I’ve tried to get into STO multiple times over the years and I’ve always found it to be frustratingly buggy. It’s not unplayable, but it has enough bugs in it that I get annoyed and stop playing at about the same point each time.
The ship combat works decently well and is fun, but the ground combat is really rough in my experience.
Someone once posted that if it wasn’t a Star Trek game it would have died years ago…and I still believe that holds true. The space combat is fun, but I always felt that the ground play was added as an afterthought. It’s certainly gotten a lot better over the years but even today feels like it was tacked on to pad out the gameplay.
The ground sections absolutely feel tacked on. They were what would end up killing my interest. That, and the F2P model in general makes for a bad experience in my opinion.
The F2P had definitely gotten much better since the early days of the game. Obviously paying players have a clear advantage but it hasn’t bothered me as much this go around. F2P players have access to almost all of the same gear but it’d just require a ton of grinding to close the gap.
I honestly assumed STO died years ago.
I kinda quit playing it when greifing the ERPers stopped being fun (or even all that possible), since the rest of the game had stopped being fun quite a while before that.
Hard to say if someone other than Cryptic is good or bad for the game, given Cryptic was always pretty shit.
I played on and off since it became F2P and only got back into it last year when I built a new PC. The overall quality had improved over the years and they’re definitely pumping out a LOT of new content