Update: Borticus give a decent explanation why they had to do it.  ‘Nuff said,

There is no doubt that duty officer assignments in Star Trek Online have been inconsistent at best in terms of rewards and value for the average player.  One of the few saving graces following the brutal XP alignment and dilithium ‘redistribution’ of Delta Rising, was that you could still effectively level a toon through duty officer assignments.

Even Gecko in a recent interview spoke to doing his dailies with doff mission that were of higher value.  Yes this method takes time, but given all of the other impediments to the average player’s experience (poor code, bugs, UI inconsistencies and weeks of game lag due in part to bad Cryptic infrastructure), duty officer assignments was one of the few systems you could use relatively easily.

A recent build update to Tribble has effectively killed that as well with a cut of up to 90% in the value of the reward.

Resolved an issue that was causing all assignments with durations between 12 hours and 15.9 hours to scale their rewards more aggressively than intended. The Skillpoint, Expertise and CXP bonuses from these Assignments will be reduced accordingly.

Click to see XP reward changes.

The question is why now?  Why make a game already beyond the reach of a casual player, that much harder to enjoy?  What’s the plan here?

And the excuses that this was broke to begin with?

Star Trek Online has been undergoing a massive realignment in rewards, difficulty and playability for the past 6 months.  From cutting dilithium rewards, to increasing dilithium sinks; from XP reductions and cost increases for leveling, and now a massive cut to duty officer rewards, Star Trek Online is fast becoming a game I cannot recommend to new players.

In their favour Cryptic has been slowly been making changes that benefit players, but often these come after months of complaining, all the while players are leaving and staying away. While the recent Delta Recruits campaign has had traction (and shit-loads of lag) with some new players, the impact on returning players has been far less spectacular.

Feedback from the regular hard-core players on Reddit have been nothing short of disgusted with the recent changes to Tribble.

At this stage a casual player playing 2x a week would have NO hope to gain value from R&D, and now no value from Duty Officer Assignments to progress in the game.  Yes, they can progress quickly to Lvl 50 with the current content easily.  Anything beyond that is now well out of their reach.