Star Trek Online

posted on December 13th, 2011, 9:42 pm

lifetime, i wonder how long that will actually be. sto isn't as big as wow (or other big mmos), eventually they're gonna take the servers down. so the life in lifetime is the life of the game not the player.

posted on December 13th, 2011, 9:48 pm

lifetime, i wonder how long that will actually be. sto isn't as big as wow (or other big mmos), eventually they're gonna take the servers down. so the life in lifetime is the life of the game not the player.

Are you implying people don't know this?^^

Look... even all the well-known (due to the up-time until now) F2P-MMO's have been online for several years now.
If you now pay 200 for the LTS of STO and the game runs till 2015, you will basically have paid 50 bucks a year. Does that really hurt so much if you enjoy the game without feeling forced to play because you have paid monthly?

posted on December 13th, 2011, 9:55 pm

Are you implying people don't know this?^^

no, why would this be arcane knowledge? i'm sure others share my point of view on this.

you sound a bit confrontational. 

also the lifetime subscription is the equivalent of USD240 over here. then add in £10 for the actual copy of the game.

my point is that sto could be shut down much sooner than anybody thinks. especially if they dont get good numbers from the ftp transition. lifetime subscriptions of this value are wild gambles.

[Shril]

posted on December 14th, 2011, 9:58 pm

Last edited by Shril on December 14th, 2011, 9:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Do you even know much money is made from sales alone? Im not just talking about the game itself, im talking about cryptic points too! Do you think that STO would go free to play if they couldn't afford it?

I payed 14 € so I could download the full game and play it for 1 month. On top of that I got 5 trial keys I gave to a friend. After his 1 month trial vanished I gave him another one of mine so he could play another month. Till then he reached Admirals Rank. I also played 1 months before I "bought" it on a trial key from someone else. You see, it costed me no 45 € like a conventional game but 14 Euro to play 2 months plus a friend of mine could play another 2 months for no money. I never had to buy cryptic points. One has to pay for e.g. famous clothing with cryptic points. I may be a nerd - but I'm not that of a nerd.

STO goes f2p because the new publisher Perfect World wants it so. Atari was not interested in changing it to be f2p. f2p works, even on WoW it would work. It is said to tripple returns...but who knows the actual numbers?

All what you see there is intelectual content. In other words: stuff you don't hold in your hand. It is costly only to develop but they they can market it at a expense a few pennies per piece!

I don't see any difference to a conventional game.

For example (this is not an advertisement, i am actually stating an example): website.ws is so profitable that they can easily hand out 50% of the fee they charge for usage of their domains as rewards for users recommending it to other people!

To sumarize it all in a single sentence: There is a fat clear line between sustainability and corporate glutonny!

In the end I came cheaper off as when buying Mass Effect for instance and I had the same fun with both games. If they make profit from my 14 Euro this is ok. The profit may be tiny....say 4 Euro. They can use that for whatever as long a they keep up the support for STO. The other option would be an extension of STO...a "Season 5" you had to pay for another 30 Euro for another week of fun until you see the words "game over"? No thanks. If there was no multiplayer it would not be justified to pay so much money.

[RedEyedRaven]

posted on December 14th, 2011, 11:54 pm

Last edited by RedEyedRaven on December 15th, 2011, 12:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

you sound a bit confrontational. 

I don't mean to.

my point is that sto could be shut down much sooner than anybody thinks. especially if they dont get good numbers from the ftp transition. lifetime subscriptions of this value are wild gambles.

1. Even without f2p, STO has a not too small playerbase that more or less frequently pays money for whatever C-point-stuff or recurring subscriptions, so why should Cryptic risk their customers, assuming they're a profit-oriented company?
2. I don't think the uptime of the game will depend that much on the numbers from F2P. However F2P will probably make it go on far longer than you might expect, Cryptic's other game "Champions online" is still up with f2p and lifetime subs and such, so why shouldn't STO prevail too?
3. I noticed people tend to be pessimistic about STO, but I also figured many of them don't seem to understand how a company works (also half of those who complain didn't even play it) - The F2P-transition brings some dumb stuff with it of course, but it doesn't really hurt if you have a lifetime subscription because you can just wait until you got stipends for several months to buy the premium-ship you want. That's just one example of how wrong pessimism and hate can be in this case

posted on December 15th, 2011, 11:49 am

champions online has a broader appeal than sto, geeks into superheroes and stuff are more common than geeks who like trek gaming.

there's a list here that contains many shut down mmos:
List of massively multiplayer online role-playing games - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

sadly, companies are quite willing to bring the axe down if the numbers arent good.

i think ftp is something they will want to see good numbers from, as they will probably need the money from the microtransaction (newest overused gaming buzzword) stuff.

sto got worse reviews than age of conan and warhammer online, both of them have rumours going around of how long they will last, server numbers have been reduced on warhammer online.

i just don't see an advantage in betting serious sums of money that sto will be operating several years from now. monthly subscriptions are less of a gamble. ftp is even less of a gamble, and if i enjoyed the genre of rpgs i would give it a try out on ftp. every game is worth a free spin.

personally i think mmos should rework subscriptions so that you only pay for the time you use. rather than having monthly subscription for every month, allow the user to easily take a month off without paying. obviously thats good mainly for the player and not in the company's best interests.

posted on December 15th, 2011, 4:38 pm

personally i think mmos should rework subscriptions so that you only pay for the time you use. rather than having monthly subscription for every month

I agree, monthly subs kinda force players to use their "time-credit" because otherwise it wouldn't "pay off". I never liked that either.

sadly, companies are quite willing to bring the axe down if the numbers arent good.

i think ftp is something they will want to see good numbers from, as they will probably need the money from the microtransaction (newest overused gaming buzzword) stuff.

Humm.. I personally got the impression that some of the new STO-features make the game alot better now.
Impatient players can transwarp to far-away mission-locations now, and the Duty-officer-system is very fun to play around with, and with F2P I don't see a reason to not be optimistic about the server-uptime.

posted on December 15th, 2011, 5:39 pm

Humm.. I personally got the impression that some of the new STO-features make the game alot better now.
Impatient players can transwarp to far-away mission-locations now, and the Duty-officer-system is very fun to play around with, and with F2P I don't see a reason to not be optimistic about the server-uptime.

good new features will hopefully keep the numbers, which will obviously be necessary, let's hope those features cut the mustard. more people playing any star trek game is good, so i wish sto luck, i think it will need it.