In the face of Impending Doom!

Burnham, Michelle

This is your captain.

Yesterday we lost many members of our crew, some of whom were our friends as well as colleagues. We shall never forget them, and our respect goes out to them who lost their livelihoods to save our ship, The Disruptor Beam, which has been suffering from lack of dilithium crystals to keep us boldly going where no games company has gone before. We are under attack by the evil forces of Capitalism, and there is only one thing we can do to keep our ship afloat!

I must ask all of you to make a small commitment to the ship. If you haven't yet done so, please buy the Monthly Card. The rewards will be great, the ability to buy an extra shuttle, extend your voyages, buy extra crew to bolster the event weekends, and so much more. The choices are many, and will benefit the entire ship as well as yourselves. It may make it more difficult for low paying members such as myself to compete in events, but at least the ship will keep flying!

We have two choices. We can make a small commitment to supporting the command structure and keeping the ship afloat, or begin to look for new skies elsewhere.

Thank you for listening.

[NDQ] IcebergDX

Considering how POORLY DB has done in some of the little things like:

1) Fixing recurrent bugs that have been issues for a LONG time.
2) Not QA checking additions to the games.
3) Abysmal planning of events, and coordination of characters with events (play the game, don't just pull names out of Memory Alpha and Memory Beta and put them on a dartboard.
4) NON-EXISTENT CUSTOMER SERVICE for the major part.

Not only no, bout H--- NO. I have been doing the monthly card. Finding out that they just canned 30% of their company, including some of the people that actually TRIED to help out tells me that they do not need or want my money any more. So I will happily spend my remaining DIL, and pay MO MORE! DB wants to drive the game into the ground because of their incompetence, then I will happily be a free member and laugh at them as they do it.

Bekka

Sorry this is their own fault. How long did they think people would spend 25 real life dollars on ONE single star to add to a 5* crew.

How long did they think we would go on paying them for our VIP Benefits that are not benefits at all, but just a way to scam more money out of us. (and yes it is a scam, when I paid money up front when I started I was buying into something that told me I would be able to have additional cadet tickets etc.. NOT that I would have to pay more to use those so-called benefits)

They continue to bombard us with event after event every weekend (and I know we don't NEED to participate, however...)

If they would provide true value for money spent, more people would spend more money. Instead they went after people with a disposable income and didn't care about the longevity of that sort of income.

I have stopped spending my own money for a while now, and unless I have $4 in free google play money (from doing surveys) I don't do the monthly card. DB doesn't deserve any more of my hard earned cash, this game is not worth $100, let alone the $100 I put in, plus some months that I did pay the $4. (and to think some people have spend in the 10's of thousands, I can't fathom)

It is a shame they had to let people go, but us spending more money won't solve that problem, DB realizing they are the problem and fixing things internally is the only solution.

KNakamura

DB is trying to reduce capital outflow probably to make them more valulable for investment. Which .. yeah, I can see it, but just pandering to the IP won't last forever..

{DD} Capt Jello

Game companies are bought, sold, and merged like stocks these days. They come on strong, then usually go defunct just as fast. DB has 3 large franchise games, and I'd assume the royalties/licensing is expensive. I'm also assuming that the management has no clue how to run a company properly or efficiently. The owners of game companies are usually game developers, not businessmen. They don't know how to handle customer service because they have only sat behind a computer with no personal interaction with people to know how to handle a customer or what their needs are. It starts off with "Hey, I came up with this great game... let's see if it catches on." When it does, they make their money and piss it away. Most game companies only have their one-hit wonders which can't sustain the company forever!

[TFA] Celeres

I've been a monthly card player almost from the start, and will continue with it for now. But this week's news is discouraging, to say the least. And the fact that the related discussion topic was very quickly closed by the moderator makes it even worse. Silencing the people who spend dollars on this game when they are concerned will not make them open their wallets wider.

Banjo1012

Now the special offers are starting to make sense. I got the 30 pull for $50 offer nearly every week for four weeks and I bought it each time. Then last week I got the $100 offer. I bought that as well. They then threw the $100 offer at me again a few days ago and I passed on it. As I opened those packs through the weeks I ended up four starting all the crew I wanted, I would be delighted if 5 star crew dropped more often and perhaps would have paid that second $100 but one of those grips of 30 pulls yielded NOT ONE legendary behold. I also paid $50 for two ten pulls, all beholds. Out of those 20 beholds yep, not one legendary. So they kept me going at $50 a pop, then shot it up to $100 but the return is just not there to put that money into it especially now that all I would be interested in are stars for legendaries that very rarely drop. The special offers were there to save the financial day, but if they would have just put them in the time portal for everyone so much more money could have been made. I also totally agree with the thread that says why buy event packs to score higher in events so you can win the crew you bought to score higher in the event. I can put a good effort into it and win the crew I want anyway

[Deleted User]

It'd help if they did something when you pull an already FF character, or get a behold with three FF characters.

I'm hardly a whale, but when I'm getting three FF options on a 4* behold when I have under 25% of the 4*s FF it doesn't inspire me to spend.

I relented and got a monthly card for the first time in a while, mainly for voyages refills, but doubt I'll get another one. I'm even wondering if I'll bother buying another offer.

I'm happy spending to support a game I like, but not if what I'm buying is a 10x premium pull of nothing but Honour fodder.

Burnham, Michelle

It's a weird game alright. Sorry to hear so many people being frustrated

Mordack

If I were in DB's shoes I would think it prudent, in the light of recent news, to give reassurance to the players. I wasn't encouraged to see that the relevant discussion thread had been opened and closed before I'd even had a chance to wake up and contribute to it.

I do try to err on the side of positivity despite having numerous concerns about the game, but I'm afraid that if anything yesterday's news has made me less, not more inclined, to continue spending money . Even if we forget about new content and events there are still a number of bugs and basic UI issues which need to be addressed. If presumably there are now less staff working on the game, why should we be any more confident that these longstanding issues will be addressed? What is the long term future of this game? What is the plan? Until these issues are addressed substantively and through official channels I wouldn't blame player for being reluctant to continue spending their own money.

[OPA] Sky Marshall DaYng1

Letting go 40% of DB's staff isn't necessarily doomsday but I will tell you a cautionary tale of a match 3 game I used to play called tower of saviors that is effictively dead and slowly withering.

They too over valued their highest ranking cards and in a ever increasing power creep cycle kept putting out new ones in a field where duplicate garbage was the norm and the new shiny character was seldom pulled. This led to the majority of the player base to quit and now it's just a few lonely whales and die hards hanging on.

The majority of the super rares in the time portal are a waste of money. Even some of the cast variants are extremely poor in relation to the new power creeps. They hold minimal value and with the ratio of 9 for every 1 legend any offer past the 10 for 10 is a unacceptable gamble because of the chance of duplicates, duplicate beholds (this is a special form of we don't care but we tried, RNG deal with it), and NOT being guaranteed a legend.

If you keep treating us like drunken blackjack players your casino will fold up DB. I wish you luck.

Pallidyne

BelleAnna wrote: »

It's a weird game alright. Sorry to hear so many people being frustrated

Are you genuinely surprised? And have you noticed how much of the above is not 'weird'?

Tron of the Users... EOL

The choice to join the STD cast and ignore the fans is like the NFL ignoring it's fans, tell fans they don't matter and they believe it... My money will wait for something non-STD, I always loved the hope in Star Trek that is gone so I will enjoy the show when it did have hope and boycott the show that doesn't all else is really secondary... STD is actually looking like a good/excellent/fine sci-fi show, but it is a horrible Star Trek show... There is a difference, no matter how quality your product if it goes against canon it will be hated see Star wars episode 1 vs Force Awakens... one ignores the other embraces them.

Magnum, p.i.

That's so sad to read
I'm a huge Star Trek fan and I've been enjoying the game every day since the very beginning.

As someone already stated before, I agree that the pricing is not ideal, especially concerning the "offers" (I never bought one of them). But I'm still drawing the monthly ticket.

I really hope that this is not the journey's end.

Magnum.

cannabination

Fix your predatory monetization strategy and we'll spend more, bottom line. We've been warning you forever that you can't just bank on the tiny percentage of whales to pay the bills forever. Open up the deals a little by sending out the nice 10 pack bundles to all players, increase legendary drop rate from 10% to 20% and super rare drops in the 2-10 slots, make all super-rare or legendary pulls beholds, and remove the possibility of ff'd beholds. I guarantee you see more pack sales than you ever imagined possible. Also, fill up our chronitons when we buy a pack, it doesn't cost you anything but sweetens the pot immeasurably. Do you want us to give you our money happily or begrudgingly?

Also, give us better VIP rewards and I'd wager you see a lot more spending across the spectrum. Y'all have made a fun game with a broad audience, you've done most of your part. If you show respect to the people who give you their money I'm confident that would go a long way to encouraging spending from the giant portion of the bell curve that currently only does so very rarely.

Fwiw, I am VIP 14 and have been for over 6 months, I feel like I've contributed enough to at least be qualified to criticize.

Captain Soweto

I still do the $100 event deal each week. My squadron is used to now having Level 100 Fully Fused event Legendary as the shared crew for the event.

But that absolute glut of offers with new crew a couple weeks ago turned me off on trying to keep collecting the new crew as soon as they come out. And now, they are doing strange things. Every time there is a Galaxy or Hybrid event, they have always offered chronitons. Last week they didn't. This week they didn't. If you want chronitons, the only way to get them is go with the 6500 dil featured pack. Most of those packs at this point for me are just honor, and I can't see spending $60 to get 500 chrons and a bunch of honor when normally it only cost me about $12.50 before to get 500 chrons.

I get now that the glut of new crew a couple weeks ago was to push them out while customers had confidence, so that they could perform their layoffs after that. But it was way too much way too quickly. I am sure I am not the only customer that ended up getting turned off of trying to keep up with new crew.