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.
Another night, another patch! Most importantly, it sounds like the lack of exploration anomalies that was making the clusters so tedious has been dealt with. Also, I’m not certain, but perhaps those “exploration rewards” mentioned below are the long missing Badges of Exploration. I’ll check that out tomorrow!
Star Trek Online Open Beta 20100119a.10 Patch Notes
* We’ve removed the code that unequips items when you drag a power off of your power bar. Note that the only way to return these powers to your power bar is to have the item equipped, then open your power list (the datapad icon on your power tray) and drag the power icon back to where you want it.
* We’ve added a fix to address transactions that were taking longer than expected on the latest release. This should improve issues where players reported their weapons getting swapped constantly.
* Video setting defaults were being miscalculated improperly for some cards. We’ve made an update to address this. If you log in and your video settings are not as you expected, Go into the Options – Video menu and select Restore Defaults. If it is still not to your liking, you can use the basic and advanced settings to adjust your video resolution and display features.
* PVP Queuing systems have been updated so that they will refresh more reliably.
* Addressed reported issues of zone chat and custom chat channels not working properly or being disallowed due to zone name length.
* We’ve fixed several bugs that are responsible for the majority of the gameserver crashes on this new release. Instances should play more reliably now.
* Added mail locations to QoNos so that Klingon players can send and receive mail with attached items
* Repeatable Star Cluster missions now grant exploration rewards.
* Addressed an issue where Star Cluster anomalies were too scarce or not respawning fast enough as well as lowered the maximum number of ships per Star Cluster Instance. Exploration should now uncover more unknown systems!
* Space Weapons Cannons: Removed the limitation that prevented you from firing two cannons simultaneously. They still have a 1 second shared cooldown, which has a very similar impact. Fixed a subset of cannons that were not following this behavior.
* BOff Abilities: Cannon Rapid Fire: This ability was cancelling itself after one shot, like other attack upgrade abilities. However, this is supposed to last for a duration and improve all cannon attacks for that period. Fixed so that it no longer cancels itself.
* Addressed the issue in the Korvat system where if the user cancelled the mission dialog, you could not progress the mission. Note that there may be additional similar issues in other systems. If you find one of these, please bug it. To fix, you may need to use the “Depart System” button on your MiniMap, and then continue the mission again. If that fail, drop and retake the mission.
* Added mission text explaining changes to Klingon PVE objectives.
* Addressed an FX issue on the Ghost Ship that made the map unplayable once the player initiated the dimension shift.
In honour of Mr Leonard Nimoy’s voiceovers for Star Trek Online, which were finally enabled in the most recent patch. And also because I never miss an opportunity to post videos of Star Trek actors singing.
