I've been gone for a good while and now am nearly overwhelmed with relearning the basics as well as all of the updated goodness while I was gone. I've been checking out the wiki and the forums, but I'm still not clear on a few things.

You can apparently have a pretty large stable of bridge officers and bridge officer candidates. Why do you need more than those needed to fill your stations if you aren't going to use them to train your people? And how do you get rid of not needed and not sellable bridge officers that you end up with?

When you're upping your character's skills, if you want to eventually use a skill in a higher tier, do you have to put points into the skills to the left of it in the earlier tier or does one tier's selections have no bearing on the next?

How has the play-for-free thing gone over? It looks to me like you really don't have to spend a dollar/zen to be competitive and if you really wanted to buy something, it's a relatively small purchase or you do a few surveys and there you go. I don't get the Tholian lockbox thing that requires a C-Store purchase to open - that seems to go against the rest of what they've set up.

Thank you for your help and time. I may come up with more questions yet.

You can sell unneeded or unwanted bridge officers on the exchange.

The lockboxes are a way to get ultra-rare ships into the game while making an ASSLOAD of money for PWE. Its a really bad lottery where they give you the box for killing almost ANYTHING and hope you'll be curious enough to buy some keys to open it. The new tholian box has fairly decent rewards, but the earlier ones were pretty horrid.

I have several bridge officers that I swap out for DPS vs Crowd control/support roles. So I hot swap them in between combat depending on what is needed. Also, some people have multiple ships, each with their own bridge crew depending on the use of that vessel.

No, you dont have to put skill points in the slots directly left to the one you want, as long as you reach the other all EXP spent requirement for the rank, your fine. For example, I have three ticks in Tactical space Starship Maneuvers without having any ticks in the two skills below it. I just filled the rank requirments in the Science and Ops tiers below.

Well, I'm a New F2P player, and you are right. You really are not required to spend a dime in order to be competitive. As I have said before, Starships are just templates. How you assign your boff powers, skill points, gear your ship, etc. has a greater impact on your skill level then which ship you fly. My Free Luna was able to out DPS rainbow Oddys, because my ship was equipped better.

And, as boglejam was saying about the lock boxes, they have a chance of having an ultra rare, alien ship. And they make bank for the game. It is a way of tempting you to buy something by having it in your face. And apparently it works well enough they have rehashed it four times over. IF you dont like them, chuck them in the bin like everyone else does.

Welcome Back, Captain. Good to have you onboard

Think of your Bridge Officers are equipment for space and you have your answer. More Bridge Officers give your the flexibility of changing out BO abilities w/o having to retrain and rank up your BOs. You might have a standard build you use for most almost everything, but may have another build for dealing with tractor-beam-happy Borg.

And swaping out goes double for ships with Universal slots. For example my main character uses the Odyssey cruiser. I have a standard Engineer I use for most thing in the Lt Cmd Universal Slot. When I want to do damage I'll swap out to a Tactical Officer. That means every 15 seconds, I using a Torpedo and Beam weapon ability. Rather than 30 seconds. I have the flexibility use using AoE attacks all around or mix in more damaing single target attacks.

The only thing that matter when skilling up is spending enough XP to open the next tier of skills and a rough balance of 75/25 Xp split between space and ground. Although you have a lot of wiggle room in the 75/25 split. You can spend you XP anything you desire within those limits.

F2P has drawn in a lot more players which is very important for the health of the game. Even thouse some F2P account won't spend any, they are players that you can team with in order to play the game. That makes the game more fun for you and you may be willing for spending a few buck here and there.

And you are correct in that you don't have to spend any money to be competitive in the game. The free ships and rewards/requipment that be obtained are good enough for 95% of the game.

But with the Dilithium / Zen exchange, you can actually "buy" anything you want in the C-Store w/o having to spend any of "your" cash. The Dilithium exchange allows people with a lot of time and little money to exchange play time (i.e. dilithium) with people with money but little time to play.

Thank you for taking the time to write out those great responses, guys! It really clears things up completely. I'm slowly but surely getting a handle on what's going on. Coming back it's been information overload to the point where I didn't know where to start.

If you're a good representation of what the STO community is today, I'm glad to be back in it.

Yes thanks, im also returning to the game, and had alot of these questions as well