free.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club