If it ain't broke...

Please, Cryptic, stop fixing things.

There's a story arc in Star Trek Online called "Spectres" which is one of the best I've played in the game, and when I started this character it was the content I was most looking forward to revisiting.

That hasn't happened yet. When I first played STO the arc was available at level 15, but it had since been shifted up to level 31. Having hit level 31 - actually 33, because I've been gaining levels very fast due to a double xp event - I've now discovered that it's now only available at level 65. Why this was I didn't know, so I looked around and found this on Reddit, from one of the devs:

"We moved the Spectres, Cold War and 2800 mission groups to level 65 and removed them from the mission journal because they aren't part of the overall storyline and they're older missions that will need future updates to make them reach our current bar for content quality."

Fair enough, but that last part worries me. While I was hunting around for some xp to push me up to 31 without starting the next story arc I came across a mission from an earlier arc that, according to the mission log, I hadn't done before. I actually had, in a sense, because "Mars, the Bringer of War" is actually a reworking of two missions I did during my last run of STO, and all I can say is that if this is the current bar for content quality then I hope they don't get around to redoing "Spectres" any time soon.

The mission used to start with a space battle followed by a boarding action on a Starfleet vessel. It still does, only now instead of fighting through the decks of the ship the away team is beamed directly onto the bridge for a confused fight at very close range and in a very confined space, followed by more of the same as additional Feds pour in. In a later mission a sequence in a shuttlecraft has been  dropped in favor of a direct attack. It all feels very streamlined, or perhaps simplified would be a better word.

But it's the attack on the Mars shipyards that takes place in between these two sequences that really stands out. I'll admit I wasn't too fond of the original version either but the reworked mission is a complete debacle. Playing on Advanced difficulty the KDF forces were able to thin out the smaller Federation ships but were then hopelessly outclassed by three battleships. There was no maneuvering worth a damn since before long the Feds were sitting in the Klingon respawn area, and shrugged off whatever damage the KDF were doing to them, which wasn't much since my allies were easily distracted by the remaining smaller ships and split their fire so randomly that they weren't making much of an impression on any of their targets. It was only by making suicidally reckless attacks to destroy the small ships that I was able to eventually break the deadlock.

I came away from this mission baffled at how any of it could be considered an improvement on what it replaced, though the music that accompanies the battle at Mars - an arrangement of the Holst piece that the mission is named for - is a nice touch. So there's that, I guess.

All that said... I get that there's some content that probably has to get redone so that it works with the current build of the game, but that does seem to happen a lot with Cryptic's MMOs and I have to wonder, looking at Neverwinter, how much of it is necessary and how much of it is not.