*Review edited slightly due to a patch that added confirmation for skilltree choices, I'm not sure when exactly it was patched in.

I've been on the fence about which way to lean for a long time, I want to recommend it because I've always been a big fan of Star Trek and this is the only ST MMO, but I just can't.

Latest edit: Cryptic is removing the foundry, which allowed players to create content for others to play through. The best missions in the game, bar none, are player created and that's all going away because Cryptic can't be bothered to continue supporting the foundry. It's worth noting that it's going away for Neverwinter as well. Farewell, STO. You had a rough run and were treated badly by the people in charge but you'll still be missed.

To start with, it has consistently gone downhill since cryptic (the developer) was sold off by Atari and bought by perfect world international. Anyone familiar with PWI knows they're at about the level of nexon for terrible support, outrageous prices, and poor to nonexistent communication. Well, I'll give cryptic this, they do blog posts and announcements about everything, have frequent livestreams, and devs will occasionally chime in on forum topics, but when it comes to support? Good luck. You may or may not get a canned response when you submit a ticket, and may or may not ever get a real person to reply to you after you reply to the canned response, and they know their support is beyond terrible because they completely removed the satisfaction survey people could fill out after their support ticket was closed.

The prices for most of the premium content is also ridiculous (especially ships.....$25-$30 per for endgame ships), and even things that are basic in most MMOs cost money here. Want to rename your character? Pay up. But the rename tokens don't even work properly and it shows your old name in a lot of in game dialogue. Did you pick a wrong skill somewhere in the newly revamped skill tree that just made things more confusing? Guess it sucks to be you, pay up for that reskill token. You can buy 30+ character slots, but the game has been made so alt unfriendly with all the reputations and specializations to grind for that it's mostly pointless to play more than one character anymore unless you're really hardcore and can juggle 2 or 3. And the expansion themed bundles? $130 for a few ships, a handful of costumes, maybe a title or two, and some master keys? I don't know about anyone else but I can't justify dropping $130 unless there's some physical goods to go with it.

New "content" is frequently added to the game but it's almost always just a tie-in to some new cash item, most often gacha style lockboxes which aren't cash items themselves but require master keys to open, which are cash items. Lately any new features are just tweaks to or revamps of existing mechanics, which always cause a slew of bugs that get reported on the test server but usually make it into the live build anyway. Some bugs have been around for years and have never been fixed, eventually cryptic just gave up trying to fix most of them and either labeled them as "working as intended" like cloak deactivating on dialogue popups, or just decided to ignore them. This is compounded by the fact that all of the original devs either quit or were let go and the new ones have little knowledge of how the game's base code works. One of them even posted in a forum topic about bugs that "working on STO was like trying to untangle spaghetti, you're going to end up with a mess no matter what you do."

Power creep has gotten so disgusting in STO that it's even hard for the devs to keep up with it. One of the most popular queued missions (Crystalline cataclysm advanced) has been broken because player damage output can get so high the boss with hundreds of millions of HP sometimes dies before one of the objectives can be completed. A lot of people just shrug and say "oh well", but when you consider that the objectives are tied to events that trigger at certain HP threshholds and it often dies before the first one finishes so the second one can trigger.....yeah. But instead of addressing the runaway damage output it gets buffed even more? It used to only be the hardcore elite players that could hit the 75k DPS mark, then it was 100k, now they're pushing 150k and people hitting 50-75k is becoming common. Instead of giving enemies better AI and more skills to use to mitigate or heal damage cryptic takes the lazy route and just increases HP and damage output for them, then puts out the next set of shinies to boost player damage output and the cycle repeats.

The game was fun while Atari owned it, and still was for a while after, but it's been turned into just another cash cow that milks a popular franchise. There is very little "Star Trek" material in the game in it's current state aside from the general theme, if the ships and outfits were replaced with generic designs nobody would be able to tell it was a Star Trek themed game. There's no exploration (there actually was an exploration system but it was removed because cryptic decided it would be too much work to update it) and the theme to every mission is "kill them all", there's no diplomacy options that actually matter (there USED to be diplomacy missions and even first contacts with minor species, but they were removed for the same reason as exploration) since no matter what dialogue choices you make you don't affect the outcome of missions at all, it's basically just flavor text with no substance. The only reason I still play occasionally is I've invested too much time into it to throw it all away, so I log in every now and then to blow things up for a bit or chat with friends.

TL;DR:
If you think you'd like a generic grind MMO with a Star Trek flavor you may enjoy it, but if you're a Trek fan who's looking for a Star Trek themed MMO, sadly this isn't it.

*Review edited slightly due to a patch that added confirmation for skilltree choices, I'm not sure when exactly it was patched in. I've been on the fence about which way to lean for a long time, I want to recommend it because I've always been a big fan of Star Trek and this is the only ST MMO, but I just can't. Latest edit: Cryptic is removing the foundry, which allowed players to create content for others to play through. The best missions in the game, bar none, are player created and that's all going away because Cryptic can't be bothered to continue supporting the foundry. It's worth noting that it's going away for Neverwinter as well. Farewell, STO. You had a rough run and were treated badly by the people in charge but you'll still be missed. To start with, it has consistently gone downhill since cryptic (the developer) was sold off by Atari and bought by perfect world international. Anyone familiar with PWI knows they're at about the level of nexon for terrible support, outrageous prices, and poor to nonexistent communication. Well, I'll give cryptic this, they do blog posts and announcements about everything, have frequent livestreams, and devs will occasionally chime in on forum topics, but when it comes to support? Good luck. You may or may not get a canned response when you submit a ticket, and may or may not ever get a real person to reply to you after you reply to the canned response, and they know their support is beyond terrible because they completely removed the satisfaction survey people could fill out after their support ticket was closed. The prices for most of the premium content is also ridiculous (especially ships.....$25-$30 per for endgame ships), and even things that are basic in most MMOs cost money here. Want to rename your character? Pay up. But the rename tokens don't even work properly and it shows your old name in a lot of in game dialogue. Did you pick a wrong skill somewhere in the newly revamped skill tree that just made things more confusing? Guess it sucks to be you, pay up for that reskill token. You can buy 30+ character slots, but the game has been made so alt unfriendly with all the reputations and specializations to grind for that it's mostly pointless to play more than one character anymore unless you're really hardcore and can juggle 2 or 3. And the expansion themed bundles? $130 for a few ships, a handful of costumes, maybe a title or two, and some master keys? I don't know about anyone else but I can't justify dropping $130 unless there's some physical goods to go with it. New "content" is frequently added to the game but it's almost always just a tie-in to some new cash item, most often gacha style lockboxes which aren't cash items themselves but require master keys to open, which [i]are[/i] cash items. Lately any new features are just tweaks to or revamps of existing mechanics, which always cause a slew of bugs that get reported on the test server but usually make it into the live build anyway. Some bugs have been around for years and have never been fixed, eventually cryptic just gave up trying to fix most of them and either labeled them as "working as intended" like cloak deactivating on dialogue popups, or just decided to ignore them. This is compounded by the fact that all of the original devs either quit or were let go and the new ones have little knowledge of how the game's base code works. One of them even posted in a forum topic about bugs that "working on STO was like trying to untangle spaghetti, you're going to end up with a mess no matter what you do." Power creep has gotten so disgusting in STO that it's even hard for the devs to keep up with it. One of the most popular queued missions (Crystalline cataclysm advanced) has been broken because player damage output can get so high the boss with hundreds of millions of HP sometimes dies before one of the objectives can be completed. A lot of people just shrug and say "oh well", but when you consider that the objectives are tied to events that trigger at certain HP threshholds and it often dies before the first one finishes so the second one can trigger.....yeah. But instead of addressing the runaway damage output it gets buffed even more? It used to only be the hardcore elite players that could hit the 75k DPS mark, then it was 100k, now they're pushing 150k and people hitting 50-75k is becoming common. Instead of giving enemies better AI and more skills to use to mitigate or heal damage cryptic takes the lazy route and just increases HP and damage output for them, then puts out the next set of shinies to boost player damage output and the cycle repeats. The game was fun while Atari owned it, and still was for a while after, but it's been turned into just another cash cow that milks a popular franchise. There is very little "Star Trek" material in the game in it's current state aside from the general theme, if the ships and outfits were replaced with generic designs nobody would be able to tell it was a Star Trek themed game. There's no exploration (there actually was an exploration system but it was removed because cryptic decided it would be too much work to update it) and the theme to every mission is "kill them all", there's no diplomacy options that actually matter (there USED to be diplomacy missions and even first contacts with minor species, but they were removed for the same reason as exploration) since no matter what dialogue choices you make you don't affect the outcome of missions at all, it's basically just flavor text with no substance. The only reason I still play occasionally is I've invested too much time into it to throw it all away, so I log in every now and then to blow things up for a bit or chat with friends. TL;DR: If you think you'd like a generic grind MMO with a Star Trek flavor you may enjoy it, but if you're a Trek fan who's looking for a Star Trek themed MMO, sadly this isn't it.