Chronomancer:
Vibora Bay Watch
We’ve had a big secret here at Cryptic, and we can’t hold it in any longer. Over the past few months we’ve been working like mad on our first (untitled) expansion for Champions Online! The setting is Vibora Bay, one of the Gulf Coast’s largest and most exciting cities. It’s a center of commerce, culture, tourism, and some incredibly strange goings-on. It maintains unusual traditions of mysticism and religion along with an eclectic group of inhabitants and frequent paranormal activities. Heroes constantly face threats of global proportions, but this time the crisis is greater than ever. The apocalypse has come, and it rides upon the half angelic / half demonic wings of Therakiel.
A web page is currently in the works that will feature screen shots, a video trailer, and detailed information on this level 37 – 40 mega-adventure pack, so stay tuned for more information!
Daeke: I’ll cut off this speculation before it even begins. Vibora will be our first paid content expansion. I can’t talk pricing yet, but it will not be something on the scale of a full boxed game. It is a new zone, and will be priced accordingly.
I’m already being hard on STO, so I’ll skip the obvious remarks about a single-zone paid expansion for an MMO that five months ago launched woefully short of content, and continues to be. Oh darn.
Or you could return to the beginning of our STO Open Beta coverage with Part 1.
7:59 pm GMT, Day, er, lets call it Day 15
It is the last day of the Open Beta! In three days time, on Friday, the doors will open for Headstart.
There have been a couple of smallish patches since last I wrote, but no patch notes. Might have just been hard to describe stability improvements, but I am somebody who likes to rummage through patch notes, so the lack makes me a little sad.
We’ve been promised some surprises before this parallel universe folds in on itself, probably starting in a couple of hours. I’ll be sure to keep you informed as to what the festivities entail!
8:42 GMT, Day 15
The events aren’t supposed to be starting until about 10 pm GMT, so I’m killing time pootling about in the Briar Patch, the area of space made famous by Star Trek: Insurrection. Lieutenant T’Rix takes an instant dislike to the area, possibly because it is also home to the largest honey-nut Cheerio in the universe.
Born and bred in a Briar Patch.
10:13 pm GMT, Day 15
And so it begins. The Klingons are attacking Sol. Unfortunately they have the same spawn point as the Federation. Coupled with their low numbers, this is not looking like a fun time to be a Klingon.
Another glorious Federation Victory!!!
Klingons are lasting seconds. Poor fellows. I do hope this isn’t the whole of the End of Beta event, because all it’s doing at the moment is demonstrating how ill-thought out PvP is in Star Trek Online. The zone-in point is, of course, filled to the brim with Federation mines. They have no chance whatsoever of getting a foothold.
I’m in Sol instance 77, btw, if you want to say hello! If you’re a Klingon, I suggest pooling your resources in one instance. Maybe things are going better for the Klingons elsewhere.
As I lack the necessary killer instinct to engage in mass-spawn killing, I have retreated a little distance away. Hoping that the tide will turn against us. Perhaps they’ll get some NPC assistance. Certainly can’t rely on a Dev turning up with as many instances of Sol as we have.
10:38 PM GMT, Day 15
I’m receiving reports that some Klingons have managed to get onto the station. It is only about 10 seconds at full speed from where you zone in to where you get asked to beam aboard, so this seems possible, especially as they might be getting onboard from a space instance less packed with Feds. Going to dock and take a look.
The station instance I arrive at has one Klingon spawning over and over again. Kind of like in space, but you can see the face of your victim. Going to head back outside.
Hmm, reports are that the Klingons are not surviving long enough to get the option to be able to leave the zone, so they’re stuck there. Tempers are fraying over there.
10:51 GMT, Day 15
*crackle*
Request for assistance *hisss* All Federation Vessels.
Can anyone hear me? It’s the Borg!!!!
Argh! It's like Wolf 359 all over again!!!
11:10 pm GMT, Day 15
Borg are appearing on our Space Stations, and in Sirius Sector space. What do they want? Why now? Nobody knows, but it probably has something to do with assimilation.
11:59 pm GMT, Day 15
Not what you want to see at your spawn point! Now we’re the ones being camped!
The arrival of the Borg Cubes
I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed to be doing. These are instanced battles you get to from Sector Space, much like the regular ones you’d find elsewhere. The normal ones have goals, but these just seem to be us vs Borg.
00:35 am GMT, Day 15
Things aren’t going much better back on the Station! Endless waves of Borg are drubbing us soundly. Endless. Waves. Mindyou, we endlessly respawn too, so it is only fair. Beginning to get a little bor(g)ing, truth be told, as we don’t seem to have any goal, as such. It’s also a bit of a struggle fighting all these level 50 enemies in space and on the ground for little old me. Doesn’t seem to be a level-up NPC about like there as for the Champions Online End of Beta event.
If you're looking for Sulu, he's right through that door.
Champions Online also had achievements you could unlock that would carry forward to the live game. I’ve not seen anything like that here. I hope I’m not missing one!
2:00 am GMT, Day 15
The Star Trek Online Open Beta is officially over, and thus so is my Open Beta liveblog. I hope it was vaguely useful to someone somewhere! What did you think of the Beta, if you were in it?
Would somebody please buy the Cryptic team a Next Generation boxset. Ideally force the marketing team to watch it too. I’m all for trying to attract non-trekkers, but there are actually quite a lot of Star Trek fans. I think we’d be a big enough demographic for them to do quite well, if they’d stop trampling on our childhoods Abrams-style.
That sound you can hear is Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave.
I’ll be writing my final Star Trek Online conclusions some time between the end of Open Beta (to give them a chance, however slim, for a wonderpatch), and the beginning of headstart.
In the meantime, that advert pretty much tells you what you need to know about STO as it currently stands.
Oh Evony. We trieds to leaves yous alone and lonelies.
Arkenor says:
I wrote a little story, back in the day, about you stealing content from Civilisation, mostly because of the high regard I holds Civ in. Also because it was incredibly easy to prove what you’d done, and I am lazy.
That got picked up by quite a few sites, and was used as primary source material for many a tale about the internet. To this day most of our incoming links are to that post. Folks far more influential than we had picked up the banner, occasionally falling foul of frivolous litigation. We moved on to things more fun, because you, Evony, are not very much fun at all. Not to mention that you’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down.
Yes the indeeds. We were letting bygones be goneby, and all thats.
But this time you’s gone too fars, Evony. You’s messing with my’s Queen. This is what is happenings to the peoples who mess with my’s shiny Queen Antonia.
Nos to the stealings my Queenships images!
Yes, she always the underdresseds at bests of time, but that does not be givings you the right to be using hers to advertise for yous horrid game.
As spotteds by Krystalle, who is kindly lettings us display evidences of the infamous deedishness heres:
What, she was wearings too many clothes for you, so yous removeds even more? Also, she not glows like thats. When I call her the shinies glowies Queen, it was the metaphors!! You’s sos stupids!
I’s been speakings to her Queenliness, and the Council, and we’s not takings such mean insultings lying downs. This is the wars, Evony! Not being able to be leavings Norrath is going to make it the trickies to give you the vigorous hammer-cloutings yous deserve, but just yous be waitings! The magicals Concordium are workings on the portal spells as I writes.
I shall be stridings about yous world likes a mightyish colossus, smitings yous horrible tiny stolen bitmap cities with the full 3-dimensional furies. Like sos!:
A poorly made artist's impression of what Maltheas is going to do to Evony.
Repents you’s evil ways, before it too lates! Repents!!
Another substantial patch came in overnight. Mostly minor bugfixes this time, but in high quantity.
Oh, just noticed the tribble change. They can no longer be used in combat. A lot of people had been using them to make themselves almost indestructible in ground combat (petting one raises your health), so that is certainly going to make a big difference. Horrid little things anyway!
Patch Notes
A cutscene now plays after creating a Federation Character
Updated contextual mouse cursor designs
Costume parts in the tailor remain valid options even after hitting random.
The character pictured at login now updates after deleting a character.
Bridge Officer candidates that have not yet joined your crew may be traded with other players.
Fixed the interact for the Ganalda ship vendor
Removed some unexplored systems that were causing players trouble.
Fixed mini map image for Risa ground, Andoria ground, Vulcan ground and Vulcan system
Removed animated loading screens. Replaced with beautiful screen shots and concept art.
Fixed an issue where some players were unable to respawn in PvP maps
Fixed eject warp plasma clouds FX so they fade out properly.
Updated Emergency power to shields to use the new “liquid” shield FX.
Adjusted the coloring of Tykens rift FX to blend a little better.
Fixed issue with ship explosions dropping FX mid explosion.
Players can no longer depart system when on their bridge.
Updated many enemy spawn animations to user proper Beam In FX
Standardized the display names of anomalies nodes
Updated the KvK version of Borg Hunt so that it will scale with player ranks
Added missing merchant contacts to sector space cargo ships.
Added Klingon versions of ground weapon fire and batleth icons.
Fixed an animation issue where arms looked weird while holding rifles
Fixed a bug that allowed food and drink to be used in combat
Fixed a bug that allowed tribbles to be used in combat
Fixed several new gameserver crashes that players reported
Updated FX for several Klingon Kit powers
Added more faction icons to enemy target status windows
Added subsystem targetting to the Weapons tray, if those powers are available to the player
Fixed Subsystem targetting powers categories so they can appear correcty in the Science vessel special UI.
Removed the recipe search category from the Exchange
Fixed a bug that was spawning too many Borg cubes in iPVP
Added descriptions of how to acquire exploration badges to appropriate vendors.
Updated the visual appearance of contact windows for both Federation and Klingons.
Updated costume presets for some species
Added indication when your current power value exceeds your target (due to buffs, skills, etc.).
Added a message to the queue server that lets you know you were forced from the queue after it halted.
The crew of the Azura are no longer wearing Starfleet uniforms
Fixed warp cutscene playing from Sector space to System in Cardassian space.
Klingon and Romulan Patrol missions now point to proper locations
Added a fix to prevent the instance selection window from popping up briefly when transferring to another map
Removed checkbox from instance selection window that would set the “always select instance when switching maps” option
Fixed several commodity missions that were being greedy and taking all of a given commodity in your inventory, rather than the necessary amount. Fixes
Fixed a typo with the Klingon PvE exploration mission description
Fixed the door leaving the Qonos warriors hall so that player can’t get stuck inside
Updated the PvE repeatable Klingon missions to clarify that players must complete the PvE map 3 times to complete the mission
Fixed many unknown system ground missions that were put into an unwinnable state if the objectives were done out of order.
Adjusted kill counts for all PvP ground arenas
Clicking a power in the tray that is flagged for auto attack will now fire properly
Removed the assault column from assault PVP scoreboard
Added black backgrounds to the target window images so that ground headshots don’t float.
Also added art for the new device/kit backgrounds.
Add more translation text for non-english players. More to come.
Adjusted mission rewards at higher levels that were giving rewards too low compared to the mission. These should be much more in line now.
Bridge Officers can now use costume presets when customizing
Change Memory Alpha mission text to make it clear that E’genn is in the middle of Earth Spacedock
Starfleet was offering Klingon Empire bridge officers to Federation players instead of Klingon Starfleet bridge officers. Not anymore.
Fix some issues with assault and area control scoreboard information where teams weren’t showing up properly.
Bridge Officers no longer have a voice option. This will be re-added at a later date.
Known Issues
There is a bad bug with shuttles that are causing them to despawn properly and inflicting players with 10 minute cooldowns in combat. A fix is coming soon. For now exiting the map or dying will fix the cooldown issue.
If you end up with ground powers in your space tray, drag them off your space tray and hopefully they won’t come back
Bridge officer powers are not automatically assigned a keybind. Moving their power on your power tray should fix this
Some status FX will show as white squares on space targets
Most notably, the issues I had in the last episode with combat being too easy, and with exploration clusters not having enough anomalies, are supposed to have been rectified.
2:55 pm GMT, Day 12
With just three days until the end of Beta, I’m not going to go through individual missions in much detail unless they really stand out as something different to what I’ve already described. I want to make sure I get to Lieutenant Commander and can show what happens at that point.
I only need another 500 or so skill points to be promoted, and to that end I’m doing a few Exploration missions in the Arucanis Arm. Not having any problem finding anomalies reasonably quickly now.
Lieutenant Grall’s “Do three Explorations” missions are now granting Badges of Exploration, which is good news. I should pop back to Sol and see what 75 1st Order Badges of Exploration will get me.
Badges of Exploration are finally discovered!
In the center area of Sol Spacedock there are NPCs you can buy goods off using your Badges of Exploration. It all seems ground-based equipment. Armour, weapons, and kits are all on offer. For the tier 1 items, they are all of common (white named) quality, except for the kits that are green. From tier 2 onwards the guns and armour are green, and the kits are blue, making it a lot more useful.
Speaking of item quality, we got some information on those green named Bridge Officers that turned up recently. Stormshade gave us some details.:
Here’s the deal with the “higher quality” Bridge Officers:
1) You guys haven’t seen all the Bridge Officer Skills in the game yet. These guys have a chance to grant you access to those uncommon, rare, and super rare skills. They also might have higher tiered skills in a lower level slot. The only skills available at the Bridge Officer Trainer are the common skills.
2) The traits these Bridge Officers have are superior to the traits a “white” Bridge Officer has.
At the moment the rarity of a Bridge Officer skill is not marked. I have no doubt that someone (maybe even me) will sort out a list of the rarities before long, but it would be helpful if we could tell just by looking at them.
4:48 pm GMT, Day 12
When you spend enough skill points to reach level 11, Admiral Quinn contacts you and asks you to come to see him at Sol Spacedock.
On speaking to him you gain 6 more inventory slots, 12 more bank slots, a free costume change, and a plaque which will get your your first real ship! Your maximum number of Bridge officers increases to 6 from 4.
5:02 pm GMT, Day 12
Taking that plaque to the shipyard, via the turbolifts, gives you a choice of free ship you can receive. Either a cruiser, escort, or science ship. In spite of being an engineer I went for a science ship, as I suspect the low manoeuvrability of the cruiser would not agree with my flying style.
The Shipyard also has consoles, ship weapons, and other goods available for Badges of Exploration. I pick up a nice new phaser turret.
And here is my new vessel. The USS Opera is a Nova class science vessel. For any given tier and category there are up to three ships. They have identical stats and you can mix and match the parts between them. This one is pure Nova, simply because I think it looks nicest that way.
The Nova Class Science Ship
To get a good idea of what ships have which capabilities, I recommend Suricata’s most excellent ship chart. It shows not only what the ships look like, but also gives you details of weapon hard-points, manoeuvrability ratings, and much more.
10:04 am GMT. Day 13
Another patch came in overnight, bringing us up to version20100123a.1. Patchnotes are here.
It looks like there were two patches last night. The larger of the two addresses player concerns (which I share) that the game has become too easy since the giant patch of the 20th of January. Though if it has left the tier 1 combat as easy as it was, it is going to be a bit of a shock for players when they hit tier 2.
Recent changes added when we unlocked the level cap introduced imbalance to combat at mid to high levels. Closed beta players will be quick to point out that things are much easier than what they remember. To address this we have tracked down the issues and reverted combat back to the intended difficulties. We hope that you will find space combat to be more challenging now, especially starting in Tier 2.
Improved gameplay balance in space
No direct change in Tier 1 combat
Increased damage of space enemies above level 11 (Tier 2).
Reduced science vessel shields and hull by about 10%
Added more interesting weapons Bridge Officer abilities to enemy ships
All Romulan/Reman ships now use mostly plasma torpedoes instead of Photons. So their High Yields will be Heavy Plasma Torpedoes instead of Salvos (including their Bird of Prey Frigates).
Improved Romulan/Reman D’deridex – Added additional Aft Plasma Array, Viral Matrix, Photonic Shockwave, and increased its used of Heavy Plasma Torpedoes.
Improved all Hirogens ships– Added Transphasic Torpedoes
Improved Klingon Negh’Var – Added Boarding Party at higher levels
Improved Cardassian Galor – Added Evasive Maneuvers, and Feedback Pulse
Fixed Borg shipWeapons (It’s tractor Beam and Cutting beam were note working)
Fixed Torpedo and Mine powers that were unintentionally harming your own crew.
Fixed Rapid Fire to work properly.
Made a tuning pass on Chroniton projectiles
Tricobalt weapons now have a 30 second shared cooldown.
Updated the plasma ball to have slightly more direct damage and slightly less DoT damage
Removed some Federation spawns in Klingon PVE missions that were not granting XP properly
Added some missing end tier ships to the stores
Removed a bad Shield HP console that was not working properly
Reduced the damage from the Metreon Gas in the Briar Patch that was smoking everyone. Sorry Riker, we had to do it.
There as also an earlier one intended to enhance stability.:
Some players were unable to interact with objects on public maps (such as the ground portions of the Tutorial). These now work more reliably.
Fixed a crash when inspecting and looking up item information.
