Experimental Upgrades, Part 1: The Upgrade Before the Upgrade

Good day, all, and welcome back to Joe and STO! I was going to get cracking on the bad half of Star Trek Online’s monetization plans, but I got sidetracked with some relatively late-breaking news concerning a general buff to your ships for free!…and for a price…or both. We’re not 100% sure how it’s all going to work out.

In a recent blog leading up to the next content update on October 6th, we learn of a ship upgrade system for all Tier 5-Upgraded (“T5-U”) and Tier 6 (“T6”) starships. It will effectively mean your ship moves up half a tier with the ability to slot a few more items and a trait to help your combat performance.

What may be surprising to you is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a system like this.

Let’s hit up the history of ship upgrades by talking about the T5-U ships first. This will give us a historical point of comparison for this new upgrade type.

THE TRANSITION TO TIER 6: TIER 5 UPGRADED

History

When the level cap increased from 50 to 60 in 2004, Cryptic had already planned a new level level of ship that would be “necessary” to combat their increased challenges going forward. Tier 6 (“T6”) would be the full implementation, but there would be so few of them on release.

We all know T6 is a huge jump from Tier 5. You get:

• Starship Mastery package (T1-T4 help the ship you’re on, while T5 unlocks a trait for use at any time in one of 4 or 5 Starship Mastery slots).
• Extra Console slot.
• One more BOFF ability (bringing the total up from 12 to 13 for non-Fleet ships).
• Better hull and shield modifiers.
• Consoles with passive boosts along with the 2-minute activatable that had been standard on almost all ship-based Consoles.
• Specialist seating (usually at least one, even if the ship itself doesn’t have innate ship specialist abilities)
• On some ships, an innate ship mechanic (like Gather Intelligence on “full-spec” Intel ships)

These ships were not only brand new designs, they were more expensive: 3,000 Zen each compared to the previous tier’s ships’ 2,000-2,500 Zen each (when not bought in a Bundle).

What if you wanted to keep flying your T5 Intrepid? What about that Odyssey-class Operations Cruiser you love so much? The Scimitar was still good at T5 even after more T6s came out.

Cryptic had your answer: a Tier 5 Upgrade!

For 700 Zen, your T5 ship became T5-U, gaining the following:

• Starship Mastery package through Tier 4 (no Tier 5 for a Starship Trait exists on T5-U), with a progression track that best fit your ship type (Escort, Strike Wing Escort, Cruiser, etc.).
• 1 extra Console slot, themed to your ship (e.g.: Escorts got 1 Tactical console slot)
• Hull (ship HP) increase that scales from Level 50 to Level 60.

Of course, a full Tier 6 (which was level-locked to Level 50 and higher back then) had the following extras a T5-U could never get:

• extra Bridge Officer ability slot (from 12 total to 13 on non-Fleet ships).
• Specialist seating (not guaranteed to be on all ships as only Intel, Pilot and Commando existed at release of Delta Rising)
• Tier 5 Starship Mastery for a character-usable Starship Trait.
• Fleet version of your ship (if it exists) gets a free T5-U upgrade.

Tier 6s were strictly superior to T5-Us, but at Delta Rising‘s launch we only had 9 total Tier 6 ships: 5 Federation and 2 each KDF Romulan (long before Romulan ships were faction-agnostic; Romulans also could only use Romulan ships beyond Tier 4). If you wanted your T5 ship to be closer to viable for Delta Rising‘s story (and trust me, it was a steeeeep performance curve increase) or if you wanted to keep using your T5 ship with better combat ability, you needed one of these Upgrade Tokens.

Starship Eligibiity

Although STOWiki has a much more in-depth list of what can and can’t be upgraded to T5-U and how, here’s how you basically knew if you could upgrade your ship:

• Lockbox/Lobi “grand prize” (non-Mirror Universe) ships: Free (up to a certain point, which only happened within the past few years before they stopped putting T5 ships in regular Lockbox prize pools)
• C-Store T5: 1 Starship Upgrade Requisition required per T5 ship, account-wide upgrade available after use.
  • Exception (later): Ranger Temporal Battlecruiser, as there was a T6 version for it on release (remember, “T6 levels with you,” is only about a year or two old, so T1-T5 ships were still being included to bridge the leveling gap, in this case for new Agents of Yesterday-based Federation characters or those who simply liked the 23rd Century TOS aesthetic).
• Fleet versions of C-Store ships got an automatic free T5-U upgrade option if the C-Store version for it got the upgrade.

Cost Consideration

Those upgrades cost 700 Zen per ship. That…didn’t seem too bad.

• It was under $10 (which is my personal definition of a microtransaction).
• It has an account-wide effect (once an Odyssey-class Operations Cruiser T5 was upgraded, it was a free upgrade option on that specific “class” of ship for all other Federation characters).
• Your ship did better (even if it was just barely, considering the equipment and rarity/Mark levels we had available at the time).

What’s better, if you have multiple ships you wanted to upgrade, you could get a 4-for-2,000 Zen Bundle, making the effective cost 500 Zen each. Essentially, you could have four pseudo-T6s for the price of four fully-T6 ships.

Let’s consider what a “T6”-like ship would cost you at the time versus a full T6:

• Tier 6: 3,000 Zen
• Tier 5: 2,000 – 2,500 Zen
• Upgrade Token (per token): 500-700 Zen
• Price Range of T5-U Ships: 2,500 – 3,200 Zen

Depending on how many ships you were upgrading, your per-ship price tag on a T5-U ship via a C-Store T5 could be as little as a higher-end Tier 5 on its own (2,500) or as high as a bit more than a proper T6 ship (3,200). HOWEVER, considering options in 2014 were fairly limited, maybe 700 Zen to upgrade your T5 Defiant wasn’t such a bad proposition.

These Starship Upgrade Requisitions are sellable on the Exchange. If you didn’t have the Zen to get an Upgrade Requisition, you could eventually get the EC for one for no additional cost.

Finally, Veteran players got access to 1 of these “T5-U” tokens, Bound to Account. If you still had a T5 ship you wanted to use (most likely because a T6 version didn’t exist for it yet), this was a fully free upgrade for you.

“You’re switching between past tense and present.”

Yep…because they’re still available, as are Tier 5 ships in the C-Store (screenshots taken Monday morning, October 5th, 2020).

I don’t know about you, but short of a Legendary release, I still have my eye on the T5 Scimitars. They have the consoles that best mimic its abilities in Star Trek: Nemesis. I have the T5 versions on my main account, but IF I were to get any Scimitars on my alt account I’d probably go T5, in which case I may go with a T5-U upgrade on one version of it acknowledging the T6 versions are strictly better.

Other than a corner case like this, you’ll never need one. Why spend 2,500 Zen on a T5 ship and 700 Zen on a Starship Upgrade Requisition when you could spend 3,000 Zen on a Tier 6 ship, of which we have a much wider variety of choices than we did in 2014?

PART TWO COMING TUESDAY MORNING

Sorry, guys, but this is becoming a wall of text (far beyond what I would personally like for length), so I’m splitting this up into 2 parts. Unlike some other series that haven’t been finished, this will be done by Tuesday morning, October 6th so you can make an informed decision on whether to pursue the new Experimental Upgrade on its launch.

Until then, take care, and I hope you all enjoyed the little history lesson this post ended up being. 🙂