I liked the free trial of Champions Online fairly well, but I had been hoping they'd learn from its mistakes when developing STO. Unfortunately it was not to be.
Had ground combat involved some diverse missions instead of 90% of them being mob grinding, it might have been a worthwhile addition. Seeing it turn into button-mashing against braindead AI while depending on your own AI teammates that can't do jack should have been an indicator to scrap it.
What's actually there in the space combat simulator part is quite good overall. They really should have made that the focus and perhaps given diplomatic and more planet-based missions in an expansion or major content release down the road.
The worst parts are that in typical Cryptic fashion buffs, attacks and everything to do with combat are based on their namesake. You'll frequently get ship upgrades that say something like +0.1 Starship Tachyon Deflector Array. How much is that bonus? What skills does 'Tachyon Deflector Array' affect? You won't know without researching on wikis devoted to it. The in-game explanation of anything is absent. Odd pseudocode-like phrases are abundant on items and skills. Good luck deciphering.
Next up is that with the game already fairly focused on space combat, there's so little diversity in enemy ships. You'll lose track of how many Birds of Prey and Romulan Warbirds you've disposed of.
My experience is mostly from the beta, so perhaps things have at least improved some, but I seriously doubt there's been any major overhaul of the core attributes of the game. Some of the most fun I had was removed when they strangely lowered the difficulty and stopped enemy ships from being able to launch large salvos of torpedoes. It was quite enjoyable working with others to take down ships that were only a couple levels higher than you or even the same level, but had one or two especially strong abilities that could shred your ship if you weren't paying attention or they got lucky. The issue back then was that since there was absolutely no death penalty, there was no incentive to not just charge into fleets and act suicidally in general.
Still, some very intriguing combat abilities such as torpedo spreads, attack patterns that fired phasers at multiple other ships in the vicinity, engineering teams you could send to friendly ships to repair health, etc. A lot of promise, but just a shoddy job putting the whole package together. I feel bad for anyone who paid for the lifetime subscription as it was plainly a money-making scheme and it's dubious if the game will last more than a year or two.
