The OP Elephant in the Room.

I have been playing staw for a lot longer than I’ve been able to attend OP events. I can remember Wave 2’s release with fondness – it was the first new wave to be released since I started playing the game and I was excited to see the game grow. Most of the time I played at a friend’s house and it was very thematic –We’d think up our own scenarios and missions builds and play through a campaign together (The Campaign is still going by the way, I may blog about it at some point). It wasn’t until I moved to Chelmsford in Essex that I found a relatively local store that hosted OP events, the first I was able to attend being Arena (the report of which is available here).

So I won the S’Gorn, a ship with cards I’d never seen before, from a race that didn’t have any retail releases at the time. I was hooked on a new drug- Limited Edition Ships.

It took a while for the next OP event to take place, and I was more than a little concerned when I didn’t hear anything because I feared that I wouldn’t be able to win any more Prize Ships. They’d given me a taste and then cut me off, a classic drug dealer trick! Also, I missed 7 Months worth of OP ships, especially the Sutherland and Ch’Tang. How was I going to make sure I had access to all of these wonderful cards!?!

So I started to trawl the secondary market looking for the OP ships that I’d missed out on. First I managed to get my hands on the Aj’Rmr, Additional Weapons Array and Romulan Pilot? Great! Then I splashed out for the Sutherland (3 times retail…) High Energy Sensor Sweep and Secondary Torpedo Launcher and the Ch’Tang DefCon1, Barrage of Fire and Synon. I absolutely loved have cards that not everyone else had. I loved being a completionist and having everything more though, and that meant that I shelled out on the secondary market for the Akorem, Krayton, Rav Laerst and Tholia One, not necessarily for cards (There are some great ones, Kira, Conditional Surrender, Invaluable advice and, eh, Plasma Torpedoes (!) respectively) but because I wanted to make sure I had the cards in case one day I needed them.

Since I started playing at OPs regularly I haven’t had to spend money online, with the exception of Resistance 1, I’ve won a prize ship at every event I’ve been to. Having been there in the past, though, I understand the anguish that people go through to get the OP ships. It’s a two pronged thing: They want the cards that make them competitive AND/OR they want all of the cards. I completely get that – on both counts.

I like the trend at the moment to release similar or expanded prize packs as retail packs. The way that the Gornarus, Tholia One and Kreetcha releases were done were all slightly different, but certainly helped to give the people access to some of the cards that are on those difficult to find OP ships from months ago. The trouble is, this isn’t enough. It’s great that I can get Faked Messages and Impulse Overload in a retail pack, but the named ships is the Gornarus, not the S’gorn. I can’t run a fleet with two named Gorn Raiders in it. Plus, if I was a Gorn superfan, I’d really dislike the fact that I couldn’t get Gorn Pilot or Gorn Commander in a retail pack. The competitive player may be satisfied with the release, (although no CS in the Kreetcha sucked) but the collector is still raging that he can’t get the other cards. In this way I actually feel that the Tholia One retail release, which contained everything from the prize ship –and more- was a better solution than the S’Gorn/Gornarus release.

I know some people have complained about the Tholia One release being too similar to the prize ship that they worked ‘so hard’ to get, but at the end of the day, I’d rather know that if I missed a prize ship, it’d be along in the retail version eventually; it’d certainly stop me scouring the secondary market before events to make sure that I had a backup plan should I fail to win one.

What do people think about this issue- Should Prize Ships be re-released in retail or would that be doing the OP winners a dis-service?

I'm still Not Picard,

D