So, I wanted to talk about a recent situation that happened on Star Trek: Fleet Command (STFC). Hopefully, this situation will help people who are thinking about trying the game think twice before playing it.
During and since a recent Scopely server rollback that forced everyone to redo the BP (Battle Pass) daily, because they were implementing the latest patch that went live recently (Symbiosis Part 2) server-side, Buie, my hubby, and a member of my alliance [EENC] have been conversing back and forth with Scopely, because their rollback caused the shield that he placed on his base (a 12-hour shield) to drop, his base got drained by a player from the alliance [ATAK].
For those that don’t play the game, when a player’s base is drained, all of the base resources (Parasteel, Tritanium, and Dilithium) that it takes months to gain (through farming and dailies) are taken, leaving the player with very minimal (less than 200k of each) mats to do the things to advance and gain power in the game. Considering Buie had built up billions (and in the case of Parasteel over a trillion) in mats, that’s a lot of stuff to loose to a rollback that he had nothing to do with implementing. Depending on your level (and whether you purchase mats from their cash shop or not), it can take months and even years to build up billions and trillions of mats, because though Scopely likes to tout that the game is free-to-play, they make it so hard for ‘free-to-play’ players to advance that many quit the game before reaching level 35. In fact, unless a player started on their server in its infancy, the second a current newbie player hits around level 25, they can/will get hit and destroyed by players as high as level 39, and something about Star Trek: Fleet Command (STFC), the higher the level a player is, their power grows exponentially. A level 25 player competing and defending themselves against a level 30 is daunting, let alone a level 39, because of all the research that said level 39 can and/or has gained that also takes those basic mats mentioned above to pay for and achieve.
An example of the cost of research in STFC in terms of mats needed and time.
An example of research that a level 25 may have just started compared to the bonus in shield penetration that a level 43 has. This research can be completed at around level 39-40. This causes my battleship (currently I have an Augur, which can be unlocked at level 34) to bypass a level 25’s shield to do massive, direct burning damage to their ship’s hull–a ship’s main HP.
When contacting Scopely about what happened, in their initial response, Scopely stated to Buie that because they didn’t see where something happened to his base in their logs, it didn’t happen. True, though it shows that his shield dropped because of their rollback because their logs don’t show his base getting drained, it didn’t happen, even though his base was in our territory. The thing about territory is, unless you are a member of the alliance that owns the territory, you can’t move your base to said territory to make draining a base faster. So, it took hours for this player to come into our territory and drain Buie’s base while he (and the rest of our members) slept because this happened overnight, but Scopely says that nothing shows up in their logs. As a result of this response, Buie tried to respond to the ticket with proof that the act occurred, including screenshots of the conversation he had with the player that drained his base. Scopely responds again saying that since his base getting drained was a clean raid, they are going to do nothing about it, even though their rollback and dropping of Buie’s shield caused the raid to be clean. So, as a result, they decided to promptly close the ticket with no resolution and send Buie on his merry way.
SO moral of the story folks, don’t trust Scopely to act in good faith when it comes to their own fuck ups. Also, think long and hard before trying this game. A game is supposed to be fun and a stress reliever, not another stressful and sometimes anxiety-inducing chore, and STFC can most definitely be that for some.
