Ya know, I quite enjoyed Cryptic's first MMO - City of Heroes/Villains (I started with COV). Sure, it's the same old grind that you see in every MMO, but it was just a fun and cool game. Combat, when it wasn't lagging, was enjoyable with the ragdolls and physics. The best part of the game is the characters - you can make all sorts of crazy-looking characters and it's pretty awesome when you see someone who makes you actually LOL. Last is that COV/COH has some really awesome mechanics that solve a few problems plaguing MMOs - one is the sidekick/lackey feature and the other is the mission Architect. The Sidekick/lackey feature literally means your level is flexible - group with someone of vastly different level than you and you can artificially change your level to match his. This means you can now earn XP, influence and have a challenge (eg not powerleveling) - this makes playing with friends much, much more enjoyable. Mission architect isn't great but the idea is - allow players to create their own dungeons, list them and allow players to play. A huge problem with MMOs is players run out of stuff to do and developers "solve" this by regurgitating old stuff either with higher difficulties, or have some ultra rare loot so you have to play it 100 times, or simply copy-paste new areas so they *seem* new but it's still the same crap (notice how you still fight boars in WoW, even at level 80).

Last but not least, Cryptic has been supporting CoV/CoH with *free* updates every few months for the past few years - actual content patches, too, like level cap updates, new skills/abilities, new areas and more. This is really rewarding for those who subscribe, since they actually see where their money's going. Again, this is unlike Blizzard, whose updates typically consist of bug and balance fixes as well as content for super-high level play (such as raids). For a normal player, this kind of sucks since you will not see this new content (you have a regular playing schedule) and the balance fixes won't affect you as much since you probably only have 1 or 2 toons.

What does this have to do with STO? Cryptic is a dedicated developer with some interesting ideas. This means eventually, maybe... just *maybe* STO will become good.