I like STO. That is to say I liked STO. I finished the game, I "won". I am currently unemployed so I have quite a bit of free time and playing pretty casually I managed to get through the game. And having said that I will be canceling my subscription and not for the reasons I ever imagined I would. (this isn't exactly an "I quit" post so please keep reading.)

To counter the idiots;

No you can't have my stuff.
I am not your "brah" so don't bother saying "later" to me.

I will be keeping a close eye on STO to see if they deliver some more content but at the moment there isn't much left for me to do other than make another character and take a trip down memory lane for another 7-10 days (now that I know what all the missions are and where to go I imagine leveling will be even faster). I absolutely hate PvP so that isn't really an option.

And at the risk of making a "wall of text" I would like to point out some of the things that could improve the experience for future players, regardless of how short the game is:

Create enough unique missions to level to cap without having to grind. I realize that grinding is part of most MMO's but in truth you can usually get from level 0 to level X without having to camp monsters (exploration missions). Having your mission log dry up is distracting and it gives you a feeling of an intentional speed bump in the level process. It makes exploration missions feel like a band-aid to cover up the lack of content.

Fix the tool tips. Someone should take a few days/weeks to rewrite most (if not all) of the tool tips so that they are more informative. Ships should have clear cut descriptions that touch only faintly on canon, and not be description based exclusively on canon. When selecting a new ship I don't care that it was developed in secret or that it was based off of an older design. I want to know tangible information like where it's strengths are and what it's weaknesses are in an easy to read well laid out format.

A small personal beef: Don't give missions for an area you cannot get to until you can get there. Getting missions to explore Gamma Orionis and the B'Tran Cluser beyond it at RA 1 and RA 2 and not getting the ability to actually go there until RA 3 is just silly. Specifically when you run out of missions and you have to just grind your way up high enough to reach RA 3.

Never stop giving sector information. I would assume that our ships have maps and navigational information, the captain of a ship shouldn't have to remember passing a solar system to navigate back to it. This isn't some rural wasteland where we have to "take a left where the old Johnson place used to be". Excluding sector information and replacing it with "Romulan Front" in the mission description is not good story telling. It is frustrating and annoying.

Develop a manual for the game. This is a no-brainer and baffles me as to why it isn't more complete. Sure there is a manual on the website but it is painfully lacking in information the player cares about.

A final word;

Obscurity is no replacement for ingenuity. Making things hard to understand or obtuse does not make them challenging or good. It makes them annoying and frustrating... it makes the game "elitist" as the valuable information within the game (crafting, system locations, progression) are only known to those that have been there and done that and many people (myself included) find joy in seeking that information for ourselves and not just spamming chat asking people where to go and what to do. The fact that I have to go to a third party website to get that information (such as which systems are in which sector) is disturbing.

I will probably dink around with the game for the remainder of my free time so maybe content patches will keep me interested, I hope they do. I would like nothing more than to keep my subscription going because I still love the space combat... even if it doesn't match up with the Federations ideals.

Count me in with you. I'm unemployed and have alot of free time. I got a about 3 mission left. Seeing the end of the game comeing up very quickly isn't motivating me to finish. I though the point of an mmo was to not have an end. This was totally a single player game experience for me. Blew through the whole thing by myself in 2 weeks.

Plenty other things I could say about the game but I'll leave it at that.

Later, brah!

You knew SOMEONE had to eventually say it. On a more serious note...

Every critique you touched upon are almost to the last exact thoughts I have about the current status of the game, as well.
Content missions are just... a necessity. I have never heard of a game being criticized for having too many things to do throughout the time people play it. Except from ADD inflicted folks who think Dragon Age offered, and this has actually been said, 'too much to do'.
I digress...
Optional paths to advancement, optional endgame paths for different playstyles (PvP or PvE), the ability to stumble into side missions as a reward for exploration in a game about... exploration. Really, especially with this I.P., the opportunities for a unique play experience are limitless.

I can't pretend to understand the goings on of Cryptic or why this game was released in the time frame/state that it it's currently. Likely reason? The almighty buck, but that would be speculation on my part without facts. It strikes me, though, that if the focus on content stays strong, good people like metric here would remain a player in the game.

The tooltip critique is so spot on, there should almost be a political movement to expand on it. Half of the 'complexity' of this game is lack of clarification and a simple, easy to understand description of what things are, and what they do. Sure, there's a place to have information about it's history and design reasons for those wanting to explore more about it (like, say.. a codex), but being direct goes a long way to aid in new players, and veteran players down the road alike, in understanding what your vision for the game really is.

About the missions, I admit it. I spent spent probably 10 minutes at the Transwarp gate at RA2 trying to get to the B'Tran Cluser. I had to look up why I was unable to access it, and only then found you had to be RA3 to actually go there. While getting to RA3, I still had no reasonable clue as to why we were given tasks or missions we couldn't even do.
Maybe it's a game mechanic oversight, or perhaps even a 'bug', but issues like that aren't 'well, this game can be complex', that's just a scratch-on-the-head design.

I think the greatest portion of your post, metricsimpleton, is by far your Final Word entry.
It goes back to what makes a game 'complex' or not, and what you've said pretty much completely nailed it. I truly believe a lot of the so-called 'complexity' is due to many things being in a form of unfinished state; a limbo of how the designers want to guide players through the experience, and how players want to figure out how crafting works, or what sector they're supposed to be in, and when.

I'm not one to have my hand held to every piece of game content, but in a game where a LOT of players had trouble finding Sulu (an overused joke now, but in beta and even launch, a moment for confusion for some in the playerbase), I really feel the expectation of the developers on what players can simply 'figure out' is a bit unbalanced, if that makes sense. I think it's a case of 'know your customers' when it comes to issues like this.

Overall, I found this game far, far more enjoyable and almost addicting than I ever considered I thought it would be. Like the OP, I would love nothing more than to stay in this gaming universe and play for awhile.

At this point, it's all up to Cryptic now. I've done my part by subscribing and playing. Hopefully they do enough down the road to keep myself, and indeed people like you, metricsimpleton, exploring new life and civilizations...

-Dragon

There is more as well... I am willing to admit that I might have missed content, maybe entire segments of content. But it wasn't for a lack of trying. Every time I gain a level I contact every single person I can at Starfleet and I take every mission they have to offer. If I missed something by not just randomly heading in a new direction I am not sure what I can say other than it lends strength to my argument about the game being obscure instead of interesting.

I do like the game, don't get me wrong. This isn't a thread talking about how much I hated this or that. In fact I believe that a solid MMO and indeed a respectable Star Trek game can be built off of what Cryptic has begun here, but the core content is so shallow it is almost depressing.

I hate to utter the dreaded "W" word (and acronym) here but lets just say that in some other MMO that will not be mentioned I was able to level from 0 to 60 and I was dropping quests as I went because they no longer offered a challenge and my quest log was full. I still recall hitting level 60 and clearing out my quest log and noticing for the first time in months (yes... months to cap at my play speed) that the quest log has little cobwebs in the corner as a graphic. It had never been empty since that first quest were I killed some little rat men.

This wasn't four years after launch, after multiple patches and expansions. This was within the first three months of launch and I was dropping quests within the first week as I got to level 20 and had gray quests that would not be worth my time.

In STO I have been figuratively scraping the bottom of the barrel randomly flying near solar systems wondering if I might have missed a mission somewhere. Hoping for that dialog that would offer me a quest 30+ levels under me just so I would have something to do.

What STO is currently is a foundation of something greater. Let's just hope the current foundation that is full of holes (lack of missions to cap) and fractures (rampant bugs) won't cause the whole thing to come crumbling down later.

It always bugs me as well that i get told to go to xxx sector but i have to go hunting for it on a star chart.

Christ, im the Captain of a starship.............i should have minions to do this kinda thing for me, pretty sure my helmsman is taking the preverbial....

I'd just like to point out most of those quests were/are "kill x of y" or "get x off of y" or my least favorite "take x to y", all with very slow travel involved. Yeah, i get that some of the quests here are like that, but it wouldn't really make this game better to extend leveling time and repeating more and more of the quests. And personally i didn't care a lick for the lore or story of WoW, bland fantasy for the most part, your opinion may vary, and with addons telling where quest objectives were, i got to the point of just racing through them. I can go from character creation in WoW to cap in two or three weeks. I've done it, just to see how fast. It's easy, but boring.

Guild Wars has a quick cap, and while i can't really stand that game, people enjoy it after cap. I haven't hit cap here yet, so i don't know what happens or what you can do, but there is more to life and games than hitting cap.

Edit:

Because i forgot:

Can i have your stuff?

Later, brah.

Well put matey, well put!!!

Hope you'll be back for the borg content.

Unfortunately most MMO's are founded on the go kill X number of Y and look for 5 Z's while you are at it. I thought the leveling in STO was far too fast, I would often only complete two or three missions and I would suddenly level. I would sometimes gather as many as 4000 points to spend on my captain without realizing how quickly I had gathered them up.

Those sort of missions don't hold a lot of value but they do take up time... the time sink in STO appears to be confusion.

I honestly feel that if the quests were laid out logically and the locations given plainly, the game would take a few days to cap. It is only the muddled quests and shoe box system design that impedes your progress to cap.

And, you mentioned the dreaded "W" word!!!! Now the thread will get derailed into incoherent babbling about how things aren't the same and x's will replace "K" and "S" (thnx) and words will be truncated so much they will no longer resemble any language worth knowing. Great.

And no you can't have my stuff! I am still using it! Later Broseph.

I can not hold any weight to your post or opinions since the game has only been out for 13 days and you have already completed it. Do not feel bad I would have the same reaction to someone who watched 20 minutes of a two hour movie.

Some of the things you listed as needing improvement or to be added to the game are already in the game so that leads me to believe your exploration of the game was somewhat limited in a rush to reach the end.

If you take the same approach with life as you did with this game rushing to the end you are going to be in for a lot of disappointment in life. Maybe you need to spend some time out looking for work and a little less time playing games on the computer and don’t give me the I can’t find work excuse, because there are always jobs to be done maybe they don’t pay well or are not your cup of tea but they are there and it is a pay check. I have done some work I wouldn’t even make a monkey do in my lifetime to get by.

As you didn't elaborate as to which things I mentioned being in the game that are there already I can't discuss that, but I am actually playing right now. I didn't rush anything, I simply played the game more than you did. there are 24 hours in a day and because I have the free time I spent more of them on the game than you.

I did every mission offered me, if you would suggest that I simply sit at Sol and ponder the implications of my actions then I don't see how that could add anything to the game.

There are others that did indeed rush through the game, making RA in 3 days. By comparison my trip through STO was a slow drive on a winding road.

You do imply that I have in some way missed 5/6ths of the game by stating that I watched "20 minutes of a 2 hour movie" If I am missing 5/6ths of the game I would kindly like you to expand on that and tell me where the other 60 sectors are at that I somehow missed. I have already explored 12 of the supposed 72 sectors you imply exist.

My guess is that you seek to attack me directly and in your blind rage you have pulled numbers out of someplace dark. Maybe moist.

As to the implication (and slander) against my ability to find work. It doesn't deserve comment. I believe there is a bridge somewhere requiring your presence under it.

*edit:

I just read my post again and there is nothing in my post that suggests new features, simply some of the same content as we already have and more information to the systems already in place. So disregard this reply. Clearly this was just a troll and attack on me personally and it shouldn't have been acknowledged at all. I will leave it though because sometimes you have to feed the trolls. I would suggest that instead of assuming I am attacking the game you should read the post and form a reply that isn't a soapbox for your own agenda.