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  • Arc Fatigue: There are some that are convinced that the entire Iconian storyarc, which had been essentially the entire driving point of STO since its inception, had essentially run its course and that the Iconian War story arc's lackluster run was because the devs were running out of steam and just wanted this done and over with. Admittedly, many of these players were, too.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Has its own page now.
  • Alt-itis: The game suffers horribly from it - free players get three slots (four, following the Delta Recruitment event) and subscribers/LTS players get 4-5 to start with and can purchase 2 or 4 more up to a maximum of 49. With four factions, three classes and multiple races (especially the catch-all "Alien"), players will want to try to get them all. However, this has caused players to be bitten in the ass as of recently due to the time-gated grinds - players who are in the mind set of Gotta Catch 'Em All wants to have their characters with all of the ships, all of the DOFFs, as much Dilithium as possible and will get really pissy because they can't. The advent of Delta Rising made this harder for many players who had accumulated multiple characters due to a number of reasons, including a lack of usable missions to level up with and the advent of the Specialization trees. After Steven "SalamiInferno" Ricossa took over as executive producer Cryptic started taking steps to remedy this, including making ships obtained via event grinds available for free across all characters once they'd been unlocked once.
  • Anticlimax Boss: The Iconian Herald ships and troops are really no more difficult to destroy than any other endgame boss. In fact, other endgame boss races like the Undine and Vaadwaur can be more difficult to destroy and cause more damage to the players.
  • Annoying Video Game Helper: Multiple. Your crew sometimes qualifies, as they will break in with messages about how you need to go do exactly what you were already doing. Quest givers sometimes break in with transmissions while you're actively doing something like harvesting resources, taking control away until you acknowledge the message. And in any given TFO, be prepared for mission control to berate your team about the 6 things you should be doing at once or call your attention to dangers you've already dealt with. And then there's Tovan Khev.
    • Odo is one of the main offenders; during The Swarm TFO, he will constantly and loudly demand you go deal with crises in up to 3 different locations at once.
    • A mechanical example during the Risa summer event: an "artifact scanner" is supposed to help you zero in on the location of treasures for the Artifact Hunt, but in practice it steers you ten different directions before finally getting close enough to dig the artifacts up. No wonder Sovak (the Ferengi antagonist from the TNG episode Captain's Holiday) was so unsuccessful finding the Tox Uthat, if he used this device.
  • Ass Pull: "Butterfly" ignored the rules laid out in "Year of Hell" for how the temporal weapon ship works. Every change made in the episode had unforeseen but logical consequences: erasing the Rilnar destroyed the Krenim because Krenim-Rilnar interbreeding contributed an antibody to the Krenim genome, erasing a comet destroyed species by removing the amino acids it seeded on various planets, and erasing the timeship itself rebooted the entire episode. But in "Butterfly" the unforeseen consequences are completely unconnected to the missing events: erasing a space-rock indirectly responsible for the Yamato finding Iconia prevents Hobus (because the Iconians were never alerted to the presence of life in the Milky Way), but also somehow causes Romulus to be assimilated by Borg who come out of no-damn-where, and erasing the transwarp conduit via which they came to Romulus somehow makes Hobus happen again (kicking everyone over into a Close-Enough Timeline and back to square one).
  • Audience-Alienating Era: There are a few that are universally panned. The two being:
    • Season Four: Crossfire. Season Four took place during the infamous "Great Content Drought", with the only thing being majorly added was a revamp of the ground shooting system and changing up the Borg.
    • Expansion Two: Delta Rising. While many players laud the voicework and the storytelling, players found the sudden EXP jump between levels and the harder ST Fs to be unbearable. This is exacerbated by the fact that, unlike Legacy of Romulus, the Delta Rising logo was quickly replaced with the Iconian War logo once Season Ten dropped. The seasons that followed have been at best deeply divisive, with the Iconian War starting off well but becoming mired in various types of stupidity after "Delta Flight" and having an extremely controversial Deus ex Machina ending, and Season Eleven being based entirely on Time Travel (specifically the Temporal Cold War arc from Star Trek: Enterprise).
    • By its conclusion, the Iconian War had become such an Audience-Alienating Era with episodes such as "Time in a Bottle" (involving the Ferengi extensively), "House Pegh", and "Broken Circle" (wherein Hollywood Tactics get most of the Alliance fleet killed and the death of an Iconian is accompanied by dialogue that is less epic and more cringe-inducing) that the playerbase was desperate for ANYTHING else to play. The Temporal Cold War that followed is rife with plotholes, stuffed with flat villains with rote motivation, and dripping in over-the-top melodrama, but it's actually been reasonably well-received by the playerbase for not being the Iconian War.
  • Author's Saving Throw:
    • Several missions put you in contact with Non Player Characters interested in the Hobus supernova (the one that destroyed Romulus), all of which say things that boil down to "yeah, this doesn't make one damn bit of sense", which it didn't. An arc reveals the supernova and its FTL blast wave were the result of a weapon deployed by Romulan Admiral (then Praetor) Taris at the behest of alien "dark masters", a.k.a. the Iconians.note  This is a take-off from the new movie's prequel-comic Countdown.
    • The game also acknowledges that Data is alive and commanded the Enterprise-E after Picard finally retired. This is explained in The Path to 2409 and the tie-in novel The Needs Of The Many: Data's memories that were transferred to B-4 toward the end of Star Trek: Nemesis were activated, essentially restoring Data within B-4's body. Data was quite pissed about this, disagreeing that his life was worth more than B-4's, and it contributed to his decision to resign from Starfleet after the Enterprise-E's destruction, rather than command the Enterprise-F. In the Star Trek Magazine short story "Unexpected Honor" he's briefly shown trying to make a new body for B-4.
    • Cryptic did it again after they introduced the Voth. While shooting dinosaurs "with frikkin laser beams attached to their heads" was fun, it was controversial at best from a story standpoint (actual armored vehicles would make a hell of a lot more sense). In Season 9, the Voth are defeated in the Dyson Sphere by the Undine, bringing back a popular but underused threat.
    • Among the reasons the season 9 Undine lockbox ships were hated was the fanon idea that Undine ships were themselves intelligent beings,note  which led to the theory that forcing them to now obey Feds, Klingons, and Romulans required Mind Rape. Delta Rising's first mission, "Mindscape", included a line from Tuvok that most Undine ships were in fact something like tools, no more sentient than a normal starship (Eric Cooper's command ship in the mission is an exception).
    • There is a subtle one in "Time in a Bottle" which apparently explains why the Iconian War isn't an all-out galactic war of survival: when T'Ket complains that they should eradicate everyone right this moment, M'Tara tells her companion that everything must go according to plan and apparently, that plan does not include turning our heroes into smears on the wall.
    • "Butterfly" solves the Genocide Dilemma players were flipping over about prior by stating that eradicating the Iconians was number one on their list, but the Disaster Dominoes caused by this would have been too much. Let's put it like this: by holding back Warp technology for 50,000 years, Vulcans have become the Proud Warrior Race Guy and Klingons have become utter pacifists. And that's just the surface.
    • According to dev "Tacofangs", T'Ket's continued war against our heroes at the end of "Midnight" is supposed to essentially explain why the Iconian queues are still going, even after the story's over. This is a case where the Author's Saving Throw actually makes things worse, though: previously the queues' continuation after the story was over had been regarded as simply a necessity of the medium. Providing an in-universe rationalization just added to the preexisting dissatisfaction with the Deus ex Machina Bad Guys Win ending of the Iconian War where the Iconians basically say "oops, our bad" and wander off without getting anything resembling a comeuppance for their murder of billions of people. The matter then got a second saving throw when an actual plot use for a renegade Iconian fleet commanded by the person who slew Kahless II and was in a position to claim his sword was found in the Gamma Quadrant arc, leaving it easier to ignore the queues explanation as simply obfuscation.
    • The Age of Discovery and J'Ula's Discovery storylines contain a number of elements addressing common complaints about season one of Star Trek: Discovery:
    • A mission relatively early on in the Klingon War arc involved having the Klingon player character slowly torture information out of a very reluctant and helpless Starfleet captain, something that left a bad taste in a lot of players' mouths. As of a 2020 update, the events around the mission have undergone a Retcon, and the sequence of events now has you simply beating the captain into submission before extracting the information from his ship's computer.
  • Awesome Music:
    • Most of the music in the game is merely okay. And then you start fighting Romulans.
    • The main theme starts off with a classic Trek feel, then halfway through kicks off into a rousing orchestra piece that makes you want to jump into your ship and take on the whole galaxy.
    • Legacy of Romulus has a truckload of great music, as befits its status as the game's Growing the Beard expansion pack. Particular highlights:
      • The primary theme for New Romulus. You'll hear this primarily in the Staging Area, but you can hear it anywhere, since it's long.
      • The "Virinat theme", which greets newbie Romulans and is the theme of the colony while it's at peace. Later on, it also serves as cruising/ambient music for when you're doing various heroic things as a Romulan character - since you never forgot Virinat and are carrying on its legacy.
      • And then, of course, "Return to Virinat".
      • The already awesome Romulan battle theme gets new variations that are usually played when fighting the Tal Shiar or Elachi as a Romulan.
    • The 2017 First Contact Day probably gave players the best music to launch model Phoenix Warp Rockets to: Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride", the same song used in Star Trek: First Contact.
    • Klingon TFO "To Hell With Honor" is a mass space-to-surface assault set to a looping electronic riff on Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyrie". Bonus points for the line "The smell of deuterium in the morning is most pleasing!"
  • Broken Base: See here.
  • Cargo Shipping: A rare example in which the fans themselves are shipped: For April Fool's Day 2021, Cryptic announced a new mode allowing fans to virtually ''date'' one of their five favorite starships (or, as they pointed out in a footnote, one of the five they had basically picked out of a hat). Each ship had a corresponding avatar and personality profile. One of the five, and leading by far in the poll for which starship players would romance first, was the fan favorite Akira class, personified as a bubbly anime girl. As Cryptic said, "Living starships with AI programmed to be hormonal teenagers. What could go wrong?"
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Contested Sequel: If we count expansions, then Delta Rising is certainly this. There are a number of reasons that lead to this with two of the biggest being the increased amount of XP needed to level up compared to the amount of XP earnedExplanation  and the increased difficulty of the former Elite PVE missions, now Advanced, and the decreased rewards.Explanation , these changes leading players to get on their high horse and declare that the game was "no longer for casuals". It also didn't help that this was released around the same time franchises like Assassin's Creed, Halo and Pokémon came out with new installments. On the other hand, the reception of the writing and art quality for the storyline missions ("Revelations" in particular) has been overall positive, albeit the writing is frequently considered to be out-of-character if you're playing KDF.
  • Crazy Is Cool: Guroth of the cross-faction Delta Fleet. Why? Because the guy loves his explosives. He's also quite smart, as he points out certain things to make bigger booms without threatening ships. He also pulls a Strawman Has a Point in his chapter of "Tales of the War" when he points out that they're in a war, redundancies can go to hell when you're trying to win. Especially if you know what you're doing.
  • Creator's Pet:
    • A lot of accusation towards the Federation, due to the fact that they have the most expansive collection of ships, better outfit choices, a more complete story, etc. etc. Cryptic's defense on this point is financial: according to data released during the 5-year anniversary, Starfleet player characters account for almost 3/4 of the game's toons, so it's just plain more cost-effective to focus on the Federation. The most frequent counterargument is that this is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, i.e. if the KDF had been a full faction from the beginning instead of originally being monsterplay unlocked with a level 25 Fed toon (an artifact of the game's infamously Troubled Production), the numbers might be more even.
    • Also the Excelsior-class, which as a DPS cruiser easily outperforms the half-century-newer Galaxy-class (see Low-Tier Letdown). This one has more truth to it than most considering Geko openly says the Excelsior is his favorite ship. Finally rectified with the Andromeda-class, which can use the GCS as a skin.
    • Sela is reaching this point, especially after the Iconian War arc made her a Karma Houdini by letting her escape Earth in a blog entry after the final battle, despite The Reveal that the whole war was her fault to begin with. Most of the players want to put a disruptor bolt in her head and be done with Her Royal Sociopathy already (especially since two of her escapes required her captors to be handed the Idiot Ball), but Cryptic seems to want to keep her around for later stories.
    • J'ula in the Star Trek: Discovery/Klingon Civil War episodes, to some. Aside from being T'Kuvma's sister (tying her irretrievably to DSC's Contested Prequel status) she - once transported to the present day - mounts a Klingon-ultranationalist terrorist campaign against The Alliance that eventually escalates the preexisting divisions in the Klingon Empire into a full-blown Civil War. But then, regardless of your feelings, the game requires all player characters (including DSC Federation characters, whose commanding officer she murdered in the Justified Tutorial) come into an Enemy Mine situation when her Number Two betrays her and hands her Weapon of Mass Destruction to Chancellor J'mpok. In "Knowledge Is Power", you even play as her for the majority of the mission, while she seeks to atone for destroying her brother's greatest accomplishment (as a result of said campaign she caused).
  • Demonic Spiders: Has its own page.
  • Designated Hero: The Kobali in Delta Rising's Kobali Prime Battlezone. The game attempts to portray them as a peaceful people under attack by a race of genocidal maniacs. Yet while the Vaadwaur aren't free of fault, the Kobali are holding huge numbers of Vaadwaur as Alien Popsicles and using the failed stasis pods for reproductive stock, along with Vaadwaur battlefield casaulities, and tell a series of lies as to why the Vaadwaur are after them to the Alpha Quadrant Alliance captains attempting to help them, even if it is out of fear of abandonment to their fate. And then there's the fact that their standard response to a resurrectee rejecting the lifestyle is, at best, to go after them and heavily attempt to persuade them otherwise (see Jhet'leya and Keten)... or at worst, basically use force to bring them back. It's to the point where Captain Kim acknowledges that they can't simply ignore what the Kobali are doing simply because both they and the Alpha Quadrant alliance are fighting the Vaadwaaur.
  • Designated Villain:
    • The Vaadwaur in Delta Rising's Kobali Prime Battlezone. The game attempts to portray them as genocidal maniacs attacking the peaceful Kobali. However, the Kobali have their own issues (see Designated Hero), and the worst the Vaadwaur do as a species on Kobali Prime (besides having started the conflict) is try to infect everyone on the planet, including themselves, with a countermeasure for the Kobali reproductive virus and use chemical weapons that specifically target Kobali lives only. Individually, Gaul goes Jumping Off the Slippery Slope shortly thereafter in "All that Glitters", but at the same time Gaul was the only senior Vaadwaur commander who was actually doing evil deeds of his own will. The rest were either bluegill hosts, or completely in the dark about the true nature of these revelations, including all those below them for the latter.
    • The Na'kuhl, despite being the Big Bads of the Future Proof story arc, get a lot of sympathy on the forums due to the fact that all they really want is to restore their home planet after its destruction due to Kal Dano's inability to keep a firm hold on his Weapon of Mass Destruction. The Time Police come off Unintentionally Unsympathetic for denying them this. Several seasons later, the PC and the Lukari finally do work with the Na'Kuhl to restart their sun, and even help create a rapprochement between them and the Tholians.
  • Disappointing Last Level: The Federation, KDF and Romulan Republic all have three unique storylines, though the Federation detours into a Featured Episode partway through. After the end of those stories, all three deal with the same things: they go to Nimbus III, they help the Remans and stop the Tal Shiar, they go to the Alpha Quadrant and rescue Deep Space 9, then deal with the Breen, the Borg and the Undine, and so forth. While these missions do net you some very valuable loot, after playing them numerous times, they tend to get tedious. This is why some players tend to just spam the hell out of Task Force Operations to level up, even if the story missions allow you to level up almost instantaneously.
    • Cryptic is aware of this and has started to work on it a little bit, first by adding new Featured Episodes at the end of the storylines and second, by announcing that they are revamping and retconning the old last level missions (specifically the underwhelming and annoying Cardassian, Borg, and Undine arcs). Additionally, the Breen, Devidian, Second Wave DS9, and Nimbus mission arcs - with the exception ofthe latter for Romulan players - are made secondary, optional mission arcs. Play them, or don't; it's up to you.
  • Discredited Meme: At least at the Reddit forums, they are getting really tired of people referencing the memes spawned by the whole Tau Dewa Patrol debacle.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: With the revelation of Sela's role in the Iconian's attitude towards everyone and T'Ket's refusal to accept peace, there have been some people who have felt bigger sympathy for T'Ket while a greater urge to see either Sela brought to justice or outright murder her for her actions.

    E-L 
  • Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the gameplay gets very repetitive after awhile (shoot some ships, beam down, shoot bad guys, beam up, shoot more ships...), the storyline gives continuity for Trekkies on what happened in the Prime universe after the supernova event depicted in Star Trek (2009).
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: A few of them.
    • Linnea, Admiral Quinn's secretary for being an Ocampan. She has no backstory or even Cryptic written dialogue (she is a foundry contact though), but still very popular.
    • Lt. E'genn, a research on ESD whose claim to fame is over him not understand the concept of what "egghead" means, hence his nickname, Egg. This was used to great effect when Surface Tension released, revealing him as an Undine.
    • Admiral T'Nae, for being an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight Vulcan.
    • Ambassador S'taass, for several reasons - being one of the most fleshed out KDF characters, someone who doesn't like the Empire entirely and yet is their top ambassador, Deadpan Snarker, and willing to rip Jem'Hadar apart with his claws. Also, he's voiced by Charlie Adler, who's been a badass before.
    • Hakeev, for being such a great Love to Hate villian.
    • Admiral Tuvok, not only for being a canon character but also for being a Reasonable Authority Figure, and the most clever person in-game.
    • Captain Akira Sulu, no reason to tell you why.
    • Eldex, the Token Heroic Vaadwaur of Delta Rising, who makes common cause with the Alliance to overthrow Gaul. Given the perception of the Vaads as the storyline's Designated Villain, there are frequent calls by forumites for the Alliance to open peace negotiations with him. Instead there's an easily missed handwave in "Dust to Dust" that Eldex turned hostile after Gaul was killed, and he never appears again.
    • Ship-wise, the Jupiter-class dreadnought and Typhoon-class battleship have gathered quite a following on the forums despite never having been made playable. While both are in the process of being removed from the game due to their low-quality models, there are frequent calls for Cryptic to revamp them and bring them back. The Jupiter was finally brought back in name as a Federation carrier, though as noted in arguments against the design on the forums, the Jupiter-class carrier has only a passing resemblance to its predecessor.
    • The Lukari, and Administrator Kuumarke in particular, could have easily come off as a Creator's Pet given their significant role in post-Iconian War storylines and the fact they're technologically ahead of even the Federation in some respects (notably having figured out how to use protomatter to safely terraform planets), but their earnest lightheartedness and lack of any distasteful dark secrets won players over.
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: The conclusion of the Iconian War arc was meant to be a Bittersweet Ending where The Alliance managed to secure a peace deal with the Iconians by handing over a MacGuffin at the absolute last second before being wiped out, but came off to a lot of players as a straight-up Downer Ending on account of the Iconians basically getting to be Karma Houdinis: they suffer no comeuppance nor even apologize for the tens of billions of people they killed in the galaxy and fluidic space over the past three decades, nor do they lift a finger to stop T'Ket from continuing the war all by her lonesome.note  As one forum commentator put it, "The bad guys won. They killed people until they got what they wanted."
  • Fandom Rivalry:
    • Already suffering from this. Not helping is the fact that Star Wars: The Old Republic has gone Free To Play as well, leading to something of a revival of the Ur-fandom rivalry.
    • Also has an internal one between the players who prefer the Federation, players who prefer the Klingons and the players who prefer the Romulans. Federation players usually want the cloaking ability the Klingons and Romulans have, the Klingon and Romulan players want the expansive set of ships the Federation has and the Federation and Klingon players wish the Romulan players weren't so overpowered.
    • The main STO forums vs. the /r/sto Reddit forums. The Reddit forumers don't like the main STO forums because, 9 times out of 10, a single post can devolve into a circlejerk of complaints, attacks and other facepalm-worthy moments. The main STO forumers don't like the Reddit forums because they feel that the forums is nothing more than a circlejerk of praise towards Cryptic and that nothing could ever go wrong with the game.

      It should be noted that these are both a major case of Accentuate the Negative: in the main forums, there are other places where players don't curse Cryptic's name in anger and act like complete nut cases and a lot of that is focused in the General Discussion section and in the Reddit forum, there are players are critical of the game, but show it in a way that doesn't invoke the G.I.F.T like the forums do (though there are a few players there who do and will even get critical if you ever dare try to downvote them.)
  • Fan Nickname:
    • "Boff" / "BOff" / "BOFF" for "Bridge Officer" (AKA your Bridge Bunnies). Likewise, some variation of "Doff" for "Duty Officers", the Redshirt Army who run your Lower Decks.
    • Among others, KDF players are Klinks or Klanks, spiral wave disruptors are pissbeams, the Caitian Atrox Carrier is the catbus, and the Jem'hadar Attack Ship is the bugship or Jem bug.
    • "Rainbow boats" or some variation thereof for a Noob mistake of not making your weapon types match up, because of the resulting beams being in all colors of the rainbow. As one guy on the forums remarked on one of these who used cannons, "every time he fired it looked like a pack of Skittles exploded."note  With the addition of several subtypes of weapon, it's possible, and even somewhat desirable, to have a "rainbow boat" that uses a single energy type. Phasers, in particular, come in truly dazzling array of colors and effects.
    • The forums use so much shorthand for builds and abilities it's practically a second language you have to learn.
    • The new Obelisk carrier has also been dubbed the "Obisek" carrier, noting how close it was to the well-known Reman character of the Romulan storyline.
    • "T'Its", or some variation thereof, for the nameless Vulcan lady with plentiful cleavage that graces a lot of the promo art. By the same token the pretty Romulan who was on the Legacy of Romulus art got dubbed "So'Hott" until she was revealed as Commander Tiaru Jarok, the Romulan Republic's flagship captain.
    • In a similar vein, "Handsome Phaser Guy" for the unnamed white male human Starfleet captain on the box art pointing a phaser out of the cover.
    • "Grinderversary", a derogatory name for the fourth anniversary by some because of the fact that the ship released for this event could only be obtained by grinding.
    • "Fake Majel" to refer to the actress who has replaced Majel Barrett in death as the Computer/Tutorial voice. The actress is Lani Minella, same person who voices Admiral T'nae.
    • "Tacscorts", a portmanteau of "tactical" and "escort", is exactly what it sounds like: tactical officers flying escorts heavy on tactical boff powers.
    • "The Great Content Drought", a span of of time from February 2011, when the "Cloaked Intentions" Featured Episodes were dropped, to December 2011, which was the release of Season Five: Call to Arms. During this time, no major content was released due to Atari's mishandling of the game and the uncertainty of PWE's buying.
      • It also has another nickname - "The Year with No Cups", referring to the fact that when funding to STO was cut, it lead to a point where they couldn't even afford cups in their breakroom, let alone a dev team.
    • "Dread-Not", "Dreadnot" or other variations refer to the Galaxy-X Dreadnought Cruiser by PVP-based players who put down the ship after its recent updating.
    • "DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM" or some other variation referring to players crying that STO isn't how THEY want it and threatening/are leaving and thus the game is dying.
    • The Clicky Aliens for the Solanae.
    • "Bortascrew" has been used as a derogatory term by those who see the Bortasqu'-class as a Low-Tier Letdown.
      • "Spaceball-1" is used for the flyby of the ship during the 2014 First Contact Day/Day of Honor/Republic Day.
      • "Captain Whiny B*tch of the IKS Whineatyou'" turned up after 90% of Koren's lines in "Surface Tension" consisted of her harping that Starfleet was only able to send two ships (USS Voyager and the Fed player character) to defend Qo'noS from a full-scale Undine assault. This after she was present for much of Starfleet's reserve forces getting trashed defending the Sol system from what the Undine considered a diversion.
    • "DOH" for the Day of Honor, more used in a hilarious derogatory manner (as in Homer's trademark "annoyed grunt") due to the fact that the Bortasqu''s tactical officer has a Cannon skill and the ship has no cannons.
    • "Junior Officer Unappreciation Weekend" for a weekend event comprising both a doff XP boost and an "opportunity" to grind for doffs at the respective academies. The former was appreciated, as was the free unique doff (although the fact that there was apparently supposed to be a unique Romulan version for whom the quest target was never added has been thoroughly savaged), but the grind, coming as it did not long after the Mirror Invasion grind and the Grinderversary, has pissed off the forums to no end.
    • "Veterans", a title used by certain older players, used in the effect to as to why Cryptic shouldn't change X for the new people.
    • "What's your beef with X?", used by players who want to know why Cryptic "hates" a certain ship/race/etc. Made popular by the long-running "What is your beef with the Galaxy Cryptic?" thread which players have been discussing at great lengths the importance of having the Exploration Cruiser made better BOFF-wise (which eventually happened with the Andromeda-class at Tier 6).
    • "Slapped in the face", used by players who felt insulted by certain moves by Cryptic (e.g. making the Risian Luxury Cruiser a better ship than the Galaxy-class).
    • "Gozer the Iconian" is a derogatory one towards the first appearance of an Iconian by detractors.
    • "Aux2Bat" is the nickname whose ships utilize a build that centers around the BOFF power "Auxiliary to Battery" which, if players time it right, can grant a ship's beam weapons full power without losing power to weapons.
      • "Aux2Dulmar" is the nickname that uses the Aux2Bat in coordination with the DOFF Marion Frances Dulmur, which increases a player's attack power even more when using a certain skill.
    • "MUH IMMERSHUN!" is a derogatory name towards the reasoning people hate certain aspects of the game or why a certain thing should or shouldn't happen: ruining one's immersion.
    • "Craptic", a derogatory term slung at Cryptic itself, mostly when they alter a portion of the game that anger players.
    • In Delta Rising, "Vaads" for the Vaadwaur, a term that's also used In-Universe among Ten Forward's fan fiction writers as a way of Nicknaming the Enemy. Ditto "Zombies" for the Kobali (who reproduce by converting corpses into more Kobali).
    • "Plasma Doping", an exploit that allowed players to combine the powers of the Embassy Plasma Consoles (which gave attacks a certain amount of Plasma DOT) with the Vulnerability Locators (which increased the chances for Critical Hits)
    • "Recluse Nanny", having the Tholian Recluse Carrier essentially "carry" you through a DPS run, artificially boosting your DPS to higher levels.
    • The "Blog War", mocking Cryptic's inability or unwillingness to make the Iconian invasion more immersive and instead telling much of the story through a series of blog entries. Supposedly the Iconians are kicking everyone's asses, but in-game they really only have one actual battlefield victory,note  and outside the featured episodes and a couple STFs there is zero evidence the war is even going on.
    • "Ch'Mol'Rihan" has been adopted by a subset of Rihannsu fans as a more grammatically correct name for New Romulus in Romulan. For reference, while ch'Rihan is the Romulan name for Romulus, it means "[homeworld] of the Declared" ("the Declared" being the Romulans themselves), so the canon name "Mol'Rihan" actually means something like "new Romulan" rather than "New Romulus".
    • After the fiasco in "Broken Circle" where he tried to Zerg Rush the freaking Herald Sphere, Captain Kagran from the KDF got renamed "Zapp Kagran" after Zapp Brannigan.
    • "Connie" for the Constitution-class, the class of the original Enterprise. "Konnie", the nickname for the Kelvin Timeline Constitution. "Donnie" for the Discovery era Constitution.
    • Waffle Station for Vauthil Station, which you defend from the Terran Empire in the revamped Mirror Invasion event. (The nickname comes from Obisek's somewhat odd pronunciation of the station's name.)
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The consensus over at the STO main forums is essentially the Iconian War "doesn't count" because it wasn't a war in their eyes.
  • Friendly Fandoms: Someone on the production team of Star Trek: Picard obviously is a fan of STO, enough to canonize four starship designs from the game by having them appear in an episode. Cryptic saluted this by putting the four ship models on sale in the Zen store.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Split-Beam Rifles have a secondary attack that allows you to split the energy beam and hit up to 3 separate targets at once. The attack itself does considerable damage (just slightly less than the sniper shot from a sniper rifle) and each beam proceeds to do full damage to each target, making it easy to take out multiple enemies faster instead of just focusing on one enemy at a time.
    • The Romulan Hyper-Plasma Torpedo Launcher. It combines the two torpedo skills, firing salvos of three heavy plasma torpedoes at a time. These torpedoes do AoE and DoT (Area of Effect and Damage over Time), and while they can be targeted and destroyed, if their own target is destroyed before they get there, they'll find a new one. If you use the High Yield torpedo skill, each torpedo in your next salvo does double damage. If you use the Torpedo Spread skill, you fire two heavy torpedoes each at three, four, or five targets, depending on your skill level. With the right combination of gear and duty officers, you can increase the chance of reduced cooldown to the point where you are almost constantly firing hyper-plasma torpedoes. The High Yield and Torpedo Spread abilities above do not affect cooldown, either.
      • For added damage, the rest of the Romulan Singularity Harness set - the Zero-Point Energy Conduit and the Experimental Romulan Plasma Beam Array - make it even more dangerous. The ERPBA dishes out continued high damage beam shots without draining your energy. The Zero-Point Energy Conduit gives you more power to use while increasing your chances for a Critical Hit. Two of those pieces increase your attack power and all three turns your Beam Array into a powerful DoT-inflicting weapon.
    • The Plasmonic Leech of the Vandal Destroyer. When you use this, energy from all four substations (weapons, shields, engines and auxiliary) are drained and placed onto your ship. This makes Klingons and KDF-allied Romulans dangerous as they can keep their energy levels sky high and dish out almost constant high-level attacks. Though at least Feds and Fed-allied Romulans can get this off of the Exchange, and with recent changes to the lockbox system, they're pricy but still attainable (when they used to cost as much or more than full-fledged ships).
    • The Valdore's Shield Absorptive Frequency Generator, which gives you a chance to fully heal your shields for 200% of the damage dealt. This makes Romulans even more dangerous than usual as they can pummel you and constantly restore their shields.
    • The Replica Thompson Submachine Gun should be called the "Borg Killer" since even Elite Tactical Drones can't adjust to its physical damage, allowing you to mow down crowds of Borg in a few seconds of sustained fire just Picard did in Star Trek: First Contact. Granted, it doesn't do as much individual damage as its other physical brethren the Zethram Shotgun or the TR-116B sniper rifle, but it compensates by hitting the enemies in front of you a lot and can be boosted further by skills and traits like the Commando Specialization that increases damage with aim and also lowers the secondary attack's cooldown. The fact that it was originally available during the First Contact Day event (where a daily grind was all that was required to earn it) and was later moved it to the pricey Picard Bundle in the Zen Store may mean that Cryptic actually is aware of how much a Game-Breaker it is.
    • The Cnidarian Defender Ship introduced through the Risian Summer Event, or more specifically, the Cnidarian Defense console that turns it into a stationary turret that not only deals huge damage to any five enemies that gets in range, but also hull heals any five allies in the same range. There are disadvantages to the Defense form (it's almost non-existent speed and turn rate and going under ten percent health reverts it back to its regular form,) but considering the healing aura also affects you (and the Space Trait Energy Refrequencer, for example, can convert a percentage of damage dealt into hull health and you will be doing a lot of damage, easily fifteen to twenty thousand per ship every few seconds,) it's fairly easy to build your Defender to boost hull regeneration and exotic damage. It's more useful for PVE than PVP as human opponents will very quickly target Defenders or just avoid your range, but regular enemies will just plow into the field like dummies and very quickly disintegrate unless they're dreadnoughts. The Defense Console already gives you +38 all damage resistance and +28.5 hull restoration to begin with, so even with the cooldown for the ability itself you're likely to survive until it's useable again. On top of all that, the Defender can be used to farm items to sell for Energy Credits simply by parking it in front of a space where enemy ships will warp in with the patrols "Rescure And Search" and "The Ninth Rule" being very useful for this, especially the former where Mokai ships will spawn at the end of a mission and be easily taken out by the Defender's field; even better, by destroying the ships so quickly will cause the game to spawn more ships than it would ordinarily, making it easy enough to score hundreds of thousands of credits when you sell all that loot.
    • The Annorax Science Dreadnought has a Secondary Deflector and Sensor Analysis, a 4/3 weapon arrangement, the highest shield modifier at 1.45 (Fleets only reach 1.43), a Hangar Bay, a Chroniton (re: Antiproton) Lance weapon, 5 Science Console slots, 4 Tactical Console slots, a Universal/Intelligence Lt. BOFF seat and a Universal Lt. Commander BOFF seat. It can not only use the Consoles from the Year of Hell ship set, but also from the old Temporal Warfare ship set. You'll be hardpressed to find a ship that's more overpowered than this!
  • Genius Bonus:
    • A material used in some doff assignments related to Caitians is "Ferasan Nepeta Leaves" (generally taken to be marijuana IN SPACE!). The Nepeta cataria plant is more commonly known as "catnip". No wonder the Caitians are interested in them.
    • The Terran expansion introduces a TFO called "Iuppiter Iratus", set in orbit of the planet Jupiter. This comes from a Roman telling of the Prometheus myth; "Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas", literally, "Jupiter is angry, therefore [he is] wrong." The full version is, "Jupiter, you seize on a lightning instead of answering, therefore you are wrong".
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Syphon Frigates. They're not especially tough and will die pretty fast to any kind of firepower, but they launch Power Syphons. Power Syphons start sucking out your warp core's power as soon as they get into range. And Syphon Frigates like to appear in squads of three, forcing you to pause, kill all their Power Syphons and then go back to killing them... except they like to stagger their syphon launching, and they can launch more!
    • The Targ Handlers. They're damage sponges, sure, but they also spawn endless rushes of Targs at regular intervals until you finally kill them. They like to appear with Swordmasters, too, so when you're trying to kill the Swordmaster you end up with annoying Targs running sideways at you to chip away your HP even more.
    • Any kind of fighter. They're small, annoying, and easy to kill. And Annoying. They sometimes show up when you're trying to concentrate your fire on a battleship. And they're annoying.
    • The goddamn motherfucking Devidians. Yes, those mind-sucking bastards from the TNG episode Time's Arrow. They managed to infest a space station in the former Neutral Zone and feast on its inhabitants, and it falls to you to get in-phase with them and fight 'em. They use health-drain attacks exclusively (that is, they attack you and get health back at the same time) AND even their weakest mooks have an ability that allows them to temporarily become invincible. They don't hit very hard, and so they really aren't very dangerous especially if you have anyone with a health-restoring ability with you, but they take forever to kill even with focus firing.
    • The Tholians. Words really can't describe it, but we'll try:
      • Widows are Tholian fighters, and they're one of the more fighter-happy factions. Difficult to hit, not terribly dangerous, but annoying in swarms or when also dealing with larger ships.
      • Meshweavers are very small ships, also not particularly dangerous, but can generate Tholian Web "walls" between you and them. While the wall is between you, you can't target or fire at the Meshweaver (or Meshweavers, since they always come in at least pairs). All you can do is navigate around the wall or pour fire into it to destroy it. [[Artificial Stupidity Fortunately, the Weavers will frequently maneuver around their own wall, even though they can fire through it no problem.]
      • Orb Weavers are basic cruisers, and can generate a full Tholian Web around your ship. It's small enough that, unless you have a very nimble ship, you will end up flying against the web, which damages shields and hull. You can destroy parts of it by targeting the "Web Nodes" that hold it together, and if you don't make a hole and escape pretty quickly, it will collapse in on your ship, dealing roughly 80% hull damage. Oh, and as with the Meshweavers, you can't shoot through this web, but the Tholians can. And did we mention how two Weavers sometimes cooperate to double-web your ship, so that even if you break one, there's another waiting to crush you? Yeah, that happens...
      • Tarantulas are Tholian battleships, packed with weapons and very tough. Some of them also have a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon that fires in a cone; any ship caught in it is encased in a rapidly-collapsing Tholian web that's pretty much a One-Hit Kill.
      • And all the Tholians love firing Heavy Disruption Torpedoes at you, destructible projectiles that, if you let them hit you, stand a pretty good chance at knocking your weapons system completely offline for what feels like forever.
    • Elachi Saboteurs. Tiny robots that latch themselves to your face and explode. Not only do they inflict plasma damage on everyone nearby, but they're fast and hard to see in the dark.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • During closed and open beta there were numerous bugs which although game breaking, were incredibly funny. The best of them involved Tribbles which in the game are basically a small medkit. Petting a Tribble you carry in your backpack heals you slightly every ten seconds. The ideal time to use the Tribble is during critical moments in ground PVP while making good use of cover. During a Ground PVP mission aboard a Klingon freighter, the opposing teams eventually meet at the central corridor where a bitter firefight ensues. Both sides take cover behind large obstructions and attempt to gain ground on the other. Losses are not heavy since players can simply crouch and heal. Unfortunately a bug forced the client to consider the Tribble to be a viable Medkit. Since players may forget the number of medkits they are carrying, repeatedly pressing 'H' to heal would cause the game to run the Tribble heal animation. This involves the character taking the tribble out of their backpack and gently stroking it while it purrs, giving it a gentle poke and laugh as the fuzzball softly coos before returning it to the backpack. This animation forces the character to stand out of cover for a solid 10 seconds. Many missions were lost due to the majority of either teams suddenly standing up and deciding to poke their Tribbles while taking the entire opposing team's phaser fire to the face.
    • Another Tribble bug would cause any Tribbles used during a heal in Ground PVP to slowly grow in size. For some reason the bug was serverside so every player on the server could see it happening. Over the course of 15 to 20 minutes the Tribble would slowly grow out of the players right pocket, eventually taking up the entire map. Occasionally the gradually inflating Tribble would be anchored to a random body part of the character instead of the right pocket. This would yield several players running haphazardly through the midst of a firefight with a large Tribble consuming the upper half of a player's body, head or leg. The growing Tribble had full collision so given enough time, players would start getting their Tribbles caught on doorways, ship decor and eventually become embedded in the map.
    • Sometimes upon switching from Ground PVP to Starship mode, some players ships would be massive flying Tribbles.
    • More like a Good Bad Typo, but there's a duty officer assignment to investigate rumors that your faction's military intelligence agency has inserted operatives aboard your ship. Its title is "Investigate Rumors of <insert faction> Intelligence". Cue jokes about <faction> being rumored to be intelligent. Cryptic actually fixed this at one point only to backtrack because people liked it so much.
    • One possible version of the "Officer of the Watch" daily in player fleet starbases is to be requested to line a group of cadets up for inspection and inspect them. The KDF version occasionally spawns a targ by mistake.
    • A pre-launch bug that recurs from time to time causes the game to sometimes forget to change the player's avatar when moving from a space map to a ground map, resulting in indoor starships.
    • Another season 8 bug involved the brand-spanking new Origin bridge set up. Thanks to a screw up, the viewscreen shows the stars flying away from the ship, not towards, giving rise to comments that ships were flying backwards.
    • The "D'Deridex Defender", a D'Deridex Warbird whose coding glitched to the point where it was near invincible and had an amazing hull heal rate. This was due to the fact that a patch caused the AI to use its healing skills.
    • The "Borgassian Death Turret", an odd spawn in Foundry stages where, instead of Cardassian-based ships spawning, a turret would spawn, causing one of the many stock Borg clips to play and fire a One-Hit Kill shot at you.
    • Post-Season 9, giant floating Andorians in the Undine Battlezone. You can almost hear the devs laughing when you read the patch notes that fixed it:
    • Another "forgot to change between person to ship" bug: the USS Running Man.
    • A number of bugs due to the bizarre way the Romulan faction was implemented. Among them, despite the Romulans not usually having access to T5 ships of their allied faction, during the 2014 summer giveaway Fed-Roms were able to acquire the T5 Ambassador-class Support Cruiser Retrofit. (The same was not true of KDF-Roms and the Varanus Support Vessel Retrofit.)
    • In the Delta Rising mission "All That Glitters", you can drop a Subspace Party Amplifier on the dead Talaxian whom Gaul kills, making him stand back up and dance. When it finishes and he claps, he'll drop back down dead again.
    • Here we learn about a way to kill Non Player Characters on social maps. After completing "Defend Rhi'ihho Station", go looking for a surviving Elachi skitterer, then beam out right as it attacks, causing it to explode on the next map.
    • When the fifth anniversary episode "Dust to Dust" launched, a glitch in one stage would cause Harry Kim to be electrocuted by the Stock Video Game Puzzle you just completed. Some things never change.
    • The "47-second ISA run". A new item called the Particle Focuser was causing it to benefit from all other damage bonuses. Cue a video that showed a group of players one-shotting the STF mission "Infected: The Conduit". Later investigations from players revealed this was causing damage in the trillions.
    • While testing the brand new Admirality System on Tribble, players began finding out that their ships were being treated as DOFFs for the normal DOFF system. Thus, we have a Kobali Samsar Cruiser being sent to a councilor, A Jem'Hadar Dreadnought being treated for minor lacerations and A Breen Saar Thelen Carrier being treated for a stomach ache. Oh, the irony.
    • As part of an April Fools' Day promotion in 2018, Cryptic put a holographic Captain Kurland character on the Deep Space 9 promenade as the contact point for getting a free item. Much hilarity ensued when KDF toons discovered they could fight him.
    • As of October 2021, the "Death Planet" Nukara map treats you as if you're always wearing an environment suit, even if your toon is walking around in a miniskirt (rather than the planet killing you). This proved to be a prelude to the modification where a character's EVA suit is automatically equipped when needed; the "bug" was that half the update was done before the rest.
    • Possibly part of the same update, the Borg stopped adjusting to your energy weapons, so the hated frequency remodulators can be dispensed with in favor of something useful on your toolbar. Sadly, this seems to have been fixed.
  • Growing the Beard:
    • While STO had been improving step by step over the first few years of service, it's generally agreed that, technical gremlins aside, Legacy of Romulus was the "Riker steps onto the bridge with the beard" moment for the game. So many things, large and small, were improved that in some ways it was hard to recognize it as the same game that launched in 2010. The Romulan leveling and play experience, in particular, was light-years ahead of the original launch missions and became the gold standard to which the rest of the game was held; Cryptic even eventually decided to completely overhaul the Klingon and Federation leveling tracks so that they would be of equal quality.
    • By Cryptic's own admission, LoR also marked the first really successful period for STO from a business standpoint, and marked the point at which they began making enough money to really polish the game up and bring in some of the content they wanted from the start. The general uptick in quality of content since LoR's launch was noticeable.
  • High-Tier Scrappy:
    • The Lobi Store-bought Kelvin Timeline Intel Dreadnought Cruiser, better known as the USS Vengeance of Star Trek Into Darkness is a powerhouse. It sports a 5/3 weapon layout, a Lt. Commander Universal BOFF seat, access to both Temporal and Intel BOFF powers, uses the Intel powers, armed with a basic cloak, four Tactical Console slots, a hangar and a trait that gives power boosts for using Cannon: Scatter Volley or Beam: Fire at Will. Reaction is quite mixed.
    • The Risian Luxury Cruiser got absolutely savaged on the forums for being a cruise liner built by a race of hedonists that nevertheless somehow outperformed the Galaxy Refit as a combatant starship. (This took place several years before the Andromeda-class was released.)
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Dinosaurs with frickin' laser beams on their heads (i.e. the Voth Battleground), in light of the Angus McSix song "Laser-Shooting Dinosaur". YouTube commenters decided it made the perfect theme song.
  • Ho Yay: The Ferengi running the store in "Q's Winter Wonderland" seems very enamored of the event sponsor.
    Q is a genius! And so handsome!
    • It's rare that the game acknowledges your character's gender (which lines up with most of galactic civilization in the Star Trek universe at this point in the timeline,) so when an NPC flirts with you in some missions it's regardless of what your characterization choices were.
  • I Knew It!: When Cryptic told fans that the "Sphere of Influence" mission was being held back, fans had assumed they were adding voices. When people took notice that Worf's model had been revamped to look like how he was in the series, but older, people figured that the reason had to do something with Michael Dorn.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The fate of the T6 Excelsior, Galaxy-X and Defiant. The T6 Excelsior only only gains an extra BOFF power to its Lt. Engineer seat, thus making it virtually the same as the T6 Galaxy minus the universal Ensign. The T6 Galaxy-X has the same BOFF layout as the T6 Galaxy, making it the only reason you would get a T6 Gal-X is for completion purposes (or because you like the unmodified GCS design better visually). The T6 Defiant suffers from the same heavy usage of Tactical BOFF seats that the T5 version does, with rings being ran around it by the Pilot Ships and the T6 Prometheus.
  • Jerkass Woobie: It's hard not to feel sorry for the Na'kuhl after they lost their homeworld. Well, it would be hard if it weren't for the fact that instead of trying to rebuild their civilization elsewhere (which the Romulans managed to accomplish after the Hobus supernova in less than thirty years), they spent the next four centuries wandering around the galaxy plotting revenge against the Federation. Even though it was the Tholians who killed their sun after stealing a superweapon from the future, and the Federation fought nearly to the death trying to prevent it.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: In the Scorpion's Abyss mission, the Captain and the entire Away Team gets ambushed, in an appalling display of Cutscene Incompetence, and assimilated by the Borg. Predictably , this sticks for about 10 minutes before someone gives you a new nanite cure, and everyone is back to normal by the end of the episode.
  • Love to Hate:
    • Hakeev is the poster child for this in the game. When Legacy of Romulus was announced to have him as the main Romulan villain the joy was palpable.
    • J'mpok is another one. Feddies hate him for starting the KDF-FED war. KDF players hate him for killing Martok. In-universe he is unpopular, but he's never been an actual villain until the Klingon Civil War arc.
    • The FED/KDF Rivalry out of game could be this as well.
    • Gaul in Delta Rising was heavily praised as a well-done villain. He's essentially Hakeev minus Chewing the Scenery.
    • By the end of the Iconian War, there's a pretty strong consensus that the characters should just shoot Sela already.
  • Low-Tier Letdown:
    • The PVE metagame tends to revolve around doing as much damage as possible as quickly as possible (mobs in the game tending to be HP sponges), which Tactical captains and boffs are the simplest to build for. Thanks to power creep, outside of premade PVP teams healboats and tank builds basically have no role because A) even the flimsiest tacscort can usually pack in enough self-heals to last well enough against Non-Player Character attackers, and B) Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. Thus, if you aren't meaningfully contributing to DPS while in a PVE instance, or packing offensive sci, you're basically just slowing down the team. This is at the core of the PR problems of the Galaxy-R, Galaxy-X, and Star Cruiser, all three of which are engi tanks with limited tac powers. Tank builds are generally considered useless because the threat generation mechanic is easily overpowered by DPS builds. That said, in PVP, Science builds rule. This is in large part because of the Subnucleonic Beam ability, which instantly wipes out most buffs on the target and therefore acts as a hard counter to DPS builds, especially since it's almost unique to PCs with rare exceptions so players new to PVP may not have encountered it before.
    • The Exploration Cruiser Retrofit, its Fleet variant and the Dreadnought Cruiser as such (essentially, anything that has to do with the Enterprise-D), due to the fact that it leans heavily on Engineering skills, poor turning (especially for the Dreadnought, since it can use Dual Heavy Cannons) and poor DPS-building consoles. Even with the two-piece bonus the phaser lance's accuracy is still horrible, causes horrendous power drain, and has a three-minute cooldown, and getting the two-piece set requires expending two console slots that could've been devoted to improving your more-often-usable broadside damage. And when min-maxers can match or exceed its damage with a tac boff's beam overload skill, you can see why the more competitive players drop it in the "fail" column. It's the wrong ship to feature a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon, and just to add insult to injury, the conceptually identical disruptor javelin on the KDF's Guramba Siege Destroyer is far more effective despite its lower base damage. Finally Rescued from the Scrappy Heap with the Tier 6 Andromeda Exploration Cruiser and Yamato Dreadnought Cruiser, both of which come with a Lieutenant Commander Tactical boff seat and make the phaser lance a lot more effective. Players on Tribble for Season 9 also found that it was one of the better ships for the "Undine Incursion" TFO.
    • The Odyssey-class could also qualify. While it would make a great cruiser, it's hampered by the fact that it is really reliant on its universal consoles, making it essentially a 7-console ship. However, in a rare case of Tropes Are Not Bad applying to this particular trope, it has made the USS Enterprise-F stand out in the story as most players are not using an Odyssey themselves.
    • The Bortasqu' line got dumped in the "fail" column mostly because it's altogether too different from the rest of the KDF lineup. The Klingons tend to build smaller, faster ships that can use dual cannons well, but despite being called a "battle cruiser" like the Vor'cha and its cousins the Bort is basically a Starfleet engineering/tactical Mighty Glacier with the serial numbers filed off. It can mount DCs but on launch couldn't turn well enough to use them properlynote , so the majority of KDF players used to the faction's many zippier options found they often had to reskill to use it competently. It also has an outsize Inertia stat which cripples its acceleration and weaker shields than its opposite number the Odyssey-class, and its cloaking device is substandard (ostensibly due to the ship's size, but this flies in the face of the Deep Space Nine characters once transferring a cloak from a bird-of-prey to a Negh'Var battlecruiser from a different universe with no loss of effectiveness). It doesn't help that, since Cryptic calls it a "battle cruiser" even though it's really a conventional Federation-style cruiser with a Klingon skin, when cruiser commands debuted the Bort didn't get the "Attract Fire" command that Starfleet cruisers get (although threat generation isn't all that useful in the metagame anyway).
    • Many players have dumped the Dyson Science Destroyer ships into this category... only if you're a Federation player, though. As Klingon and Romulan players have a deficit in dedicated science ships compared to the Federation, many have welcomed this ship. For the Federation, however, many call it inferior to the Vesta line of ships due to the fact that its gimmick concerning the extra Proton Dual Heavy Cannons forces players to adapt a weaker attack build or ignore it completely. This also hurts the Klingon and Romulan players, but it's usually ignored for the fact that, again, they don't have dedicated science ships. On the other hand, the Warp Core that completes its four-piece space set makes the space set wonderful and all four pieces are frequently tossed onto other ships. In fact the Romulan version is sometimes outright hated for being too strong, since it has all the abilities of its sisters from the other factions, plus Romulan Battle Cloak.
    • The D'deridex-class is often nicknamed "D'-derp-idex" or some variation thereof due to a similar PR problem to the Galaxy-class. The free T4 one is a blatant reskin of the free Galaxy that comes right after the much more escort-like Mogai-class; upgrading to it during the leveling missions can make them feel almost unplayable. However, advanced players consider the T5 retrofit, especially the fleet version, Difficult, but Awesome due to having lieutenant commander boff slots in all three disciplines, enabling some terrifying combos when combined with its battle cloak and singularity powers. It's not, strictly speaking, the best ship in the Romulan arsenal, but it's perfectly playable.
    • The Aquarius-class Destroyer for having low amount of weapon slots on what should be an Escort-level ship, low health equal to a Bird of Prey but without the Cloaking advantage and so on. The Aquarius was released strictly because players wanted one to go with their Odyssey cruisers and had told the devs "they didn't care what stats it had." Thus the playable Aquarius was born. Its Klingon counterpart got a buff with the Raiding mechanics added but the Aquarius didn't because its a Fed ship and it doesn't make sense for the Federation to have "raiders." It got so bad that when Captain Shon crashed the U.S.S. Aquarius (the Aquarius destroyer assigned the Enterprise) into an Undine planet killer, people joked that Shon found the only way an Aquarius would ever be useful.
    • The Scimitar-class dreadnought warbird lands here due to being difficult to use well. A very small percentage of Scimitar jocks can make it a near-indestructible juggernaut. Combined with the performance of its canon version, the ship got a reputation for being absurdly overpowered, and is thus attractive to players who think that just owning the ship will make them invincible. Hence the Fan Nickname "Scimitard", for Scimitar players in PVP who are considered a free kill until proven OP.
    • To many players, Tier 5 ships became this almost the moment Tier 6 was first announced. The main reasoning for this is because they feel that, because they don't have a Starship Trait, can't use Specialization BOFF skills, lack the 13th BOFF power and have to pay to get an upgrade, they're automatically useless. This goes double for non-upgradable ships like Mirror Ships, Dil-bought ships and Mission-earned ships. They probably worked wonders, but the second Tier 6 showed up, in many players minds, they were useless and no longer worth it. (This has no bearing on reality: despite Cryptic finally launching Fleet Tier 6 ships, the DPS record is still held by top-ranked Scimitar jocks, with the Fleet Patrol Escort Refit a close second.)
    • The Jem'Hadar Strike Ship for a variety of reasons. Like the Patrol Escort Refit, it became the replacement for the old Jem'Hadar Attack Ship, which infuriated players due to the fact that the old post talking about the the JHAS said that it would have "T6 Capabilities" and it only became a T5-U. The other thing that puts this here is its BOFF settings, which give it both Intelligence and Command BOFF slots, with the Command one being a Universal Lt. Comm. seating.
    • Surprisingly, the T6 Excelsior is this because It's the Same, Now It Sucks! - unlike the T6 Galaxy and T6 Avenger before them, whose BOFF layouts were improved compared to their T5 counterparts, the T6 Excelsior's only change is that its Lieutenant Engineering slot turns into a Lieutenant Commander Engineering/Command slot. Essentially, if you already have the T5 Excelsior, there's no need to get the T6 one unless you want the skin or the trait. Another reason is because it uses the more maligned Command specialization instead of the Pilot specialization, which denies players the ability to use "Fly Her Apart, Then!", named after a line Hikaru Sulu spoke about the lead ship of the class in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It's also been said that it looks too similar to the existing T6 Command Battlecruisers. (Ironically, some of the Galaxy fans are actually glad the T6 Excelsior didn't get much of an improvement—they were worried about the GCS getting outclassed again.)
    • The T6 Temporal Heavy Dreadnought Cruisers (which includes the Universe-class, i.e. the Enterprise-J). They're so impractically large they get in the way of other players and turn like they have all the time in the world (meaning it's basically impossible to bring a lot of weapons and abilities to bear). Also they're physically unimaginative: a lot of complaints are that such a butt-ugly ship shouldn't be playable at all!

    M-S 
  • Memetic Badass: Epohhs, of all things. Probably what happened was, people got annoyed about having to farm epohhs for New Romulus marks, coupled with the Epohh Lady's comments, "Don't you want an epohh friend?" Now the epohhs are trying to take over the world!
  • Memetic Molester: If Risa summer event zone chat is anything to go by, Pavyl, the Risian who has you play hide-and-seek with him on four different local nights for a quartet of accolades. The first place he has you go is this dark cave.
  • Memetic Mutation: Now with its own page.
  • Mis-blamed: Oh, brother, players have been very critical of numerous things, as of recently blaming the sudden rise in grind-related missions on then-new Executive Producer Stephen D'Angelo and blaming Cryptic itself for the arrival of Arc (it's the publisher's fault, not Cryptic's).
    • Al "CaptainGeko" Rivera gets a lot of flak himself. When PWE laid off a number of their North American staff, some of them in Cryptic, players pointed their fingers at him and Delta Rising's changes before it was pointed out that Neverwinter lost the most, not STO. When a new member of the Priority One Podcast got kicked out the episode after he did an interview with Geko, players pointed the finger at him again, saying that Cryptic has to be "shiny and perfect" when it seems that it was more of one of the podcast creator's egos getting the better of him. Most recently, two members of Cryptic's team decided to move on to greener pastures, a few players were quick to blame Geko for firing them, when everyone said that this was on their own accord.
  • Moment of Awesome: See the page here.
  • Moral Event Horizon: See here.
  • Narm:
    • The Guardian of Forever's voice actor is downright painful.
    • Hakeev can be difficult to take seriously, particularly when he starts Chewing the Scenery. Though on the other hand, his hamminess adds some levity to what would otherwise be a much Darker and Edgier storyline for the Romulans, compared to the Fed and KDF campaigns.
    • M'Tara's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the Alliance in "Surface Tension" was viewed as more frustrating than frightening, due to everybody in the room forgetting the fact they have weapons from the Iconian Cutscene Incompetence field. Player response amounted to "Bring It."
    • Kahless' death in "House Pegh" is played in the mission as a heroic death in battle, but the player consensus was that Kahless died because he was stupid. Dude, kill the bastard first, then monologue. How fitting that a mere figurehead for the High Council should be the latest in a long line of mighty Klingon warriors who died because they were too busy babbling about honor to bloody think.
    • The animation in the cutscenes in "The Temporal Front" just sucks so badly, it makes everything look cheesy. Not to mention the stock gasping noises you can hear in the background.
    • Mirror!Leeta's alternatively threatening the players and then calling for repairs when Terek Nor invades our universe, always at full volume ("We've taken too much damage!... Now feel the wrath of the Terran Empire!!"), is so far over the top she rivals Hakeev for scenery-chewing. She's no less hammy in any other appearance either.
    • The clunky and repetitive dialogue in certain task force missions becomes unbearable during a long grind for reputation progress. (For example, Kagran during "Gateway to Grethor": "Troop transports from the starbase are making a run toward the planet!...Troop transports from the starbase are making a run toward the planet!...Troop transports from the starbase are making a run toward the planet!...")
    • The voice acting in "Coliseum" qualifies, between the arena announcer trying to sound threatening but coming off like a Clancy Brown impersonation, and your fellow gladiator telling you how much pain he's in (which is painful to listen to).
    • A glitch in the mission Ragnarok has the P.C. and a group of NPCs listening to the opening briefing, while standing at attention on their chairs.
    • Several cutscenes fall prey to this, when, due to glitches in the animation, characters mouths don't move when they speak. Instead, their heads just bobble up and down. There's also a TFO where you're addressed by a disembodied voice, since the character who once was there speaking has disappeared into a programming bug.
    • Kuumaarke's breakdown when she shoots and kills the Mirror Harry Kim/Borg King comes out of nowhere. The awkward looking character animation doesn't help.
  • Narm Charm: Your Away Team members leaping in the air and even springing over your head like gazelles as they try to get to their places when you move around a landscape would be narmy, if it weren't so freakin' hilarious to watch.
  • Never Live It Down: Cryptic seems to have a number of moments since the release of Delta Rising. It's not uncommon to see some players to hole massive grudges towards either the entire team or a single individual. The grudges towards the entire team is incredibly headdesk worthy as the grudge could have been caused by a former member but they would refuse to let anyone in Cryptic go.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Given that in-game 2409 is probably the closest thing to a Crapsack World the Star Trek universe has ever seen, plenty.
  • Older Than They Think: The original post of this thread accused Cryptic of ripping off Starlord from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) in their design for the Vaadwaur uniform. It didn't take very long for folks to point out that the "Gas Mask Mooks with Badass Longcoats" motif is one that dates back to World War I, and that given the trench warfare look of the Kobali battlezone and the general behavior of the Vaads, Cryptic more likely had Nazi Germany in mind.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • Shon as of Surface Tension. At first people were kinda ambivalent about him as the Captain of the Enterprise. But the moment he was willing to go on a suicide run to save Qo'noS was the moment people started to think he earned the job.
    • J'mpok may be starting to fall here now. The advancing storyline has totally vindicated his claims that the Federation was thoroughly infiltrated and compromised by the Undine, to the point Shon told Ambassador Sugihara to shut up and admit the Federation screwed up big time. However, Federation players frequently point out that under his leadership the Klingons were routinely committing war crimes, including crimes against sentience, that had nothing to do with the Undine and otherwise engaging in actions that were the exact opposite of productive ways to get the Federation government to acknowledge the problem, and an early Fed mission shows Starfleet catching and killing an Undine that had successfully infiltrated the Klingons. They've also declared his chancellorship illegitimate because we have only his word that he killed Martok in honorable combat instead of murdering him.
    • Tier-wise, the revelation of a number of T5-Us have done this to many ships with the additions of damage bonuses and extra tactical consoles, the long awaited of which is the Galaxy-class, who finally gets a third Tactical console. The biggest one is the Aquarius, who gets a massive buff to its stats, gains the flanking bonuses the Klingon Bird of Prey get and gains the optional ability to cloak.
  • Ron the Death Eater: With the revelation of Sela's role in the Iconian's attitude towards everyone and T'Ket's refusal to accept peace, there have been some people who have felt bigger sympathy for T'Ket while a greater urge to see either Sela brought to justice or outright murder her for her actions.
  • Rooting for the Empire: One of the bigger groups of players critical of the Romulan Republic is people who liked the Romulans better as realpolitik-practicing villains.
  • Sacred Cow: Fans considered ships by the Borg and the Undine to be this as they couldn't see captains piloting ships from these races. When the Undine ships became available, a shitstorm kicked up because of it.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Unlike its competitor Star Wars: The Old Republic, STO started out with a fully customizable Player Party: species, class, sex, and looks of bridge officers were all completely up to the player. With Legacy of Romulus, however, Cryptic decided to introduce a party member with a character arc and personality of his own (some theorized this to be in imitation of SWTOR). Enter Romulan tac boff Tovan Khev, who unlike the free boffs from the Klingon and redone Federation tutorials, cannot be dismissed, is consistently voice-acted, and before a patch couldn't even be redesigned. And his character arc doesn't even go anywhere: you just randomly find his sister in a Tal'Shiar base on Nimbus III without even seriously looking for her, story over. Result: STO's Wesley Crusher/Neelix.
    • Captain Koren of the IKS Bortasqu', the Klingon equivalent to the captain of the Enterprise. At first she was far more popular than Shon as a flagship captain, but her attitude since her debut has made it clear she has only two personality settings: Rage and Homicidal Rage. Even when it's justified it didn't endear her to anyone. What really did her in, though, was when in the fourth stage of "Surface Tension" she wouldn't stop harping on how Starfleet initially only sent one ship (two if your PC is a Fed) to defend Qo'noS from the Undine. Never mind the fact that a sizable portion of the Federation's ready forces just got trashed beating the Undine away from Earth Spacedock...
    • The forum also generally agrees that Jiro Sugihara is an awful diplomat. He was even the recipient of a Take That, Scrappy! in "Surface Tension" when he tried to wave off Ambassador S'taass calling the Federation on being hypocritical in its recent responses to the Undine, only to have Captain Shon basically tell him to shut up. (Which largely rescued Shon from the scrappy heap in one fell swoop.)
    • Neelix just can't get away from this to some players. Lampshaded at one point where the player can tell Neelix that there is no need of his diplomacy "skills" at a meeting with the Vaadwaur leader Gaul.
    • The Kobali have generated such hate for their smug hypocrisy, Designated Hero status, and the way they reproduce, that for some time genocide was floated by some members of the forum as appropriate punishment for their crimes.
    • On a smaller scale, Cardassian Ambassador Rugan Skyl, a Smug Snake petty racist. His first appearance in "Second Wave" has him ask the PC to obtain for him a variety of kanar (Cardassian liquor) brewed by Bajoran forced labor during the Occupation. He does this even if the PC is Bajoran him/herself (due in part to Cryptic not having the code to change the dialogue based on the player's species at the time). His only other proper appearance to date in "Surface Tension" has him get into an argument with the Bajoran ambassador, saying Bajor didn't need an ambassador at Tuvok's conference because they're Federation members (despite him seemingly having no problem with the Xindi having done the same thing). If you're playing as a Bajoran yourself, you get the option to tell him to sit down and shut up. It is rather satisfying to find out that for all the other bad things about the alternate timeline in Temporal Ambassador, it also involved Rugan Skyl ending up as forced laborer for the Tholians.
    • The Iconians, due to their Large Ham nature, association with the much-derided Iconian War, and Cutscene Incompetence fields, fall here to a lot of people. There are many parodies on the forums, most notably author Worffan 101's recurring villain Inevitably-Fated-for-Greatness.
    • Captain Kagran, for being a General Failure during the Iconian War.
    • J'Ula is utterly despised by basically everybody. She already had a big hill to climb from being associated with the Contested Prequel Star Trek: Discovery (she's T'Kuvma's sister), but when she attempted a Heel–Face Turn during the Klingon Civil War arc, players proved unwilling to forgive her past as an ultranationalist terrorist and murdering the Discovery-era Fed PC's original CO, and deeply resented being forced to team up with her. Ditto her eventual push for a resurrected L'Rell to replace J'mpok as chancellor: a straw poll posted on r/sto showed Martok to be the fan-preferred candidate, with Worf coming in second. L'Rell received fewer votes than "Other", ahead of only J'mpok, Koren, and Kagran, and J'Ula got zero votes.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Chain holds. They were annoying when science vessels could use them, but now the new weekly episode mobs all seem to use annoying hold skills. And they can, and often do, fire them over and over again. And they're annoying. And this is Older Than They Think: People have been complaining about Cryptic's seeming obsession with chain holds since City of Heroes was still a thing.
      • A sub-example from season 9: The Undine fluidic space rifts. Not only are they a strong gravity well in and of themselves, but they also spawn these blobs of yellow material that quickly got dubbed "snotballs", which irregularly orbit the rift, slowing and damaging any ship with the misfortune to fly into them. And there's no way to get rid of them unless you use the Undine space set. And the best part? The Undine space PVE queues are considered so annoying that by the time you've gotten the ability, you won't need it anymore because you'll be utterly sick of the content you need it for!
    • For a sizable section of the playerbase, the fact that the Romulan Republic is not implemented as a fully separate faction. After the tenth mission Romulan characters have to choose to make an alliance with either the Federation or the Klingons. This gets even worse if you want to play a Dominion character, since not only do you have to ally with a faction earlier, but your race has ZERO exclusive campaign missions, apart from the introductory training session.
    • The Season 9.5 Crafting system. The original crafting system was already painful, requiring you to have a certain collection of alien samples, a blueprint and/or irreplacable materials and a certain level to reach before you can use it. The new crafting system allowed you to craft any item you wanted, though you needed to have certain items before you can do so. Then, it became a gamble to find out what items you were getting - you'd know you were getting something like a Mk X Antiproton Beam Array, but would it be common, uncommon, rare or very rare? And if it was any of the latter three, what proc were you going to get? Players already infuriated by this were enraged even more when the decision came down to prevent players from maxing out crafting school levels quickly by preventing them from slotting the 20 hour assignment from the same school multiple times.
    • The original [Dmg] mod. Originally, [Dmg] only gave you a 2.5% damage boost at the very beginning of the calculation phase, essentially giving you a higher base damage. This made players ignore it as it was practically useless. Season 10.5 has pulled a Rescued from the Scrappy Heap by making it a 3% damage boost at the very end, making it a better choice than [CrtD] for builds lacking in Critical Hit chance.
    • The original Manheim Device. What the device once did was summon two versions of the Temporal Ship you were using it on, claiming to be its "past and future selves". They would also share your HP pool, which meant that there was a good chance you would die if those things were overwhelmed. It was given the mocking nickname "Suicide Console" because of that. Thankfully, a patch released in August will fix that, making those two copies separate pets.
    • The uniform tailor , which inexplicably refuses certain combinations, such as belts with skorts (but only for male toons), lets you combine pieces from some reputation costumes but not others, uses different color palettes depending on the clothing item thus making it harder to match, and at least on older consoles freezes repeatedly making the whole process painfully slow.
  • Scrappy Weapon:
    • The Romulan and Reman Prototype space sets. Nine times out of ten, if you see any piece of this active, it's only the shields and that's because it's an item you earn for completing a certain mission. Most players use either the four sets from the Omega Task Force set or the two that can be earned by missions (Jem'Hadar and Breen). However, the ship weapons are loved by all, especially the Hyper-Plasma Torpedos mentioned above.
    • The Tempest Patrol Escort Refit is amazingly overpowered (With a Universal Lt. Commander BOFF slot), but some people hated it because it attached a weapon to the rear slot, again forcing a weapon type onto ships that people would rather not have on there. The crazy part is the fact that players who have the original Fleet Patrol Escort do not get an upgrade to the Refit version, thus they get to keep a piece of game history. However, they want the new ship to replace the old one and they're angry that they'd have to shell out money instead of automatically getting it.
    • Phasers in the first few years of the game. Save for the retrofit Phasers and the Andorian Phasers (which do the same damage as basic phasers but have a distinctive blue color), many players tended to ignore Phasers altogether, preferring more damaging yet expensive antiproton weaponry (which has a built-in critical damage buff instead of a proc). They also initially lacked any item sets that boosted their damage, and the subsystem-disablement proc was less useful than others in PVE due to the mobs running on My Rules Are Not Your Rules. This started to be mitigated with a season 9 reputation item set that boosts phasers and disruptors. Subsequent seasons introduced a variety of new phasers with alternate procs and many more phaser-boosting items, and they're now one of the more popular damage types.
    • While single cannons have a wider arc than the Dual/Dual Heavy Cannons and Dual Beam Banks and can be used by any ship, their damage potential is lower than the DBB and the arc they have make it more worthwhile to just slap on a Beam Array and broadside. This was partially due to a longstanding damage calculation bug with the "Beam: Fire at Will" boff power that was patched in 2017.
    • Many players refuse to touch Tetryon energy mostly because it has the least desirable proc of the bunch, the chance to drain extra shields per hit. Compared to other types, which can either drain substations or add extra damage, Tetryon is boring. However, players are keeping an eye on this type as it is set to be the second to be outfitted with two Omni-Direction Beam Arrays after Antiproton.
  • Seasonal Rot: Delta Rising and Season 10 were both generally agreed to be a drop in quality compared to earlier material. DR was bashed for grindiness and the overuse of level-gating and system patrols as Padding, to say nothing of the deeply disliked entanglement with the Kobali. Season 10 started decently with the well-regarded missions "Blood of the Ancients" and "Delta Flight", but later missions were replete with Hollywood Tactics, Plot Induced Stupidity, and counterproductive Glory Hounding from the Klingons, and Cryptic's over-reliance on its blog to tell the story between featured episodes meant the Iconian War failed miserably to live up to expectations. This was capped off with a Time Travel-related MacGuffin Ex Machina ending that was controversial at best (see Alternative Character Interpretation).

    T-Z 
  • Take That, Scrappy!:
  • That One Level:
    • Episode "Romulan Mystery", mission "Divide et Impera" (which has since been removed from the game) was reviled for particularly blatant railroading. It forced you to massacre a Romulan medical facility in order for the Undine impersonating Admiral Zelle to Kill and Replace the facility's commander and infiltrate the Romulans. Two different Foundry authors eventually stepped in to write Fix Fics, one of which, Captain.Hunter's "Divide ut Regnes", even became a Spotlight.
    • The entirety of the "Wasteland" storyarc. It takes place on Nimbus III (which probably already counts as a strike against it), a wide battlezone-type place. However, most of the missions there require you to hike across the entire zone just to get to your mission objectives and that usually requires fighting off scorpions and worms along the way.
    • "Assimilation", in which you and your crew must work your way through a Borg cube absolutely crawling with huge numbers of drones, searching through hazards and occasional ambushes for a randomly-placed transporter... and then achieve a series of objectives in a room stuffed with a good fifty or sixty Borg. If you fight through it you will probably die. But even if you switch your bridge officers to passive, one ambush in the wrong place can lead to a Zerg Rush. Suffice it to say this mission drew a lot of screaming on the forums from people running it for the first time.
    • "Devil's Choice", the final mission of the Elachi storyline for the Romulans, was this at first; fighting three Sheshar dreadnoughts and dozens of Monbosh battleship escorts, all using crowd-control abilities and Scimitar-esque one-shot kill weapons.
    • "Hive: Onslaught", especially on Elite, and most certainly if you want the optional. First stage: Dozens of Borg cubes, spheres, and tactical cubes. Second stage: Two Borg unimatrixes, boss ships with an extra One-Hit Kill attack in addition to their usual one, and the extra one, a plasma lance, can hit you from 30 kilometers away. Also you're supposed to be able to avoid being targeted by staying next to the shielded Borg Tetrahedron containing the Borg queen, but sometimes they'll lance you there anyway because of a bug. Final stage: The Borg tetrahedron, easily a match for five player-piloted ships. No matter what you're flying, expect to die at least twice before you're done.
    • Speaking of the Borg, the "Khitomer In Stasis" TFO has become so despised that some players will just beam out as soon as it starts, since the time penalty for leaving is often shorter than the mission itself. This is the closest thing to a dungeon raid in the game, since it requires players in different locations to effectively communicate, with one player operating a console in a different room to drop force fields while the others destroy power nodes. And the nodes aren't labeled; you have to listen to the Borg announcements to figure out which one you're at. And swarms of Infected, Advanced, Elite, and Heavy Elite drones will pop up unexpectedly and tear you to shreds. Good luck completing this if 2 or more players have quit the mission.
    • "Boldly They Rode" is disliked because the EVA portion takes freaking forever. You can't run on the exterior of Deep Space 9, or even walk normally; all you can do is shuffle or use your suit jets. And the suit jets can only fly between beacons, which frequently aren't placed remotely conveniently to where you need to be. And then there's "KURLAND HERE".
    • The Daily Mission "Party Crashers" is disliked because of one of the two possible ways to get tiny Qs. One of those ways is a Shell Game where you have to try to find Q hidden within three presents. However, as this happens in the Academy hubs, it makes it harder as you have to contend with the various cadets running around as well as players who will either run past trying to get a Q or is trying to troll.
    • If you're a tacscort, "Desperate Measures" went pretty smoothly until you get to the final part, where you need to fight 3 Romulan vessels assimilated by the Borgs, which will drain your shields and hold you with tractor mines, basically killing you in seconds since, as a tacscort, you need to move around to kill stuff. Even worse if you're wielding cannons, since that means you'll likely never get to attack properly.
    • The Solanae Dyson Sphere campaign, which may well be STO's attempt at an open world sandbox, gives you extremely vague objectives, and doesn't really indicate how to achieve them or even where they're located, compared to most missions where you at least have a map reference. It's possible to fly around the sphere for hours (or run around the ground battlezone) without working out where you're meant to go or what you're supposed to do when you get there.
    • "Gravity Kills" is set around a black hole; success depends on collecting exotic "Hawking particles" and using them to destabilize enemy space stations. While trying to stay out of the singularity event horizon, and under fire from enemy ships (which seem not to be affected by the black hole). This is another one that frequently saw players quit even before it started. After a couple of major updates, it has become far less punishing.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: This is essentially the rallying cry for the Official STO Forums since Delta Rising's release, with fans angry at the fact that the road to Level 60 is much longer, the feeling that they absolutely must have the best equipment to do what they want to do and that Mk XII equipment and Tier 5 ships are no longer "the best". It's not uncommon to see posts show up at least once a week talking about Cryptic is just trying to kill the game/has killed the game, that there's no "fun" left, etc. with the usual cries for everyone to go play Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen because "it is better" or that the only reason they still play is because "it's the only Star Trek game around".
  • Ugly Cute: Several aliens fall into this category.
    • The way the Tholians scuttle around is almost adorable. They even squeak when they melee attack you!
    • Nanovs, the cuddly, harmless, six-eyed squid-things that act as living radiation scrubbers on New Romulus.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: The Vaadwaur in Delta Rising. Yes, they're basically Space Nazis and their leader Gaul has no qualms about gunning down civilians in cold blood. But neither did the Romulans, Klingons, or Cardassians, and the Federation had a detente with them for decades. The Vaadwaur are also an endangered species who used Human Popsicles to escape extermination by an alliance fighting back against their imperalism and are partially after revenge against the killers of billions (a backstory that has drawn sympathy from Romulan Republic players in particular). The real problem, though, is that their enemies the Kobali come off as the Designated Hero. While they're the Alpha Quadrant nations' ally against the Vaadwaur, the Kobali come off as Holier Than Thou with a Culture Justifies Anything attitude, and for all practical purposes contribute little of worth to The Alliance (their population is going to be fairly low for various reasons and their only modern warship was built with Alpha Quadrant technology). Plus, their method of reproduction, basically necromancy, has drawn many rape comparisons, especially given that they're holding several thousand Vaadwaur cryo tubes and using the failed ones for more stock, along with making use of Vaadwaur battlefield casualties. Gaul Jumps Off The Slippery Slope in "All that Glitters", but the storyline reveals that the Vaadwaur high command are all infested with Puppeteer Parasites except for Gaul, suggesting they wouldn't have willingly gone along with his plans.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
    • The Past!Iconians in "Midnight", presented as a Higher-Tech Species that was preyed upon by greedy jerks for their advanced technology. A significant segment of the playerbase honestly didn't care what the Iconians were like in the past after the genocides those same individuals committed in the player characters' present day, and reacted quite badly to the attempt to drum up sympathy.
    • The Kobali, for their Culture Justifies Anything attitude, being basically zombies, and repeatedly lying to their allies. See entries further up the page.
    • The Temporal Defense Initiative, for a combination of being completely useless anytime they're onscreen and for refusing to let the Na'Kuhl fix their ruined homeworld, ostensibly because it was one of the key events that led to the TDI's creation in the first place.
    • J'Ula tries to pull a Heel–Face Turn during the Klingon Civil War arc, but many players aren't willing to forgive her past as an ultranationalist terrorist and murdering the Discovery-era Fed PC's captain, and resent being forced to team up with her. This is compounded by the general antipathy to Star Trek: Discovery in general. Ditto her eventual push for a resurrected L'Rell to replace J'mpok as chancellor: a straw poll posted on r/sto showed Martok to be the fan-preferred candidate, with Worf coming in second. L'Rell received fewer votes than "Other", ahead of only J'mpok, Koren, and Kagran, and J'Ula got zero votes.
  • The Woobie:
    • Keten, better known as the original Harry Kim. Imagine waking up and finding yourself on another world, no idea how you got there, not knowing that you died and all you want to do is go home. Even more, he fights to get back to the Voyager, despite the fact that 34+ years have passed since that fateful day and not believing anyone who says otherwise. This is pretty much a scared Ensign who just wants to go home and have his life back.
    • Poor Slamek. This guy has been abducted from his colony by the Elachi, turned over to be experimented on by the Tal'Shiar, then, after a short period of freedom, had his ship crashed, been captured and forced to fight in the arena against all sorts of deadly beasts. If that wasn't enough, he's also forced to be a mole against his fellow gladiators. No wonder he seems so utterly whipped in his final scene.
  • Woobie Species:
    • The (extinct) Dewans, who were captured and used as slaves on their own world by the Iconians, who claimed their homeworld as a Risa-esque pleasure planet while worshipping them as gods. Then when the rebellions off-world occurred, the Iconians left the planet and let it get bombarded in orbit by coalition forces, leaving most of the Dewans dead. They got better, and became an advanced civilization. Then, 5 years prior to creating a Warp-capable starship, they found an Iconian Gate and figured the geothermally powered device would be better to travel the stars with. Unfortunately, they didn't know the bombardment had damaged the mantle so when they turned it on, every volcano in the northern hemisphere erupted. Then they slowly died out as their environment collapsed, leaving only a few ruins and some tablets describing their last days, begging for help, wishing for the Iconians to return and save them.
    • The Romulans get hard with this too. And not just because Romulus is an asteroid field now. Many of the Romulan Colonies are trying to break away from the Empire, the Imperial Senate was killed by Nero, and speaking of, no one is willing to help the Romulans now because of Nero's actions before falling into that Black Hole. Now Sela's a puppet ruler for the Tal Shiar who are killing civilians in the name of the Iconians, their dark masters and allied with the Elachi. And while they eventually get their act together as the Romulan Republic, that ends up being the time you learn the Romulan side of the events that led to their exile from Romulus. Turns out that only a handful (and not very well liked but still influential members) were the ones who started the violence on Vulcan. Most of them just wanted to openly express emotions like Love. And even though they fired the first shots, the Surakians sure as hell gave it right back. Eventually they CHOSE to leave because they were tired of fighting their brothers and didn't want to continue living under oppression (the followers of Surak had won by this point). And in fact, the final days before the departure they had very civil and touching goodbyes from their Surakian friends and family. After they left they thought it would only be a few years before they found a new home. It turned out to be decades and along the way they learned that their BIOLOGY (especially the Pon Farr) was a major point of their problem. Their instinctual emotions had been the problem and to force mating or duel to the death was uncivilized. So they chose to genetically alter themselves to remove those issues. But by that point, they had suffered so much during the voyage that their good peaceful emotions were drowned out by the despair of their lives. By the time they had reached Romulus, they had gotten rid of what had been the issue on Vulcan, but ironically they were more hateful now because of the horrible suffering and vowed to never forget that. And hence the Romulan Empire was born. It would take Spock's reunification movement to reexpose their earlier more civilized elements and the destruction of their homeworld for the Romulans to (as a general whole) learn that My Species Doth Protest Too Much. But after all they went through, the Romulans have been victims this whole time. This can all be read here, as its kinda obscure.
      "Father said we left Vulcan so we could be free. He says Surak's philosophy is a prison for the mind, and that one day we'll find a new home where we can do and act as we wish. That didn't make sense to me. How can you imprison a mind? He told me that Surak taught his followers that they had to suppress all of their emotions, not just the ones that cause harm. Father said that we shouldn't let anger or hate control us, but we have the right to feel them, just as we have the right to love or be happy."
      (Ten Years Later, after the above girl's mate is killed in Pon Farr.): "Love is a lie. Emotions are a burden. Why did we come so far only to embrace pain?"
    • The Tuterians in Butterfly. A peaceful race living in the fringe of the Delta Quadrant, accidentally erased from modern history because of a miscalculation during the use of the Krenim Temporal Warship. And they weren't just erased, they were assimilated by the Borg. We never even got to meet then, save for the wife of a Krenim researcher. Worse, some of them survived...and became the Sphere Builders.
    • The Lukari. In a reversal of the Romulan/Vulcan schism, the Lukari left their planet of Kentar because they couldn't stand the self-destructive nature and opted to follow the more peaceful path of the scholar Lukar. They found a planet to live on, only to have their sun be targeted by the Tholians in order to draw out Kal Dano as part of their revenge scheme against the Na'kuhl. Then, they find themselves dragged into the Alpha Quadrant Alliance's new quarrel against the Tzenkethi when it's revealed that they're using Protomatter to cleanse worlds. And, in searching for more Tzenkethi weapons, it's discovered that the Kentari killed themselves in their self-destructive ways, their planet a polluted wasteland.
    • It's hard not to feel kinda bad for the Hur'q after finding out their story in the Gamma Quadrant arc. They started out as pacifistic scientists and explorers - so peaceful they didn't even mount weapons on their ships - only to get turned into all-devouring alien locusts by the machinations of the Dominion. The first time in centuries one is sane enough to try to communicate, it gets vaporized by Weyoun before anyone can make heads or tails of what it's trying to say.
  • WTH, Costuming Department?: The Iconian Resistance ground armors. A number of players have described it as "TRON Fetishwear". Of course, because of this, it easily goes into So Bad, It's Good territory.

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