Trust me; that was not a paraphrase. It has become more and more apparent that the state of Star Trek Online’s ‘Player versus Player’ (PvP) aspect has forced the developers to enter crisis-mode. Citing low attendance across the board and insufficient support from Cryptic brass, Gozer – a Cryptic employee and STO developer – painted a grim outlook for the game’s PvP element amidst an aggressive campaign to ‘save’ it from demise. According to Gozer, if the problems with PvP are not rectified soon, they may have to completely it from the game completely.

Star Trek Online has endured failures and setbacks during its time. Its development phase was plagued by delays and an eventual shift of developers from Perpetual Entertainment to Cryptic Studios. From the first day of its release, many reviewers and subscribers cited low quality of design in almost every aspect of the STO.

Many updates have served to revamp the game and bring in new subscribers in addition to switching to the free-to-play model. You can check out the pertinent sections from Gozer’s statement after the cut.

 “Put simply, the current state of PVP in STO = FAIL

I don’t think I can be any clearer on this point. You the players don’t like it, we the developers don’t like it and all the data we pull from the servers backs up the statement as well.

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Right now because PVP is in such bad shape that we (the developers) have to decide if we think we can turn this problem around. Participation in PVP related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people that log in to the game and play in any significant way.

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Cryptic is a business and everything that makes up STO requires resources to develop, implement, and maintain. I think it’s pretty obvious that since the launch of STO that PVP has not had a fair share of those resources allocated to it. This fact is the primary reason PVP is in the state that it’s currently in.

Something has to be done, PVP cannot stay the way that it is now. We either have to try to save it, or take it out of the game completely. We have to allocate resources in order to save it and that’s where I come into the picture.

Right this moment, I’m the only resource PVP gets. My job is to figure out if I can find a way to improve the entire system in a way that does not impact development of the rest of the game in any significant way. It’s going to be a challenge to put it mildly, but I’m going to try. I’m going to do my best to make PVP a viable STO gameplay feature that appeals to a much larger audience than it does now.

It’s simply going to have to get better and appeal to a much larger group of players on a regular basis if it’s going to survive. This also means that many of you are not going to like the changes I am forced to make in order to meet these goals, but before you get too upset at something I change you might want to consider the alternative, which would be no PVP at all.

There are big changes coming to PVP, some I think you are going to like, others no so much because no one likes change. Some are not going to make a whole lot of sense at the time because you won’t be seeing the whole long term plan I have in store for PVP over the course of the next year or so.”