This week, my rant (and pet peeve) is Cryptic's butchery of Star Trek Online. I've played (heavily) : Everquest 1 and 2, Asheron's call, Anarchy Online (my toon was on the first expansion box), Earth and Beyond, Star Wars Galaxies, URU, World of Warcraft (in a very-heavy raiding guild I have run for 4 years), Neocron, Dark Age of Camelot, Lord of the Rings, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online, as well as numerous others for shorter periods of time. I am, by no means, an expert on MMOs nor have I "played every MMO," but I consider myself a hardcore MMO gamer and, as a member of the gaming community, feel I have a valid opinion. ---------------- Having watched the development of STO from its days at Perpetual to its current status with Cryptic, I find myself utterly nonplussed at its present state. If it wasn't bad enough that Perpetual did an about-face on the fans changing every facet of the game to its polar opposite halfway through development, Cryptic has taken up the mantle and made the very game the fans voted down on perpetual's flame-ridden dev boards. What really astonishes me, however, is how hard Cryptic seems to be working at changing the Star Trek-iness into something else. I can't help but feel that they never really wanted to make Star Trek, and think Star Trek is lame, and are trying to rid the property of anything Trek so it can become the different game they'd have rather made. One example is the monetary unit they have elected to employ. The dev's have said the unit of money will be "energy" because "Star Trek's economy does not use money." Yeah, they have said that in Trek episodes and films. Of course, they also have said they use "Credits" as money within the federation and "Gold-Pressed Latiunum" is used among the many non-aligned worlds as universal currency but why would use THOSE?? This way, instead of carrying a credit chit or a few strips of GPL, you can ferry a starship full of energy to pay for that donut! Why replace the convention already put into place within the property? There are so many examples of this within the development of this game that it has truly begun to take on a sort of video-game alchemy, transforming one product into another. For their next trick, they're going to turn gold into lead! yeah, i know, makes more money the other way around but the devs at Cryptic ignore things like that. happy trails.