Just…Many thoughts to those thinking about playing Star Trek: Fleet Command…

/rant

Unless you are a whale (a gamer willing to sell/mortgage all their worldly possessions to pay exorbitant amounts of money to play a game), this game is most certainly NOT for you. Avoid this game at all costs, otherwise, you will be subject to a stress-inducing, hair-pulling, demoralizing look into the worst that mobile gaming/quasi-PC gaming has to offer.

You know…when the whole debacle over Diablo Infinity was going on, I, as a player of Star Trek: Fleet Command or STFC, as it is affectionately (or unaffectionately, depending on how much money you have to spend on the game) called, actually looked at that situation and laughed. True, the Diablo Infinity situation was really bad, but frankly it has nothing on STFC. STFC is so imbalanced towards whales that I often wonder if I’ve lost my sanity playing this game.

I am a player on STFC’s US server 70 otherwise known as Maddox. Even before server 70’s recent merger with server 71, Maddox server has been a cesspool of some of the worst types of whalish behavior in gaming. True, there are some good people on this server, but they are far outweighed by the complete garbage behavior from whales on this server. I even had a whale tell me that “Money attracts money, money wants to be with money”, and this was the reason why this player’s alliance (what Scopely calls guilds) felt that they deserved to run the server as they saw fit, and if we F2P and Minnow players didn’t like it, they would just bomb our alliances and players into extinction. Talk about a “fun” way to play.

Oh, but let me back up to the way the power system works in this game. As a ‘regular’ player (I say regular because whales aren’t regular players) levels their bases, do research, missions, etc. of course, as any actual gamer knows, they get stronger. Oh but here’s the rub, as in other mobile games and P2W games with microtransactions, anyone with money can buy packs to level up their research, bases, and reputations (because reputation unlocks many of the more powerful ships in the game), and can be bought. Also, the ships themselves can be bought. True, a F2P player or a Minnow (someone who buys battle passes or a pack here or there, but nowhere near the level of a whale) can gain these same ships, reputations, etc. as well, but here’s where the ‘gatcha’ comes into play. For an F2P or Minnow player to gain the same reputations, ships, what have you, they will have to spend months of doing dailies, missions, grinding, etc. and they still may have to wait even longer to gain the same ships that a whale can buy with a few transactions. Now take those same whales, and put them on a server with F2P and Minnow players who 1) either don’t have the money to pay to win, or 2) have the money, but either want to level up the way the game is intended or who isn’t stupid or asinine enough to spend between $600-1000 on one ship that will be obsolete within five to seven levels, and you have a recipe for drama, griefing and eventually driving players away from the server and the game as a whole.

I give an example. At level 28, as a player, I can unlock the USS Saladin, supposedly one of the best ships for level 28 to around level 38. The Saladin is considered an ‘uncommon’ ship. Some players and streamers will tell you that the Saladin can aid you into the low 40s. SMH…not true at all. At level 34, as a player (if I have my Federation reputation to “Respected” level, which is 10M reputation points in the Federation faction) I can unlock the ability to build the USS Enterprise—one of (if not) the most known ships in Star Trek. The Enterprise is considered an ‘epic’ ship. If you’re a Gamer reading this, you know what the difference between ‘uncommon’ and ‘epic’ is in terms of power. For those that aren’t, ‘epic’ is more powerful than ‘uncommon’ by a good margin. The thing about getting this ship is in order to unlock it, an F2P player has to gather 150 blueprint shards in or to build the ship. Each BP shard can be gained either through “Away Missions” (if they are lucky with aid) or through purchasing the shards in the Federation Faction store. Each shard in the faction store costs 1200 Federation credits and it comes in ‘Blueprint Chests’. Credits are gained through killing hostiles of the other factions, defeating armadas (the only way to gain faction rep without losing any), spending charged nanoprobes (a Borg resource that is needed in order to level up either the Vi’dar or Vi’dar Talios—both ships used specifically to fight the Borg among other things) in the Borg Refinery to name the main ways. Now, as a F2P or Minnow player, if I wanted to use Latinum (a currency in the game that is gained either by refining Raw or Concentrated forms of the ore, through mission rewards, or from buying packs from the STFC Store) to purchase one chest that contains one shard needed to build the Enterprise, I would have to spend somewhere close to 55,000 Latinum.

Now, if I were to buy Latinum in the STFC Store, the cheapest bundle that I can buy that has Latinum in it costs $20. In this $20 bundle, I would get 18,000 Latinum as one of the items in the pack, which would allow me to buy 13 shards from the faction store. I would only have to grind for the other 137 shards, which would involve literal months of grinding and farming and have to incur the idiocy of whales while doing so.

Oh, but it gets better—I don’t even have to worry about getting that bundle, if I were a whale. If I spent money like a whale, I could just buy six of the Enterprise bundles at level 34. It’ll only cost $600 at $100 per bundle (partial unlock).

As a whale on server 70 Maddox, I can just get this bad boy built and then go about my merry way griefing on all the level 24 players, because nothing says power like attacking someone ten levels below you, whose highest level battleship is a fully upgraded Tier 9 Klingon Kumari or Romulan Vahklas. Their strongest base power they can have are 266, 325, and 172,654 respectively. There’s no way those ships can compete with my 2,138,708 base power. As an F2P or Minnow player, I finally worked up to having enough BP shards to build an Enterprise. I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere in this ridiculous, sometimes anxiety-inducing game. At level 39, with my ship research upgraded as much as possible, having built up my crew members through mission rewards and recruitment (one of the parts to level up your crew), and with the Enterprise being leveled up to tier 4, at 3.5million power, I feel like I can finally contend with people around my level. Ah crap, here comes a level 60 (the current max level of STFC) whale to attack my ship with a USS Northcutt. Don’t know why their power is only 175M, but there’s no way my 3.5M ship can survive the attack. Ah hell, now there’s a level 57 attacking my base with his Sanctus. There’s no way my base of 54, 856, 368 strength can stave off an attack from a Romluan Sanctus of 388, 069,056 strength.

1. Do you the reader think it’s fair and balanced that a level 57 player with a close to 400M in power ship is able to attack and harass a level 39 player with a base power of close to 55M?
2. Do you think it is fun if a level 24 player is griefed into quitting the game by a level 34 whale?

Also, do you think Scopely, the makers of this game are actually going to do anything about it? For me, the answer to all these questions is a resounding NO. I say this, because recently a ship, the Mantis was released into the game in a big patch. Some minnows were able to buy the ship at launch (The bundle for the ship cost $100) and were able to build the ship and start using it. The thing about this ship at launch was it was very much a ‘whale-killer’ ship because it used an item called Condensed Venom that put a big debuff on a ship that was hit with it. The debuff not only lowered the damage and defense of the infected ship, it also prevented the infected ship from warping out of the area. For about…I’d say two or three weeks at most, this ship really helped lower to mid-level alliances with the ability to defend themselves and their territories from high-level whales that like to grief players that are lower level than them. I still remember the uproar that came from the STFC whale community basically complaining that the venom did too much damage and that they weren’t able to grief like they have in the past. Some even complained about not wanting to play the game anymore, because they couldn’t play ‘the way they wanted to’ anymore. Want to guess what Scopely did? I bet you can guess, reader. Of course, Scopely released a hotfix that nerfed (lowered the value of damage) the power of the debuff, so that whales would stop complaining and continue spending money—to hell with the F2P player. I mean Scopely’s whole motto is that this game is free-to-play, but what they mean by ‘free-to-play’ is it’s free to download the game, make an account, and load up and play the game, but anything past that…

I won’t go into detail about the fact that even though there are many whales playing this game, the game client and servers for this game are so garbage and behind what standard gaming should be that with almost every new patch to the game, the client comes with a new set of bugs and glitches that make the game almost unplayable right after a new patch. Oh, and we’re not going to go into how vile and toxic the server 70 Global chat got before the merger with server 71. That would be another three to four pages. I will just say this. I played World of Warcraft from Vanilla back in 2005 until the current day, and I thought that community had gotten toxic. There were times on server 70 Maddox that the Global chat was so bad, it would make frequent readers of WoW’s World and Trade chats feel grimy and dirty…and maybe a little sick to their stomachs, with little to no moderation from Scopely at all, but I digress.

At the end of the day, I caution anyone thinking about playing Star Trek: Fleet Command to think three or four times before trying this game. This is coming from someone who plays the game as barely a passable minnow, if you are looking for a Star Trek game to play, I would suggest Star Trek Online or Star Trek Infinite, and I would recommend that you stay as far away from Star Trek: Fleet Command as possible, because you don’t want this type of toxicity in your life. True, there are very few good servers on this game, but they are VERY MUCH the exception and NOT the norm. Avoid this game…just avoid it.

/rant