STO stopped being fun around Season 5. Or whenever the Romulan shit and starbase shit came in and PVP went out. Now it's just Massive Online Autism RPG #245345669. I blame the chinks that bought the franchise.
Commie bastards drained all the enjoyment out of it and made it a grindfest.
Arent you cute ...
PvP have always sucked unless you were abusing the poorly made decisions, such as why KDF had good consoles in a attempt to make people to play KDF so they could sell twice the ships, didnt work (because wasnt the issue), Season 5 was the F2P conversion, Season 6 was Starbases but considering the sheer amount of work whatever was on them didnt come to play until a year later when people started to finish their Starbases.
Romulans didnt kill PvP as much they killed the "old guard" as in the KDF players from back when KDF was the PvP faction and had borken mechanics, PvPers remained ... what killed PvP, actually what shoved PvP in the shed, raped its ass, strangled it and then had its way with its corpse was Delta Rising, that was also from the culmination of decisions made previously that just make it very hard to get in, the laundry list of ship traits, gear, consoles, DOFFs and other shit simply became too large, of course Delta Rising killed a lot of things.
I dont blame PWE entirely for it, to begin the "commies" are ... actually they are in San Fransisco and Cryptic is in Los Angels so its kinda right as they being West Coat Neo-Libs but anyway, most of those decisions appear to come from Cryptic itself, yes ... they sell power in scam boxes, it just got more obvious and worst as it goes along, we just have a complete shit Scam Box with shit ships (they are fucking bad) but there is a valuable thing in them, that is a TMP era Phasers, now its not they are cosmetic only ... oh, no (and this is why I said about selling power in scam boxes), its that their proc is the same as Disruptors except it also for a unexplainable reason (well its explainable, RNG scam box) they also buff your damage resistance, yes ... -10 damage resistance to target and +10 damage resistance to self.
Its shit like that, not they dont fuck up ... as I said the ships are shit, only the NX (yes, Tier 6 NX, its a thing now too) have some value if only for fans of Enterprise that quite frankly should pay 900 Lobi for it just because they are Enterprise fans.
Games evolve, I dont mind the shifting meta as much a shifting meta that comes with $2000 tag on it, Delta Rising was that ... to everyone, game never recovered from it, its not that is worst because its always been kinda shit but because the shit keeps piling up, "fun" is very much ignore being a AUTISTIC and want to be "competitive" on a motherfucking videogame, MOBAs exist for that but if you are a poorfag that wants to be a "whinner" then you better be like Norfleet and know how to break the game in your favor, otherwise ... well IT AINT CHARITY, I will rag in intentional fuck you, pay us design instead of payment of lump sum and thats it but because its a question of honestly, if you are designing to INTENTIONALLY fuck people over unless they pay unreasonable amounts of money for it or create gameplay only 10% of the players can even do ... well fuck you, if you arent giving me something to play dont expect me to pay, if you offer me a ship that is like a free one but looks cooler I might buy but the moment you sell power along with the looks, dont expect you can just backtrack ...
And that is STO, PWE is hardly the only ones to blame ... it started with a company that was using the funds for STO to create another MMO and they died, then Cryptic decided to take on the contract knowing how there was no way to deliver a quality game within that timeframe, then come Atari that comes after Cryptic because they were a easy target and had 2 subscription games they thought could take money from, when Atari reaslized how fucked they were they sold then to PWE that yes, they added scam boxes but its not like they invented the thing and I am sure a lot of the fucktardry in Sto scam boxes comes directly from Craptic itself.