well I enjoy all 3 of my characters now

I do NOT want to grind the SAME content 3 times

So any new players in our fleet i will suggest not buying additional character slots because regrinding the same contentent isnt fun

so cryptic is shooting themselves in the foot, buying extra character slots to enjoy content isnt worth the grind so the will lose some customers in that reguard

just use the free character buying more is just work

The new systems (personal reputation at least) are being balanced around the average player's weekly play sessions. Just 3 hours a week.

If you find yourself unable to play (or desire to play) for more than three hours a week, then I'd agree your concerns are valid OP (for other character play).

Furthermore,

Suggestion #1: If you don't enjoy the content, don't run it?

Suggestion #2: If you want the rewards, go earn them?

... and last I saw, they were expanding the avenues to earn the materials needed to non-stf content, where appropriate. Certainly sounds like they are doing their best to allow people to best tailor their play time around the content they prefer (within the context of it being borg, or romulan).

The isue isn;t the rep system, it's the costs of the rewards. The rep system is dil cheap, the rewards are dil expensive. A full set of weapons + a single STF set all MkXII is going to set you back around 250K Dil based on a mixture of hard fact figures and generalisations by the devs.

This has been a general trend with STO. They want you to have a main.

nerfing the free dilithium from the foundry for 30 seconds of logging on a level 25+ character makes sense, but that's somewhat secondary to the larger design question.

With the jem'hadar and lock box ships, and even a bit before that, they've started pushing things to per character unlocks rather than per player. That makes having exotic alts a lot more time consuming, and you have to make more difficult choices - want the temporal space set (from the mobius and the wells), well sure, but you can only fly one ship at a time, so spend 70 million EC on a ship you won't fly to get one console that isn't spectacular - and if you want to fly the other ship on a different character, buy one for them separately.

Fleets, because they aren't cross faction (which makes RP sense), lock you somewhat to one side, since anything your other faction alt does can't count for the benefit of your fleet easily.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad for the game overall, seriously. I don't like it personally, STO is and was basically a casual easy game, making it more a more serious focus on one character poses problems. I hadn't played for something like 10 months, and I came back to the new STF''s and got full mk xii borg sets on one character in maybe 50 played hours, weapons 2 others and they at least have a couple of purple set pieces. Now here the new reputation system will eventually make gearing them easier theoretically, I have to make hard choices between say giving a wells to my science toon or keeping it for my 'main' to benefit from just the console. That sort of stuff doesn't seem like it's great for the game. They'd be better to make things valuable but not unbalanced, than make them unbalanced but of less value.

E.G. if I buy a cruiser for 2500 zen, well I don't really want to fly the same ship on multiple characters. So I'm buying it only for one toon, and an alt especially, it's hard to justify that purchase, since my eng alt for example only has 100 and some played hours, total. And he's got almost full STF gear. For him the chimera may have to be 'good enough' even though I'd probably rather a cruiser. On the other hand, if I want to play him seriously a 2500 zen ship is (or can be) significantly better than a free similar equivalent. So I'd be paying to win - which is a problem if everyone else is paying to win and you aren't. If a 2500 zen ship pack had ships for KDF/FED and 3 factions I'd probably buy more stuff because I'd feel like all of my characters are getting something out of it. The game really doesn't have enough compelling content for just one character (especially with a 8000 dilithium cap).

But they're trying to push you into, at a minimum, picking a faction with a fleet, and generally focusing on one toon (for all of the doffs, ships etc.). As I say, I'm not sure that's a good thing or not. It's not a serious constraint, you can after all just spend a bit more time on alts, and negotiate that with your fleet leader a bit.

There is still time before s7 to keep spamming STFs so you can have multiple characters with end game gear. Almost have my 6th char geared, all will have at least 1 mk XII space set and all mk XII borg or fleet weapons and mk XII ground sets on 4 of them. Makes it easy to keep doing stuff during cooldown on other characters and to refine lots of dil each day, also can bring whatever class/ship group needs. Its well worth the effort if you can gear an alt now before s7 starts, it will be much harder afterward it seems.

Yes, because Taking 60% less time on average will be harder for the player base as a whole.

Existing non STF content is poor currently that's why hardly
Anyone does it