I had to teach myself how to hate Star Trek Online. It didn’t come naturally to me.
If you’ve read the stuff that I’ve written about the game over the years, this may or may not come as a surprise, but I don’t want to leave this as some late-column spoiler. So let’s get this out in the open: I really, really like STO as a game. I’ve loved it more or less since launch. It has always had janky aspects since launch – that’s an undeniable fact – but I have played multiple characters up to the level cap and I like the game. I think it is a good game.
But it’s also a bad game in a lot of places, and I had to learn how to hate it specifically when it comes to the game’s intensely predatory monetization. You can say that there are workarounds for the way that the game sells ships. You can point to all of the ways that you can technically, theoretically access all of the best ships without ever spending a dime, or you get stuff for subscribing, and it’s not that big a deal, and so on and so forth. I know all of these excuses because I was tempted to make them. And I was wrong, and I needed to learn to hate it.
You might wonder why, if I love the game, I felt compelled to learn how to hate it in the first place. And the reason for that should be pretty clear: I don’t want to be a sycophant for any MMORPG. Period end. That has to include the games I love just like it has to include the games I don’t… and arguably it’s more important with the games I love.
If RuneScape does something boneheaded, I do not need to be convinced to call Jagex a bunch of boneheads. I’m inclined to do that anyway. And perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t cost me anything to do that. It’s actually easy to do. Which makes my temptation to do it suspect because it makes it easier to point and say “ha, those boneheads” when nothing boneheaded has actually taken place.
But STO? I like that game. That game isn’t (or wasn’t) run by boneheads. No, no, it made this decision for a good reason. It’s a good game. I like it, therefore good.
A couple weeks back I wrote about what happens when someone just doesn’t get something in an MMORPG in a column I opened with just a list of games I like and bad things about them. They’re all bad things and all real problems. But they’re also all games I like, and I get the impulse to defend some of these things. The fact that Final Fantasy XIV has more than a decade of contiguous story is part of why I like it. The richness of its world is a draw for me. It’s very tempting to look at that and frame it not as some kind of flaw but as a part of the game that you enjoy.
But that doesn’t make it not be a flaw. It just means that the flaw is part of why you like it in the first place. I really enjoy all of the Matrix films, all of which are films that have heard of subtext but want no traffic with it. And I would definitely say that is part of the appeal, but if you say that the complete lack of subtlety turns you off from the films, you aren’t wrong.
It’s why you need to teach yourself how to hate the things you love in order to really understand them.
This took me a while, and it’s something I’m still learning about. Back when I started writing for Massively-that-was, it was kind of astonishing to me how many people hated World of Warcraft and very specifically the at-the-time current expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. It just baffled me. And one of my first big features on the site was writing about Cataclysm and, yes, kind of glad-handing the expansion because I love WoW, so that means this new expansion must be good. Sure, I didn’t like a lot of the zone stories, and the talent changes were bad, and the endgame felt weird and not as fun as it did before, but… but it’s WoW. I like WoW. It’s still good, right?
Obviously, I cut 26-year-old me a fair bit of slack here. I’ve had a lot of practice since then. But part of what I needed to learn was to be more cynical about the things that I loved. To have a richer perspective. To be willing to look at the things I love and ask questions where I didn’t really like the answers at the end of the day because that’s the only way we become more honest about the stuff we love.
Way back in 2016, when the site was still pretty new, I wrote a column about how there’s a difference between loving a game and being relentlessly positive about it – specifically about WoW. Because in the seven years between Cataclysm and then, it became clearer and clearer to me how much the two were at odds with one another. There was (and still is) a lot I love about WoW, but treating the game as if all of its design decisions are good – or even most of them are good – isn’t being a fan of the game.
It’s being a fan of a fictional version of the game that I made up because that’s easier than learning to hate the things it does badly. And that game might be really good, but… it isn’t the game I or anyone else gets to play. It’s fictional.
Loving something means loving what it actually is. I cannot love my tabby cat while pretending that he doesn’t whine and cry for attention at inopportune times or that he doesn’t chew on blankets or that he doesn’t dip his chest in the water bowl and drip water everywhere. Because that’s him. That’s the cat I’ve raised since he was a kitten. I can dislike those things about him and still love him, and I can even acknowledge that I wish he did not do these things.
This is why it’s valuable to learn to hate these things that you love. Not because they suck. Not because you don’t really love them. Because learning to dislike the parts of WoW and STO and FFXIV that are actually bad allows me to be more attentive to the things that are actually good, and more importantly, makes my love more genuine. I can look at things and let myself dislike them if they’re bad, but that also means that if I say “this really isn’t bad,” it’s more authentic. Not performative in any direction. It’s just the truth, how I’m feeling, loving the thing itself instead of what I want myself to feel.
And it means that if Cryptic made boneheaded decisions about STO, I felt comfortable calling it boneheaded. I don’t feel comfortable with it now because Cryptic got set on fire, so maybe that wasn’t the best example, but you get where I’m coming from.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
