I just wanted to get advice if it is better as a mostly F2P player to get the one time account ship or the Lobi crystals. As I have up to this point only took the ship.
From my perspective, it depends on how you play. In the past I normally took the 2 ship account unlock. Since I did a lot of admiralty. And that would open them up for all my characters and I have a lot of them.
Nowadays, I’ve got probably 200 to 300 ships unlocked ( I had bought all the t1 to t5 ships as account wide unlocks before they turned it into single character unlocks) So I don’t really need any more ships though I still tend to do the summer and winter events for the ships.
If you only have 1 or 2 characters you care about, the lobi can be good if you want to outfit them with stuff form the lobi store. But I tend to ignore things in there mostly since it is only single character unlocks, and I’m not really into the whole barbi end game idea.
So for me, I’ll likely take the lockbox ship and give it to one of my characters.
Mith
As a F2P player there are several options you can take to get decent to very good ships. Fleet Variants come to mind first. They cost more of those ship module things but you can get them easily either by tier 6ing your reputation or buying from AH at around 5-7 mil EC. Doing the events were free ships are available is also an option. Keep in mind why the stats and options are better in lockbox is there for a reason but DOES NOT prohibit you from doing well in any pug elite instances. I run elite ICE with junker/fleet variant ships and I still get agrroed all the time. Only exception is those who ubered their ride and min/maxed themselves but then those runs lasts like what 2 mins? Elite runs is the standard for mark runs, normal is if you dont want to try, and advanced needs either teamspeak or a full guild run to not be painful.
Yeah I got a ton of ships too but I find as I been playing more recently I prefer to stick to my favorite ship and kitting it out but I got a ton of characters. I have recently over the past couple of months have made a Rom/Fed that I want to make my main now. I also made a new Klingon to be a new main also but I tend to play fed more. I guess I’m trying to weigh in the factor of a new account bound ship vs some lobi crystals for my new Rom.