Star Trek Online

[IPD]

romulus was s7.

FYI, i bought my lifetime subscription. it's supposed to be $199, but thanks to the exchange rate & the system registering me in europe, I ended up paying $168.60; nearly half-off the regular price of $299. So I dunno if VPN use in the states will get you the same results, but it might be worth a shot to save a few bucks.

[IPD]

Well the fleet is up to level 47 now. Game looks completely different from when it went F2P in 2012. In fact, if you left before Legacy of Romulus--you'd probably be bewildered by all the new content/changes/system-overhauls. Game feels MUCH more fleshed out than it has previously. I'm up to 8 toons now.

Yes, you can play it on a console now. Console has probably less than 1/5th the playerbase of PC, and there's no server overlap, so your account won't carry over; everything on console you'd have to re-buy new. I'm sticking to PC.

FYI, even playing just the single-player content in 1 faction--would likely take you a few weeks of regular gameplay to accomplish. Longer for casual players. The total number of story arc's has DOUBLED since I started at F2P (season 5; it's season 11.5 now).

If anyone is interested, or debating coming back to the game, hit me up. (pm me for my handle). I'm always glad to help out any and all.

[IPD]

That moment when you see Alan log in, and he doesn't respond to your PM's to say "hello".

[Alan92RTTT]

I never saw it. I have not logged in in a long time and I'm getting caught up on changes.

[Alan92RTTT]

$200 for lifetime..... tempting. But is it worth it?

[IPD]

I bought mine in 2015. It has since given me rewards sufficient to be > the cost of the purchase--assuming I were to pay for all of those things individually.

I wish I'd bought it sooner. If you were subscribed BITD, then you already have some of these things unlocked. If you weren't, then lifetime sub is even better. 500 zen per month is 6000 per year. If you are modest about earning/refining dilithium, you can probably eek another 3,000 out over the course of a year--meaning that you can buy 1 mega ship bundle per year--without doing much. You'd basically need around 75,000 dil you earned per month to get that 3,000 zen over the course of a year. Since you can refine 8,000 per character per day, you'd need only 10 days of refining dilithium on 1 character to do it.

Now besides the benefits for lifetime (which are on their website) here's some considerations.
1. There's a new Trek TV show. Odds are the game isn't going anywhere for several more years--especially with the JJ-verse movies around.
2. Lifetime gives you all veteran rewards instantly. One of the handiest is the fact that you don't have to log in to each character daily to refine dilithium. You can simply log in to each about once per week, and it will automatically refine up to a week's worth of dilithium for that toon. Quite handy & saves time.
3. Account bank is a must. If you don't already have one, lifetime gives you one. This allows you to sponsor other characters with reputation tokens (very useful), pass account-bound gear back and forth, and upgrade gear for other characters on your account, as well of a host of other things that are impossible w/o an account bank.
4. Admiralty works off the ships that you have unlocked on that character. Since veteran rewards give you a free t6 ship for each faction, plus a free shuttle, you're increasing your capabilities for doing admiralty on all your characters. And admiralty is one of the easiest/best ways to earn dilithium.
5. Lifetime means that your new characters automatically get increases to bank/inventory space that only comes to subscribers. For regular subscribers, if you aren't subscribed when you make new characters, or when those characters level up--those new characters don't get the subscriber-sized bank/inventory.
6. If you use ARC for the daily quests, this doubles your zen from lifetime. True, you don't need to be a subscriber to use ARC. Also true that ARC is a bit of a pain to set up, and it's not for everyone (it does require a fair amount of hard-drive space to install the games' files). But when you combine the zen from ARC and from lifetime sub, you can easily clear 12,000 zen per year while barely breaking a sweat. To put this in perspective, I'm a daily player (and use ARC daily)--and I'll probably have over 30,000 zen easily by the time the black-friday sale rolls back around; just in the last year. I plan on purchasing 3x mega bundles (9 total ships, 3 per faction) with my zen. Since those are always account-wide ships, that will give each of my characters 9 more ships to do admiralty with--regardless of faction. Not to mention the ship traits & just having good ships to fly. Plus the fleet versions will now cost only 1 Fleet Ship Module, since I own the basic zen ship.

Hope that helps.

p.s.

I also look at it from a cost/benefit standpoint. What would I be paying for other games that I would have been playing in the same period of time? It's hard to argue that after playing this game free for 2+ years--that I wouldn't have gotten sufficient benefit out of it already. Now that I've been here for 5+, it's a no-brainer that even though it's technically free-2-play, the developer has delivered enough gameplay to arguably justify the $200 lifetime subscription cost (especially in light of the above-mentioned rewards).