Global Chat: To each his own edition

I got STO on release day and played it for 70 before going back to World of Warcraft. I went back because none of my friends were Star Trek fans and so I was alone, plus I had invested time in WoW that I valued.

I liked STO and could see its failings, but the positives were very likeable. I told myself I would switch back once the game had been fleshed out more and corrected. When I heard that Stahl was taking over, I didn't flinch. I don't know who Bill Roper is and I don't know who Dan Stahl is. I wasn't going to make comments based on reputation because it's hard to shake a reputation, no matter what happens in the future.

CO and STO were not ready to release. We know this. But in the year since it's been out, and since Dan Stahl took over, the game has come on in leaps and bounds. But people who played the game in those first three months won't know this. I re-subbed on Monday and have had a blast. Everything feels more like a Trek game. But people don't care about that. It wasn't perfect right of the bat, so it's a poor game.

That's the issue, really. We are in a market right now that has a good amount of perfect games. People want perfect right away. Were Warhammer, Age of Conan, EVE Online, WoW or Guild Wars perfect at launch? Were they even complete? No, they weren't, but people don't care. It's too fun to look cool and score points off of Crypic and its failings, even when it has put 75% of it right within a year. It's not fast enough. Too late. STO is a great game. Season 4 will, I think, finish off Stahl's mission to fix the game. I'll keep playing. It's a good game now and will only get better.

There are a lot of us out there who love this game too. We get called fanbois, but I would like to think we are realistic people with common sense. A lot of the Crypic-bashing comes in the same form any net-based bashing comes. Long-winded threats, walls of mispelled text and funny one-liners designed to make us think that the person writing it is cool. The blind Cryptic hate is too big now. It's become its own joke, where people make bigger and bolder comments about how poor they are. It's a self-feeding monster. Nobody is willing to back down, and so it will keep growing. But people will keep defending STO because it's a good game. It's not great; it fills a niche in the market that we need and it will keep a steady income, I hope. Anybody with an ounce of integrity will try the game again before walking in and hating on it.

For me it's a matter of theory vs. practice. In theory, it's nice to know you are walking dangerous territory and that something bad might happen. In practice, it can quickly turn into the ultra-aggressive, ruining the game for all others. If the relative number of "predators" vs. "prey" climbs too high, there is a real risk of "there is a chance I might get ganked and lose everything or a significant amount of what I have worked toward will be lost" changing to "it's pretty likely" or even "I'll be lucky if I don't lose everything."

The aggressive also seem to tend to band together, ignoring each other to instead go after less aggressive players. They don't want to lose out either. At least a significant amount are like that. I have known EVE Online players who did go in risking all their own, but there were also tons of gank-bears.

I belive this at least partial hypocrisy amongst the aggressive players is a reason free-for-all games have hard times. Also the fact that often it is possible to be aggressive on one account/character and use that one for nothing else but being aggressive, while bankrolling it with a character/account that does not have the bad reputation, making self-balancing and player policing difficult.