Wednesday, March 4, 2015

STO's Evil Cash Shop

Now, I use the term evil lightly, as we are talking about a game.  The C-Store in STO is really something.  PWE puts a lot of resources into developing products for it, that's for sure.  Don't get me wrong, they put out some great stuff.  Ships in STO are usually very well done and no easy feat.  So getting a return on that investment is important.

Is STO Pay to Win?  Yes and no.  You can buy the most powerful ships with Zen (RMT).  Right now, that's usually whatever the latest T6 ship is including a special console and trait.  There are no 'end-game' ship drops that are more powerful and BoP in this game.  It's straight from the C-Store (or the Exchange for EC in some cases).

However, it's not really P2W because those powerful ships are really just optional.  The difficult PvE content can be done in lower tiered ships.  So I'm not sure what that makes STO.  Is it better than PWE making content that requires the latest and greatest ship?  I mean, eventually they will have to make the PvE content more difficult right?

Ships are a big part of Star Trek, and there are no shortage of them in STO.  The staff releases really neat ones which makes them very tempting to buy.  Sadly,  the lockbox model tends to work a bit too well and a lot of the ships are distributed in that way.  They would get more of my money if they could just be bought, but in the scheme of things I guess gambling wins out.  I can't really argue with that.