STO Is Not Your Game, But You Can Choose How You Enjoy It

Good day, Joe and STOers! (…is that a thing?) I bring unfortunate online community insight today, and you can probably already tell where I’m going with this.

With Thursday, March 11th’s patch, a ship in Earth Spacedock changed. Instead of the USS Titan, we saw the USS Voyager-J.

The Voyager-J, generically called the “Janeway Command Science Vessel,” was released last week as a Promotional Ship. This means players who want to take their chances have to buy either Research and Development packs or select Duty Officer (“DOFF”) packs from the C-Store while the promotional period is going on (the C-Store description will tell you if it is in yellow text). You can open these at any time, but you have to purchase them during the Promotional period.

The most likely prize is 10 Lobi in addition to either a Research & Development Box (with R&D materials and perhaps some R&D and Upgrade boosts) or the specific type of DOFF pack they purchased. The “Grand Prize” is a Ship Choice Pack from the pool of Promotional-level Starships.

I want to note before I start that I do own a Janeway Command Science Vessel (on the main account; it’s been practically abandoned for a year and I decided it deserved a treat.). If that will color your view of the rest of this post, go ahead and leave now.

[waits…]

Still here? Okay! You either don’t care or trust I’ll remain as objective as possible through the rest of this…hopefully.

BRIEF HISTORY OF EARTH SPACEDOCK SHIP SELECTION

On Earth Spacedock, you can look out the ship services area to see a smattering of Federation vessels curated by a developer(s) for players to see. This “feature” hadn’t been updated in around 6 years until November or December of 2020 (I can’t find the exact date on which the update went live).

During a Ten Forward Weekly livestream on December 9th, Kael answered a question about what prompted the change.

Ten Forward Weekly for 12/9/2020, 58:38 -59:05

Kael: “PunishedG, the ESD ships by the vendors got updated after all this time because honestly either Scott or Nick was playing and saw it and said, ‘Man, those are old!’ It was supposed to be a more regular thing I know back in the past we had whenever a new ship was released we would put it in there. As things changed and priorities shifted, it sort of fell off [brief cut in audio]…going to make it more frequently updated, though, so it’s not quite, you know, six-year-old ships in there.”

That update put the USS Titan (“Titan Science Destroyer“) front and center, presumably because it was the newest Federation release at the time.

On March 11th, nearly 3 months later, we got another update: The USS Voyager-J, making good on Kael’s stated intent to rotate ships more frequently.

WHY THE FUSS?

I’ll give what I view to be the consistent player issues along with my opinion on each view.

1. It’s an “RNG ship,” meaning it comes from a non-guaranteed method of acquisition (short of going to the Exchange or chat channels, but even then someone had to have good luck to get it). This to me strikes the closest to a legitimate concern. Unless someone has proof of a counterexample (and I’m more than happy to admit I’m wrong!), we’ve never seen Lockbox or Promo ships in the Earth Spacedock lineup. Everything that was shown is/was available in the C-Store at some point in time (even lower-tiered ships, which about a year ago went Dilithium-only unless a pack had C-Store unlocks for the ship(s) in question). This did serve as good marketing in case someone saw a ship they’d wanted and were curious how to get it: Just open the C-Store and look/search! We can’t do that with the 32nd Century Intrepid-class ship. Upon learning it’s in a “gamble box,” it could entice someone to try and gamble for it with built-up Zen or perhaps to overspend on boxes they weren’t going to buy before.
2. It’s a future ship among 25th Century period-accurate ships. I get it from a point of aesthetics. Everything else is from the 25th Century (or perhaps could argue late 24th as we’re only 9-12 years removed from 2399), so having an advanced future ship in Earth Spacedock makes no sense.
3. The ship is ugly. Here’s where we get into much more subjective analysis. See…I was in the same boat, too! I saw the preview pics on the blog and I was less than impressed.

I wouldn’t exactly classify those as “beauty shots.” The ship felt short, stubby, not anything like how I remembered its brief appearances in Star Trek: Discovery Season 3.

Then ZEFilms did his magic and maaaaan…I loved it!

Now, you want my opinion of an ugly ship? It’s also viewable at ESD and, ironically, it’s related:

I cannot stand the Pathfinder. I think it’s the downward-drooped nacelles in the aft and the odd deflector design. To me, it doesn’t resemble an Intrepid-class (24th century) starship. But it’s at least one developer’s favorite, and I believe some players prefer the Pathfinder variant to the canon Intrepid-class. MY preference is canon looks except on most Discovery-era Starfleet ships, where I feel they did a better job bringing the ships up to 25th Century looks versus the canon Discovery look they had to replicate.

But if my choice of ugly ship were considered a legit reason for taking a ship out of the visual presentation of ESD, then everyone’s choice of ugly ship couldn’t be there. I doubt we’d have many universally-loved ships where everyone agrees on its looks.

Where were we…ah, yes. Moving on to #4!

4. How can it be here now if time travel was banned by the time of the 32nd century?

This is where I start disagreeing hard. Have we not played STO?

• Time travel is a necessity for the story arcs “Iconian War” and “Future Proof.”
• Cryptic sells 31st Century ships in the C-Store.
• We’ve had 29th Century ships as Lockbox/Lobi/Promo ship purchases/prizes.

Plus, we don’t know the exact terms of the Temporal Accords as laid out by Admiral Vance. His understanding is there’s no time travel past to future or vice-versa, period. However, he references, “most of the 30th century,” as the time period where most of the fight to uphold the Temporal Accords takes place. According to Daniels, who’s fighting from the 31st century, travel for the purpose of historical study was allowed. So who knows?

5. It’s immersion-breaking.

Here’s my biggest opinion-based beef. What about STO isn’t immersion-breaking?

• It’s the 25th Century and we’re still flying 23rd-Century ships.
• We use flaming swords instead of Phasers for weapons.
• We can assimilate Voth City Ships!

So what does someone mean by, “it breaks immersion?” I think it means it breaks what they think STO should be: a Star Trek museum that’s a 25th century extension of the 24th century story that ended with Star Trek: Nemesis and the prequel comic to Star Trek (2009) and only recently got picked back up in Star Trek: Picard. In that context, a 32nd century vessel that “shouldn’t be here” breaks immersion.

WHAT DO I THINK HAPPENED?

It’s no mystery that some people hate Star Trek: Discovery, even to the point of calling it not canon or not part of the Prime Timeline. These types tend to hate anything or everything about it. If there’s a chance to spew hate for the series, they’ll do it.

The Voyager-J, and by extension the 32nd Century ships, are no exception. Instead of seeing a possible future where perhaps not all parts need to be attached to a ship to function similarly or more efficiently, they see it as unrealistic (because faster-than-light travel was realistic in the 1960s…) and therefore not proper starship design. These issues tend to come from people who don’t care for Star Trek: Discovery anyway (though not exclusively).

So we really have the following ovearching issues, I feel:

• It’s a Promo ship effectively being advertised in ESD.
• A vocal part of the playerbase hates Star Trek: Discovery with such a passion that they can’t stand seeing anything of it in the game.
• In general, people don’t like change.

THE UNACCEPABLE VITRIOL

I can get that people have a difference of opinion…but it can’t get out of hand. I’ve seen the usual “Craptic” insult come out again (that’s an automatic suspension in my fleet, no questions asked), I’ve seen that developer’s hard work called “trash” and “disgusting.”

Then I saw a couple disturbing things on Twitter. The first I’ll show, with names and profile pics redacted:

Disagree with someone, fine. Insult their education, that’s another. The person insulting the education of the player above them got an automatic block from me for that.

Then I heard of two well-known Twitter STO personalities going at it. Out of respect for them, I won’t post the exchange or either name, in part because I can only get half of the conversation and in part because I get people get heated and do things they maybe shouldn’t. What got my attention was one of the two involved seemed to hide their tweets after that. To be fair, though, that could be bad coincidence and that I only noticed it while looking for something they were involved with, so that’s maybe not part of this? But again, I hadn’t noticed it before this happened, and I feel the name’s big enough that I would have noticed a lack of their tweeting beforehand.

THE SOLUTION: “DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY (OR GET HAPPY)”

Here’s my overall take: It’s Cryptic’s game. Their people are the ones putting in the work to deliver something they feel people playing the game will enjoy. Kael said they’d start rotating newer ships into ESD, and they did exactly that. So we asked for this over time, and we got it…but not in the form a vocal section wanted.

You can’t control Cryptic. They want the ship there, so it’s there. Whether it’s for marketing or just to show off the newest Federation ship or maybe someone was proud of it and wanted it center stage, it was their decision for their game.

You can control how you respond to this.

• If you don’t want to constantly see the Voyager-J at ESD, you don’t have to! Cross-faction shipyards exist at Drozana and Deep Space Nine. Federation players can go to Starbase 39-Sierra, Fed-aligned Romulans can go to the Flotilla (not far from the Dyson Sphere’s Gateway).
• Mentally accept that STO is a game, meaning there will be bits you don’t enjoy but that you play it for the bits you do enjoy. Focus on what you love, not what you hate or don’t like.
• Accept that some people like the things you don’t. As I said above, the Pathfinder to me is an ugly Intrepid-class variant…but a developer loves it and I’m sure other players prefer that version of it. Who am I to say it’s objectively a horrible-looking ship? I can’t; beauty is subjective.
• Ultimately, this is a fight about pixels inside a pixelated representation of a “spacedock” that’s projected to your screen, the only thing that has physical form. Pick your battles. If it upsets you so much that you feel you have to hate on developers (not just constructively criticize their work) and especially other players, you need to take a break and reassess your priorities.

YOU WON’T AGREE WITH ME, AND THAT’S FINE

I felt this had to be put out after the two Twitter “conversations” that seemed to go horribly wrong. This is my long-winded take based on what I’ve seen and what I perceive to be the issues underlying some of the opinions I’ve seen. You may agree, you may vehemently disagree. That’s fine.

You have a right to your opinion.

You don’t have a right to attack people for it, developers or players alike.

Stop it.

For reference, the Reddit threads that started the need for this post:

Reddit Thread 1

Reddit Thread 2