Interesting take on the STO adaptation. Glad my essay was helpful to you, and thanks for the shout out. I haven’t played STO, but it sounds unfortunately common in alienating Star Trek fans while not attracting MMO fans. I’ll try to take a closer look when I have a chance. In this case, it sounds like there were some insurmountable problems hardwired in their engine that played out in their design; i.e., the inability to drill down to planet level or visit Mars to me suggests difficulty in balancing the micro of planets versus the macro of the universe. The limited p2p interactions, on the other hand, are really surprising. I’d be really interested to know the thinking behind that design choice. Anyway, great read. Thanks!

You’re right that things certainly could improve with content updates, etc. And in that sense you might be better off than I after your service problems, since it would take an absolutely massive overhaul to get me to consider playing through everything again with another character. I’d also see some potential for the release of each subsequent faction after the Federation to improve in areas this first release failed. But that’s all IF the game proves sufficiently commercially viable to sustain all those updates. I read just yesterday that the subscriber base is 100,000. Now it’s certainly not fair to compare that to WoW’s 10 million subscribers after that game had years to reach that point, but I’d imagine that all the negative reviews of STO aren’t helping to build that number up.

Friend me when you get back into the game (D’Kree@derekjohnson). I’ve love to form a fleet or something.

Still, if they can sustain the property for long enough, they can make it more robust with add-ons and updates. I wonder if in-game collaboration is something better achieved in new IPs rather than established properties. Something to ponder, though by someone else; I’m not enough of a gamer or game scholar to be able to look into that.