Ranking up is no longer optional in the Tribble build. It happens automatically without spending skillpoints.

Not really a lie if people had the 250 emblem vet reward.

Unless I'm completely mistaken 250 emblems is not even close to being enough to equip you and your ship with "the best gear in the game".

I can equip a ship 80/90% of the way, and with the *current* crafting system if you've been using it at all levels to get gear then its easy to fill in the rest and your personal equipment with Memory Alpha.

pretty much yeah, you could get close. Even WITH it it didn't matter, you were end game, not leveling. Gearing up for the meager end game we have wasn't hard, it should have been the logical step to get more endgame but well, it wasn't since we never got more.

Yup, I made it to VA1 on tribble with pathetic green equipment in the VII-VIII range.

They want as many people to as quickly hit the VA1 barrier with as little equipment as possible.

These people are then prime candidates for purchasing CPoints in order to gain dilithium in order to buy gear.

This is the lamest and most money grubbing, blood sucking behavior I have ever seen from a game company.

Cryptic is offering no reason to be loyal to them.

They certainly haven't done a single thing to deserve even the most minute shred of loyalty.

Faster leveling makes sense, think about it.

We were supposedly able to get to max level in a day, but now, we can do it in less time.

Less time at a particular level means a new player, that is unaware will buy the Plus 1 ship, only to realize a couple hours later they need the next plus 1 ship.

C-store should see a drastic increase in revenues. Increased revenues is the whole point of Cryptic ignoring the please of there player base for the last 2 years.

So all they've done is taken the red bull out of the equation.

This is quite worrying really, they want to goto a F2P model where players spend money on micro transactions, yet, by making the leveling curve faster they have completly made all the low tier C-store ships defunct for leveling, as well as made the XP tokens defunct too. Although one could argue that people will be buying the low level C-store ships for thier consoles instead. I don't think custoerms are going to be stupid enough to buy all of the lower level C-store ships if they are leveling so quickly with the regular ships and even if they do, it just means Cryptic got the money they would of spent in a shorter time, but if there is nothing really do to at level cap, it won't matter as it'll just be a lost customer.

To me it would of made much more sence to slow down the level progression to try and milk the consumer for more C-store purchases that help you level, althoguh this would of needed more playable content in the game, which from what the devs have been stating lately, does not seem to be in the pipeline for a while (1 FE been added wont cut it sadly). If the progression is slower it will give the devs more time to get more endgame content added before the new F2P players hit the level cap.