Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 7

Continuing on from Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 6.

You could also head to the beginning of this saga with Part 1!

9:33 am GMT, day 5.

Day 5 is a good day to die! Ent’er Ark’toth, proud Klingon warrior and tactical officer.

Klingons begin in the Great Hall of Qo’nos. Born at level 6, he has already outlevelled Lieutenant Reh. His starting equipment is a little better than the Federation, but not by much. He also has 3800 skillpoints to spend.

Today is a good day to blog!

The skills available to the Klingons appear to be identical to those available to the Federation. That’s a good thing from a PvP-balance perspective.

Your first mission has you proving your worth by challenging officers to single combat. I learned from this never to use my Bat’Leth. It’s awful, like poking someone with a giant cotton-bud, and you’re much better off just shooting people. For completing this mission you receive three Bridge Officers, one of each type, to get you off to a running start.

You’re then sent off around the Great Hall of Qo’nos to meet people. Qo’nos seems to be the Klingon equivalent of the Earth spacedock, with merchants and trainers lining the walls. It’s a little more confusing at first to get around though.

You insult me with your offer of Starfleet Merits!

I’m sent to the Kahless Expanse to destroy Starfleet vessels. The Kahless expanse is a zone similar to the Delta Volanis cluster, with anomalous readings I need to check out. Instead of random adventures though, these readings seem to lead to a space battle against NPC Federation ships.

The Klingon starting Bird of Prey has most of it’s weapons facing forward (though you can change that later if you desire), but it feels much more manoeuvrable than a Federation starter vessel, making the experience quite different. More than ever I deeply regret being limited to a 45 degree angle climb or dive. These ships are made for 3D fights.

I don’t know if this Kahless Expanse battle (my first) is scaled right, but at the moment it feels incredibly difficult, with the Federation vessels being numerous and powerful. It could be intentional. I’m feeling pretty pounded though!

Unfortunately, this time I'm the Klingon.

Managed to complete my task there in the end. Looks like it is simply a repeatable mission to head into the Kahless Expanse and destroy Federation NPCs.

I’ve decided to give the PvP a try, and have joined the PvP queue. Doesn’t seem to be doing much right now though.

Aha, got into one eventually. That was quite good fun. There were a number of different objectives on the map, and you had to try to control them. The longer you held them, the more points you got, or something like that. We got quite badly pounded by Federation fiends! What are the chances that when I try it on the Federation side, I still manage to find the team that gets whupped!

That appears to pretty much be the extent of what’s available for Klingons at the moment. They essentially exist to give Federation PvPers someone to fight, but have very little content of their own. This is supposed to be changing in an early content patch, but for now Team Klingon is nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. (Which makes it EVEN more of a cheek that it takes up one of your two character slots. You’re giving up a slot to become game content for everyone else!) Heading back to the Federation.

12:30 pm GMT, Day 5

Doing the Orion Sector patrol, I was first sent to the Reytan system. Perhaps it was an aberration when I did the Vulcan Sector patrol alone, as this time I am grouped up with three others for a space combat scenario. This time, everybody does their job, and we have a pleasant chat while doing it. This is how it is supposed to work!

The Kinjer system also involved space combat, but most of our assigned group left early, leaving just two of us to deal with some very tough battles. But we’re Starfleet Officers, and we got the job done!

4:34 pm GMT, Day 5

Una system was another space combat, but Pellme system was something new, a group ground mission. We first spawned near the planet and approached in with no enemies to be seen. Beaming down as an away team of five players I was disappointed to find it was just another “Find some objects and press F” mission. Didn’t really need five of us to do that, though I suppose it is nice to see other players.

I seem to be running out of new things to describe, so I may wrap this liveblog up before long, and do some sort of conclusionary post. Before I do, do you, dear readers (my logs tell me there are thousands of you, even though you’re all very quiet!), have anything you want me to look at or talk about?

6:37 pm GMT, Day 5

A lot of folks can’t get in at the moment. Stormshade explained why:

Hi everyone!

This is really amazing! We have hit the limit of how many players we can fit on the server right now!

This is one of those times where we’re both sad, and glad. On the one side, you all enjoy the game so much, we can’t squeeze anyone else on to the server. (I can’t log in right now either! )

On the other side, we really want to let you all on the server! So, here’s what we’re working on:

1) We’re increasing server capacity. We have new machines coming in to add to the server, and we’ve put a rush order on them. We’re going to bring them online as soon as we can.

2) We’re working on software solutions as well. Our development team is working night and day to be able to get as much power as we can from each machine, and we’re focusing on increasing capacity, and server stability.

For now, all we can say is, please keep trying. We know it’s frustrating. Please keep trying though. You never know when you might be able to get in!

Thank you for your patience, thank you for your support, and thank you for your interest in Star Trek Online!

Stormshade

Clearly the interest in STO has taken them by surprise. We’ve got as many players in the Open Beta as they ever expected to have to hold in the game at once

They could always repurpose some of the machines from Champions Online. I suspect it has some spare capacity these days.

I’m doing a few Delta Volonis cluster explorations at the moment. Nothing particularly new to report. One thing that did strike me, as I got three space battles in a row, is that it might be an idea to let people choose whether they want a ground-based or space-based mission. Sometimes you might be in the mood for one or the other, and it’s a bit pesky to have to bash through a bunch you don’t want to get to one you do. Or maybe that would make things too easy. What do you think?

7:27 pm GMT, Day 5

Ahh, here’s something I’ve not shown yet. Mostly because I only just figured out how to do it. Bridge View!

Captain on the Bridge!

If you click the little down arrow on the minimap, it brings up a short menu, one of which is to visit your bridge. Here you can see some of my Bridge Officers, and some other folks I’ve never seen before, hard at work.

That chair is actually a bit of a pain. If you click on it, thinking you’ll sit down, you get sent back to wherever you came from. To get that picture I had to jump on top of the chair and then select an sit emote from the emote menu. Actually it looks like my crew could do with a lesson on how to use chairs too. They’re hovering six inches above them.

When you leave the Bridge, you beam out, just like you do everywhere else, except in this case you’re just going back to your normal ship view, so you don’t actually need to beam anywhere.

In Sector Space you can select a star to travel to and go via autopilot. This can often take a few minutes to get there. It would be great if you could do that from the Bridge, and see the proper starry view you’d see on TNG. (The view screen, just out of the picture, is completely black.) As it is, you can’t actually do very much here at all, and so far as I can tell you can never be in motion when you come here. If you come to the Bridge while under autopilot somewhere, you stop. It’s just a nice location for roleplaying, which is good, but it could be much more.

How about if while on the bridge, if you used the “Hail Starfleet” ability, your contacts appeared onscreen instead of in the UI? That’d be awesome.

10:07 pm GMT, Day 5

I was travelling through Sector space on my way to Starbase 24 to try the Fleet Action type mission, when I suddenly get a distress call from the Pico system asking for assistance. That’s much more like it. It was a simple space combat against some Nausicans, but the way the mission was given to me out of the blue made it that much more interesting.

The Fleet Action was also interesting. It was an almighty battle between 20 Federation players, and a rather large NPC Klingon Armada. Everybody seemed to be participating quite well, and at the end I found out why. It is the STO equivalent (though much less complex) of a public quest from Warhammer Online, and whatever they called them in Champions Online. I think they may have even used the same code from Champions as it looked terribly familiar.

At the end you’re given a score for participation, and ranked against everyone else. You also receive skillpoints, and in my case at least, a useful item. I’d guess how many points and the quality of item depend upon how well you did. This does wonders to persuade people to not just hang around at the spawnpoint.

4:58 pm GMT, Day 6

Sorry there’s not been a new post today yet. Like a lot of people I’m having an awful lot of trouble logging in. The server is packed to the rafters, and without a queue system, getting in is a case of trying to log in over and again until you get lucky. I am not being lucky.

This liveblog continues in Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 8!

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