The T6X system is an excellent case of marketing done right: It's a feature that's essentially made ships $10 more expensive, but people love it because they're giving one away for free and putting them in the Phoenix Box. And that distracted us from the... iffy parts.

The main one: If you bought the Legendary Bundle that would've cost between $200 and $300. You now need an extra $70 of Zen to bring those ships up to the "best" versions of themselves.

T5U solved this by giving certain ships free upgrades, but that isn't happening here.

Meanwhile the alternative ways of getting tokens is ambiguous and unless it's plentiful it'll likely be easier/faster to just get 1,000 Zen to buy one.

And then there's Lockbox/Promo ships, which are very expensive but also need that extra money spent. A bit... yikes?

This also brings up the Phoenix Box again too: To get a UR token you're looking at a *lot* of Dilithium, potentially millions... or 1000 Zen, which is cheaper to get from the Dilithium Exchange than to gamble on Phoenix Boxes to get a token.

Overall Cryptic handled a problematic feature in a way that makes it palatable, which is interesting to see considering the reception to other monetisation features recently.

And it's very surprising the response has been so positive, considering everything costs $10 more now.

When the main point of praise on the feature is "Thank god it's not Tier 7" that... should probably be a bit of a red flag, I think.

Not writing all this to be overly cynical and negative but, I just don't think T6X is a very good idea.

the responses to this thread basically sum out how insidiously effective this has been. https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/j4rimb/congratulations_cryptic/